“I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “It’s like I love him and I hate him at the same time. He’s not how I expected him to be.”
“I know what that’s like. Even when you know someone well they can disappoint you.”
Right then, picturing Nick smiling at me made me feel sick. “I wanted him to kiss me, but not like he did.”
“It was yucky?”
I looked up at her again. The expression on her face was so serious that I laughed, just a little. “Yeah. It was yucky.”
She sighed. “Life’s confusing, isn’t it?” She reached forward and took my hair out of my hands, gently tucking it behind my shoulder.
Min’s father came into the room. His high forehead and mustache always reminded me of Sonny from Sonny and Cher. I felt worn out. I got up from the bed.
“Hi, Laura,” he said. He turned to Catherine. “She won’t talk to me.” I knew he meant Min. Then nobody spoke. I couldn’t help feeling like he was blaming me.
“Waffles in the morning, does that sound okay?” Catherine asked.
“I love waffles,” I answered. Min’s father sat down on the bed, kicked off his slippers, and swung his feet under the covers. I hardly ever saw my father in his pajamas, and never in bed. Min’s father turned on his bedside lamp and opened his own book. Catherine looked over at him like she was surprised, then turned off her light. I said goodnight, closing their door behind me.
In Min’s room there was only the light of the moon to see by. Because she had only one bed, when I was over she slept on an air mattress on the floor. (Except when she got into the bed with me.) I stepped around the bundle of her body in the sleeping bag. On top of the blanket, in the middle of the bed, my bookbag was open. Tucked inside my nightgown was a piece of paper folded up into a small square. For a delighted second I thought it could be from Nick, but of course I knew it wasn’t. I unfolded the note and read it in the silvery moonlight. She hadn’t written in our code. The note said, “I don’t want to practice kissing anymore. We’re too old for notes too.”
I missed Min then. Even though she was there in the same room, it was like she’d said goodbye. Now our friendship would become ordinary again. At the same time I was relieved, because what would be the point of making out with her when I had Nick? As I gathered everything together for my trip to the bathroom, I heard Min stir.
“Min?” I whispered. There was no answer. She was asleep. I went to the bathroom next door to brush my teeth.
A sound woke me up in the middle of the night. “Min?” I called softly, sitting up in bed. Her sleeping bag was empty. I pushed off my covers and went out to the bathroom. The door was closed. “Min?” I called, knocking quietly.
She didn’t answer. I opened the door, and at first my eyes teared, blinded by the bright light. Then I saw her kneeling in front of the toilet. The seat was up. Some of her beautiful long hair had fallen forward into the bowl. She started to heave again, holding on to the edges. I knelt down next to her and gathered her hair in my hands, holding it back from her face as she threw up into the toilet. Spit and a yellowish mess slid down her chin. The stink was as strong as ammonia. I tore off some toilet paper with my free hand and wiped her chin clean. She didn’t seem to know I was there as she knelt rocking a little on the bathroom mat, her eyes closed, taking deep breaths.
Then she said, her eyes still closed, “Why did you lie to me, Laura? Why didn’t you tell me you had talked to Nick before tonight?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling helpless. What was it I’d thought I could have for myself, mine alone, by not telling her? Right then, Nick was a distant idea, the way he’d been in my fantasies.
“I don’t care if you kiss him or let him feel you up or anything. Just tell me. Don’t lie to me.”
I wondered if that meant telling her why he would never go out with her. “Okay,” I said.
She started to heave again. She gripped the sides of the toilet bowl, getting ready. Still holding her hair, I leaned forward with her. When she was done I wiped her mouth.
“Oh God,” she said. “I don’t think ginger ale and vodka are such a good combination.” She took a deep breath, then another.
“Do you still like him?” I asked her. If she said yes, I wouldn’t tell her about his thrusting tongue in my mouth or the rest of it. I didn’t want to disappoint her.
“He’s an asshole.” She stated it as fact.
