by Nicola Yoon
“All right,” he says. “Let’s move on to number seven. What’s your secret hunch about how you’ll die?”
“Statistically speaking, a black woman living in the United States is most likely to die at the age of seventy-eight from heart disease.”
We come to another crosswalk and he tugs me back from standing too close to the edge. His gesture and my response are so familiar, like we’ve done it many times before. He pinches my jacket at the elbow and tugs just slightly. I back up toward him and indulge his protectiveness.
“So the heart’s gonna get you, then?” he asks. I forget for a moment that we’re talking about death.
“Most likely,” I say. “What about you?”
“Murder. Gas station or liquor store or someplace like that. Some guy with a gun will be robbing the place. I’ll try to be a hero but do something stupid like knock over the soda can pyramid, and that’ll freak robber guy out, and what would’ve been your average stick-’em-up will turn into a bloodbath. News at eleven.”
I laugh at him. “So you’re going to die an incompetent hero?”
“I’m going to die trying,” he says, and we laugh together.
We cross the street. “This way,” I tell him when he starts heading straight instead of right. “We need to go over to Eighth.”
He pivots and grins at me like we’re on an epic adventure.
“Hang on,” he says, shrugging out of his jacket. It seems weirdly intimate to watch as he takes it off, so I watch two very old, very cranky guys argue over a single cab a few feet from us. There are at least three other free cabs in the immediate vicinity.
Observable Fact: People aren’t logical.
“Will this fit in your backpack?” he asks, holding the jacket out to me. I know he’s not asking me to wear it, like I’m his girlfriend or something. Still, carrying his jacket strikes me as even more intimate than watching him take it off.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “It’ll get wrinkled.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. He guides me off to the side so we’re not blocking the other pedestrians, and suddenly we’re standing pretty close. I don’t remember noticing his shoulders before. Were they this broad a second ago? I pull my eyes away from his chest and up to his face, but that’s not any better for my equilibrium. His eyes are even clearer and browner in the sunlight. They are kind of beautiful.
I slip my backpack off my shoulder and place it squarely between us so he has to back up a little.
He folds the jacket neatly and puts it inside.
His shirt is a crisp white, and the red tie stands out even more without his jacket on. I wonder what he looks like in regular clothes, and what regular clothes are for him. No doubt jeans and a T-shirt—the uniform of all American boys everywhere.
Is it the same for Jamaican boys?
My mood turns somber at the thought. I don’t want to start over again. It was hard enough when we first moved to America. I don’t want to have to learn the rituals and customs of a new high school. New friends. New cliques. New dress codes. New hangouts.
I scoot around him and start walking. “Asian American men are most likely to die of cancer,” I say.
He frowns and double-steps to catch up. “Really? I don’t like that. What kind?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We should probably find out,” he says.
He says we as if there’s some future of us together where our respective mortalities will matter to each other.
“You really think you’ll die of heart disease?” he asks. “Not something more epic?”
“Who cares about epic? Dead is dead.”
He just stares at me, waiting for an answer. “Okay,” I say. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. I secretly think I’m going to drown.”
“Like in the open ocean, saving someone’s life or something?”
“In the deep end of a hotel pool,” I say.
He stops walking and pulls me off to the side again. A more considerate pedestrian there’s never been. Most people just stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait,” he says. “You can’t swim?”
I shrink my head down into my jacket. “No.”
His eyes are searching my face and he’s laughing at me without actually laughing. “But you’re Jamaican. You grew up surrounded by water.”
“Island heritage notwithstanding, I can’t swim.”
I can tell he wants to make fun of me, but he resists. “I’ll teach you,” he says.
“When?”
“Someday. Soon. Could you swim when you lived in Jamaica?” he asks.
“Yup, but then we got here, and instead of the ocean they had pools. I don’t like chlorine.”
“You know they have saltwater pools now.”
“That ship has sailed,” I say.
Now he does make fun of me. “What’s your ship called? Girl Who Grew Up on an Island, Which Is a Thing Surrounded on All Sides by Water, Can’t Swim? Because that would be a good name.”
I laugh and thump him on the shoulder. He grabs my hand and holds my fingers. I try not to wish he could make good on his promise to teach me to swim.
I AM A SCHOLAR COMPILING the Book of Natasha. Here’s what I know so far: She’s a science geek. She’s probably smarter than me. Her fingers are slightly longer than mine and feel good in my hands. She likes her music angsty. She’s worried about something having to do with her mysterious appointment.
