The Girl Most Likely To

Chapter Two

I woke up at seven thirty to get a head start on my newfound free life. I made my own avocado toast for breakfast and jotted down a small to-do list in my planner. While I was getting my day started, Nat meditated in our living room before heading out to the studio.

“You’re up way too early for someone who doesn’t have anywhere to go,”

Nat commented with her eyes closed. I envied her mental gymnastics, going from sitting still in silence to pretending she was discovering alien life-forms with a ragtag team of scientists.

“That’s not true. I have an itinerary for the whole weekend.”

I read from my planner. “My goal for today is to ‘relax at the spa. Deadline: 3 p.m.’”

Nat stretched her arms as she slowly came back to the present. “You gave yourself a deadline?”

“What’s wrong with that? It gives me a clear sense of whether or not my goal was completed. Besides,”

I said, flipping my planner around so Nat could see it, “there’s a dedicated column for deadlines and it has these cute little checkboxes.”

Checking off those boxes made me feel as good as any drug.

“Planning your free time feels a little . . .”

Nat struggled to find the right word.

“Ironic?”

I suggested. “See? I do have some irony in me.”

“I was going to say counterintuitive.”

Nat approached the counter to take a closer look at my list, which included balancing my checkbook and scrubbing our bathroom. Limescale was no joke. “This doesn’t sound like taking a break. Resting means you should, you know, rest. Do less.”

Nat said this as soft as a lullaby, like she was getting me to lay down the edge in my voice.

“Point taken,”

I said, trying my best not to sound defensive. Although it was my time to spend, not hers. “Are you firing me, then? Maybe I shouldn’t work. I should commit a hundred percent of my time to doing nothing.”

“And you say I’m the dramatic one,”

Nat deadpanned. “I’m not asking you to be on call. What I need is to regain control of my inbox.”

She pointed at her laptop, which was charging on the coffee table. “You should be able to get into everything. All the passwords are saved.”

I settled on the couch and opened Nat’s laptop to confirm I had access before she left for the day. “Nat. Quick question. How do you have so many unread emails?”

Six hundred thirty-eight, to be exact.

She shrugged. “If it’s not important, I ignore it.”

My skin crawled. How did she live like this? “It might be faster to set your inbox on fire.”

“Ha-ha,”

Nat said. “Some stuff is important, but not urgent.”

“How am I supposed to know that?”

We worked out a system of prioritizing messages she needed to respond to and sending her periodic reminders throughout the day, updating her calendar accordingly. Everything else in her inbox I was free to delete. I couldn’t wait to get her inbox down to zero.

“You’re going to leave me drunk with power,”

I said, already unsubscribing her from store promo emails.

“Don’t sound too excited now.”

“Hey.”

I stopped Nat before she walked out the door. There were some FreeStream emails, sending reassurances to everyone outside of the corporate office. If I were her, I thought, I wouldn’t take FreeStream’s word for anything. “You don’t think FreeStream would cancel—”

Nat tutted over my voice and covered her ears. “Nuh-uh. We don’t say the c-word around here.”

Nat was terribly superstitious about anything that could bring bad juju, so I rephrased. “Any word on a season three for Beyond the Dark?”

“No,”

she said with a weary sigh, “but the writers are optimistic. They have Commander Tan and Dr. Rhodes stranded on a desert planet in the season finale.”

“Hey! Spoiler much?”

As payback, I trashed the next one hundred unopened spam emails.

Nat swatted my hands away from the keyboard. “I didn’t mean for you to start now. Go get pampered first.”

That was fine by me. I could check something off my list. “Whatever you say, boss.”

I scored a last-minute reservation for a “rejuvenation package”

at a day spa near my apartment in Silver Lake. It included a massage, a facial, and an exfoliation session that promised to leave me restored and renewed.

“It makes me sound like an antique,”

I joked with Cheryl, my masseuse. She was an older woman with sandy-blond hair tied up in a bun. She smiled kindly as she placed warm rolled towels under my knees.

“Let me know if you want me to make any adjustments,”

she said in a buttery voice that melted right in with the soothing New Age music playing in the background. “Your comfort is my top priority.”

Cheryl proceeded to work out every knot in my body with her superhuman hands. “Try to relax,”

she cooed.

I would have if she hadn’t been yanking my arms back, steering my upper body like a bicycle. Her strong grip put my body on alert, like it was under attack. By the time she was done with me, I felt like a blob of kneaded dough. I managed to put on my robe and lumbered to my facial appointment.

My aesthetician, Nancy, began with a quick assessment. Shining a bright light on my face, she asked, “Is this your first time?”

“It is,”

I admitted.

