The Girl Most Likely To

Chapter Nine

“It used to be there.”

Danny stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and pointed across the street to a little corner plaza that was too small to be a strip mall. There were two storefronts, but from where we stood I couldn’t make out what kind of businesses they were.

“The internet café,”

Danny supplied when I didn’t say anything. “It used to be there, where the boba shop is.”

I did a double take. I couldn’t tell it was a boba shop. There was a pergola that hadn’t been there before, covering the outdoor seating with twinkling lights. And unlike chain boba shops, the place didn’t have a big flashy sign.

“It looks so different now,”

I commented. The shop was cute and romantic. Nothing like the teen hangout spot it once was.

“Yeah,”

Danny said wistfully, making me wonder how much time he’d spent there. “Do you remember the day we met?”

How could I forget? “You ran me over.”

“Well, I think we’re even now.”

“That”—I pointed at his butt—“was an accident.”

“So was mine.”

Danny laughed for the first time that evening. While it was one of those disbelieving I-can’t-believe-I-had-to-say-it kind of laughs, seeing him smile made me smile. “Let’s go check it out.”

“But the reunion,”

I reminded him. We didn’t come this far to make a boba pit stop.

“It’s only a drink,”

Danny said, with an inexplicable lightness, given how delayed we were. If I wasn’t mistaken, he even seemed downright giddy. “It’s not going to take long.”

I begged to differ, but then Danny took my hand and escorted me across the street. Any protests I had died on my lips. This was something I never understood. As human beings, we use our hands for everything. They’re at the ends of our arms, openly doing the most benign tasks. But the simple contact of two hands, holding on to one another, feels so deeply personal. Danny’s fingers firmly intertwined with mine, his knuckles gnarled like the rings of a tree while his palm provided a soft landing place for mine. I didn’t want to let go.

I had to let go, though, when Danny held the door open to let me into the modern and blindingly white shop. My hands now held a sticky, laminated menu with way too many options to choose from. Cheese foam? Crème br?lée? How were people coming up with so many new flavors and toppings? Milk tea was so complicated now. “I don’t know what to get.”

Danny diligently read each of the unique combinations while he bopped his head along to the lo-fi music playing overhead. “I might get a plain milk tea with boba. I’m trying to cut back on sugar.”

The sound of blenders mixing up smoothies must have messed up my hearing. Danny used to eat and drink anything that was put before him. “I’ve seen you eat an entire full-size Snickers bar in five seconds.”

Danny patted his stomach. “Doctor’s orders. I’m prediabetic. I even had to cut back on rice.”

One would think someone had died by the way I gasped. How do you take rice away from an Asian person?

“I’m fine,”

he continued. “I’m taking precautions since diabetes runs in my family.”

Danny ordered an unsweetened boba milk tea for himself. I ordered the same in solidarity and because I couldn’t decide. We sat at a nearby table while we waited for our drinks. It was unbearably normal for two people who’d had the most hectic evening.

“So what do you do these days?”

I asked, immediately self-conscious for starting a conversation with small talk. I’d seen him without his pants on. “I imagine work keeps you busy.”

“Yeah. Many of my clients request remote meetings, so I don’t travel as much as I used to.”

Danny fiddled with the receipt that had our order number on it. “It made my mom happy.”

“How is your family, by the way?”

“They’re good, they’re good.”

Danny’s voice pitched higher as he repeated himself. “My mom remarried around fourteen, fifteen years ago. She’s retired now.”

He took out his phone and showed me pictures of his smiling mom and her partner. Things seemed fine on that front.

“And how’s Jimmy?”

A wave of emotions swept over Danny’s face. There was a quick angry eyebrow scrunch, followed by a sour twist in his lips. The grand finale was an anticlimactic shrug. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

I said, surprising even myself. His family had always been a touchy subject that I never pressed too hard on. Not knowing where our relationship stood, I couldn’t risk saying or doing anything that could push him away.

“Last I heard, he moved to Seattle.”

Danny stood to retrieve our drinks. He was stalling. He had to be because when he sat back down he took a long sip. Long enough for six boba pearls to travel up his straw.

“It’s okay,”

I said, backtracking. My curiosity wasn’t helping. “You don’t have to say. It’s none of my business.”

I scooted my chair back. We had our drinks, so we should make our way back to the school.

