by Misa Sugiura
“Huh.” I can’t imagine my parents leaving me alone in the house for an evening, let alone a whole weekend.
“Not your parents, huh?”
“Never.”
“Hey, have lunch with us,” he says, in a bizarre change of subject. “My mom made, like, a hundred chocolate chip cookies and I brought them for us all.” When I hesitate, he says, “What—you so in with your Asian friends that you’re too good to hang out with anyone else?”
What the—?
“Fine,” I hear myself say. “But those cookies better be really good.”
Thankfully, Elaine and Hanh have a VSA meeting today, so I don’t have to explain anything to them. When I tell Reggie that I’m eating lunch with the goths, she says, a little incredulously, “What? Why?” I explain that Caleb won’t leave me alone, and that he’s promised me cookies, and I offer to save some for her. She gives me a skeptical, raised-eyebrow stare—one of her specialties, I’ve noticed—and shoos me off.
I sidle up to the goth tree, where Caleb and his friends are already dipping into a huge Tupperware container full of cookies. They all look up, and Caleb makes room for me next to him and introduces me: Ginny, Thom, Brett, Andrew, Luisa. Ginny, the girl sitting next to Caleb, scoots over, and I sit down between them.
“We’re talking about that ridiculous anti-drug stuff next week.”
I help myself to a cookie and roll my eyes, as I’m sure they’re expecting me to. “Right?”
“Like any of that’s going to keep people from doing drugs. All anyone cares about is winning pizza anyway.”
A guy named Thom shakes his head and says, “Seriously. Macarena Monday? What the fuck does the Macarena have to do with drugs? I don’t even think it’s really Mexican.”
“Knowing Lowell, she’s probably trying to get the Mexican kids involved,” says Luisa. “She probably thinks we’ll get all excited and want to do the Macarena.”
“Who’s Lowell?” I ask.
“Mrs. Lowell. She’s activities director and student government advisor.”
“How ’bout, you have to be high to want to do the Macarena,” Caleb offers.
“They should call it Marijuana Monday,” Thom says. “Dress up in a Mexican costume and dance away drugs to a song that’s not from Mexico because no one who dances does drugs. God, it’s so fucked up on so many levels, it makes me want to puke.”
About halfway through lunch, I realize that I haven’t hung out with white kids since I left Wisconsin. How’s that for weird? The bell rings and we start gathering up our things. I say good-bye and head off to English, but Caleb tags along after me for a few steps. “Hey. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I shake my head. “Your friends are nice.”
Caleb looks at me, as if he’s making up his mind about something. Then he says, “So, uh, we’re all probably gonna just chill at my house on Saturday. That’s usually what we do.”
“Huh?”
“My mom’s going to be around, too, if your mom is hung up about stuff like that.” Oh. He’s inviting me over to his house. Okay. It suddenly occurs to me that Caleb might like me—like, like me-like me.
“Um . . . I think I have to stay home to help my mom with some stuff.”
“Oh. Sure, okay, no problem. See ya.” He raises his hand in a half wave and turns and walks off. Maybe he’s just being friendly?
“See ya.”
He’s just being friendly. Yeah, that’s probably what it is. It has to be.
11
OMIGOD, SOMEONE PINCH ME. JAMIE—JAMIE!—IS walking home with me. Right now. I know. My fantasy is coming true.
Ten minutes ago, we were all straggling out of the locker room after practice, hair still damp from the showers, hauling our hundred-pound backpacks and saying good-bye to each other as kids piled into cars or headed to the bus stop. I was starting off on my walk home when I heard Jamie complaining to Priti. “My brother spilled soda all over the laptop last night, so now I won’t be able to finish that online assessment for tomorrow.”
An idea sprang to life in my head. “Hey, wanna come over to my house?”
“Huh?” Jamie turned to look at me.
“I mean, uh. I live just a couple of blocks from here. You could use my computer. You know, to do your homework. Or whatever. And catch a later bus home. If you want.” Her eyebrows shot up. She took a quick look around her, then pointed to herself—Me? “Or . . . not. No big deal, I just, you know. Just thought I’d—”
“No, that would be great.” She hesitated. “You sure it’s okay?”
