As the night went on, the state of Jaidee’s face seemed to be the only thing anyone wanted to talk to him about. People’d shuffle by him and say, “Yo, you’re like a fucking beet,” or “Jesus, dude, your face,” then go about their way. His roommate mingled, and Eli and Terrence hadn’t come after all, so after four beers, Jaidee gathered his courage and approached a group of four floppy-haired white guys laughing and slapping one another’s backs. He smiled, said, “What’s so funny?” and a couple of them turned, looked at him amusedly, then went back to their friends. One of them whispered in another’s ear while looking at Jaidee. The whisper recipient looked at Jaidee, then back at his friend, then burst out laughing. “I’m a freshman here,” Jaidee said. More roars of laughter. “What are you guys up to?” Jaidee felt suddenly conscious of his face. He’d heard of Asian flush before, and he knew he got it bad, but he assumed that Westerners had something similar, that it wouldn’t be noteworthy, certainly not warranting all these chortles and guffaws. He shook his head, left the group.
He tried to find Bryan, but the crowd had become so thick, and the house was bigger than he thought, and soon, feeling the alcohol tugging at his head, he felt that if he didn’t go outside, he might fall over. So he pushed his way through as best he could, beer sloshing on his arms, his shoulders, his cheeks. A few girls screamed as he passed, said, “Where ya goin? Where ya goooooin?” A few feet before the door he inhaled marijuana fumes. He coughed, looked up, saw a skinny, dark-haired guy with a joint sticking out of his mouth, bopping his head. The guy smiled at Jaidee. Jaidee reached for the doorknob.
Outside, the air felt expansively breathable. A group of women stood on the stoop, three of them trying to console one, the one in the middle sobbing into her hands.
“He’s such a fucking asshole,” the sobbing girl said. The others agreed by way of back pats. “I wasted a whole year of my life on him!”
Jaidee walked past them.
On the sidewalk, just a few feet from the house, a hand shot out of the dark. “Hey, man!”
It was Eli, Bryan’s friend, the taller of the two. Jaidee reached for his hand, shook it. “Hi,” he said.
“Where you going?” Eli said. In a pink polo and khaki shorts, he looked bright against the wide panel of night. His eyes were happy, altered, no doubt, from liquor.
“I’m heading back,” he said.
Eli looked at his watch. “It’s only eleven.”
“I’m just tired,” Jaidee said. “Long day.”
“All right,” he said. “I hear you.”
They stood awkwardly for a moment. Jaidee waited for a comment about his face.
“I hope you like it here,” Eli said. “I know it can take some adjusting, but it’s a cool enough place.”
“I think I’ll be okay,” Jaidee said, though something in his stomach betrayed these words. He felt suddenly helpless.
“Bryan’s a good guy,” Eli said. “You couldn’t ask for a better roomie.”
“I think I’ll be okay,” Jaidee repeated.
“We go way back, and I’ll tell you, I haven’t always been the most stand-up dude, but him, he has been, just saying. He’ll help you navigate all this shit.” He paused, scratched his cheek. “I’ll tell you this: One time—this was when I was in middle school—I got caught shoplifting. Dumb stuff, really, some action-figure toys I wanted to give my little cousin for his birthday. Anyway, I went on probation and did some community service and got a tongue-lashing from my mom, but Bryan—he was in high school at the time—when he heard about it, he just looked at me and asked what specific toys they were, then he went out and bought them and wrapped them and signed my name and shipped them to my cousin in the mail even though my cousin only lived, like, a mile away from me. I didn’t know anything about it until my cousin called and screamed Thank you, thank you! and I didn’t know what to say, was confused, but then remembered Bryan asking me the specific toys and I put two and two together. Bryan never mentioned it because that’s just how he is. I’m telling you: you got the cream of the crop as far as roommates.”
Eli’s forehead glistened. He wiped it. Jaidee looked down the sidewalk. Three guys emerged from the dark under a streetlight. One said, “Dude, the house is over there.”
“I think things’ll be okay,” Jaidee said.
“You’ll be more than okay with that dude,” he said.
“Have a good time at the party,” Jaidee said. “Bryan’s inside somewhere.”
