by Jennifer Yu
“Damn,” I say. “That is deep. Perhaps I should give the delinquent youth of this town more credit.”
“Or maybe you shouldn’t,” Kevin says. “The one right under ‘So what if we’re all machines?’ just says, ‘TC sucks dick.’”
Kevin and I spend the rest of the afternoon in the garden, moving from column to column, reading our way through the endless lines of graffiti. By the time it’s 4:00 p.m. and we get back to his car, my head is a blur of lyrics and Kerouac quotes and made-up aphorisms. I haven’t checked my phone in three hours. Kevin peers over my shoulder from the driver’s seat as I pull it out of my bag and turn on the screen, fingers crossed that I don’t have fifty-six frantic voice mails from my parents. Which brings me to the good news, and to the very, very, very bad news.
So here’s the good news: I do not, in fact, have fifty-six missed calls from my parents, which means that no one has noticed my spontaneous absence from Homecoming.
The bad news is that I have nine missed text messages from Katie and Lin, all of which appear, clear as day, on my screen the moment I turn it on, all of which Kevin reads at the exact same time as I do.
Katie Brook (12:01 p.m.): where did you GO omfg
Katie Brook (12:02 p.m.): are you and kevin making out in the janitor’s closet right now??? or the library??? rec room??? student union??? FOURTH FLOOR GIRLS’ BATHROOM???
Katie Brook (12:02): i mean, get it, girl. he is
Katie Brook (12:02):
Lin Chen (12:15 p.m.): hey do you still need a ride home this afternoon?
Katie Brook (12:30 p.m.): she can’t answer you. she’s too, ahem, ~busy~ with Kevin.
Katie Brook (12:31 p.m):
Lin Chen (12:35 p.m.):...wait but seriously do you still need a ride home this afternoon?
“Oh, God,” I say. “Oh, God.”
Kevin turns the key in the ignition and starts pulling out of the parking lot as if he hasn’t just witnessed my best friend describing him with thirteen straight winking emojis, but the barely suppressed smirk on his face is a pretty clear indication that he knows exactly what he just saw.
“If you’re trying to pretend you didn’t just see those texts, you’re doing a horrible job,” I say. I prop my elbows up on top of the glove compartment so I can shove my face into my hands and never emerge.
“You should put your seat belt on,” Kevin says, very seriously. “Put safety first and all that.”
“I’m going to punch you in the face.”
“Hmm. Don’t think punching the driver in the face qualifies as putting safety first.”
I can hear Kevin shifting gears every couple of seconds, and we’re going considerably faster now, so we must be getting back on the highway. “I live at 14 Belmont Drive,” I tell him. “Right off the shopping plaza with the Shaw’s and the Staples and that shitty Chinese restaurant no one can pronounce the name of. Please drop me off and leave me there to die.”
That actually gets a laugh out of him. “Stel. You know it’s not actually a big deal, right? There’s nothing wrong with finding me attractive. The one thing about people our age that baffles me the most is how ridiculously gun-shy people get about being attracted to other people. Like, we’re sixteen. It’s fine.”
Kevin’s statement is delivered with just enough easy confidence that I feel like I am completely and utterly out of my depth. This activates my default response to situations in which I feel like I’ve lost control: spirited defiance. Or, as Karen prefers to call it, “lying.”
“Don’t call me Stel,” I say. “That’s not my name. And also, I’m not attracted to you.”
He’s silent for a moment, like he’s not sure if I’m joking or not. Then, in a tone of voice that’s completely calm—pleasant, even, as if I’ve just informed him that the weather is seventy degrees and breezy: “All right, then.”
“Seriously. I mean, Katie is. Obviously—you saw the text messages. And she’s totally hot. But I think she’s really into her lab partner right now. So...you might have some competition there.”
“Katie is quite attractive,” Kevin says. “But I’m actually not interested in her.”
“It’s fine if you are, you know,” I say. “I’ll even—I dunno—I’ll give you her number, if you want. But yeah, you might get punched in the face by Bobby on the football team, and then you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s like I’m so mortified by the possibility that Kevin is going to think I’m some silly, pathetic girl who spends all her time pining hopelessly after him and his stupid blue eyes that I’ll literally say anything to make him think otherwise. Including, apparently, that he should date Katie.
“I appreciate the offer and the warning,” Kevin says. “But I don’t think that’ll be necessary. The number or the punching. Because Katie’s not my type.”
I lift my head. We’re two blocks away from my house, where I will crawl under my covers and try as hard as possible to be absorbed by my bed. Beds don’t get themselves into situations like this. Beds never even have to leave their rooms.
“Katie’s everyone’s type,” I say.
“Okay,” Kevin says easily. “What’s your type?”
“My type?” I say, blindsided by the question. “Uh.”
Kevin raises an eyebrow. I say the first thing that comes to mind before the silence can stretch on any longer. “I guess my type is...smart guys. You know, like...our math team. You know they won the state championships last year? That’s pretty hot.”
I am officially ready for this conversation to be over.
“Okay, then,” Kevin says. He pulls up to the curb outside of my house and parks the car, looking as relaxed as he sounds. Which is irritating, to be quite honest. I just told him that I don’t find him attractive, for Christ’s sake. The least he could do is act a little bit disappointed.