“Tell me again why you’re wearing a suit?” she asks.
I groan long and loud and with feeling. “Let’s talk about God instead.”
“I get to ask questions too,” she says.
We walk single file underneath more sidewalk scaffolding. (At any given moment approximately 99 [give or take] percent of Manhattan is under construction.)
“I applied to Yale. I have an interview with an alum later.”
“Are you nervous?” she asks, when we’re side by side again.
“I would be if I gave two shits.”
“But you only give one shit?”
“Maybe half a shit,” I say, laughing.
“So your parents are making you do it?”
A sudden yelling from the street grabs our attention, but it’s only one cabdriver shouting at another.
“My parents are first-generation Korean immigrants,” I say by way of explanation.
She slows her walking and looks over at me. “I don’t know what that means,” she says.
I shrug. “It means it doesn’t matter what I want. I’m going to Yale. I’m going to be a doctor.”
“And you don’t want that?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say.
From the look on her face, that was the worst thing I could say. She turns away from me and starts walking faster. “Well, you might as well be a doctor, then.”
“What’d I do just now?” I ask, catching up to her.
She waves me off. “It’s your life.”
I feel like I’m close to failing a test. “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A data scientist,” she says, with no hesitation.
I open my mouth to ask WTF, but she fills me in with a practiced speech. I’m not the first person to have WTF’d her career choice.
“Data scientists analyze data, separate the noise from the signal, discern patterns, draw conclusions, and recommend actions based on the results.”
“Are computers involved?”
“Yes, of course,” she says. “There’s a lot of data in this world.”
“That’s so practical. Have you always known what you wanted to be?” It’s hard to keep the envy out of my voice.
She stops walking again. At this rate, we’ll never get where she’s going. “This isn’t destiny. I chose this career. It didn’t choose me. I’m not fated to be a data scientist. There’s a career section in the library at school. I did research on growing fields in the sciences, and ta-da. No fate or destiny involved, just research.”
&nbs
p; “So it’s not something you’re passionate about?”
She shrugs and starts walking again. “It suits my personality,” she says.
“Don’t you want to do something you love?”
“Why?” she asks, like she genuinely doesn’t understand the appeal of loving something.
“It’s a long life to spend doing something you’re only meh about,” I insist. We scoot around a combination pretzel/hot dog cart that already has a line. It smells like sauerkraut and mustard (aka heaven).
She wrinkles her nose. “It’s even longer if you spend it chasing dreams that can never, ever come true.”
“Wait,” I say. I put my hand on her arm to slow her down a little. “Who says they can’t come true?”
This earns me a sideways glance. “Please. Do you know how many people want to be actors or writers or rock stars? A lot. Ninety-nine percent of them won’t make it. Zero point nine percent of those left will make barely any money doing it. Only the last zero point one percent make it big. Everybody else just wastes their lives trying to be them.”
“Are you secretly my father?” I ask.
“I sound like a fifty-year-old Korean man?”
“Without the accent.”
“Well, he’s just looking out for you. When you’re a happy doctor making lots of money, you’ll thank him that you didn’t become some starving artist hating your day job and dreaming pointlessly about making it big.”
I wonder if she realizes how passionate she is about not being passionate.
She turns to look at me narrow-eyed. “Please don’t tell me you’re serious about the poetry thing.”
“God forbid,” I say with mock outrage.
We pass by a man holding a sign that says PLEASE HELP. DOWN ON MY LUCK. A cabbie on a mission honks long and loud at another cabbie, also on a mission.
“Are we really supposed to know what we want to do for the rest of our lives at the ripe old age of seventeen?”
“Don’t you want to know?” she asks. She’s definitely not a fan of uncertainty.
“I guess? I wish I could live ten lives at once.”
She waves me off again. “Ugh. You just don’t want to choose.”
“That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to get stuck doing something that doesn’t mean anything to me. This track I’m on? It goes on forever. Yale. Medical school. Residency. Marriage. Children. Retirement. Nursing home. Funeral home. Cemetery.”
Maybe it’s because of the importance of the day, maybe it’s meeting her, but right now it’s crucial to say exactly what I mean.
“We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”
It all comes out more passionately than I intend, but I mean every word.
Our eyes meet. There’s something between us that wasn’t there a minute ago.
I wait for her to say something flip, but she doesn’t.
The universe stops and waits for us.
She opens her palm and she’s going to take my hand. She’s supposed to take my hand. We’re meant to walk through this world together. I see it in her eyes. We are meant to be. I’m certain of this in a way I’m not certain about anything else.
