I kept falling for guys who looked like Jesus: long, wavy brown hair, too skinny. Hippies. After describing Nick to my best friend, Laura, she said, “Again with the Jesus guys, Esther?” I didn’t know what she meant and when she pointed out the common thread between Nick and the last two guys I’d claimed to be in love with, I realized that I had a type and that type was Son of God.
My mother and Aunt Lydia immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when they were in their twenties. They left behind two other sisters, three brothers and their parents. They’d intended on returning, but then they both got married in Canada and stayed put, making up for their absences at family gatherings with gifts of money. I’d never met these relatives, but I knew their birthdays by the trips I’d take with my mother to a small store downtown that specialized in Filipino foods and had a counter in the back where she could wire money to her family, quickly and cheaply.
Lydia married another Filipino immigrant from her church, but my father was Irish, part of a family that had lived in Canada since the eighteen hundreds. They met at their first jobs: Mom was a secretary in the admissions department of the school Dad was teaching at. She was the first non-Anglo-Saxon to marry into his family.
After my mother and Lydia got married, their lives took divergent paths. The most obvious impact on me was that Lydia’s children (three of them) went to Catholic school while I (an only child) went to an all girls’, secular private school. My father was an atheist and my mother said she believed, but not enough to go to church and definitely not enough to get me baptized and confirmed. When I was a baby Lydia took this as a personal insult, some kind of forsaking of their shared childhood, but eventually the rift was mended. Whenever we visited, Lydia pushed bowls of pancit and adobo and lumpia my way, hoping that if she couldn’t get through to me spiritually, she could at least physically stuff me with heritage.
I met Nick through my cousin, Mary. We were the same age, but by the time we entered high school had very little in common. We spent time together out of familial obligation and nostalgia for our childhood friendship, but judged each other in the passive-aggressive way only possible between relatives. She kept inviting me to her Catholic school parties because she was “concerned” that I wasn’t meeting enough guys since I went to an all girls’ school. While it was true that my life lacked daily male interaction, I managed to maintain a healthy stock of unattainable crushes. I usually turned Mary down, but one evening after a particularly passionate harangue, I surprised both of us and agreed to go to one of her stupid parties.
I regretted my decision as soon as we arrived. Mary and her friends ignored me while I stood around and tried to look casual. I was relieved when I noticed Nick holding a beer and looking at a bookcase by himself. I walked over and saw that he’d pulled out The Great Gatsby. I’d written an essay for my English class on the use of eye imagery in the book, about how eyes were the windows to the soul and how Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes on the billboard overlooking West and East Egg were like the paintings of Jesus Lydia displayed in her house: all knowing, wise, judgmental. I thought the essay was cheesy, but my teacher liked it so much that she read it aloud to the class. She didn’t say who wrote it until the end, but later Laura said she knew it was me after the first paragraph, that she’d recognized my writing style. So, I told Nick, The Great Gatsby was special to me. “Cool,” Nick said. He had soft brown eyes. “I’ll read it.”
After the party I told Mary that I liked Nick and she wrinkled her nose.
“His hair is gross,” she said. “It’s always greasy. I bet it smells.”
“It doesn’t, and he’s cute.” I countered.
“Esther,” she said. “Sometimes you’re so white.” In the past few months Mary had taken to pointing this out, my whiteness, always witheringly, an accusation more than an observation. She said it when I talked about boys, when she flipped through my CD collection or when she analyzed my wardrobe. It made me wince and I never had a retaliation. But I am white, I said to her in my head, weakly. Half, anyway. According to Mary, Filipino tastes tended towards Filipino, Korean and black guys (no specific nationality provided). Italian too, and they didn’t count as being “white.” Her taxonomy of boys confused me. When I mentioned it to Laura she didn’t understand either.
“Maybe it’s because you’re white,” I pointed out.
She shook her head. “It’s because I’m not racist. I don’t believe in labels. I don’t judge people by the colour of their skin.”
“I don’t think Mary’s racist,” I said, but I wasn’t sure how to prove this. I suspected, however, that Mary’s judgement of me had less to do with racism than Laura thought.
“Well, then she’s just dumb.”
I didn’t have an answer for that either.
Mary said she’d talk to Nick and a few days later he called. I answered the phone and couldn’t believe it when I heard his voice on the other end. The thrill of something unfamiliar. But wait, not a thing, a boy, a stranger, someone who lived on the other side of town, even. I knew my parents had plans on Saturday night and so, feeling bold, I invited him over.
I wanted to call Laura and tell her what happened, but she’d been acting strange recently. She would skip lunch without me or wouldn’t return my phone calls. Even her sarcasm made me feel wounded more often than it made me laugh, so, wanting to preserve my enthusiasm, I kept the news to myself until I saw her at school the next day.
It was one of the first warm days of spring and we walked together outside, our sweaters tied around our waists.
“Can you believe he’s coming over?” I asked. “We don’t even know each other.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” she said. “He’s a teenaged boy and you, a teenaged girl, have invited him to an empty house. He would be an idiot not to go.”