“You’ll be more than okay!” Eli said, walking toward the house. “Just remember that!”
Back in his dorm room, Jaidee felt, for the first time, that maybe coming to this university across the world might not have been the best idea. The entire time Eli had been talking, a thorny homesickness had writhed in his chest, and as he laid his head on his pillow and closed his eyes, he smelled curry, heard the dull roar of motorcycle taxis, heard his mother cursing their neighbor, his father comforting a client, his friend chirping about school. He thought about Aran, about that last meeting in the bathroom—how smug he’d been! Aran had just been being friendly, and he, Jaidee, had taken that friendliness and smashed it, haughtily discussing America and all its potential. The four years between high school and college he hadn’t seen Aran at all—his former friend had enrolled at Chulalongkorn and moved to Bangkok, but Jaidee knew he was back in Kanchanaburi every weekend. Jaidee could’ve gone to see him, damn his pride.
Anyway.
In Thailand, he’d envisioned Lincoln as a city like Bangkok—alive and breathing, an entity of its own with a real, human pulse, but here now, surrounded by these gently rolling hills, these straight, paved roads, these large Westerners, these square, sterile buildings, Jaidee wondered what sort of life flourished—it seemed too automated, too robotic, a bit too slothful.
“But it’s early,” he said aloud in Thai. “I just got here.”
He thought of Victor Dunlap, his pale blue eyes, the muscles on his forearms jumping when he wrote on the board, his deep, gentle voice, his shirt hugging his chest. He’d seen other attractive boys around campus, and at the party, but compared to Victor Dunlap, they looked small. He’d brought to Nebraska a picture they’d taken on the last day of class: in it, all his classmates huddled around Victor, and he, Jaidee, stood closest to the beautiful teacher, smelling Victor’s slightly meaty sweat, putting his hand on Victor’s lower back, feeling a small ridge of muscle. Victor had moved away, and Jaidee had moved closer, the physical contact electric and necessary and beautiful, and if he could, he would’ve fused skin to skin, making it impossible for Victor to ever leave his sight.
“Hey, man.”
Jaidee started, sat up. He hadn’t heard Bryan come in. He looked over at Bryan’s bed, saw that he was rubbing his eyes, kneading his forehead. “Oh dude,” he said, “I shouldn’t have had that last one. Man.”
“Drink some water,” Jaidee said.
Bryan got up slowly, went to their mini-fridge, pulled out a bottle. Instead of drinking it, he held the cool plastic to his forehead. “Were you sleeping?” he asked, sitting back down.
“Nothing,” Jaidee said.
“Hmm?”
“Oh,” Jaidee said.
“You have fun at the party?” Bryan said. “You left early.”
“It was okay.”
“Sorry about Simone. She’s a bit wacky sometimes.”
“Everything was okay.”
“Those parties can get old so quick, you know? Sorry if you were disappointed. I mean, just thought since you’re new, you’d wanna see—”
“It was okay.”
“But Simone, man, she can be pretty rough. She’s so distant, you know? All the time we were together, it was like this wall. I mean, I know that’s like what chicks say about dudes, but it’s almost like she was a dude like that and that made me uncomfortable. But we’re cool now.” He unscrewed the water bottle, took a long swig. “Dude, your face gets red as shit when you drink. That normal?”
&nb
sp; Jaidee didn’t answer, just turned around and breathed heavily, pretended to sleep.
“I think that’s an Asian thing, right? But man, yours . . . yours is something else, I gotta tell you.”
Jaidee closed his eyes and willed himself to dream of Victor Dunlap. Instead, however, he dreamed of a big stretch of green field that ended in a bouncing red balloon. The balloon, after a while, became his face. And his face laughed at him for hours and hours.
* * *
The first semester was punishing. For a month it seemed like Jaidee lived in the library, looking for books on Kant (philosophy), John Muir (environmental science), gun control (composition), operant conditioning (psychology). When he wasn’t looking for research material, he was writing page after page of trigonometry, dutifully showing his work, checking the back of the book for answers. All around him was talk of parties, bar-hops, late-night boozing, and this astounded him. When did they have time? How could they possibly keep up with school and engage in so many alcoholic extracurriculars? At night, he’d lie exhausted in his bed, running everything for the next day through his mind—was he ready for the discussion? Had he read the right chapter?—but his roommate would distract him, talking on the phone into the early hours of the morning. Jaidee bought earplugs, but they didn’t work: he could still hear Bryan’s voice, muffled or not.
