thirteen
A few hours later, I found myself staring down the barrel of what looked to be an ordinary cheeseburger. But as I was learning,
appearances could be misleading.
“It’s just a burger,” Alan said. “Don’t psych yourself out. Give it a try.”
I was all about extending trust to him these days it seemed, so there was no reason not to keep doing it. I took a bite, carefully
running the flavor and texture along my tongue. It was savory and chewy. It tasted like—well—a real beef patty.
“Good, right?” His face was expectant, intensely curious.
“Yes,” I said, surprised at how thoroughly convincing imitation meat could be. We were at Monty’s Good Burger for lunch, after
touring UCLA in the morning. It was, as Alan had told me, a famous vegan burger joint in Los Angeles.
“I’ve always wanted to try this place.”
I chewed my burger, enjoying its juiciness.
I didn’t need to out my lack of worldliness to him; he had lived in Mount Pierce too, after all.
We didn’t have any vegan restaurants there.
Tofu was a thing I still viewed as a fundamentally Asian ingredient, to be cooked in its own right and not as a replacement for meat.
“Why? Why not just eat a normal burger?”
“Because I’m a vegan now. Mostly.”
I put the burger down. “You are? What do you mean by mostly ?”
“I generally eat vegan, except at home.” His mouth twisted slightly—so slightly that only someone who knew him as well as
I did would have noticed. I didn’t say anything because I understood why. But he must’ve read something into my expression.
“It’s just not worth the fight.” He sounded defensive, as though he feared I was judging him for his cowardice. “Why pick
one if you don’t have to?”
“I’m not criticizing you,” I said. And really, I wasn’t. I could predict his father’s reaction to him wanting to be vegan.
“Anyway, now you know.” He looked out toward the distance.
“I feel like we’re in a confessional,” I joked. “Is there anything else you want to tell me that you’ve been keeping close
to the vest?”
“Oh yes. Always.”
“What else?”
He leaned in. “I’ve gotten really into writing Neon Nights fan fiction.”
“Interesting.” Neon Nights was a popular anime about a former yakuza member and his efforts to escape his past life.
I knew it was based on a successful manga and had been adapted into six seasons of television.
That was about the extent of my knowledge.
I associated it with the nerdier set. The thing that caught my attention was that I had never known Alan to be a writer. That was always me.
“You’re one of only a few people I’ve told.”
A few people. So I had been downgraded slightly, to one of a circle of confidants. It was only fair, I supposed. “Why?”
“Why am I telling you, or why have I told only a few people?”
I thought about it. “Both, I guess?”
“Well, you can guess why I’m telling only a few people,” he said easily. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing people expect
out of a two-sport athlete and homecoming king. And I write a lot of romance. I’d never hear the end of it from my teammates.
And I’m telling you because you already know everything embarrassing about me and you’re still around, so I figure this wouldn’t
drastically change how you feel about me. We’re already in too deep. I like telling you things. I like seeing your reaction.”
I paused. “You were homecoming king?”
He grinned happily.
For any other person, this level of clout-chasing would’ve been off-putting and shameful.
But he was too likable for it to matter.
It came off as a charming quirk, rather than thirstiness.
In any case, I knew it all sprouted from the same source.
Alan had a deep-seated need to be loved, and he sought love everywhere to quench this need.
He needed this love from strangers as equally as he needed this love from me.
It was no wonder he wrote romance. He was an intrinsically romantic person.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?” I asked.
“Tell me something you’re keeping close to the vest,” he said, parroting my words back at me.
“I don’t hide things like you do from the world.”
“Just from me.”
I looked at him, not fully comprehending.
“Let’s step back to the day before. You tried to convince me that you wanted to major in astronomy . You.”
“I don’t know what I want to major in.”
“That’s not true.”
I drew back. “What, you’re going to tell me about myself?” I was full of indignant offense.
“I could guess. You want to major in journalism, obviously.”
He truly surprised me this time. “Why would you think that?”
“You told me you were taking Journalism II,” he said slowly. “What kind of person takes Journalism II without a serious interest
in it?”
Ah yes, I thought. We had shared class schedules. But only in passing. It didn’t occur to me that he was paying such close
attention. I hadn’t paid that much attention to what his schedule was.