I didn’t say anything. I felt attacked, the way I had when Nick had said he didn’t like Min. It had been so great slow dancing with him, when he wasn’t trying anything. I had let myself hope for a little while. Inside me, the part that wanted so much to be touched, to be held, blew out, like a gas flame turned down too low.
“He’s a terrible kisser,” I admitted.
She turned her head toward me. Her eyes were bloodshot. “How would you know?” But there was a tiny smile at the edges of her mouth.
I smiled too. “How would I know?” I asked.
CHAPTER 5
Min
Summer 1979
“IMPRESSIVE, MIN,” MR. CONNOR SAID as he gave me my paper. It was eighth period English, minutes before the end of class. He paced the aisles between our desks and placed a paper in front of each one of us. For a moment I left mine face down without looking at it, letting the pleasure of his compliment wash through me. I had enjoyed comparing and contrasting “The Magi” by W. B. Yeats with “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot. I turned the paper over. On top was an A+ in bright red ink and the words “Very original and deftly written. Well done!” below the grade.
When the bell rang, I heard the halls flooding with students’ voices. In the front of the room, Nick asked Mr. C. if there would be extra credit questions on the exam. We were in the final marking period of tenth grade, but I knew Nick was planning to apply only to Ivy League colleges and wanted to graduate at the top of the class. I didn’t know what he was worried about. He would get in anywhere he wanted: in addition to being smarter than everyone else in our grade except me, he was wholesomely blond, a star basketball player, a member of the debate team, and Secretary of the Student Council. He was the most well-rounded person on the face of the earth. I liked to make him sweat, competing for first place with me, even though I knew I wouldn’t be going to college. Since my parents’ divorce two years before, my father had pretty much disappeared from my life, and my mother was barely making it on her own. That was another thing: Nick was rich. I had a shitload of reasons for hating his guts.
I stood up, while around me the others filed out, talking and laughing. A couple of girls said goodbye to me as they left. I watched them go, thinking how stupid feathered hair looked, then collected my books together as I listened to the shouting voices beyond the door.
When I was leaving, Mr. C. called out, “Hold on a minute, Min,” so I waited by his desk while he finished answering Nick’s questions. By the time he and Nick nodded goodbye and he turned to me, the room was empty.
“That was an excellent paper, Min, your best yet. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Connor.”
“You probably know you’re in the running for the English award. There’s one more paper due for this class. Keep it up and the award is yours. That’s off the record, by the way.”
I grinned at him. Sophomores hardly ever won the English prize. I left the classroom on a total high.
In the hall, I almost collided with Nick, who was standing outside the door. I looked up at him, startled, then moved around him and walked away.
He kept up easily. “Think you’re going to win it, don’t you?”
“What were you doing, eavesdropping?”
“You should go back where you came from, gook. You know you don’t belong here.”
Blank silence. I stopped. “What did you say?”
Nick didn’t even bother to look back as he walked away. I had been an idiot to believe that because I was grown up no one would use words like that against me anymo
re. It had been years since anyone had. I stood watching him go, waiting for something to happen. I wanted somebody to kill him. Then I felt a surge of energy race through my body. I had to move or I’d explode. “You cocksucking motherfucker,” I heard myself yell. I ran down the hall after him and threw my armload of books at his back as hard as I could. They hit him and clattered to the floor.
Nick turned around and started to move toward me. I was suddenly aware of how tall he was and how solidly built. I stood my ground, shaking. His gaze shifted, moving beyond me. I knew he was bluffing. I didn’t dare take my eyes off him.
“What in God’s name is going on here?” a voice demanded.
I turned around. Mr. Connor was standing in his doorway down the hall.
Neither Nick nor I said a word. I crossed my arms and refused to speak at all. Mr. Connor looked from Nick to me and back, clearly frustrated.
“This behavior is childish. Fighting in the hall is beneath either of you. What’s going on?” He waited, giving us another chance to explain ourselves. Then he said, “This had better be the end of it.” I watched him go back into his classroom, feeling strangely sad. Even Mr. C. had no special authority, no real answers.