“Okay, then!” I repeat, compensating for horror that is threatening to swallow me whole from the inside with way too much enthusiasm. I am experiencing so many emotions at once that I feel vaguely like I’m drowning in them. There’s relief that he’s not making fun of me mixed with outrage that he’s so being aggressively casual mixed with the barely suppressed giddiness I feel whenever I’m in close quarters with him mixed with a wild urge to kiss him right now because Jesus Christ am I attracted to him.
GET IT TOGETHER, my brain yells.
“Well,” Kevin says, “I had a lot of fun with you today, Stella.” He looks at me and smiles—just smiles—and it hits me that furiously protesting my attraction to Kevin has actually made me ten times more attracted to Kevin, because the universe is cruel and unfair. This isn’t enjoyable at all, I think. Isn’t attraction supposed to be enjoyable?
“I had a lot of fun today, too,” I say. “I just want to make sure that we’re on the same page about how I feel about you. These things can get awkward when people don’t communicate properly, you know, and that’s the last thing I want to happen...between...us.”
The last three words get lost on their way to my mouth, because Kevin has done that thing again, where he turns and leans all the way in and then he’s there, right there. “I think...” Kevin starts. He draws out each word softly and slowly, like he’s thinking very, very carefully about them.
I am not the type of person who is careless with my words, I remember him saying. That conversation feels like it was weeks ago.
“I think you’ve made it very clear how you feel about me, Stella,” Kevin says. I can’t tell if I’m imagining the faint smile on his face.
“Just wanted to make sure,” I say weakly.
“Have a good weekend, all right?” Kevin says. I take this as my cue to open the door and step out of the car.
“Thanks, Kevin,” I say, trying so hard to keep my voice casual that the words come out totally flat. Then, of course, I overco
mpensate, and my “You, too!” sounds positively manic.
Kevin winks at me before he drives away, which leaves me standing in my driveway 1) slightly dazed, and 2) in need of a cold shower.
“That was fine,” I tell myself, walking up to the garage. “That. Was. Fine. That was totally fine. Oh, who am I kidding? That was a disaster.”
I replay this afternoon time and time again over the course of the weekend, going over every word and every loaded pause until I start to feel like I’m going crazy. But what I forget to mention—what doesn’t occur to me until weeks later, long after I’ve exhausted every possible implication of the sentence “I had a lot of fun with you today” ad nauseum—is that Kevin never did answer my question about what he was doing last year.
16.
“So let me get this straight,” Lin says. “You just...lied?”
“It’s not my fault,” I say. “It was like a self-defense mechanism kicked in and the next thing I knew, I was vehemently insisting that I could only be attracted to a mathlete.”
“A mathlete?” Katie says blankly. “Like Brady Thompson mathlete?”
The three of us are having brunch at this diner near Lin’s house, an emergency Saturday morning meeting I called the minute I got home last night. Joe’s Kitchen & Coffee is probably one of the most beloved places in Wethersfield, so much so that you can never get a table without waiting at least thirty minutes. But the guy who runs the diner, Mark, always manages to squeeze us in because Lin has been tutoring his daughter in English for the last three years. It’s a testament to how god-awfully boring Wethersfield is that one of the perennial topics of conversation is how a restaurant called Joe’s Kitchen & Coffee came to be run by a guy named Mark. This is what constitutes cosmic irony in this town.
“Brady is cute,” I say weakly. “He’s got that, you know, bookish-geeky vibe going for him. Lots of girls are into that.”
“Look,” Katie says, turning to me. “Stella.”
Katie chews thoughtfully on a piece of her omelet before proceeding.
“I feel like you should think of this Kevin situation as an opportunity,” she says.
“I am thinking of it as an opportunity,” I say. “It’s an opportunity to drop out of school and relocate to a sparsely populated desert in the Pacific Southwest.”
“No,” Katie says. “An opportunity to laugh off something a little bit embarrassing that happened and realize that when you don’t take your screw-ups so seriously, no one else does, either. And an opportunity to be honest with Kevin, for once, instead of playing everything off like a joke. An opportunity to be vulnerable.”
“I don’t like this advice,” I say. “Can I resubmit my request and get a new piece of wisdom instead?”
“No,” Katie says flatly. “That’s my advice and that’s what you get. And we all know I’m right.”
“I don’t want to be vulnerable,” I whine. “Being vulnerable opens yourself to being—oh, I don’t know—vuln-ed.”
“My friendship,” Katie announces, “is wasted on you.”
“Thank God you still have Lin,” I say.
Lin clears her throat, picks up her glass of water, and then puts it down again.
“I have Lin for ten more months,” Katie says, “before she runs off to Brown and abandons us for members of the artsy, literary crowd who all have cogent opinions about literature in the American Jazz Age.”
Lin clears her throat again.
“Yes, Lin?” I say. “Is there something you’d like to share with us?”
“I have news,” Lin says.
“We figured from all the ahem-ing,” Katie says. “What’s the news?”
