Chapter Eight #2
“I don’t want you drinking, Sabrina, remember you’re a good girl.”
“Yes, Mom.” She knew how hard it was for Lee Lee to allow her to go.
“Remember your manners, and you text me. Have you said thank you to the Herzogs today? Did they like the dumplings I made?”
Sabrina had thrown the dumplings away before arriving at the Herzog house.
“They did, Mom, they loved them. Mrs. Herzog said to say thanks.”
“I knew they would. I took out the chilis. What are you doing there every day?”
“We go to the beach, we play board games. Just regular stuff, Mom.”
“Okay, you’re using that hat and the swimsuit I bought you? Make sure you don’t sit in the sun.”
Sabrina looked at the white line her watch strap had left on her wrist from that afternoon.
“I’ll try.”
“You will get dark and your skin won’t be so beautiful.”
“Yes, Mom. How was your day anyway? Are you okay?”
The internet is not working again. What do I do?
Who do I call if the air conditioning isn’t working again? Can you do it from there?
Have you paid the gas bill?
Sabrina arrived at the party alone. Dance music pulsed through the walls.
Bass rumbled through the wooden floors that were sticky with beer and wine.
She paused in the doorway and stared at the kitchen counter, covered in half-empty bottles of liquor and the triangle of beer pong cups that sat forgotten.
Her sight adjusted to the dimness. She almost didn’t see Kit, whose eyes were bloodshot.
The alcohol had loosened her movements, her hips swayed, and her shoulder tilted to one side, leaning up against Brad’s.
She stood beside a group of senior boys Sabrina had never spoken to but watched from afar in the high school cafeteria, being careful to avoid walking past their table.
Sabrina searched the room for Dave but couldn’t find him.
When she approached Kit, she saw a half bottle of wine dangling from her hand.
Kit lost her footing for a moment as she saw Sabrina.
“Rina!” she said. “I didn’t know if you were gonna make it. You been so long, baby.”
“What are you doing here? You were supposed to meet me an hour ago. I’ve been waiting for you.” Sabrina said the words fast, through her teeth, but low enough that nobody else could hear.
“I came early with Brad, I didn’t realize. I thought I messaged you. Ooops, I’m sorry. Have a drink with meeee,” she said, knocking her shoulder into Sabrina’s. She could smell the wine, and the smell of sweet vape smoke drifted toward her from the group standing beside Kit.
“You didn’t reply to any of my messages.” She hated the sound of her voice as she complained.
When Kit pulled her cell phone from her pocket, it fell to the ground, and Sabrina kneeled down to pick it up.
“Oops, thank you, my BFF,” she slurred. “Yeah, I see you texted me a buncha times. I didn’t hear it.”
Brad draped his arm around Kit’s neck but faced his friends. Sabrina scanned the room for Dave again.
“Come on, Rina, let me pour you a cup.” Kit broke away from Brad and hooked her arm through Sabrina’s, pouring wine from her bottle into a red party cup.
Sabrina gulped down the sour, warm wine. She wanted to shudder, but she held her breath and offered the cup again to be filled.
“That a girl,” Kit said, pouring more wine.
By the time the alcohol unknotted the tension in Sabrina’s body, Kit had wandered back to Brad.
Sabrina walked across the sticky floor, still searching for Dave.
It was her first real high school party, but she already felt like she had outgrown it.
She hadn’t even had her first joint or thrashed around on the dance floor.
She had never been a part of these moments—and suddenly she didn’t care about missing out on them.
She found him sitting alone on the stoop of the house, holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger.
“You smoke?” he asked, holding the cigarette up to her. She shook her head.
“Suit yourself,” he mumbled and stared out at the people passing by the front of the house.
Sabrina searched for something to say, something that might make him look at her.
Nothing came, and she coughed on her own spit as she breathed in too quickly.
Dave offered her his bottle of water, and she took a long sip.
She expected to taste the cigarette, but there was nothing, just the smooth plastic spout of the water bottle, and it occurred to her how their lips met in that moment, though she knew he wouldn’t think of her at all.