Danny put down his cup with a thunk, stopping me from getting up. “Actually, it is.”

This I had to hear. I sat back down. “What do you mean?”

“Where do I start?”

he said under his breath. “After Jimmy was released from jail, I lost track of him.”

He shrugged again when my eyes threatened to pop out of my face.

I didn’t see that coming. I’d followed Danny’s advice. I steered clear of Jimmy whenever I went to the mall. Sometimes I’d stay on the second floor and go down the escalator on the opposite side to avoid him. “When did he go to jail?”

Danny looked off to the side as he thought. To an outsider, he’d have looked like he was browsing the bookshelf, choosing from a collection of board games and manga stacked there. Belying his soft, pensive expression were the angled lines of his profile, especially his sharp eyebrows pointing at the worry lines on his forehead.

“Do you remember how I moved a lot?”

he asked finally. I nodded. “My parents used to make up all kinds of excuses, like our landlord raised the rent. But I knew it was because of Jimmy. He owed a lot of people money, and they didn’t mess around. We didn’t know how bad it was until they’d show up out of the blue to collect and, you know . . . they weren’t friendly about it.”

Danny mindlessly rubbed his temple, inching closer to that silver scar underneath his hairline. “Around graduation, these guys were showing up at my house every few days. It was hard to leave the house sometimes. That’s why I was late to Awards Night.”

“Oh.”

All roads kept leading back to Awards Night. I didn’t know what to do with this new information. An explanation should’ve been a balm, but it only made the wound sting more. I’d known that his family situation wasn’t the best. He’d said little about it, but enough that I knew how distracting it had been. Danny used to work every day to support his family, even helping his brother when it had caused him a lot of grief. I’d selfishly thought that Danny didn’t show up because of our fight, like being a no-show was his version of revenge. After I went home that night, I’d decided to shut him out and pretend he was merely a blip in my senior year. Even if he’d tried to explain all of this back then, I wouldn’t have let him because I was hotheaded and emotionally stupid.

“Danny, I’m so sorry. I had no idea it was that bad.”

Danny shook his head as he swirled his drink. “It’s not like I told you any of this. I should’ve told you. I should’ve done a lot of things differently.”

Danny’s eyes lifted until they locked on mine, and kicking in like muscle memory, I held my breath. This was the game we’d played countless times. We’d flirt at the edge of honesty then back away, left with having to guess the rest. It had never occurred to me that I’d gotten things so wrong.

“I wish I’d known. I wouldn’t have—”

But I couldn’t blame Danny for not telling me. I wasn’t exactly nice to him toward the end. It was too late to defend my choices, especially now that I knew what had been going on with him, but maybe explaining them would help him understand. “You know why I wanted you to be there, right?”

“Because you wanted me to witness you beating Mariana?”

Danny said, probably to annoy me. He knew the reason. “You told me you weren’t sure if your family would make it.”

That was what I told him, but it wasn’t the entire story. “My parents never came to any of my school events, so inviting them to Awards Night was a long shot. But then my dad’s print shop went out of business and he had a short window to move his stuff out. My mom went to help him, and they totally forgot about Awards Night.”

It was stupid that I still felt disappointed about it, especially when I didn’t win anything. Had my parents come, it would’ve been a complete waste of their time. “Business hadn’t been going so well for a while, but when my dad decided to close, it started to hit me that he wasn’t going to be able to help me pay for college. I needed the awards. I thought it would help me get more scholarships.”

Danny didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. We both knew how things turned out. The only recognition I received was the one printed on my name tag. Most Likely to Succeed. What a joke.

“I was stressed out and I took it out on you,”

I said. “I’m sorry.”

This conversation was long overdue, but it was good that we finally cleared things up. Danny seemed to think so too. He fixed a smile on his face that didn’t really match his melancholy eyes.

“I don’t want this night to be about regrets. We’re starting over, remember?”

Danny tapped his boba cup into mine. “To new memories.”

It was tempting to return the gesture and knock his cup back and pretend everything was okay. I could’ve replied with something like, “We’ll make it a night to remember,”

or some other sentimental cliché that could have doubled as our prom theme. But my cynicism had sharp claws. Danny’s rosy outlook felt more like smoke and mirrors. There was a nagging feeling in my gut telling me to dig a little deeper. As much as Danny had just shared, I knew he dealt with things by keeping it light. In the past, we’d sweep our fights under the rug and pretend they never happened. Maybe if I hadn’t had tunnel vision when we were younger, I would have noticed that pattern sooner. I wasn’t about to let history repeat itself.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your brother before? We used to talk all the time.”

