Chapter 1
The only reason movies and TV shows and books are so obsessed with stories about the underdog triumphing over their bullies is because that kind of thing never happens in real life.
In real life, the underdog remains the underdog.
The wounds of childhood trauma have broken them, and they are unable to stand up straight and smile convincingly for the camera.
Meanwhile, their tormentors carry on as they do, carefree and blissfully ignorant of the permanence of the damage they’ve wreaked on others.
Or maybe they’re not ignorant, maybe they know exactly what they’ve done, and it’s a secret knowledge that heightens their sense of power.
Maybe it’s something they get off on, a dirty little memory that they return to in the darkness of night, to caress lovingly, savoring the ephemeral shot of endorphins that comes with the thought: I did that to that loser, and I got away with it.
It is possible I am getting too abstract for my own good.
I tend to do that sometimes. It’s the effect of having been Haven Lee’s target.
Growing up, my parents often called me Space Cadet, because I was always floating off into space.
Actually, if they took the time to get to know me, they’d know I wasn’t so much floating off as I was desperately shutting out the rest of the world because, thanks to Haven, it had gotten too awful for me to exist in.
But they never took the time. Nor did they have the energy. I don’t blame them.
Meanwhile, Haven Lee maintains the most beautiful relationship with her parents. Every Sunday morning, they meet up for brunch—sometimes at a fancy place with bottomless mimosas; sometimes, when they’re feeling nostalgic, at a dim sum place in San Gabriel.
Most Chinese families I know only go to Sunday dim sum together, but Haven and her family are different.
Aside from the Sunday brunches, she also drops by for dinners at their house on Wednesdays, where she and her dad make something labor intensive from scratch—dumplings or buns or handmade noodles.
Haven’s mom makes the cocktails. She goes all out on these cocktails; she has a nifty little device that forms a giant bubble filled with scented smoke, for example, that she blows onto the top of the drink.
Haven pops it with the tip of her nose, and the family dissolves into peals of laughter as lavender-or-orange-peel-scented smoke spills out.
The meals are accompanied by good wine, and at the end of it, everyone is red faced and full bellied, and there is so much camaraderie and love in the house I could just die.
Meanwhile, the couple of times I see my parents throughout the year are vastly different.
I still try to make cheerful conversation, but their sullenness will wear me down after fifteen minutes, and before long, we will accept the silence, our cutlery pinging against our plates with painful clarity while we eat.
But, I remind myself, at least my parents are still able to have meals with me.
Dani’s parents would probably give up everything just to have her back for one meal.
I live as far away from all the painful memories as I can, on the other side of the country, in New York City, but still I can’t keep myself from keeping up to date with Haven’s life.
It’s next to impossible not to, especially when she makes her life so readily available for public consumption.
Haven is an influencer. Not the type of influencer people love to hate.
She’s a food influencer. Her food isn’t pretentious; there are no acai-and-matcha smoothie bowls with painstakingly arranged flowers on top of them.
She cooks hearty meals, high-calorie foods that should stick to her bones but don’t.
Sometimes they’re multistep dishes that take hours of preparation, other times they’re ten-minute dishes that she rustles up in her bright and airy kitchen.
And they look absolutely delicious. Her followers, over one million of them, have been clamoring for a cookbook for ages.
As much as I hate to admit it, if she came out with a cookbook, I would probably end up buying a copy, because her food looks so good.
The thing that kills me is that back in school, I was the one who was into baking first. Haven had zero interest in anything involving the kitchen.
It feels like yet another thing she’s stolen from me.
But unfortunately, I am not an influencer. I have a desk job and a very attentive boss. A fact that I am reminded of when said boss, Annette, barks at me to bring her coffee.
I swipe at my phone, closing Instagram—Haven with her fork midway up to her heart-shaped lips—and hurry to Annette’s kitchen.
I slide a Nespresso pod out and pause. Today is Tuesday, and on Tuesdays, Annette takes the ristretto.
Right. I slide the pod back and spin the tower.
After locating the correct pod, I push it into the Nespresso machine as Annette calls out, “Coffee ETA?”
Annette loves saying “ETA” because it makes her sound busy and important.
I sometimes wonder why a prewedding photographer needs to sound busy and important, but maybe that’s just another thing I haven’t quite learned about the wedding industry.
When I first started, I was so hopelessly ignorant that I didn’t even know what a prewedding photographer was.
Then I learned that it’s a photographer who takes pretty pictures of couples before their actual wedding day.
There is a huge market for it, especially with Asian couples.
Ninety percent of Annette’s clients are couples from all over Asia who want glamorous pre-wed photos in Manhattan.
They come with suitcases stuffed full of gorgeous ballgowns and rented wedding dresses so stunning I often just stop and stare at them.
Annette takes these couples all over the city and photographs them at every iconic New York location.
Every single time, she tells the couples that this spot is unique, that very few couples have gone for that spot.
Thing is, though, she is lying. I know, because as her assistant, I’m the one who edits the actual photos, and they are all the same, every one of them, down to the poses.
Annette believes in being well prepared, in never standing behind the camera at two wide-eyed people and not having a trusted pose to suggest. It’s a good strategy, actually, because most people don’t like standing in front of a professional-grade DSLR camera.