“Oh, totally. No problem.”
“Sweet. Thanks.” She smiled at me and I smiled back and after a couple seconds of smiling at each other I started to feel silly, so I looked away. But I’ve been smiling all the way home.
After a brief, mortifying, and very Japanese introduction to Mom (Hello, I’m sorry my daughter is such a loser, it’s so kind of you to be nice to her, I really owe you one), we escape to my room, and Jamie checks out my bookshelf while I run to the kitchen for some snacks.
“Emily Dickinson?” she says when I return laden with Diet Cokes, a bag of kettle corn, and a bowl of rice crackers.
Oh, no. “Yeah. I know, I’m a nerd.”
“No, that’s cool. We had to read a poem by her in eighth grade: ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’ I liked it.”
“That’s the poem that made me want to get that book!”
“But I don’t get her sometimes—she’s a little weird for me, you know? This shy white lady shut up in her house all day writing poems. All those white writer ladies ever did was sit around and write and sew—Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, the Little Women chick . . .”
“No, they did other things. Like knit lace and drink tea.” I giggle, and she laughs with me, which feels kind of magical for some reason.
“Louisa May Alcott,” Jamie says next.
“Oh, right.”
She adds, “You should read Sandra Cisneros. She wrote this poem called ‘Loose Woman’ that’s like the opposite of ‘I’m Nobody.’ She says whatever she wants, she does whatever she wants, and she doesn’t give a shit about what people say. No sitting around inside and sewing.”
Note to self: Google “Loose Woman” by Sandra Cisneros. But I have to defend Emily.
“I don’t think she cared what people said. I mean, she didn’t mind people thinking she was weird or whatever. I thought that was kind of the point of ‘I’m Nobody.’”
Jamie chews her lip. “Huh. Yeah, I guess you’re right.” She smiles. “You need to read ‘Loose Woman,’ though. It’s pretty great.” Oh, I will. She moves on. “Ooh, this is pretty,” she says, taking down my red lacquer box.
“Oh. That’s—”
“Huh?” She opens it.
—private. “Oh, nothing. I was just going to say my parents gave it to me.”
She admires the pearl earrings. “Wow. Are these real?”
“Yeah.”
“Best friend?” She holds up the photo of Trish and me.
“Meh. Used to be.”
She holds up the phone number.
“Someone my dad knows. I don’t know why it’s in there.”
Now she’s playing with bits of sea glass in her palm. “Where’d you get these? They’re so pretty.”
“I know, right? I used to like to collect them whenever we went to the beach—Lake Michigan. When I was little, I’d pretend they were like, magic stones from an underwater kingdom and I was actually the long-lost princess . . . kinda silly, I know.”
“No.” Jamie looks up and smiles. “It’s not silly. I was thinking the same thing. Like, they’re pieces of your soul that got lost or something. Like who you really are, like the princess. Or like people who make it through a tough time—you know, like you start off sharp and broken, and then over time you become smooth and beautiful and like, your own piece.” If I didn’t have a crush on her before, I definitely do now. A girl-crush, I mean. “You’re laughing at me
. You think I’m a total nerd. I can tell from your face,” she says.
“No! No, I think you’re . . . cool.”
“Oh, right. I heard you hesitate there. You totally think I’m a nerd.” She smiles. “That’s okay. We can be nerds together. Poetry nerds.”
“You saying I’m a nerd, then?”
She looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “Your own personal volume of Emily Dickinson?”
“Oh, okay, fine. You win. Nerds together.”
I lie on the bed and Jamie sits on the floor as we do our trig homework. She finishes ahead of me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her stretch, shut her textbook, and slide it into her backpack. So unfair. I turn back to working out how deep I would have to dig to reach a bed of coal that is tilted at twelve degrees and comes to the surface six kilometers from my property. Right. Like that would ever happen in real life. I struggle to put together an equation involving opposite and adjacent sides, angles and tangents. Or maybe cosines. Algebra and geometry were easy, but I just can’t put the pieces of trigonometry together in a way that makes sense to me. I don’t even really understand what some of the pieces are.