On the night before his first psychology exam, he sat up in bed, took out his earplugs, and said, “Hey. I have a test tomorrow. I have to sleep.”
Bryan looked at him, blinked. “Just a minute, Kendra,” he said. He put a hand over the receiver. “What’s that?” he said, looking over at Jaidee. “A test?”
“Yes,” Jaidee said, feeling suddenly warm. “I have a test.”
Bryan looked at his watch. “It’s eight o’clock, Jaidee.”
“My test is at eight thirty a.m.”
“You need twelve hours of sleep?”
“It’s not like I’ll wake up right before the exam.”
Bryan sighed. “I think you need to relax a bit. Maybe get some air. Clear your head.”
“I need to sleep.”
“Dude,” Bryan said, “you’ve got to chill about all the school stuff. It’s not like a B is gonna kill you.”
“Can you please just let me sleep?”
Bryan shook his head. “This is important, okay? Sorry.” He took his hand off the receiver. “You there?” he said.
Jaidee flopped back on the bed, put his earplugs back in. As Eli had said that first night, Bryan had been a good roommate—he’d left Jaidee alone for the most part—but these late-night phone calls were wearing on Jaidee. Sometimes he’d fall asleep only to wake up at midnight and still hear his voice. Sometimes he even dreamed of Bryan, mostly Bryan on the phone in various locations—ice caves, Bangkok, mystical villages surrounded by sheets of lavender, lopsided dorm rooms, farmhouses—and in his dreams, he, Jaidee, would say, politely, “Are you nearly finished?” Bryan would simply hush him and continue talking on his phone among the wildlife or the fairies or the farm machinery or the villagers. On this day, however, the day before his psychology exam, Jaidee didn’t want to stand for it, so he sat up, huffed, threw on some clothes, and walked out of the dorm.
It just so happened that on this evening, the campus gay and lesbian group was meeting in the student union—there’d been flyers posted around the university, some of them ripped, a few of them with doodles of erect penises. He’d noticed them as he’d gone from class to class, telling himself that when he got a minute, he’d join, see what it was all about, perhaps meet a boy with whom he could practice kissing. As he walked around the buzzing student union that evening, he remembered the flyers. He found one and noted the location. When he got to the designated room, the meeting was nearly over. The leader, a round, curly-haired woman named Hayley Wells, turned to him, smiled, and waved him in. He looked at the group: there were ten women, five of whom had visible facial piercings, and nine men. The men, Jaidee thought, looked mostly unremarkable, though there was a group of three who sat toward the back and smirked, their arms identically crossed over their chests, their hair coiffed, their skin bronzed. Two were blond, one was dark-haired, and when Jaidee sat next to the dark-haired boy, the boy looked immediately to his right, at his friends, then at Jaidee.
“Remember,” Hayley was saying, “we have a Pride Committee meeting next week. We need to try to make our float structurally sound this year. We can’t have another—”
“That wasn’t my fault!” came a squeaky voice from the front. It was one of the women with piercings, this one a small hoop in her lip.
“Nobody was saying it was your fault, Katie,” Hayley said.
“You looked right at me!”
“I was looking everywhere,” Hayley said.
The boy next to Jaidee sighed. He leaned back in his chair, yawned. He was wearing shorts, though it was October and only fifty degrees outside. His knees were knobby, covered in fine, dark hair.
“I’m not going to argue this,” Hayley said. “We can talk later if you want.”
The boy in the middle leaned over to the dark-haired boy, whispered, “It was her fucking fault.”
“What was?” Jaidee asked.
The boy looked at him, his eyes small and suspicious. He had blond hair, spiked, and his forehead collapsed into a surprisingly meaty face. The face shouldn’t have been attractive—each component part was too exaggerated or wide or beady or plump, but it all cohered into something startlingly mischievous and sexy, and as the boy spoke, Jaidee had focused on the lips—thin, dry, pink—thinking they would be good lips to practice kissing on.
