sixteen
Of all the colleges we’d seen so far, none of them had stood out to me, until this one. UCSB was astonishingly beautiful.
We walked along the lagoon on campus, a huge body of water that linked up to the ocean. The water was deep blue, lined with
paths where people jogged around the perimeter. Far in the distance, you could see the purple blue of the ocean beyond and
the low rise of mountains. It was hard to beat having access to the beach on campus.
UCSB didn’t need a tour to sell the experience. Just walking around was enough. It felt like we were on vacation. It was incongruous.
Being here should’ve made the application deadline loom harder rather than seem far away.
I thought about what this trip would’ve been like had I done it with my parents instead.
We had taken a week off to visit colleges with Sam when he had been applying.
We marveled at the aged redbrick campus of Harvard and the impressive gothic architecture of Yale, each lending a sense of weight and history.
Sam’s face was tight with suppressed excitement.
He didn’t want to seem too eager to leave the nest, but I could tell that he was no longer with us in the present.
He was soaring toward his future, already gone.
I could not have felt more different about it.
It made my parents’ absence on this trip feel all the more conspicuous. We hadn’t talked since Mama and I had the spat about
the secret we were keeping from Nai Nai. It seemed that they were hell-bent on avoiding anything difficult with me, from the
beginning of this trip to now, where even apparently talking to me was too much.
I wondered what they were doing. And I wondered about Nai Nai, whether she was thinking about me.
“What’s turning in that brain of yours?” Alan asked as we circled the lake.
“Oh,” I said. “Just thinking about everyone in China. Without me. What’s happening, and all that.”
“Ah,” he said.
“I feel like I was just dumped on this trip as something to be rid of.”
“Ouch. And what am I? Chopped liver?”
I smiled. After everything from the past few days, I could let myself feel grateful that he was here. We were tentative but
feeling our way toward openness again. And it was nice. I could admit it now. I had missed him. “You know that’s not what I meant.” I folded my hands together. “It’s been years since I’ve gone back. Hard to believe. What about you?”
“Three years,” he said. “Three and a half. I don’t have any relatives there who I’m close with anymore. They’ve all passed
away. And everything is so unfamiliar. The last time I went back, I felt so out of place. It almost hurt to be there, you
know? To be somewhere you used to fit in and no longer fit anymore.”
He always seemed to say my innermost thoughts. That was what made us so deeply connected back then. I knew, logically, that
there were many children like us, even if in Mount Pierce, we were a special set. Maybe at Weston High, we weren’t special
at all.
“Sometimes, I try not to talk to my grandmother,” I confessed. “It just makes me too sad. So I avoid her.”
“Even though avoiding her hurts too,” he finished for me. He had been raised temporarily by his grandparents as a child as
well, but his parents had rejoined him in Shanghai in the later years, before they all moved to the United States.
I nodded. It was shameful, but he understood, at least. “The more I avoid her, the more I don’t know what to say to her when
we do talk. I’m just in a constant cycle of guilt. Guilt building on more guilt.”
“I get it. You ever heard the term satellite babies ?”
“No. What’s that?”
“I learned it only when I moved to San Diego. They’re kids who were raised by extended family, usually grandparents, while their parents worked in a different country. And then they go back to their parents when they’re older. Common mostly among Chinese families.”
“Huh. Satellite babies,” I repeated. It conjured up a lonesome image, floating in space, touching nothing. Was that why I
felt so rudderless all the time, so unable to fit in anywhere? But then, Alan had never had this problem. Maybe he was an
exceptional satellite baby. One who had overcome our fundamental nature. He had found his way back home.
“It’s a very specific experience. It’s no wonder it’s hard for us, right? Leaving our grandparents, joining our parents. It
was so strange when my grandmother died. That was the last time I went back. For her funeral.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gone. That’s terrible to say, isn’t it? But I wanted to remember her the
way she was. It didn’t feel real until I saw her body.”
Although Nai Nai was getting older, her dying still felt like an abstract future thing. The idea of it made me shiver. One
day, I wouldn’t have the chance to talk to her anymore. Would I regret all the times I’d been too busy to call? Or the summers
I hadn’t visited? Nai Nai never complained. She never made me feel bad about it.
