by Misa Sugiura
“But you can’t be a lesbian. You’re Asian. Asian girls aren’t lesbians!”
I’m not sure what to make of this. But Reggie and Hanh laugh.
“Are you kidding? What does that even mean?” Reggie says.
“Well, do you know any Asian lesbians? I mean, besides Sana,” Elaine shoots back, crossing her arms.
“Margaret Cho. Jenny Shimizu,” says Reggie. She knows the most random things.
“Who?”
“Margaret Cho is a comedian. And Jenny Shimizu is like, this fashion model who used to go out with Angelina Jolie and Madonna.”
“Angelina Jolie and Madonna are gay?!” Crumbs of Petite Vanilla Scone fall out of Hanh’s mouth as she says this, and she puts them on her plate absently.
“I think they’re bi. So’s Margaret Cho.”
“Wow.”
Elaine and Hanh are impressed. I am, too.
But Elaine still wants more. “But I meant someone you don’t have to Google. Someone young. Someone like us.”
Reggie shrugs and grins. “I guess Sana’s the first.”
I haven’t said a word this whole time because I’m putting most of my energy into keeping my body from shaking itself into a heap of rubble. Which is weird, because coming out to my friends could not be going better. After the initial surprise, no drama. No freaking out. No awkwardness. Nothing I expected. Like, the next thing Elaine says is this:
“You’re so lucky.”
What?
“Yeah, right?” says Hanh. “Think of how much easier it’s going to be for you to get into a good college.”
“What?!”
“Oh, come on. Asian lesbian? You can get in anywhere you want! It’s so unfair.”
“Oh, I know!” Elaine chimes in. “I mean, practically no one can write that on their college app. You’re a total shoo-in. And you get to have a girlfriend and your parents won’t even care if you go on a date because they won’t know it’s a date.”
“Yeah. You can go in your room and shut the door, but Elaine’s going to have to do it in the backseat of Jimmy’s car,” says Hanh, ducking a punch from Elaine.
Somewhere back in a corner of my mind I’m annoyed that they’re talking about my being gay as nothing more than bonus points on college admissions and secret dating possibilities, but mostly I’m relieved they’re taking it so well. “So you guys are fine? Like, with me?”
“Omigod, Sana!” Elaine says. “We’re totally fine! I mean, we’re surprised. But you’re one of us no matter what.”
“Yeah, come on. It’s the twenty-first century. This is Silicon Valley,” adds Hanh. “Nobody cares. Not even most old people.”
“You’re not in Kansas anymore,” Reggie says.
“I’m not from Kansas, I’m from Wisconsin.”
Reggie groans. “I know that. It’s a figure of speech. Like from a movie. The Wizard of— forget it.”
“Can we tell people?” asks Hanh.
“Um. Not yet.”
“Because, seriously, no one cares. I mean, they care, like, it’s news, but they don’t care, you know?”
“I have a gay friend,” says Elaine dreamily. “How cool is that?”
“Okay, Elaine cares.” Hanh turns to her and says, “Elaine, everybody has a gay friend. Jonathan Luckhurst is gay. Danny Nguyen is gay. Chimere Hackney is gay. And that’s just in our class. Besides, she’s not a trophy. You don’t get points. God, I just can’t with you sometimes.” Hanh shakes her head. Reggie does, too.
“Well, she’s my first good friend who’s gay.” Elaine glares at both of them.
“Yeah, I don’t want to be everyone’s new gay friend. Just keep it quiet, okay?”
“Okay.” They all nod.
“But thanks for trusting us. It’s good to talk about it, isn’t it?” Reggie says.
Yeah. It is.
There’s one thing we don’t talk about, though, and that’s Dad. I thought I’d spent the night awake and fretting about Dad, with brief commercial breaks to think about Jamie, but it seems that I fell asleep at some point, and that’s when Hanh and Reggie told Elaine about Dad. The three of them start to press me to talk about the karaoke disaster.
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” I tell them, which is true. If I even think about that photo, my stomach lurches like the floor has dropped out from under me, and I start feeling light-headed.