···
The following day, Sabrina and Kit went to the beach after eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in silence in the kitchen. They laid out on their towels. Sabrina always worried about the sand and the mess it would make on the Herzogs’ white Turkish towels.
“You’re so fussy,” Kit muttered, and Sabrina watched as Kit’s sandy feet left streaks across the fabric. The sand made Sabrina’s skin itch. She wiped her feet again.
“So last night, Dave and I kind of started this thing,” Kit said, reclining, her eyes concealed by her sunglasses.
“Last night?” A cascade of images from the house party ran through her mind. When? Did she sneak out? Why didn’t I notice? I thought it was Brad she liked, not Dave. How did so many things happen last night that Sabrina missed? She thought she had been there with everyone all along.
Sabrina had hardly spoken to Dave during senior year. In fact, she had given up altogether on having any connection with him until a few weeks before graduation, when he appeared before her in the library. The sound of a chair being pulled up at her table interrupted her thoughts, and there he was.
“Hey. What you working on?”
Dave sat across from her and leaned over the pile of books. Advanced Spanish Grammar , Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Flannery O’Connor’s short stories.
“A paper I have for AP class.” Her words left her mouth slowly, and she felt herself lean backward and her cheeks began to flush as she looked at him.
“What’s it on?” He peered at her open folder, her neat, small writing annotating the handouts.
“We did a whole thing on these authors. It’s kind of an interesting class actually.”
“Right.” He spun his pen on the table and took out a MacBook Air. “You know, I wish I’d taken that class. I didn’t realize until it was too late I’m really into these writers.”
“You are?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Well, yeah, I am. I didn’t know you were into English lit.”
“I am. I wanna be a writer one day,” he said.
She looked at him and nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. She wondered if Kit knew this about Dave.
“You’re gonna sit here?” she asked, scanning the room, looking for Kit.
“You were saving it for someone?”
“No, not really…”
“Cool.” He put his headphones on and opened up his book. She stared at him for a moment, her mouth slightly open, searching for something else to say, but her mind went blank with the thrill of his presence.
For the rest of that period, she could not concentrate on her paper.
Instead, she thought about how her hair smelled.
And whether he had sat there to enlist her help with his assignments.
She had to fight the urge to ask; she wanted to feel the warmth of his approval on her skin.
And then she thought of what Kit would say had she walked in at that very moment.
The rest of the day passed in a blur, and Sabrina was relieved not to see Kit at all.
She rushed a message to her, to say she had to head home to help her mother, an excuse that always passed unquestioned.
What Sabrina didn’t expect was the exhaustion that overcame her that night.
And now this boy, whom she had watched carefully from the sidelines, this boy who had ignored her for the last twelve years, this boy who was like an actor on the stage, acting alongside her friend, the main characters, suddenly looked out at her in the audience, and she felt the heat of the spotlight on her.
Until this day, senior year had been a year of waiting for Sabrina.
A year of wishing the time away so that her life could begin in college with new friends, new teachers, new neighbors, in an environment where she wasn’t burdened with how everyone else saw her: an Asian immigrant’s daughter, AP class nerd, low-income household, a latchkey kid, Kit Herzog’s sidekick.
Senior year had been about patiently plowing forward with her studies, keeping her grades sky-high so the world might open up.
She couldn’t wait to leave, for the rest of her life to start.
She had not cared nor known about anything she might have missed during her final year in high school.
Then, that afternoon with Dave in the library, as though a warm breeze blew in through the window and shook the musty papers that lay before her: the wind changed.
She had wanted the year to end fast so she could reinvent herself, but suddenly she was overcome by a painful urge to be present.
She was not ready for her future yet. She wasn’t ready for Princeton yet either.
She wanted to stop time and stay right there, in Chestnut Hill Academy, and have a high school moment.
Hours later, Sabrina sat awake, leaning over the schoolwork spread out on her bed.
Her neck ached as she wrote notes in the margins of the Steinbeck novel she had already read.
She realized that her fingers turned the pages of the book that Dave had thumbed through earlier, and a thrill rushed through her, followed by a shudder at the realization that Kit felt this every time she was with him. She wanted to feel it too.