Nancy squinted as she scanned my face, as though she was counting every single pore.

“You should drink more water,”

she said finally.

I tried not to laugh. That I did know.

Nancy rubbed two fingers gently on both of my temples, applying the perfect amount of pressure. She moved on to smooth strokes on my cheeks, erasing every thought in my brain. I miraculously forgot about my aching body that had been pulled like taffy. This was the calming experience I signed up for.

“Okay,”

Nancy said, stopping way too soon. I opened my eyes to see her face, now wearing glasses (safety goggles, more like), and sharp tools where relaxing fingers had been.

“What are— Ow!”

“I’m cleaning your pores,”

she explained as she continued to prick and press my face with her stainless-steel instruments. “Let me know if it hurts.”

She couldn’t tell from the way I flinched every time she prodded my face? I was reevaluating everything I ever heard about facials. But I stayed quiet and trusted the process. If this was supposed to help me have the same glass skin as Nancy, then so be it. Beauty required a little pain.

By the end of this self-imposed torture, I contemplated forgoing my last appointment. The receptionist reassured me that the exfoliation session would be gentle and I would come out refreshed from the cascades of water that would wash away my dead skin. I should’ve walked out the door when I saw my masseuse pull on rubber gloves and boots. The room looked like a laboratory, with a table in the center and showerheads instead of lasers pointing at it. The scraping and scrubbing I expected. But then I was buffed with a moppy sponge that reminded me of the drive-through car wash. For the grand finale, I was doused with water coming from every direction. I returned home drenched, physically and spiritually.

“It couldn’t have been that bad,”

Nat said after I recounted my epic journey at the spa. She’d washed up after coming back on set, but there was still a stubborn smudge of waterproof eyeliner on her eyelids. “You’re glowing.”

“It’s because they scrubbed me raw and then lathered me up in moisturizing serum.”

I fired up Nat’s laptop. “How do people do this regularly?”

I found more comfort in scrubbing our bathroom than secluding myself in dimly lit rooms with the constant sound of running water. Oh no, I realized. What if spas ruined the sound of water for me?

“Well, you survived,”

Nat said, indulging me in my first-world pity party. “I’m sorry the spa didn’t work out, but you didn’t have to jump right back into work.”

“I don’t mind. I feel better when I have something to do. Otherwise, I’ll do something drastic like get a pixie cut.”

“Need I remind you that you Felicity-chopped your hair during your Lilith Fair phase? Sarah McLachlan called. She wants you to save your hair and those poor rescue dogs.”

“It wasn’t that bad,”

I said, as I trashed an entire page of unopened emails. It was quite cathartic. Not to mention, it was fun to browse through Nat’s inbox. There were cool emails in there, like a rom-com script her agent forwarded to her. Nat was finally seen as a leading lady because of the will-they-won’t-they storyline between Commander Tan and Dr. Rhodes on Beyond the Dark. I blocked out time for her to run lines with me. “By the way, I put the fitting with your stylist on your calendar.”

“Thanks.”

Nat’s calendar was horrifically blank. How did she keep track of where she was supposed to be on any given day? I’d never seen her carry around a planner either. “Are you scheduled to arrive in Austin a few days before South by Southwest or are you jumping into press?”

Nat held up her hands in the perpendicular “T”

formation. “Hold on. Time out.”

I looked up from Nat’s laptop. “What?”

“You don’t need to give me one hundred and ten percent, Rach. I’m not going to fire you.”

I couldn’t be too sure these days. What was the harm in nailing down some details?

“You have a month before the premiere. If we don’t book your flight now, you’re going to get stuck with an aisle seat by the bathroom, and you don’t want that because that’s how Keanu Reeves was discovered by a fan. Do you really want to take awkward selfies with someone holding their pee?”

Nat rolled her eyes. “Are you done?”

I nodded. “I’m not that famous,”

she said, annoyed that she had to say that out loud. “I don’t have anything to worry about. And Keanu? How do you even know that?”

“You can find anything on the internet if you try hard enough,”

I said, which was true in general but not in this case. The mystical algorithm did its thing, and an update popped up on my Instagram. “I’m going to block out your calendar for the whole week just to be . . .”

My finger hovered over the touchpad. In Nat’s mostly vacant calendar there was one lone event scheduled the weekend before South by Southwest. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The label read: “CHS Class of 2003 20th Reunion.”

How did I not know my high school was having a twentieth reunion? Deep down inside me was a pissed teenager wondering why I wasn’t asked to help plan the damn thing. But that pettiness was soon overtaken by a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Senior year had been one of the worst periods of my life.

“There’s a reunion?”