Nick left too. Alone, I gathered up my books from the floor. I couldn’t make my hands stop shaking. I told myself I should have been on my guard with Nick; I couldn’t let him get to me. Walking toward the other end of the building where my locker was, I ran the fingers of my free hand against the rough white wall. The tips began tingling, sending bursts of sensation down the nerves of my hand. It was a rush without lighting up. I used to create this energy feeling from the walls of my elementary school, too, which were made of the same drab cinder block. Back then, I liked to pretend I was a superhero recharging my super powers. I would use them to knock the other kids unconscious, just from the force that would emanate from my hands.
When I turned the corner, I found Laura sitting slouched against my locker, her arms resting on her upright knees, her long, honey-blonde hair in her face. She was just sitting there, without even a book, waiting for me in her gym shorts, t-shirt, new white socks, and cleats. This year Laura had made it onto the girls’ varsity soccer team. She’d been JV in tennis and basketball two years in a row. I stared at her legs, which had grown thick and muscled from practice. I loved her legs.
In the last month, I had become aware that I had a serious crush on Laura. It had been a gradual realization: a growing warmth in my chest whenever I saw her, an increasing attention to her clothes, the way she wore her hair from one day to the next. For six years she had been my best friend. Now I was discovering that she was beautiful. She tended to complain that she was too big, her hair too limp, her face too round, uninteresting. I thought differently. I thought her face was wonderful, expressive and alive. I thought about her all the time, though she didn’t know it. Right now I wanted to run my hand along the smooth curve of her calf, which she shaved faithfully every week.
I sat down on the linoleum floor beside her. Laura looked up, and her smile made my heart tighten a little and then start beating harder. I kept my arms wrapped safely around my knees, uncertain what to think, how to act. Sometimes I desperately wanted her to know how I felt about her, and at the same time I knew I would die if she ever found out. I had started to watch myself carefully. Even sitting next to her like this felt like an honor. I had to rely on memory for the right way to act around her. I was forgetting what it felt like to be a friend.
“Where’ve you been?” Laura asked, slapping the back of her hand playfully against my jeans. When I didn’t answer she asked, concerned, “Did you get your paper back?”
Normally, I would have bumped her arm with mine, then stayed leaning against her. I needed her warm skin against my arm grounding me. But now I was too scared to do it. The way I had come to feel around her wasn’t going to help me. I realized I was still trembling.
I nodded. “Yeah. A+.” The grade seemed trivial now.
Laura looked down. “That’s great, Min. You must have worked hard on it.”
“No, not really,” I admitted. I didn’t want to talk about the paper. I leaned back against the hard metal of the lockers. “Someone called me a gook.”
I felt Laura get very still beside me. I didn’t know what that meant, or what she would say. We had never had this conversation before. We had never had to.
“Who?”
“Nick. He said I should go back where I came from.”
I had hated Nick ever since seventh grade, when he dated Laura a few times and then dumped her. She was devastated. He was the first boy she ever kissed. I remembered that we both had thought he was cute. In seventh grade, Nick had a lanky body and sandy blond hair that fell into his gorgeous blue eyes. He had been shorter then. Even while they were together, I used to put myself to sleep by masturbating as I fantasized about making out with him. How could I have thought about him so much? As I sat next to Laura on the cold linoleum tiles, the memory of wanting him to kiss me made me feel sick.
“Nick called you a gook?” Laura sounded as though she didn’t believe me. I wondered if she still liked him and I had made a big mistake by telling her. I wished suddenly that she hadn’t waited for me this afternoon.
“That’s what I said.”
She was frowning. Her face was turning pink, the way it did when she was angry or embarrassed. She shook her head. “He’s such a jerk. He always was.”
I shrugged. “They all are. So what’s new?” I thought she’d agree. The handful of guys she’d gone out with since Nick had all dropped her after a few weeks.
