Chapter 4 Magnolia #2
By the time Iris came out of her room, her hair still mussed up, dressed in jeans and a hoodie but with a fresh face of makeup on, I’d been waiting in the living room for over an hour.
I didn’t mind, I’d spent the hour muttering different phrases in my new accent and fussing over everything, checking and rechecking my backpack to make sure I hadn’t forgotten my wallet or my magical Shiseido kit.
Iris slouched down the hallway, yawning, and stopped short when she caught sight of me perched on the sofa.
I said, “Morning, Ci—uh.” Nope, I couldn’t bring myself to call her by her name. “Morning.”
“What the fuck happened to your face?”
My smile froze. “Um. I put on some makeup?”
“No. Not some. You look like you put on all the makeup you found at CVS. Jesus, Magnolia. You look like a goddamn clown.”
My nose started itching, a sure sign I was about to cry, and I pinched the back of my thigh as subtly as I could to stop the tears from coming.
“Wash it off. I am not going to be seen on campus with”—she gestured at me—“this.”
I nodded and jumped up, eager to get away so she wouldn’t see me cry again.
“And what the hell are you wearing? What happened to the shirts we bought?”
“I…” I had no idea what I was supposed to say to that. The tops we bought were too sexy? I felt like a fraud wearing them?
“You know what? Never mind. We don’t have time. Just go wash the crap off your face.”
This time, when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see an American teen. I saw myself for what I really was. A kid trying to pass herself off as a woman. I washed it all off. Iris and I didn’t say another word to each other the entire drive to school.
· · ·
If you don’t know what a community college is, well, neither did I.
Community colleges aren’t colleges, not like the kinds you see on TV.
They’re more like a stepping stone between high school and a real college, and the best thing about them is that just about anyone can enroll.
That’s why, at age sixteen, I could go to one, no questions asked.
I had my GCE O-Level exam results, and they were enough to get me in.
You couldn’t do that at a normal college; you’d need to sit for the A-Levels to get in.
Anyway, the school I was about to attend was called Pasadena City College.
I had no idea what to expect. I think mostly I was expecting a stereotypical American high school, but of course it wasn’t like that at all.
It was more like a university, but tiny.
Well, I say “tiny,” but it was actually pretty huge.
Multiple buildings spread across an entire city block.
City blocks in LA are huge and sprawled out, not like ones in Jakarta.
Once Iris parked and we got out of the car, she said, “Okay. Listen to me.”
I resisted the urge to flinch.
Iris took a piece of paper out of her bag. “This is a map of the school. You got your timetable?”
I nodded.
“Good. Buy your textbooks at the store. Don’t talk to me while we’re at school. I’ll see you back here at three. I’m not waiting around, so don’t be late.”
With that, she turned and stalked off, her hips swaying in a way that mine never could.
I looked down at the map she’d given me.
Coming from Iris, handing me a map was a surprisingly caring gesture.
I tried not to dwell on how enormous the campus seemed to me.
Easily five times the size of my high school.
Okay, according to this, the bookstore was in building B.
I made my way out of the parking structure.
Every time someone walked past me, I stared at them, studying everything about them—their outfits, their hair, their walks.
And, above all, the way they talked. I played the phrases over and over in my head, tasting them, running through the words until they were etched into the curves of my brain.
Hey, man, how’s it going?
Babe, did you—
No thanks, buddy.
Random phrases around me that I would never hear in Indonesia.
I felt an almost overwhelming sense of homesickness followed by anger.
Mostly at myself, because here I was in Los Angeles, and instead of being excited, I was scared.
I wanted to hide in a dark corner before someone noticed me for the fraud I was.
Though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was being fraudulent about, exactly.
My fingers twined and twisted together as I walked with my head down, glancing up once in a while to check that I was headed in the right direction.
I spotted the bookstore from a distance; there was a long line of students snaking its way out of the building.
My heart sank. There were only about twenty minutes before my first class began, and I doubted this line was going to move all that fast. What if I didn’t make it through the door before my class started?
Would I get in trouble? Did they take attendance in college?
No, wait. This wasn’t college. It was community college.
Did they take attendance here? Which would be worse—to be late for class or to not have the textbooks with you?
The questions came to my mind in quick succession, like bullets spitting out, rat-a-tat-tat, completely overwhelming.
But without any other choice, I joined the line and tried not to panic at how slowly it was moving.
“You got your class schedule?”
It took a moment for me to realize that someone was talking to me. Then it took another moment for the words to sink in. And another moment for me to parse through the quickness of her words and her accent, both familiar and unfamiliar.
“Um…did you hear what I said?”
I looked up. And up.
I don’t know if you’ve met the love of your life yet.
I hope you haven’t. It is a tragedy to meet them at the age of sixteen.
Especially when she’s nineteen. And a she.
Who knows? If I’d met her just a couple of years later, all might’ve worked out.
I like to think that we’d have given it a good go before crashing and burning.
And we would’ve crashed and burned, I’m sure, because, god, I was a mess in my twenties, and—I found out later—so was she.
But right now, standing in front of the PCC Bookstore, I didn’t know that. In this moment, all I knew was I was looking at the most enchanting person I had ever seen in my life. And that was how I met Ellery O’Shea. The love of my life.