I heard myself say as I toggled out of Nat’s calendar and into her inbox. I had to find more information.

“Oh, I forgot about that,”

Nat said. Clearly, since she didn’t even tell me about it. “I RSVP’d, but I’ll probably get there late. I have to be on set that day.”

I made a note to get Nat’s filming schedule. “How come you didn’t tell me? A heads-up would’ve been nice.”

Nat crossed her arms, making me wonder if I should be talking to my new boss so casually. It was hard not to when we’d known each other for over twenty years and we were currently sitting next to each other in our pajamas. “I distinctly recall someone telling me they never wanted to relive high school ever again.”

Damn, I was dramatic. I did say that, but it pertained to one specific person who crushed my heart. “That was a long time ago.”

Nat eyed me. “It’s not too late to RSVP if you want to go. The invite is somewhere in my email.”

“I should look it up anyway,”

I said as I typed “reunion”

in the inbox’s search bar. “You know, to enter the details in your calendar.”

“Suuure.”

Nat didn’t believe me for one second, but she left me to it. “I’m going to bed. I have an early call time tomorrow.”

I waited until Nat disappeared into her room before I opened the invitation.

Dear Miss Natalie Huang,

The Commonwealth High School Class of 2003 invites you back to campus to celebrate its 20th Reunion on Saturday, March 4th at 6 p.m. We would like to honor you and induct you into the CHS Alumni Hall of Fame for your contributions in acting.

While we take a stroll down memory lane, there will be an auction benefiting Commonwealth High School with smart-room upgrades. Please bring your wallet and generosity. To donate prizes, please reply and direct the message to our reunion chair, Mariana Sanchez.

We hope you can join us for an evening of making new memories with old friends. RSVP by February 17th. If you can’t attend, reconnect with the Class of 2003 on our Facebook page! Go Eagles!

The CHS Reunion Committee

Mariana Sanchez

Belinda Kang

Winston Lin

Danny Phan

Vivienne Tam-Blake

Danny Phan. After all this time, my chest still tightened at the sight of his name. I had to shove the confusing, contradictory feelings back into the vault of my memory until I knew what to do with them.

I reviewed the names of those on the planning committee again. Who put this team of people together? Seriously, no one thought to ask me?

I swallowed down my jealousy. It was silly. Until recently, I didn’t have the time to plan the reunion anyway. I shouldn’t be getting upset over having one less thing to do. Still, this list of names confused me. Mariana was our student body president, so her involvement was a given. Belinda Kang was one of the valedictorians with me. She was a college professor now. The last time I saw her was at her wedding to her high school sweetheart, Oscar Castillo. I mean Dr. Oscar Castillo, family physician.

But Winston Lin? He was our class clown. The only thing I could rely on Winston to do was moon the entire school, which he had done on multiple occasions. That boy was weirdly proud of his pasty ass. As for Vivienne Tam, I’d only known the It Girl of our school to attend parties, not plan them.

Then there was Danny. The only thing he was good at was breaking my heart. Then again, I was pretty sure I broke his.

I set aside Nat’s laptop and traded it for my phone to search my own email. I tried a few different keyword searches, but I couldn’t come up with an invitation. I checked Nat’s email again. Her invite was sent to the same email she’d had since high school, which forwarded to her current email address. If my invitation was sent to my high school email address, there was no hope of retrieving it. I couldn’t remember my password, and I was fairly confident that the email provider didn’t exist anymore.

I checked my Facebook account. I hadn’t used it in a while, but I never got around to deleting it. The idea of erasing a bunch of memories and connections with a few clicks scared me. I had to reset my password, but after I logged in, I found the reunion page. There were photos uploaded from names that looked somewhat familiar. I scrolled through images of cliques and varsity teams. It was strange. I used to think high school was so hard, but now, looking at these young faces again, so full of life, I wondered if we had gone to the same school.

In some ways, high school hadn’t been that bad. It was the last place where I felt truly accomplished, where there was a direct correlation between my hard work and my achievements. It set me up to handle everything that came after, like my grueling schedule in college while balancing my part-time job and my coveted internship with legendary producer Gloria Miller. That woman opened my eyes to the behind-the-scenes of filmmaking. It took only one phone call from Gloria to get any production assistant gig I wanted. Work had come relatively easily until recently. But when it came to life—the stuff that I was supposed to do outside of work—that I hadn’t figured out yet.

I checked my notifications before logging out. I skimmed past old birthday wishes until I found the message I’d been looking for.

My invitation to the reunion was sent by none other than Danny. It had been waiting for me in my Facebook messages for over a month. The message was a copy-paste replica of the one in Nat’s inbox, down to the induction to the CHS Alumni Hall of Fame, except mine was for my contributions to the entertainment industry.