But she doesn’t take my hand. She walks on.
WE ARE HAVING A MOMENT I don’t want to be having.
When they say the heart wants what it wants, they’re talking about the poetic heart—the heart of love songs and soliloquies, the one that can break as if it were just-formed glass.
They’re not talking about the real heart, the one that only needs healthy foods and aerobic exercise.
But the poetic heart is not to be trusted. It is fickle and will lead you astray. It will tell you that all you need is love and dreams. It will say nothing about food and water and shelter and money. It will tell you that this person, the one in front of you, the one who caught your eye for whatever reason, is the One. And he is. And she is. The One—for right now, until his heart or her heart decides on someone else or something else.
The poetic heart is not to be trusted with long-term decision-making.
I know all these things. I know them the way I know that Polaris, the North Star, is not actually the brightest star in the sky—it’s the fiftieth.
And still here I am with Daniel in the middle of the sidewalk, on what is almost certainly my last day in America. My fickle, nonpractical, non-future-considering, nonsensical heart wants Daniel. It doesn’t care that he’s too earnest or that he doesn’t know what he wants or that he’s harboring dreams of being a poet, a profession that leads to heartbreak and the poorhouse.
I know there’s no such thing as meant-to-be, and yet here I am wondering if maybe I’ve been wrong.
I close my open palm, which wants to touch him, and I walk on.
ACCORDING TO SCIENTISTS, THERE ARE three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain.
As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen.
The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.
Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference.
The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed.
Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.
Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence.
So why does Daniel feel like something more?
THERE ARE EXACTLY NO ITEMS on the list of things I want to do less than go to my interview. And yet. It’s almost eleven a.m., and if I’m going to go to this thing then I need to get gone.
Natasha and I have been walking along in silence ever since The Moment. I wish I could say it’s a comfortable silence, but it isn’t. I want to talk to her about it—The Moment—but who knows if she even felt it. No way does she believe in that stuff.
Midtown Manhattan is different from where we first met. More skyscrapers and fewer souvenir shops. The people act different too. They’re not tourists out for pleasure or shopping. There’s no excitement or gawking or smiling. These people work in these skyscrapers. I’m pretty sure my appointment is somewhere in this neighborhood.
We keep walking and not talking until we get to a giant concrete and glass monstrosity of a building. It amazes me that people spend their entire days inside places like this doing things they don’t love for people they don’t like. At least being a doctor will be better than that.
“This is where I’m going,” she says.
“I can wait for you out here,” I say, like a person who doesn’t have an appointment that will determine his future in just over an hour.
“Daniel,” she says, using the stern voice she’s sure to use on our future children (she’ll definitely be the disciplinarian). “You have an interview and I have this…thing. This is where we say goodbye.”
She’s right. I may not want the futu
re my parents have planned for me, but I don’t have any better ideas. If I stay here much longer, my train will derail from its track.
It occurs to me that maybe that’s what I want. Maybe all the things I’m feeling for Natasha are just excuses to make it derail. After all, my parents would never approve. Not only is she not Korean, she is black. There’s no future here.
That and the fact that my extreme like for her is clearly unrequited. And love is not love if it’s not requited, right?
I should go.
I’m going to go.
I’m getting gone.
“You’re right,” I say.
She’s surprised, and maybe even a little disappointed, but what difference does that make? She has to want this, and clearly she does not.
I WASN’T EXPECTING HIM to say that, and I didn’t expect to feel disappointed, but I do. Why am I thinking about romance with a boy I’ll never see again? My future gets decided in five minutes.
We’re standing close enough to the building’s sliding glass doors that the cool of the air-conditioning washes over my skin as people enter and exit.
He sticks out his hand for a shake but quickly pulls it back. “Sorry,” he says, and blushes. He folds his arms across his chest.
“Well, I’m going,” I say.
“You’re going,” he says, and then neither of us moves.
We stand there not saying anything for another few seconds until I remember I still have his jacket in my backpack. I take it out and watch as he shrugs it back on.
“In that suit, you look like you should work in this building,” I say to him.
I mean it as a compliment, but he doesn’t take it as one.
He tugs at his tie and grimaces. “Maybe I will one day.”
“Well,” I say after more staring-and-not-talking. “This is getting awkward.”
“Should we just hug?”
“I thought you suits only shook hands.” I’m trying to keep my tone light, but my vocal cords go all husky and weird.
He smiles and doesn’t try to keep any of the sadness off his face. How can he be so okay with showing off his heart?