And yet I need to have it. I need to examine it. So I ask Hanh to text me the photo she took, which she is only too happy to do, so that she can then erase it from her own phone. Her paranoid parents check her phone periodically to make sure she’s not doing anything she’s not supposed to.
“Well,” Reggie points out—as she always does, “it’s not like they’d be wrong.”
22
MOM COMES TO PICK ME UP FROM THE APARTMENT at eleven o’clock. I go right to bed and take a nap. When I wake up, there’s a series of texts from Jamie.
Hey
Sana?
Just txtng to say I shouldn’t have put my arm around u at the gym wo asking. Sry. Got a lil carried away, I guess Tmb
Aww. So I text her back:
Hey, s’ok. Just took me by surprise. I think I’d have been jumpy even if u were a guy. I guess I’m kinda shy about that stuff in public, sry
No problem
xoxox
xoxox
I spend most of the rest of the day in my room, finishing my homework, texting with Jamie, daydreaming about Jamie, and fretting about Dad’s whereabouts.
By five o’clock, I can’t take it anymore, so I text Dad:
How’s New York?
Fifteen minutes pass and there’s no reply.
I can’t sit still, I can’t look at the picture anymore, I can’t focus on my homework, and I definitely can’t talk to Mom. I pace around my room like an animal at the zoo and finally change into shorts and a T-shirt and tell Mom I’m going for a little run.
Once outside, I take off down the street. Good long stride. Get your heels up. Breathe. I can feel my head starting to clear already. I run faster, breathe harder, feel my ponytail brushing against my back, feel my feet on the ground, the muscles in my quads, my heart and lungs pumping blood and oxygen, just run, just run, just run.
I don’t know how long I go like this, just running, feeling glad to be away from my brain, from my ridiculous life for a while.
Which is why I practically jump out of my skin when a car horn honks at me and someone yells, “Hey, doll!”
Caleb slows down and pulls over and I walk to the curb to yell at him. My heart, already working hard from my run, is now hammering a hole in my chest.
“God, Caleb, don’t do that!”
“Sorry,” he says, but he’s working hard not to smile, I can tell. That jerk. “No, seriously. I didn’t mean to scare you. Just wanted to say hi.”
“Okay, well, hi.”
“How’d the karaoke caper go last night?”
Great. And here I thought I’d escaped it for a while. “Oh, fine,” I say, but I can’t look him in the eye.
“Fine?” He’s leaning across the front seat, peering intently at me. Suspiciously.
And then I hear myself saying, “Yeah, pretty much. Except for the part when my dad showed up with his girlfriend.” It’s meant to sound flippant and ironic but my throat closes like a fist on the word “girlfriend” and it comes out as a squeak and suddenly I’m crying again. Godammit. In public. Out on the sidewalk. And here comes an old couple walking their dog. “Can I get in?”
“Sure.”
Once I’m safely inside the car, I start crying for real. Not horrible wracking sobs, thank goodness—I’ve still got a little pride—but definitely a steady stream of tears, and some pathetic sniffly, weepy little hiccups every now and then for good measure. It’s embarrassing, making Caleb sit there and watch me dissolve in a puddle of tears when all he did was ask how last night went. But I’m too tired to care very much. Eventually I dry out and tell him the whole ug
ly story of seeing Dad with That Woman at PopStar last night.
“That sucks,” he says. I shrug. “What are you going to do?” I shrug again.
“Would you mind driving me home?”
Caleb obliges and we stop a couple of driveways down from my house. On a sudden impulse, I reach for his hand.
“Thanks.”
“Anytime, doll,” he says, and winks.
“Stop calling me doll! And don’t do the wink. It’s not a good thing.” He winks again. Ugh. I get out of the car, wave good-bye, and jog home. When I get back, my phone has a message on it from Dad:
NYC is good! Very exciting. How was the homecoming?