“And you know, Kit,” he added.
I was startled. “You remember Kit?”
“She was your most prized possession. Of course I remember.”
Kit was a Kit Kittredge American Girl doll that my parents got secondhand from one of their friends who had a daughter ten years older than me.
I got it for my first Christmas in America, wrapped up and regifted in a Payless shoebox along with a hardcover companion book and a set of accessories.
I didn’t know anything about American Girl dolls, but I knew it was the most expensive gift I’d ever gotten.
I didn’t have anything like that in Da Ji Cun.
She just looked pricey with her finely stitched clothes and smooth artificial skin.
“American Girl,” Mama had said softly when I opened the box, wrapped in old newspapers because we couldn’t afford flashy wrapping paper. “Like you.”
Even though Kit had a perky blond bob and blue eyes and looked nothing like me, I immediately felt like she was mine. I took
her everywhere. She was the most American thing I owned. Having Kit made me feel a little bit like I had a road map for fitting
in with other girls. All I had to do was be more like her. I read Kit books from the library and ran her traits through my
fingers like shiny coins. Spunky. Intrepid. All-American. In the Kit Kittredge canon, she was a reporter.
I had completely forgotten.
I shook my head. “I don’t want to be a journalist because of a child’s doll. That would be ridiculous.”
“Who knows why people do anything? Maybe it wasn’t a linear A to B. But maybe there was a spark in there, somewhere.”
“Not a very good origin story,” I said dryly. “Would make for a trite college application essay.”
He hummed. “Aren’t all college application essays trite? Isn’t that the whole point of them?”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t finished mine yet.”
“So, what’s holding you up? They’re almost due.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure you would understand.”
“It has to do with Sam, doesn’t it?”
I blinked rapidly, struck sharp with a pain that I couldn’t describe. I kept underestimating him. He was far more perceptive
than I gave him credit for. It made me uncomfortable. Even after only a few days, it seemed impossible to bury anything deep
enough that he couldn’t find it.
I couldn’t figure out what to say or where to begin about Sam, so Alan shaped the words for me. “What happened to him? How
did he die?”
It felt so crude, the English language. Short sentences looking for hard truths. They were the questions that people wanted
to know and that my parents had invited by keeping it all in the dark. So few had directly asked. And I had never told anybody.
I looked up at Alan’s face and knew so clearly that he was not probing out of nosiness. He was tender and sad. I wondered
if he was remembering Sam as a boy, when we were all children.
I had rebuffed him once before on this question, but now, it seemed different. Before, it felt like trading gossip. This time,
I was telling him a story about Sam. But really, I was telling him a story about me, because Sam’s story was part of mine,
and mine was still going.
“He died of a drug overdose,” I said. “Adulterated Xanax, laced with fentanyl. He didn’t have a prescription for it. They never figured out who his dealer was.”
His face whitened. “Jesus.”
I was strangely calm, my eyes dry. I had imagined before, maybe, if I had said it out loud to someone—anyone—that I might
unlock some kind of peace or acceptance. The truth will set you free, or so people said. But mostly, I felt hollow. Which
was to say, I felt the same as I had before.
“It was accidental?” he asked, transforming his statement into a question only right at the very end.
“That’s the thing, actually. It’s impossible to know. I think it’s what kills my parents the most.”
“Is that what bothers you too?”
It was, and it wasn’t. Sam was gone. However it happened—intentional or not—didn’t matter, because the end result was the
same. At least that was one way to think about it. But I couldn’t convince myself of that. Of course it mattered. The whys
and hows of it were all that I had left. They were what kept me up at night.
“Yes. All of it bothers me,” I told him.
“This is what’s stopping you from finishing everything.”
He still didn’t understand.
“He went to college, and then he never came back,” I said. “How am I supposed to get over that in nine months’ time? How am
I supposed to look forward to the thing that killed him?”
It was a peculiar sensation, the knowing steady onward march of time, toward what felt like an executioner’s block.
Logically, I knew I could probably go to college and not die.
Most people went to college and came out of it just fine, proceeding to adulthood a little more educated, a little more mature. Most people. But not Sam.
And why? He had been the best of us. He was built for college. It seemed particularly cruel that he didn’t survive it. If