This was one of the times I wished we were having this conversation over text, so he wouldn’t hear the vulnerability in my sandpaper voice. I didn’t want Danny to think I was still hung up on this, but there was no denying at this point that I was. I needed to know where things went wrong.

“I didn’t know how. My own parents wouldn’t even talk to me about it. There was this unspoken expectation that whatever happened in our house stayed in our house.”

Danny shrugged. “It’s hard to talk about the things that you’re taught to hide.”

“Like us?”

My body flushed with the heat of embarrassment. I’d said the silent part out loud.

“What are you talking about?”

If Danny needed to jog his memory, then we were at the right place. “You never talked to me at school, even after we found out we’d been chatting online. It was like you didn’t want anyone to know we were friends.”

“You need to look in the mirror, Rach.”

For a second, I thought he meant that I had something on my face, until he said, “It goes both ways.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I asked. Danny shook his head like he didn’t want to touch this topic with a ten-foot pole. “I can handle it.”

Danny gave me a look like he wasn’t convinced. If he needed proof, I had plenty to give him. “An asshole producer once told me that he could see me in a movie if I shed a few pounds. He went as far as to say I’d look less bloated if I cut back on the soy sauce.”

It was a racist and misogynistic double whammy. “Working in Hollywood,”

I continued, “made me grow a thick skin quick. I can take it.”

Danny ruminated for a bit, wariness apparent on his face as he raked his hair. I rested my arms on the table like we were sitting in a boardroom. Whatever he had to say, I wanted to hear it. Eventually, he relented and dropped his answer quickly, like he was running away from a grenade. “You always cared too much about what other people thought.”

I wished my drink had some sugar to make this feedback go down easier. “What are you talking about?”

Danny shook his head, unwilling to elaborate, but I egged him on. “If you don’t tell me, I’m never going to know.”

“Fine,”

he said, though he avoided my eyes. “Your clothes, for one.”

Is he being for real right now? He was going to start with something superficial?

“What about it?”

I patted away a dusty spot on my elbow, a souvenir from my fall. “I can’t look nice for the reunion?”

“Yeah, but this”—he waved his hand up and down at my clothes—“it’s a little much for the high school gym, don’t you think?”

I scoffed as I buttoned up my blazer. I failed to see what was so scandalous about this camisole. A little cleavage never hurt anybody. “You need to get out more.”

“You asked for this,”

he reminded me.

“What else? It can’t be the outfit,”

I said. We’d gotten this far. He might as well tell me everything. “I’ve always been this way, apparently. How so? Was it because I wanted to be the best? Collect awards?”

I didn’t see how that was a bad thing.

“You lied to people about your job,”

he said, as if I’d forgotten. “Were you planning on coming clean, or were you going to wait until you were officially inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. None of my answers to my classmates’ questions were anything to be proud of, but I must’ve done something to get selected in the first place. “Is it so bad? Haven’t you ever wanted to people to think you were worthy of recognition?”

Danny squared his shoulders as a blistering heat ignited in his eyes. “You have no idea,”

he said. “But at what cost, Rach? Your integrity?”

“Since when did you become the moral police? It’s just an award from school.”

Danny dug his hands into his hair, causing it to stand on end. “Who are you? Do you hear yourself right now?”

I did. But I couldn’t stop myself from saying whatever it took to win this argument. At my ripe middle age, I was aware of my patterns. I’d gotten into enough hot water in relationships to know that much about myself. But knowing about my bad habits and doing something about them were two separate things.

“Sorry it’s not the Grammy Awards, Rachel, but it’s a big deal to some people who appreciate the honor.”

“The Grammy Awards are for music,”

I corrected him, practically shouting. It wasn’t the sharp comeback I’d heard in my head. Danny was still mostly right.

Danny’s chair scraped the floor as he rose from his chair. “Let’s revisit when we can talk more calmly.”

“I’m calm!”

That earned me a “get real”

look from Danny. Admittedly, I deserved it, but damn, it pissed me off.

“Why are you asking me, then?”

He threw his empty boba cup into the trash can on his way out. “You seem to have it all figured out.”

If that were true, why did I feel like I just lost?