I look up to see Jamie watching me. Ack. Please let me not have been doing something embarrassing without realizing it, like making a funny face or picking a zit or something. I don’t think I was.
“What?”
“Oh! Nothing,” she says, looking away. “I was just, you know. Nothing.”
Omigod. Is it my imagination, or is she blushing? I feel my own cheeks grow warm, and I pretend to play with my hair so I can cover my face. Could it be? Maybe. But I could be wrong. Slow down. Make some space. Redirect. “God. I cannot do this trig homework. How is it so easy for you?”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“It’s not hard.”
“It is for me.”
She groans dramatically and climbs onto my bed. “Scoot over. I’ll help you.”
Both of us on the bed. Okay. I scoot over as directed, and I’m still lying down and she’s sitting, but my bed isn’t that big, so there’s a pretty significant stretch of my body that’s touching hers. She didn’t have to get on the bed and sit this close, but she did. She’s so close I can feel her thigh on my ribs. But she’s just helping me with my math homework. Still, there’s the way she was looking at me before—she wasn’t just staring off into space and I happened to be in her line of sight. She was gazing at me—at me—I know she was. Well, I think she was. Was she?
“Hey, pay attention!” She nudges me with her knee.
“Sorry. It’s just so . . . boring and confusing.” And thinking about you is just as confusing, but so much more interesting.
“It’s not. Just listen.” I make a superhuman effort to focus on trigonometry. Tangent, sine, cosine. All too soon, it’s six thirty, time for Jamie to go back to school and catch her bus. As she packs up to go, she holds out the Emily Dickinson. “Can I borrow this?”
“Sure. Nerd.”
“Thanks. Nerd.”
We walk to the bus stop together, and lean against the little bus shelter, so close we’re almost touching. We gaze down the street in silence. The bus appears, and as Jamie stands up and hoists her backpack, it throws her off balance and she stumbles sideways a little.
“Whoa! Sorry,” she says, catching herself on my arm. A shivery little zing! shoots up my spine. A good zing. A great zing. I try to catch her eye, but she’s already headed toward the curb. She climbs onto the bus while I stand there with my heart bang-bang-booming like a bass drum, and she waves good-bye as the door closes behind her. My hand waves back, but my mind seems to have left the premises. I turn and walk home, alternately feeling like I’m going to levitate and float away on a pink cotton candy cloud, and feeling like I’m teetering on the edge of a huge cliff, looking down into a wild and windy abyss.
I like her. Like, like her-like her. No doubt. Even more than I liked Trish. She’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s real, she’s romantic. She thinks pieces of sea glass are like pieces of a lost soul, for crying out loud. I like her so much I can hardly even breathe.
But I so don’t need this. After a lifetime of feeling different and out of place, I finally fit in. I’m finally comfortable. I can finally work on the subtler points of being uniquely me, instead of having to explain the obvious Asian flag that everyone can see. I don’t want to fly a new freak flag. I really, really don’t.
When I get back, Mom is using her little wooden pestle to grind sesame seeds in a special ceramic bowl. She’s making broiled mackerel for dinner—my favorite—with sides of vinegar-sugar cucumber salad, boiled spinach with ground sesame seeds and sea salt, and, of course, rice and miso soup. I wonder if I should have asked Jamie to stay for dinner, but then decide that the mackerel would probably have grossed her out. Broiled mackerel is served with its head and tail on, and you basically pull the meat off the bones in little chunks until there’s just a skeleton and a fish head left. You’re pretty much face-to-face—literally—with the fact that you’re eating a dead fish.
“Did you finish your homeworks?” asks Mom.
“I have a little Spanish left to do, and a couple of chapters to read for English.”
“Dinner is in twenty minutes. You can do some more homeworks or set the table.”
Not a word about Jamie. Which is a little strange because she often has something to say about the few friends that I’ve ever brought home—usually that they’re prettier, taller, smarter, or more polite than me. But still. I’m curious.
When we sit down to eat, and after I serve myself some mackerel, I hand it to Mom and ask, “So what do you think about Jamie?”