Liar! I want to type. Where are you really? But I don’t. I can’t. I don’t know what I’ll do if he texts me back another bald-faced lie. I think of the dance, of kissing Jamie, of how everything should have turned out. How Dad and his girlfriend ruined what should have been a perfect evening. I type,
Homecoming was fun
Mom misses you, tho. You should call her
There. How’s “NYC” now, you evening-ruining cheater? For a moment, I feel sort of vengefully happy for hopefully ruining his evening.
But as I reread my text, the righteous anger fades, the truth of what I’ve just typed comes through, and all I feel is sad.
23
OH. MY. GOD.
Jamie’s left the poetry notebook in my locker, with a new poem: “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson. And a note:
This makes me think of you. Not just because of the wild nights part (haha), but also because you’re like my harbor in a wild ocean.
Love, J
I reread the last part of the poem:
Rowing in Eden
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!
I’m her harbor. My heart is melting. Other parts of me are heating up, too, but in a different way. Wild Nights. Wow.
I don’t think I can put this one in Ms. Owen’s journal.
The poem that Jamie left for me in my locker has me moving through the day in my own personal bubble of happiness. I want to hug myself and spin around every time I think about Jamie, about the way she looked at me, about the poem. And if I did spin around, tiny sparkling stars would come streaming out of my pockets. Everything is ice-cream sundaes and rainbows and Christmas all rolled into one, and most of the time it’s enough to make me forget about Dad and That Woman. When that memory threatens to burst my bubble, I take a peek inside the poetry notebook and immediately feel better. Until one time it occurs to me that the poem could refer to Dad and That Woman, too. Ick. I shove that thought out of my head, out of my bubble. Just concentrate on Jamie’s signature and how it says “Love, J.”
There, that’s better.
After cross-country practice, it’s difficult not to hold Jamie’s hand on the way to my house. It’s really difficult not to fall right onto my bed and start making out the moment my door is shut. Well, let’s be honest. It’s impossible. We spent all of Sunday apart after our first kiss(es) on Saturday—what do you expect?
Eventually—reluctantly—we take a break and get our books out. When I’ve managed to concentrate on my trig homework for almost forty minutes, I reward myself by looking up at Jamie, who is lying on the bed scribbling notes in the margins of The Awakening—another fun nineteenth-century book about adultery. It’s about a woman named Edna who feels trapped in her marriage, and she falls in love with a man who’s not her husband. In the end, she can’t bring herself to subject her family to the scandal it would cause if she were to run away with her lover—but she also can’t bring herself to go back to life the way it used to be. So . . . she drowns herself in the ocean. Cheery stuff. I feel sorry for poor Edna, trapped in a time when women had no choice but to become housewives and have lots of babies. Though I’m mad that she killed herself. I wish she’d fought back. Then I think about what’s okay to do in society today, and what’s still scandalous.
I remember how Jamie started to put her arm around me at the dance.
“Do your friends know? I mean, about. You know.”
Jamie puts her book down. “About you? Or about me?”
“You, I guess.”
“I came out to a few of them this past summer—you know, Christina, Arturo, JJ. A couple others. I was with this girl, Kelsey, from Stanford track camp. But we weren’t together for very long, and I dunno. I didn’t post anything anywhere. I don’t think a lot of other people know. But as long as they don’t give me a hard time about it, I guess I don’t really care who knows.”
“Was Kelsey the one who . . . walked all over you?”
“Yeah. I . . . she was the first girl I ever . . . you know. And she was so, like, experienced. I guess I fell pretty hard, and then she basically punted me when camp was over. She was just playing me the whole time. And I kinda lost it. I was so pathetic, like, ‘Why? What did I do? How can I change?’ Texting, calling . . . ugh.” She shudders. “Christina was so mad at me.”
Christina again. “I don’t think she likes me.”
Jamie exhales slowly. “I know. I wish you guys could get to know each other better. She’s been there for me through everything, and she’s just afraid I’ll get hurt again. I told her it’s not like that with you, but you know.” She shrugs, then takes my hand. “You wouldn’t do that to me, right? You wouldn’t just leave me like that.”
“Never.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Good.” She leans over and kisses me once, twice, three times.
Time for a study break.