Even now, she was probably patiently waiting for the day she would see her American grandson again. She was the only one who
didn’t know that she never would. Not in this life, anyway.
As we meandered through the grounds, he gave me tips about the teachers he was familiar with and what groups of people at school to avoid.
We had flipped roles from when we were at Mount Pierce.
I found myself enjoying his descriptions of Weston High and how different it was from what I knew.
He had been so anxious before, and now he was confident about school and his place in it.
I wondered what it would be like when we returned to class next week. Would it be like how we were now? Walking and laughing
side by side in the sun? And how surprising it would be to everyone there, that we went so far back.
I had a tiny nagging question that had been tickling the back of my mind this entire time, but it had never seemed like the
right moment to ask.
“There’s still one thing we haven’t talked about,” I said.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Who’s Victoria?” I tried not to let any trepidation enter my voice. It was an innocent question. I prepared myself mentally
to feel no attachment to the answer either way, and yet for some reason, my body was not getting the message. Beneath my skin,
my blood vessels surged, heating the surface, but hopefully not turning me red.
His eyebrows did a tiny jump. He coughed lightly, surprised. I knew then that the answer was not nothing.
“How do you know about her?”
“The twins asked. Remember?”
“Right. She was my girlfriend.”
“Was?”
“Yes. Was. Which I guess makes her my ex-girlfriend, for clarity.” He laughed. “Are you worried?” he teased.
I definitely flushed then. “No, I don’t care.” But I knew my face belied my words. I had so many questions. How long? How did they meet? Was he in love? I had to lower the temperature of my interest, though, for self-preservation. I shrugged. “I was just curious at how the twins knew about her.”
“Is this the portion of our conversation where we talk about our past love lives?” He grinned easily.
“I think mine would be a very short update, but sure.”
“Okay, why not? I’m curious. I dated Victoria for two and a half years. Long enough that I once invited her on a family trip
to Los Angeles, so the twins met her then.”
“Oh. Serious.”
“I guess so.”
“Sounds pretty serious to introduce her to your family and go on a family trip together. What was she like?” And why did you
break up? I wondered silently.
“Smart. Intense. But very funny when she wanted to be. We were both on student council together. We ran against each other
for president. She won. She was Chinese American. Born in the Bay Area. My family really liked her.”
I felt intimidated at his description, as though I were being measured up to it, and I wasn’t comparing favorably. “Wow,”
I said, my bones feeling loose and unwieldy. “So what happened?”
“It’s odd, right? She was perfect on paper.
It was like one of those things where it just seemed inevitable that we would get together.
” He paused. “I make it sound so mechanical. I did like her. But we seemed to be lesser than the sum of our parts. Over time, it felt like she was more interested in a vision of who I could be rather than who I was. It was small stuff at first, but then it became bigger and more existential. Eventually, we got closer to post–high school life, and, of course, it got complicated. It was her dream to go out east for college, and she wanted us to apply to the same colleges. And I didn’t want that.
So that ended up being a deal-breaker, because she said she couldn’t see a future with me.
” He went quiet. “It was fair. She was always the one thinking about who we could be, and for some reason, I never thought about us at all.”
“So you broke up with her?”
“No. She broke up with me.”
It hadn’t been his decision in the end. Maybe, then, this was all an ex post facto justification for what had happened. Who
knew if it was even true? I tried not to look disappointed.
“The truth is,” he confessed, “I knew it wasn’t quite right for a long time, but I could never bring myself to do something
about it.” His eyes went misty and distant at some painful memory I couldn’t see, before he gathered himself again. “And,
you know, it’s shallow, but I really didn’t want to go to homecoming alone.”
“You’re so noble. Did she break up with you before or after?”
“Before,” he said promptly. “She was always braver than me.”
That must have been early in the fall, only a few months ago. “Did you love her?” I asked.
“Wow. No pulling punches from you, huh?”
I shrugged.
He hesitated. “We dated for over two years. We said ‘I love you’ to each other after one.”
“That didn’t really answer my question.”
He shot me a sharp look. “I guess it’s complicated. I don’t know.”