I got the feeling that she was implying I was an idiot for being so excited about it, but I was still proud of myself, puffed-up from what I thought was an act of bravery.
Saturday arrived and I spent the day anxious and jumpy. I was starting to doubt that it had been a good idea to invite Nick over. I tried calling Laura for a pep talk, but her mother told me she wasn’t home, so I called Mary instead and she answered right away.
“Why are you nervous?” she asked. “You don’t have to sleep with him if you don’t want to.”
“That’s not why I’m nervous,” I said, wishing Laura had been there.
“So you are going to sleep with him?”
I laughed at Mary’s interest in my sex life, but now I had the additional worry that Nick was expecting it as well. As my parents prepared to go out for the evening, I went to their bedroom to see my mother. She was putting on makeup.
My mother was born breech and there’s a Filipino superstition that says breech babies have the ability to be healers. Whenever my aunt had a bad headache or a cold, she called my mother. Mom always rolled her eyes, but she would still drive over to see what she could do to help. My father got a kick out of it too and at night I often found him sitting on the floor, my mother on the couch above him scratching his balding head while they watched television. “Maybe your mother can make my hair grow back,” he’d say, his eyes half- closed like a dog. I was sceptical of these so-called powers, but sometimes when I had cramps, I would lie in bed and she would rub the small of my back. The warmth of her touch was maybe not healing, but it was soothing. Before Nick came over I craved that kind of comfort.
“Going to have a quiet night?” she asked.
I nodded. “What time will you be home?”
“Not late.”
I worried that Nick would still be here when they returned. As I fretted, Mom walked past me in a cloud of perfume.
But when Nick arrived, I relaxed. We went to my bedroom and he was the one who noticed the guitar first. He asked me to play him a song.
Laura and I learned how to play guitar together the summer before. We met our teacher waiting at a radio station to get free tickets to a concert
. He was behind us in line and overheard us talking about how we wanted to learn to play guitar and said he could teach us. We didn’t think twice about accepting his invitation and every Thursday afternoon after that we gave excuses to our parents and met him for lessons. Sometimes they were at his place, a dark, skinny row house he shared with two gay men, but when the weather was nice we’d go to a nearby park. The three of us would sit cross-legged on the grass while Laura and I took turns playing his second guitar. At the time he was the most interesting person we’d ever met. We talked about inviting him to parties and laughed at how everyone would freak-out. As the summer wore on, his quirks became annoying. He was twenty-four, nine years older, and we weren’t sure why he was spending time with us. We broke up with him at the next lesson telling him we’d learned everything we needed to know and wouldn’t be coming back. He looked upset, embarrassed, but we ignored it and left. Together we’re powerful like that.
When I played the guitar for Nick, it was the first time I’d played for someone outside of those guitar lessons. Nick was very attentive. He was quiet and leaned in to listen to me sing. And then we kissed, and I know I said it was sloppy, but it was also sweet.
Laura called me that night, late.
“How was it?” she asked.
“It was fun.”
“That’s great, Esther,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it. Either way, that night I fell asleep content. I thought about Nick and wondered if he was going to somehow factor into my life. I wondered if he would count.
At school Laura kept distancing herself from me. We’d known each other for years, but had only become best friends after bonding in an English class over our taste in music. I wasn’t used to not talking to her multiple times a day. A school week passed, then a weekend, and we had barely spoken to each other.
One day my calculus class ended early and I made my way to the cafeteria to meet other friends for lunch. You could take a shortcut through the parking lot to get from one end of the school to the other, and I ran into Laura there.
“Hey,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” she asked me.
“Aren’t you?”
“They let us out early.” She was holding a copy of King Lear and a green notebook we had bought together a few weeks ago. I had a purple one.
“Are you coming to lunch?”
She shook her head.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Laura, what’s going on?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Why aren’t you telling me anything these days?”
“I don’t have much to say.” She left me standing there, baffled. I’d been angry about her behaviour all week, but at that moment I was confused. Sad. I thought of the time we’d walked away from our guitar teacher, how easy it’d been for us to turn our backs on someone we’d admired so fiercely at first. I didn’t like that power used against me. I’d never been dumped, not by a boy or a friend, and when I sat down on the steps to steady myself, I was surprised when my eyes spilled over with tears. I cried just a bit, and then I went to lunch and hoped that no one would notice my shaky hands, my red eyes.
That afternoon I couldn’t concentrate in class and so I wrote Laura a letter. It was six pages. I asked her if everything was alright and if she was mad at me and told her that she could talk to me about anything. I miss you, I wrote. I stuffed it into her locker at the end of the day and went home.
A few days later there was a reply from her in my locker. It was just as long as mine, on yellow, legal-sized paper. She was fine, she said. The letter was chatty and friendly and then, somewhere in the middle she wrote, I had a dream and in the dream I kissed you. I’d never had a dream like this about Laura, but I wasn’t surprised when I saw it in her letter. I read it over a second time and tried to figure out how it made me feel. It didn’t disgust me and it didn’t scare me. It affected me and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling. On a certain level, I understood, even if I didn’t have an adequate response.