After a few minutes, I start worrying about the pile of homework still waiting to be done. I know. I’m so messed up. Feeling guilty about homework makes me think of Mom, and thinking of Mom makes me worried she’ll walk in on us, so I pull away and ask Jamie, “Does your mom know?”
Jamie shakes her head. “Are you kidding me? She would freak if she knew. She’s like old-school Catholic. She’s all ‘strong Latina’ this and ‘independent woman’ that, but I think that underneath she’s pretty old school. Like, she made me promise not to have sex until after I become a doctor and get married.” She giggles. “She’ll probably get that part of her wish even after I get married—if I get married . . . and if you define ‘having sex’ as ‘putting a dick in your you-know-what.’”
I don’t know why, but that makes me blush.
Jamie laughs again, then says, “Maybe I should tell my mom about us. At least she’d stop worrying about me getting pregnant.” She sighs. “Do your parents know?”
“I didn’t even know for sure until you.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hm. And what do you think so far?”
I guess homework can wait a little longer.
A couple of study breaks later, Jamie asks if Mom knows about Dad’s affair. I don’t have a good answer. “I don’t know—it’s not like they’re acting different or anything. They’ve never seemed really close. But I mean, people in Japan don’t like, hug and kiss or say ‘I love you’ to each other, really.”
“That’s messed up,” says Jamie. “I didn’t know Japan was so, like, weird.”
Suddenly I feel a bit defensive. “It’s not like that so much anymore. Plus they’re from the countryside from like, super-traditional families.”
“Huh. Well, anyway. I think you should tell your mom, just in case. Show her that picture. She deserves to know the truth.”
“Yeah, maybe. But she’ll kill me for being out at karaoke.”
“So tell her your friends went out, took the picture, showed it to you, and you recognized your dad.”
“Then she’ll think they’re bad kids and she’ll never let me go out with them again.”
“So hang out with me and my friends.”
“Yeah . . . maybe. I dunno. I don’t want to ditch my friends.”
“Hanging out with my friends doesn’t mean yo
u’re ditching yours.”
“I know, I just—whatever, that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want to tell my mom about my dad. It’ll mess everything up.”
“Like things aren’t gonna get messed up anyway?”
“I know . . . but maybe they won’t. I—it’s been going on for years, now. How am I gonna tell her that? Maybe . . . maybe she’ll figure things out on her own. I mean, it’s her marriage, right?”
“But it’s your family. I know it’s hard, but she’s your mom. You have to stick together. Someone has to tell her, and it’s not gonna be him. She deserves to know. She deserves to have a choice.”
“Yeah, I know she does, but I just . . . I wish I didn’t feel like it was up to me.”
“I know.” Jamie puts her arm around me, and we sit like that, with my head resting on her shoulder, for a long time. It feels even better than everything we’ve done together so far.
After I see Jamie off at the bus stop, I come home almost ready to have a talk with Mom. But not quite. Because how can you ever be ready to tell your mom that your dad is having sex with another woman? I don’t know.
Tonight’s dinner is special, for o-tsukimi, the harvest moon festival. Everything is round, like the full moon. Mom’s making tsukimi-soba—buckwheat noodles with a raw egg cracked on top—chicken meatballs, kabocha with sweet-salty sauce, and daikon, carrots, and taro root boiled in fish broth. She’s even found some fu—tiny starch dumplings to go in the miso soup—that have pictures of rabbits on them, because in Japan, instead of the man in the moon, there’s a rabbit. Mom’s a good cook, and she’s proud of the meal she’s made. I take a photo and text it to Dad, to spite him:
Nom nom! You should be here!
I poke a hole in the egg yolk with my chopsticks and stir the yolk into the noodle broth a little. It makes a rich, silky contrast to the salty broth and chewy soba noodles. Dad should be here. And it’s not like he couldn’t. He’s somewhere in town, after all.
The more I eat—the sweet pumpkin, the daikon seasoned and cooked to melt-in-your-mouth tender perfection—the more resentful I feel about Dad’s absence, and by the time Mom and I are carrying the dishes back to the sink, I’m ready to tell her. Jamie’s right. She deserves to know the truth.