The boy didn’t answer, just leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms again.
“I’m new here,” Jaidee said.
“Yeah, no shit,” the dark-haired boy mumbled.
The other two chuckled. Jaidee looked away.
Afterward, Hayley, the group leader, came up to him, smiled, asked him his name. She told him about the meetings, how they usually had a topic to discuss but that this time everyone had been consumed by this Pride float gone awry—apparently Katie, the protesting girl in front, had managed to flub the float so it made a high-pitched whine as it moved.
“We go out afterwards as a group,” she said. “If you’re interested.”
Jaidee looked at the door, where the three boys he’d sat next to huddled. They snickered and sneered and tried hard to look as aloof as possible.
“Ugh,” Hayley said. “Those guys are ridiculous. I don’t even know why they keep coming to the meetings.”
“Ridiculous?” Jaidee said.
She leaned in. “It’s like they think they’re in some sort of TV show.”
“They’re actors?”
She looked at him, squinted, then shrugged. “I guess. In a way.”
“They seem okay.”
“Probably best not to think about them too much, you know?” she said. “So what do you say? You wanna come with us to the bar?”
Jaidee didn’t go with them to the bar that night, but instead went back home and found Bryan in bed, facing away, headphones on, looking at a book. When Jaidee came in, Bryan glanced over his shoulder, grunted a greeting, then returned to his textbook. Jaidee undressed, climbed into bed. He tried to run through famous names in psychology—Freud, Jung, Piaget, Skinner—then tried to match them to their area of expertise—dreams, animus, development, conditioning—but his thoughts kept racing to visions of the blond boy’s lips. What would lips that thin feel like when pressed against his own? Like tough skin kneading his face? Or maybe surprisingly soft, the slight jut of the lower one transforming into a sort of plush cushion once it made contact with his mouth. For years, he’d imagined Victor Dunlap’s lips, the prickly stubble scratching beneath his nose, the hot breath filling his throat, but Victor’s lips were wide and substantial—very different from the blond boy’s. Was it worth it even to try, then?
Of course.
Jaidee went back to the g
roup the next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, and he sat with the boys in the back, learned their names—Nick, Chris, Jared—and tried as best he could to enter their conversation. Their barriers, however, were seemingly impenetrable: every time Jaidee leaned in, contributed, they shot him a half-bewildered, half-irritated look, then went back to talking among themselves. They sometimes wore caps, backward, and they almost always wore brand names, the type that loudly advertised themselves in reds and blues: Abercrombie, Gap, Banana Republic. Jaidee called his uncle, told him he needed new clothes, that he—his uncle—should expect a few more charges on his credit card because Jaidee had grown out of all the clothes he had.
“Are you becoming fat?” his uncle said.
Jaidee assured his uncle that he wasn’t, that actually the opposite was true: he’d lost weight and his clothes were much too baggy.
“How is it possible to lose weight when you go to America?” his uncle said.
Jaidee went to the mall. He changed his wardrobe. He got a haircut, showed the stylist pictures of movie stars, said, “I want to look like this.” He bought a cap. He wore it backward. He watched lots and lots and lots of TV. He studied American idioms. He started saying “dude.”
Nick, Chris, and Jared watched his transformation with amusement. Sometimes Jaidee would show up to group wearing the same shirt as one of the boys. The boys would remark on it, unkindly, then turn back to their threesome. “Dude, that shirt,” they’d say.
From the other international students around campus Jaidee kept a distance. He now found them distasteful. The floppy hair! The ethnic clothing! The groups huddled together, not speaking English! He was different, he knew. Even having been in the country one semester, he had assimilated. He’d adapted to his surroundings, he thought. He shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch.
One evening, in the student union, munching on Doritos and watching a Friends episode, he noticed a guy sitting on the leather chair a few feet away. In his lap was a sandwich wrapped in paper. The boy opened it carefully, took a bite. Some of the sandwich’s contents—lettuce, cheese, ham—fell back into the paper. Jaidee stared.
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