The huge lens and the knowledge of how much they’ve spent on this photo shoot overwhelms them, and without Annette’s gentle guidance, most of them would stand there with frozen, terrified grins.
Annette is all gentle guidance when it comes to her clients, coaxing them into romantic poses (“Look down so we get a good shot of those beautiful lashes of yours, yep, perfect, and meanwhile, you put your arms around her and kiss her shoulder, yes, just like that, oh, you two are naturals!”) but with me, she is an army drill sergeant, shouting for ETAs and at me to give her the 35 mm or the 1D lens, and she never does it in a complete sentence, as though she can’t even spare the extra words.
She never says, “Fern, can I have the thirty-five millimeter, please?” She simply gestures at me and says, “Thirty-five.” She doesn’t say, “Fern, can you flick the bride’s veil up, please?
” She cocks her head toward the bride-to-be and says, “Veil.”
And—god, I’m embarrassed to share this—but here is the worst part of my job.
The most demeaning. I go up to the bride-to-be, my shoulders laden with Annette’s massive camera bags, each one weighing at least twenty pounds, and I take the bride’s sheer lace veil and wait for Annette’s signal.
Annette raises her camera and checks the lighting, then she nods.
I throw the veil up and scamper as quickly as I can out of the shot.
I do it without jostling the precious camera bags too much; each of these lenses costs more than my monthly wages.
It’s not the weight of the bags that I find demeaning, even though they are brutal and have contributed to my increasingly terrible posture.
It’s the scampering. The way I am expected to do my job and then disappear as quickly as I can, running like a hamster to hide in the grass so that the real players in life, the Annettes and the Havens, can take their shot.
I have long learned that, just like animals, humans are all born into a hierarchy of predator and prey. Sure, most of us don’t go around ripping each other’s necks out, but we are all hunting or being hunted in one way or another. And I am one of nature’s prey. I’ve made peace with that.
My patience knows no boundaries. Somehow, even when I think I’ve had enough, when I think the last shreds of my dignity have been snatched away, I manage to scrounge up an extra tiny bit.
Like now, for example. I would’ve loved to stand up straight, shoulders back, and say in a firm voice, “Annette, you are a brilliant photographer and I admire you deeply, but I don’t think making your coffee is part of my job description. ”
Of course, I don’t do any of that. Just the thought of it is enough to make me shiver. An actual tingling going down my spine at the image of me speaking like that to not just Annette but anyone, really.
If I sound like a pathetic loser, it’s because I am.
My therapist would sigh and shake her head if she heard me referring to myself as a “pathetic loser,” but I haven’t been able to let go of that label.
For now. I have this firm belief that once my book gets published, I will be able to stop seeing myself as a loser.
Annette often jokes about how I’m learning all her trade secrets so that I could replace her one day, but the truth is, I don’t want to be a photographer.
Dealing with customers terrifies me. No, I want to be an author.
It’s the whole reason I moved all the way from LA to New York City.
Here is the hub of publishing, where every major publisher is and where all the respectable literary agents are.
I have dreams of bumping into an editor in chief of some Penguin Random House imprint while buying Annette’s kale-and-brussels-sprout salad.
Of my manuscript flopping out of my bag (in my daydreams I carry around a printout of my manuscript everywhere I go, even though of course I don’t do this in real life) and the editor flipping through the first pages.
Her entire expression would light up as she reads my first paragraph.
She’d look up at me and say, “Who are you? Let’s talk.
” And my life would change, just like that.
Unfortunately, this isn’t how publishing works. The truth is, editors are inundated with manuscripts to read. If one actually fell at their feet at Sweetgreen, they’d probably run away screaming.
But I’m not entirely hopeless; in fact, I have a literary agent.
Bet you weren’t expecting that. Not Fern!
But yup, I do. I signed with her eight months ago (best day of my life), and after three months of revisions, we are now on submission to publishers.
Most people outside publishing don’t know what a feat it is to even get a literary agent to represent you.
My parents definitely don’t. They are real estate agents, and when I was querying literary agents, they kept going, “Fern, I don’t understand what’s the holdup in finding a literary agent to represent you.
Our clients come to us with a house and we’re like, ‘Sure, I’ll be your agent.
’ Why can’t you just do that?” I got tired of trying to explain that literary agents get thousands of emails a year from hopeful writers begging for representation and that they can only sign on a handful.
So I know enough to know that my book is actually good.
Good enough to get me an offer from a real-life New York literary agent!
Her name is Poppy, and she is brilliant.
Okay, so she’s pretty junior; technically she’s an assistant herself, but her boss trusts her enough to start her own list, which is saying something.
And everyone says that younger, newer agents are hungry, which is perfect because that’s what I am too.
Hungry. Starved, really. Like there’s a black hole inside me that can never be filled up.
It’s what I’ve been for as long as I can remember.
But I know that once I get a publishing deal, none of this—not Haven’s glossy success or Annette taking advantage of me or even my horrible, painful past—none of it will matter anymore, because that hole inside of me? It’ll finally be filled up.