Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  I too had applied to only four.

  An annoying little gremlin perched itself on my shoulder and whispered in my ear:

  Maybe you shouldn’t have been so sure of yourself.

  Skipping AP History is going to cost you!

  Your essay was so boring. YAWN.

  YOU are boring.

  Your applications can’t just be good — they need to be exceptional. ARE they exceptional? Are YOU?

  Have you demonstrated knowledge? Passion? Integrity? Authenticity? Confidence? Initiative? A commitment to service? Special talents? Grit?

  The gremlin would not shut the hell up.

  “Does anyone know where the bathroom is?” I asked.

  “Inside the sliding door and down the hall to the right,” said Mia. “You can’t miss it. It’s huge.”

  I walked inside, found the enormous bathroom, and, as I washed my hands, reassured my well-lit reflection that everything was going to be fine. Everything was on track. I could always send out a few more applications if I wanted to. Even so, my heart — the one I used to have — was racing around in my chest like a hamster on a wheel. I took a deep breath.

  Instead of heading back out to the pool and patio, I wandered farther into the house. Past the family room, where a bunch of kids were playing beer pong, as well as several rooms with closed doors. Bedrooms, I assumed, and likely occupied. At the end of the hallway, I peeked into a darkened room that looked like an office or a library, with shelves of books lining every wall except for the one that consisted entirely of a floor-to-ceiling glass door that opened onto a large deck sweeping out over the valley below.

  I hesitated on the threshold of the room. It was empty, and it felt like I shouldn’t be in there. But I was also curious.

  I stepped inside and spent a little time studying the spines of the books on the shelves. It always fascinated me to see what other people read. Or at least what they wanted people to think that they read. Craig’s parents were into Philip Roth, modern art, and mid-century architecture, apparently.

  I pushed open the sliding door, made my way to a pristine white chaise lounge, and took a seat. Out there, the voices of the partygoers in the back blended into a pleasant hum, indistinguishable as individual conversations. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the light breeze tickling my face. I remember feeling really tired. Tired of being at the party. Tired of talking about school.

  Until Liam Morales dropped abruptly into the seat next to me, nearly scaring me out of my skin. My heartbeat surged so fast that it hurt.

  “Hey, Russell.”

  He calls everyone by their last name. It’s an annoying habit.

  “Jesus, Liam. You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

  Liam had been Emma’s crush since fifth grade. When we were in middle school, I spent many a sleepover night with her, studying his Instagram feed and devising plans to pass by his lunch table or “unexpectedly” bump into him on our way to the community pool near his house. Along with probably scores of other girls. Liam, with his impossibly long-lashed brown eyes and wavy hair, was the movie star of our class. And as we had made our way through high school, he had only grown more and more good-looking — a fact I was not unaware of as he sat mere inches away from me, shirtless and wrapped in a pool towel.

  I also noticed that he was pretty drunk.

  “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you, Russell,” he said. “Just curious who was out here drinking alone. Are you depressed or something?”

  “No, just bored of talking about college applications.”

  Liam swayed his drink in my direction. “Cheers to that.”

  So we talked about something else. I don’t remember what. I actually didn’t have a drink, so Liam shared the rest of his. It was soda mixed with a lot of gin and tasted terrible. Then he found a bottle of some kind of syrupy dessert liqueur in the office/library. We passed it back and forth.

  Later, I do remember him telling me this: “You know, you’re actually pretty cute. I’m kind of wanting to make out with you right now.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  He looked surprised that I wasn’t immediately flattered. “No, I mean you’re so serious all the time, it’s sort of hard to notice.”

  “Am I?” I asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you laugh.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, maybe you’re just not that funny. You know how good-looking people don’t have to work too hard to get people’s attention?”

  “So you think I’m good-looking.”

  “Liam, that means nothing. You know you are good-looking.”

  “But I’m not funny?”

  “Only very lucky people can be both.”

  “Maybe you’re just mean and have no sense of humor.”

  I kicked his chaise and he caught my foot in his hand. Then he ran his hand up my bare calf.

  I’m not going to lie: Liam didn’t have to work very hard to get me to kiss him. My head was spinning from whatever it was we had been drinking, making me care less than I should have about Emma, who had been annoying me with her college admissions obsession that night. Plus, his hand on my calf was so warm. His face so perfect. His body so close. He pulled me toward him, onto his chaise.

  I remember thinking that when it came to kissing, Liam knew exactly what to do with his lips. His hands. His tongue. Not that I had a ton of experiences to compare him to. I had kissed exactly three boys during my time in high school: Henry Shrader, once, in my sophomore year after the homecoming dance; Ajay Shah, on the orchestra trip to Disneyland, during the fireworks; and Matt Cohen, who I made out with for a couple of weeks, in my room, while we were working on a joint school project. He had always seemed a little unsure of his technique. But while Liam was the complete opposite of unsure, there was also something so methodical, so impersonal, about the way that he kissed me. I sensed that this was how he kissed every girl. Many girls.

  As he started to untie the string on the back of my sundress, I pulled away, trying to catch my breath.