Laura said nothing. She retied the laces on her right cleat. “Walk me to practice, okay? I’m late.”
“Sure.”
I was happy to change the subject. I stood up, got books for that night’s homework out of my locker, and threw them into my knapsack before spinning the combination lock closed. Outside, the sun was bright, reflecting off the windows of the beige stucco buildings. I lit a cigarette as soon as we had pushed through the double doors and took a long, satisfying drag.
“Are you crazy?” Laura asked, looking behind her. We weren’t allowed to smoke on school grounds. “Someone might see you.”
“Like I give a shit,” I said and stuffed my lighter back into the front pocket of my jeans. We ran down the steps and took the path down the hill to the gym. As we passed the girls’ locker room on our way out toward the athletic fields, Laura said, “Eric Newell invited me to his party next weekend. Will you go with me?”
“Those parties suck, Laura.”
“Come with me, Min,” Laura pleaded. “It’ll be fun. James and Devin will be there. I like Devin. He’s a really nice guy. He doesn’t try to show off in front of girls. I could definitely see losing it with him. I bet he’s really gentle.”
She waited for me to respond, but I had nothing to say. She’d had the chance to go all the way with three different guys in the last two years, but she’d stopped them at second base, saying she wasn’t comfortable going further. I didn’t get what she was waiting for.
“Do you know what James told me at lunch?” Laura asked, sounding happy. I stifled a flip response. I was already tuning her out. “That Devin grew up in Vermont. Can you believe it? I want to find out if he lived in Middlebury. Wouldn’t it be great if he asked me out at the party?” She waved away the smoke from my cigarette. “Maybe I should ask him out. Min, do you think he’d be scared off if I asked him out?”
“Laura, I don’t care,” I burst out. “Why can’t you shut up about boys for just one second?”
She did shut up. I could feel the hurt coming off her in waves, like heat. Then she said, stiffly, “Sorry to bore you. You never minded before.”
“It wasn’t the constant topic of conversation before.”
I didn’t really understand myself why I had lashed out at her. When Laura had started going out with boys, I liked to hear in detail about her dates: what he did, what she did, how it felt. But
these days she just seemed obsessed, and about the most moronic things. It was as though there was nothing else she ever thought about except boys. It infuriated me.
I was aware of another reason for my flaring anger, one that I had been trying for a long time to ignore. The unspoken rule. None of the boys Laura and I liked—the blond ones, the all-American types—would ever ask me out. I was an Asian in a ninety-nine percent white town. Even though I had grown up going to the same stores, eating the same kinds of meals, watching the same TV shows, even though I had white parents just like them, I wasn’t accepted as being the same as everybody else. For years at Old Mill, my classmates had called me “slant-eyes” and “Jap.” The girls wouldn’t let me join their games of hopscotch and cat’s cradle and jacks. The boys were no better. A group of them used to ambush Roberto and Miguel outside after school, beating them up until they managed to scramble, bleeding and crying, away from the circle of legs. I used to overhear those boys bragging about it outside during recess while I sat reading a book. I started to store up my super powers by dragging my fingers along the school walls.
Since I’d been going to Tam High, I’d made a few friends I went to the movies and hung out downtown with. I had learned from watching the way they acted with me in public how to be what they expected: white at times, Asian at others. But when it came to dating, the policy of exclusion remained firmly in place. It didn’t matter how I behaved or how much I fantasized about those fair-skinned, beautiful boys. As much as a guy might like me, I wasn’t good enough to go out with. Maybe I was also angry at Laura for not being aware of this rule, or if she was aware of it, for not acknowledging it.
We had arrived at the chain-link fence at the edge of the baseball fields. The soccer field was beyond, with the Richardson Bay Bridge in the distance, a glimmer of water peeking out from beneath it. The rest of Laura’s team stood around in clumps, kicking balls back and forth. The coach, a woman who had taught my gymnastics class the year before, had taken one girl aside and was speaking to her intently, one arm around her shoulder, the other gesturing.
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