“The news,” Lin announces, “is that I finally figured out what I actually want to write my common application essay about. Like, for real this time.”
“Thought you were writing on the genius of East of Eden,” I say.
“I was writing on the genius of East of Eden,” Lin says. “But every single draft ended up being over twelve hundred words. And the limit is six hundred and fifty. And they all sounded like academic papers. College essays are supposed to be about you, not about a long-dead author, and especially not about a long-dead author who didn’t even go to the university you’re applying to. They’re supposed to be personal. So...”
She pauses dramatically.
“So?” Katie says.
“So I am writing about a deeply important relationship that has shaped me into the woman that I am today.”
Lin has obviously rehearsed this declaration in front of a mirror a few times.
“You’re sure you’re not still writing about John Steinbeck?” I say.
“I am writing,” Lin continues, “about my relationship with two people who have always supported me, even if they insist on getting in six million unnecessary sarcastic comments while doing so. I’m writing about you guys.”
Katie’s mouth drops into a comically perfect O.
“Wow,” Lin says. “Glad you guys are so touched at being the topic of the most important essay I have ever written.”
It’s Katie who regains her senses first. “Oh-my-God-Lin-of-course-we’re-touched!” she says, as if it’s all one word. “Aren’t we, Stella?”
“So touched,” I say. “But, Lin—are you sure this is a good idea? Katie and I aren’t very interesting. In fact, we’re so uninteresting that it seems like we should be the last people you’d write about in such an important essay. I mean, I just dragged you guys out of bed at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning because I’m having boy problems. Please don’t tell Brown that I once called an emergency Saturday morning brunch for boy problems. In fact, don’t tell Brown anything about me. Write about—write about your parents! Didn’t they immigrate to America with, like, five dollars in their pockets? That’s much more inspirational than Katie and I could ever be.”
“Yes,” Lin says. “The story of my parents’ immigration is, in fact, much more inspirational than anything I could write about you or Katie, who are both sixteen years old and have never faced anything remotely resembling political persecution. But when I suggested that to my college counselor, she said, and I quote, ‘It’s a nice idea, but runs the risk of coming off as generic or overdone.’ Which I’m pretty sure is just a polite way that guidance counselors tell Asian kids that every other Asian kid is also going to write a sappy essay about their parents, Lin, are you sure you want to do that, too? Plus, I don’t want to write an essay about my parents. I want to write an essay about me. And I think my relationship with you guys says a lot more about me than my relationship with my parents. I mean, I didn’t choose to be my parents’ kid. But I choose to be friends with you.”
Lin smiles, as if the matter is now closed. “So yeah. I’ll send you guys a copy when I’m done.”
Katie raises her glass of water and says, “To Stella finding vulnerability and to Lin getting into Brown with her bomb-ass essay that only she could possibly write.”
And then, simply: “To us.”
Lin picks up her glass and clinks it with Katie’s. They both turn expectantly to me.
“It’s just—we’re being so corny,” I say.
Katie rolls her eyes, picks up my glass, and does it herself.
“To us,” she repeats. And while I don’t drink to that, I do smile when she does.
44. March
In hindsight, I think, staring at the distorted reflection in the spoon on the table in front of me, this entire thing was a horrible idea.
“Stella,” Kevin says forcefully. He reaches across the table, picks up my spoon and drops it onto his plate, where it clinks and clangs before finally falling silent. My omelet—the Joe’s Kitchen special—is cold, and Kevin hasn’t even touched his toast.
“Kevin,” I say quietly. “We’ve been talking about this for an hour. I don’t want to discuss t
his anymore.”
“Well I do,” he says. Kevin’s got this look on his face that I can barely stand to look at. Anger makes Kevin look like an entirely different person—someone ten years older, someone who I’ve encountered only in the form of a television villain or an over-the-top movie antagonist, someone the real Kevin would never want to be around. Someone I don’t even want to be around.
“It takes two willing participants to have a conversation, Kevin. And I am no longer a willing participant.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” he presses.
“Oh, but that’s the thing, Kevin,” I say. “I have answered your question. I have answered it a thousand times. There is nothing going on between the two of us. We are doing a project together, that’s all. He has a girlfriend, for fuck’s sake! The real problem isn’t that I haven’t answered your question. The real problem is that you don’t believe me.”
I can feel my voice rising. This is not the correct response, I know. If I get angry and frustrated, it’s only going to fuel Kevin’s anger and frustration, which will make me even more angry and frustrated, until the two of us are just a self-sustaining cycle of anger and frustration that neither of us knows how to get out of. There’s just this part of me that wishes, hopes, prays that this time will be different. That this time, if I just plead enough, if I just show him how ridiculous he’s being, if I just manage to say in the right words that I love him, I really do, so much so that it fucking terrifies me, then it will be different.
“How could I believe you, Stella?” Kevin says, his voice up another couple of decibels. I always used to think that my dad’s default response to conflict—to shut down his emotions and go absolutely calm—was the worst possible way of handling arguments. Of course, now that Kevin is yelling at me in a crowded diner on a Sunday morning that was supposed to be a date, I’m reconsidering that assessment.
“How could I believe you?” Kevin repeats. “You—”