If only they knew I was painfully unemployed. Even if I’d still been working at FreeStream, I hadn’t done anything deserving of this kind of recognition. My career met its demise because I played a small part in reinvigorating an old franchise that would eventually get a horrible remake. I didn’t push any boundaries or create new art like I imagined I would when I started in this business.

I wanted to delete the invitation until I saw the message below it.

Danny: hope you can make it

Reading those five words sucked the air out of my lungs. The last time Danny and I spoke, I was so angry and I said things I didn’t mean. If I’d known they would dissolve our friendship, I wouldn’t have said them. Danny was more sensitive than he let on.

I reread his message. He wouldn’t have sent me a personalized invitation if it wasn’t an olive branch. Or maybe he didn’t care anymore. It had been twenty years. The past was well behind us. Judging by his profile picture, time had treated him well. His former hedgehog hair was now longer, swooping the edges of his smiling face. He had more wrinkles around his eyes than before, but he looked like the same Danny I knew.

Damn. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, and here I was, staring at his picture, wondering what he had been up to since he moved away after graduation. The last thing I heard about him was at Belinda’s wedding about ten years ago. Someone mentioned that Danny was seeing someone, and I stopped looking him up. Curiously, there wasn’t a relationship status on his Facebook page.

I stopped snooping around. I had no right. I had kept my promise and never spoke to him again. But there were times like these when I’d feel low and the nights were quiet, making way for regrets to come roaring back, Danny being one of them. I cringed at how I used to wait by my computer to chat with him, especially after we met in real life. But for that brief period in my life, he was my person. I could tell him just about anything.

Then things imploded because my emotions were volatile and confusing. But Danny wasn’t totally innocent either in our friendship’s demise. Friends didn’t usually kiss friends in a way that altered their brain chemistry. If he wanted to see me again, he better be ready to tell me his part of the story. If he could do that, maybe there was a chance we could be friends again. That sounded kind of nice.

I RSVP’d for the reunion. It was a week away, so I had some time to think about how I could spin the fact that my subscription to The Hollywood Reporter was my only contribution to entertainment these days.

I opened my planner and jotted down my new goals.

Date: March 4

Time: 6 p.m.

Goals: 1. Renew friendship with Danny Phan

2. See old friends

3. Relive high school for one more night

Deadline: March 5

February 2003

Things were back to normal when we returned to school. Danny glided from class to class hoping that none of our teachers would call on him. We made eye contact for a second, but it felt accidental. Danny’s face was unreadable before he buried it in his arms for a nap.

Before I found out who he was, it made sense that we didn’t hang out at school. I knew my reputation. Smart but uptight. Got things done but didn’t let things slide. It never bothered me that there was always a “but”

because I knew I had people who understood me.

While my parents didn’t always get why I was so busy, they trusted me. “You know what you’re doing,”

they’d say as they unwound after work, before calling relatives in Cambodia. They saw the straight As and figured I was doing something right. My sister, Angela, was the one who really took care of me day to day, filling out all of the important school documents that my parents didn’t know how to read and feeding me when my parents worked late. Nat had been a good friend ever since middle school, when we discovered a mutual love of movies. She loved the craft of acting and was a verifiable chameleon. My interest in movies was a result of happenstance, in that my parents worked all the time and left Angela and me with our television babysitter.

And then there was SuperxSaiyan85. I could be okay with Danny holding up the status quo at school as long as our online chats stayed the same.

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: have you ever watched the movie, You’ve Got Mail?

SuperxSaiyan85: Is that the AOL one? With Tom Hanks?

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: yeah. It reminds me kind of like us, except you’re not running me out of business

SuperxSaiyan85: thanks for ruining the ending for me

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: you weren’t going to watch it

SuperxSaiyan85: now i’m not

I went for it and asked the question I was too scared to ask the other day.

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: did you know that you’d been chatting with me this whole time?

SuperxSaiyan85: nope

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: why did you chat me with that night? there were other people in the chat room

SuperxSaiyan85: i dunno. i was bored

SuperxSaiyan85: if i knew i was going to listen to a girl cry all night about her sister, i woulda IM’ed someone else =P

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: shut up. I missed my sister. She helped me with everything. I was scared about handling high school without her

SuperxSaiyan85: everything turned out okay, didn’t it?

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: I guess so. As long as I bring in the grades, my parents leave me alone

SuperxSaiyan85: my parents leave me alone too but it’s because they’re too busy working

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: same. they’re so lucky we don’t get into trouble. can u imagine?

SuperxSaiyan85: i know, right?