On Victoria Day weekend, Nick’s parents went away and he invited me over. He picked me up from the subway station in his mother’s car and on the drive to his house we stopped at a nearby convenience store and bought popsicles. Mine broke in the package, and I ate it with my fingers. His little brother watched television in the living room, but we ignored him and went straight to Nick’s bedroom where he made me listen to Tom Waits. We were making out and then we had sex. I hadn’t planned on sleeping with him, but it happened and it was nice and the only thing I regretted was that he kept Tom Waits playing on the stereo.
When the record ended, we heard small explosions outside. Kids were setting off firecrackers in the street for the holidays and we got dressed and joined them. Nick swiped a bundle of sparklers from his little brother, and we sat on the curb and lit them one by one, waved them around, the goldish yellow sparks flickering and spitting in the early summer night air.
After our first letters, Laura and I continued writing to each other, writing more than we actually spoke. We even stopped hanging out together at school and it was strange, but there was something satisfying about the letters, a feeling of connectedness that we hadn’t had before. We wrote about everything, except I never said much about Nick and she never elaborated on her dream. The only time we stepped out of this pattern was shortly afterwards when she invited me to come with her to a show that weekend. It was at the house of a new friend of hers, she said, and she thought I’d like the music.
On the way over to the house Laura explained to me that her friends were Straight Edge, that they didn’t drink or do drugs,
“So there won’t be any beer,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Are you Straight Edge now too?”
“Kind of,” she shrugged. A boy in one of the bands was handing out wristbands he’d made with skulls and crossbones on them. We fastened them to each other’s wrists. We sat under a tree and kept to ourselves as it got darker out, and then everyone went to the basement for the show.
The performers were hardcore/screamo bands, high school kids, and I didn’t really like the music, but there was so much energy in the room. Everyone jumped and sweated and screamed along and I closed my eyes and listened to everything vibrate around me, wondered if the ceiling could cave in from such exuberance.
We left before it was over to catch the last subway home, but right before we went inside the station, Laura grabbed my arm and we kissed, bathed in the light of the late-night TTC subway station. When you watch movies, television, whatever, it seems like teenage girls kiss each other all the time. It’s so cliché. But at the time, it didn’t feel like that. It felt essential and risky.
I got a scar on my wrist the next day, a tiny snip in my skin. I gave it to myself accidentally when I cut off the wristband. It wouldn’t come off and I wanted to stick it in my diary as a reminder of everything, but the scissors slipped and there was a tiny gush of blood, and a band-aid, and then, a v-shaped scar. A few days later I pushed up my sleeve and showed it to Laura. We were standing outside school on our way to different classes. We hadn’t spoken much since Saturday and hadn’t sent any letters either, and we’d definitely not spoken about the kiss.
“Did it hurt?” she asked.
“Not really.”
She held my wrist and studied the scar. Her hands were warm and I could feel her breath on my skin. “It looks like the bottom of a heart.”
A week later my parents and I were at Lydia’s for dinner. Before we ate, Mary said she wanted to show me something in her room.
She closed the door and put her hands on her hips. “I can’t believe you’re sleeping with Nick!”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Does everyone?”
“I have my sources. You slut.” She meant it as a compliment. “But Nick told you about his girlfriend, right?
”
“Girlfriend?”
“They’re not really together anymore, but from what I’ve heard, they’ll be again soon. They’re like, soulmates.”
“Oh.” I leaned against Mary’s dresser, the wind knocked out of me. “I know about her,” I lied.
“You’re cool with it?”
“I’m kind of seeing someone else anyway.”
“You’re poly?”
I’d never heard the term, but nodded.
“Who are you seeing?”
“Someone from school.”
“But you go to a girls’ school.”
I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—polyamoury, girls—but I acted like I knew what I was talking about, that I had already pondered the philosophical and intellectual aspects of these concepts and was comfortable with them.
“Whatever.” Mary shook her head.
“Don’t say anything about it to anyone,” I said. “Especially your mom.” I imagined all of those paintings of Jesus directing their tortured glances at my immoral, pre-marital sex, homosexual experimentation ways. I felt damned.
“I will obviously not tell my mom. You’re so white, Esther.”
We both stopped talking, deflated.
“What do you mean by that?” My voice was smaller than I meant it to be. I was embarrassed to ask, but I wanted to know. I’d never thought seriously about the fact that I was Filipino or white until Mary pointed it out. “I am half-white.”
“You’re half-Filipino too.”
“So what? Why does it matter?”
I wondered if Mary was on to something. I liked kissing Laura, but I didn’t think about it the way I thought about kissing Nick. And I liked spending time with Nick, but I didn’t like it the way I liked spending time with Laura. I was worried that I would only always be half of something. That I was wholly nothing. Or maybe Mary was implying that I was letting one half engulf the other. Was that even possible? And was it bad?
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