  “Do you want me to stop?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking, finally, of Emma. Thinking of how she’d never forgive me if she found out. And thinking that I wasn’t entirely on board with where things were heading anyway.

  A few weeks later, when my heart nearly exploded and I got the news that I would probably die if I didn’t get a new one, I almost wished we’d kept going. Not because I was pining for Liam. We didn’t really have much in common. I simply didn’t have time to wait for someone amazing. Or to worry about Emma’s feelings. She would have plenty of chances to feel her heart race during first kisses. To go to parties, dance, flirt, hook up with hot college boys, maybe even fall in love.

  And there was a pretty good chance that I was going to die a virgin. The end.

  Anticipating another long, quiet day in the library, a place I used to happily spend hours at a time, I already feel like a caged cat. The summer syllabus for AP English Lit flies out the window, fluttering behind me like a bird with a broken wing.

  The ocean has many moods. Today it seems kind of feisty, ready to toss some people around.

  It’s late morning, and instead of camping out in my usual study carrel in the school library, I’ve been sitting in the cool, damp sand for about thirty minutes now, watching Kai. A small group of surfers dotted the waves when I arrived, and although they were too far out for me to see their faces, I recognized Kai right away. I’ve become familiar with the way he moves. Athletic. Graceful. Fearless.

  Beneath a misty bluish-gray sky, the waves are head height — big rolling swells that lift and curl over in an explosion of foam. As each one rises, the surfers paddle into the wave like a school of fish. Kai makes his pop-ups look effortless, quickly pivoting his board to skim sideways across the water, riding each wave as long and as far as it lasts.

  It occurs to me now that I knew Kai before I met him.
Well, not knew him, exactly. I’d seen him. He’s one of the ones I couldn’t take my eyes off of all those weeks ago when I drove on a whim to the beach. The one. Because when he’s in the water, he’s beautiful to behold. Like right now, when he propels his board right off the top of a swell, twisting around nearly 360 degrees in midair. It’s a move that looks both exhilarating and impossible. A move, I decide, that I need to master. He’s been holding out on me, I think, with a slight twinge of annoyance.

  The next set is bigger and fiercer than the last. Kai launches like a rocket off a fast-rising wave, pivots, wobbles, and then drops straight down into the churning whiteness below. My stomach tenses, heart guns it to a hundred, and it’s only after I see his head come up that I realize I’ve been holding my breath.

  Minutes later, he’s paddling back out and I scan the horizon behind him, trying to read the ocean for what’s coming next. In the distance, another set rises up. A few surfers pick up the first wave as it sweeps toward the shore, but Kai paddles over it. Dives through the next.

  Number three.

  That’s the one.

  The wave barrels forward, gathering height and width. It’s going to be a monster.

  Kai plows right into it, and it seems to pull him up like a child’s bath toy. But in one swift move he’s standing. I track him as he pivots, then as he disappears into a swirling green tunnel.

  As the wind slaps at my face, I almost feel like I’m speeding across the length of the wave with him, adrenaline coursing through my arteries and veins.

  I wrap my arms around myself, realizing I’m shivering. It was sunny and in the seventies when I left my house this morning, but here I’m underdressed in a thin blue hoodie. I should probably go. Kai looks like he’s getting ready to paddle in and I’m kind of embarrassed about him seeing me, sitting here like some beach bunny. It’s not our usual lesson day.

  Just as I’m about to stand up, I spot him walking out of the water with his board. He shakes his wet black hair, once, like a dog, and then swipes it back with his free hand. He scans the beach as if he’s looking for something, until he makes eye contact with me. I feel my face flush. How long had he known I was watching?

  I don’t know whether to sit or stand as he makes his way toward me. Would getting up make it look like I was waiting for him?

  This is so awkward.

  “Hey,” he says as he approaches. It looks like he has a slight limp today, and I wonder if he hurt himself when he dropped off that roiling wave.

  “Hey,” I answer, trying to sound normal.

  “I . . . thought we were on for Wednesday?”

  It occurs to me that he could be annoyed that I’ve barged in on his morning off, when he’s free from helping beginners like me stay upright. In my head, I run through possible responses that don’t make me sound like a stalker:

  Oh, really? I thought you said Monday this week. My mistake!

  Yep, Wednesday. I’m just meeting some friends. Who should be here any minute . . .

  It’s not Wednesday??

  Ultimately, I settle on the truth.

  I shrug. “I didn’t feel like going to school today. Thought I might come out and practice, but it’s kind of hard to do that without a wetsuit. Which I left at home.”

  I feel like a small child looking up at him like this. I should have stood.

  “Yeah, a wetsuit is mandatory today,” he says as he sits down next to me in the sand. Okay. This is slightly less awkward. “It’s goddamn cold out there,” he adds. I notice that his lips are blue. They are also nicely shaped. Full.

  He’s quiet for a few seconds, still catching his breath. His chest rises and falls. “You’re supposed to be in school?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Summer school.”

  “Huh. You don’t seem like the summer school type.”

  “What’s the summer school type?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Sort of a fuckup?” Then quickly shakes his head. “Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  Nevertheless, I feel compelled to explain that I’m not in danger of becoming a high school dropout. “I missed the final semester of my senior year and I need to make up the credits,” I say. “So . . . summer school.”