Mom pokes her chopsticks into the fish and tears out a piece. “She wears lot of makeups.”
“So?”
“Too much.” She tears off another hunk.
In Mom’s eyes, any amount of makeup is too much, so I’m not surprised. “I think she looks pretty.”
“Too much makeups is not pretty. Girl should look like girlish, not like trying to be grown-up.”
“She’s not trying to be grown-up. She just wears makeup. Lots of girls do.”
An image of Christina’s Pinot Noir lips flashes in my mind, along with a flicker of doubt. Why does her makeup bug me, but not Jamie’s?
“Hn.” My mom digs the mackerel’s eye out of its socket—it’s her favorite part—and pops it into her mouth. “She doesn’t look like good student.” The pronouncement of death. My mom will never approve of anyone who is not a good student. Not that I need her approval.
“Mom, she’s in all the same classes as me.”
“Affirmative action.”
“Mom!”
“She’s a Mexican, isn’t she? Schools just want to say they have multiculture in advanced classes.”
“Just because she’s Mexican American doesn’t mean she’s a bad student.”
But Mom’s not having it. She picks a stray fishbone out of her mouth and says, “The Mexicans are lazy, and not so smart—look how long they live in America, and they still need the Spanish language on everything—even for driver’s license and voting! That is lazy. I only live here for seventeen years and I had to learn English for driver’s license, reading newspaper, and everything. I didn’t ask for everything to be in Japanese.”
“Mom. Jamie’s not lazy. Mexicans aren’t lazy. It’s way more complicated than that.”
“I didn’t say Jamie is lazy! I said Mexican is lazy. Japanese started with poor, and no English, and discriminated. But Japanese are successful now. San Jose airport is named after the Japanese person. The Mexicans are still just the gardeners and kitchen workers.”
She’s never going to get it, so I give up trying to explain and go back to defending Jamie. “Well, Jamie aced her last trig test.” So there.
“Well, maybe Jamie is good student.” Mom looks sternly at me. “But she’s the exception.” I shake my head. There really are no words. No, wait. Mom has a fe
w left. “And she looks like bad student. That’s her fault if I think so. If you want people to think she is good student, tell her to stop wearing so much makeups.”
I pour a trickle of soy sauce on my sesame spinach and take a bite. When I was little, I used to pester Mom to make Hamburger Helper like Trish’s mom. Or just order pizza. Trish’s mom was a good cook, but she said she liked to take a break and relax sometimes. She didn’t want to waste energy worrying all the time about what Trish ate, or who she hung out with, or where she went on the weekends. Mom, on the other hand, refused to relax. “Being a mother is my job. You say relax, but relaxed worker is just lazy. How can I be a good mother for you if I cook lazy food? If I let you do whatever you want, if I let you be friends with bad people or let you wear sloppy clothes, I am being the lazy mother who doesn’t care enough to be strict.” Typical. I guess it’s nice that she cares enough to look out for me, even though she’s totally wrong. But sometimes I wish she cared enough to listen, as well.
“Hey, Sana! C’mere a sec!”
I adjust my course and angle over toward Jamie and three of her friends, who hang out not far from where I meet Elaine and Hanh before school. It’s a cold morning, and they’re all slouched in oversize black hoodies. Christina is leaning against one of the boys, and they’re all staring at me impassively, except for Jamie, who’s smiling.
“These are my friends,” she says. “That’s Arturo and Christina—you remember Christina,” nodding at the couple, “and this is JJ.”
Arturo looks like he could be twenty—he’s short, but he has a muscular build, broad shoulders, and thick, straight eyebrows over serious brown eyes. JJ, from psych class, looks like he wants to be twenty. He’s taller than Arturo, with bright eyes and a ridiculous, scraggly little mustache. He’s shifting back and forth like he’s either freezing or just has too much energy to stand still. He’s twirling a Darth Vader key chain on his finger.
“’Sup.” Arturo tips his chin at me and JJ flashes me an impish smile.
“You’re in psych with me,” JJ says. “You’re one of the smart ones.”
I think that’s a compliment. But Christina gives me a slow once-over that makes me doubt she sees it that way.