  “Got it.”

  He looks like he might be about to ask why I missed a semester of school, so I change the subject.

  “So when are you going to teach me how to jump off a wave like that?” I nod toward the surf.

  He laughs. “Patience, newbie. Took me a few years to work up to the three-sixty.”

  It’s a nice-sounding laugh — warm, despite the cold weather. I think he should do it more often. He shivers.

  “You’re supposed to be in school and we both could use a parka,” Kai says. “Doesn’t seem much like summer, does it?”

  I make a sweeping gesture across the shoreline. “I thought you were used to this. Haven’t you been surfing out here since you were a kid?”

  “Here? Nah. I learned to surf in Hawaii. Been here in the Bay Area for about four years. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this water.”

  Hawaii. I’ve only been once, on a family vacation to a beachfront resort in Maui, when I was about seven. I swam in the pool the entire time because, back then, I was afraid of the waves.

  Then something clicks in my mind. I say what I’m assuming aloud. “You’re Hawaiian?”

  He shakes his head no and grins. “And now you’re about to ask me the question that every mixed-race person gets asked all the time.”

  “What question is that?”

  “‘What are you?’”

  “Oh, so you’re a mind reader, are you?”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “I was thinking, wrongly, that you’re Hawaiian. But now that you’re planting questions in my head . . .”

  I can’t help that I’m curious about him. I want to know more about his family and his life and why he was maybe limping a few minutes ago and where he lives and . . . just everything.

  Kai continues. “Is he Hawaiian, Korean, Japanese . . . ?”

  “Kai.”

  “My dad is Japanese American,” he says. “And my mom’s side of the family are English and German, so, like, white.”

  I nod and then add, “Both sides of my family are white.”

  He smiles, and I’m relieved to see that he’s not annoyed at how nosy I am today. “You don’t say.”

  “Well, Irish and Polish, if you’re looking for more specifics. Do you miss it? Living in Hawaii?” I ask.

  “I was pretty little when we lived there, but I definitely miss not freezing my ass off when I surf. I miss warm nights. But this place is beautiful too, in a different way. It’s wild, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. There was a time when I never would have considered paddling out into the waves that are crashing in front of us. But now it’s all I want to do. We sit in silence for a few minutes, staring out. My brain is desperately searching for something else, something interesting, to say.

  Kai saves me from having to come up with anything. “How’s your head?”

  How’s my head?

  And just like that, I’m sucked back into all the anxieties that I’ve come to the beach to get away from. The headaches. The hallucinations. The nightmares. Forgetting stuff . . . or remembering stuff that I didn’t even know I forgot. But I realize he’s talking about when I got hit by my board last week.

  “Oh, fine,” I say, touching my temple.

  “Good,” he says. Then he squints at me. “You know, you kind of look like a Smurf right now.”

  I tug at the strings on my blue hoodie, which is pulled tightly around my ears. “Phew. That’s exactly what I was going for.”

  He sort of laughs. Then there’s another awkward silence. Kai stands up. “I’m freezing. I’ve got to get out of this suit.”

  And just to keep the awkwardness going a little longer, Kai, getting out of his suit is now scrolling like the Times Square news ticker across my brain
, making my stupid face flush for like the third or fourth time today.

  “Oh, don’t let me keep you!” I say. Too loud. “I’m going to watch a little longer.” I hope there are still surfers out there to watch. “See you Wednesday.”

  “See you Wednesday.” He starts walking away, still with that hint of a limp, but then calls over his shoulder. “And don’t forget your wetsuit!”

  “I never forget my wetsuit!” I call back. “Well, I mean, except for today!” My voice is swept away by the wind.

  “What?” He’s already close to the path between the dunes that leads to the parking lot.

  “Nothing! Never mind!” I gesture for him to keep walking.

  He looks my way for another second and then disappears into the shadows cast by the dunes.

  I’m freezing too, but there’s no way I’m heading out to the parking lot until I’m sure he’s gone.

  I tuck my chin to my chest and pull my hands up into the sleeves of my hoodie.

  Gah. I feel like an idiot.

  “Omigod, Chloe! How are you?”

  If one more person asks, I’m seriously going to lose my shit.

  It’s Mia, launching questions at me in her rapid-fire, high-pitched voice: “We haven’t seen you in forever! Are you feeling okay? What have you been doing this summer?”

  This.

  This is why I didn’t want to go to Emma’s graduation party. Everyone wants to know how I feel. Am I okay? Am I really back from the almost-dead? Do I need to sit down? Can they get me anything? It makes me feel like I’m no longer just Chloe. Now, I’m also A Story. One that gets told when my name comes up in conversation: I saw her collapse that day on the track. They are hungry for details. What was it like? Do you feel different? How big is the scar? And I hate being the center of attention. The target of all the concerned faces and the well-meaning questions.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “How’s your summer going?” Asking Mia to talk about herself is usually a reliable way to shift the focus.

  “Oh, you know . . . super busy. Alexis and I did this environmental service trip to Costa Rica in June and it was so amazing. Check out my Instagram — there are a ton of photos.”