Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sabrina
Sabrina checked her phone too often. She tried to set rules for herself.
She turned her phone off completely before turning the lights out at night, but twenty minutes later, she turned it on again.
She looked up Dave in her contacts on WhatsApp to see if he was online.
She checked her Snapchat to see if he had posted, then Instagram.
She spent every spare moment between her shifts, chores, and sleep refreshing her feed.
When she got up in the night to go to the bathroom, she reached for her phone in her drawer and could not stop herself from checking again.
She worked out the average time it took him to reply to her messages based on the exchanges they’d had so far.
It was ninety-four minutes. This was longer than she wanted.
If she had her way, his average time would be a single minute, just enough time for him to compose the perfect response.
She was getting better at the messages she wrote too.
Sometimes she was even proud of her tone.
When it took him almost a whole evening to respond, she felt a black mood descend, a cloud she could not shake.
If she was tired, she would get to the point of tears until she heard that heartening ping on her phone.
She changed her notifications, so he had his own sound.
He was busy, she told herself, although she knew this was just opening the door to the far more disturbing question of what he was busy with.
Was he messaging a girl? Or worse, was he doing nothing and simply looking at her message with no desire to respond?
This thought caused the black cloud to thunder and rain over her until she heard the reassuring ping again.
His messages were brief but warm, sometimes an emoji she stared at, trying to find its meaning.
The best nights were after they had seen each other that day.
They would message for hours, and sometimes she would realize it was already one in the morning and they were still talking.
Then she couldn’t wait to see him again.
And until she did, she thought of only that, the excitement rising in her as the hour drew nearer.
To Sabrina’s surprise, Dave Harrison was a good listener.
He took in everything she said, carefully considering her words and turning them over in his mind.
She stared at his face in those moments, studying his features: his mouth, his nose, the way his hair fell over his eyes.
He was interested in what she had to say.
It was intoxicating. This came as a surprise to Sabrina because of how Kit described him.
She expected Dave to be distracted, that his only reason to spend time with Sabrina was because nobody else was there.
Kit always presented him as a “user.” Someone who was just waiting for a better offer.
But this was not how he made Sabrina feel.
Mr. Hargreaves, her English teacher in senior year, who was British, once told the class that they were always on send.
She liked this phrasing, and the way he said this in his British accent.
Sometimes she tried to mimic it in front of the mirror.
She sounded ridiculous. On the other hand, Dave had perfected his British accent and always shouted out to her as she left his house Toodle-oo, jolly good, tallyho.
She never looked back as he called after her, but her smile spread wide over her face, and by the time she reached the end of the street, her smile felt like it would burst out of her cheeks.
···
“I will say this…” Dave always started conversations this way when he wanted to make an observation about Sabrina.
She examined her nails as they sat on the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps. There was just enough cloud and breeze to keep them there comfortably for a while. She listened to the rustling branches with her eyes closed. The clouds darkened on the horizon. The rain was coming.
“You are not at all how you seemed at school,” said Dave.
“Oh yeah?” She kept her eye on the clouds, trying to work out when the weather would shift.
“No. You are a straight talker, Chen.”
She loved when he called her that. Out of his mouth, her surname, which she had loathed most of her life, had a sweetness that trilled in the air like birdsong.
“I think leaving school, graduation, it made me feel different.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I felt like I was always waiting for a chance to speak…. There were a lot of competing voices in high school. It’s kind of hard to be heard over them. Everyone’s talking at once.”
“I guess when you put it like that, I probably wasn’t heard much either. People were loud.”
“Ummm, I don’t think it’s the same thing. Being you is different from being me,” she said with a sharpness she regretted.
“Why, because I’m theoretically popular?”
“Yeah, that and you’re white, and you come from the right family.”
“Oh come on,” he said, “you really feel that way?”
“People treat you differently. I don’t just mean the kids in the class, I mean teachers too. Friends, parents, even Kit. You’re immediately on the inside and I’m not. Just like Kit. Kit is a Herzog, so she’s in the fold, though she can play at the edges too.”
“You really think so? I mean, my best friend is Manish Agarwal. You think he feels that way too?”
“Maybe a little…but he’s also rich. His dad is a professor at Penn, isn’t he? And works at Microsoft.”
“So it’s what, down to money?”
“Listen, there are always going to be people on the inside and those on the outside. But at a school like CHA, after a certain age, you start to notice. The kids who have their beach houses down the shore. When they go on school trips to Europe. I’m guessing the reason you’re there is that someone in your family owns a house or some business in Chestnut Hill, right?
So it doesn’t matter that you live in a brownstone in Society Hill, you still get a spot at the school?
Look at the cars in the parking lot. You ever notice how those school buses are kinda empty?
There is an invisible line that exists between those who have money and those who don’t.
That line gets more visible when you throw in minority parents, or a less-educated family background.
My mom is working class. She works as a janitor in a public school, a real public school, and sometimes takes a second job doing overnight shifts at a motel to work at the reception desk.
She is not stupid. She’s smart, she’s just not educated.
And she is not from here. And we have no money, except for just enough to pay the bills, to buy discounted food, and sometimes, when she feels real wild, she might take me to Target and treat me to something.
So yeah, I am on the outside for all the reasons above.
So it’s different for me. In the Venn diagram of high school differentiators, I’m on the opposite side from you. ”
Dave paused and took in her words.
“I didn’t know.”
“How could you know though?”
“By looking.” He finally said, “And I’m sorry that I didn’t.”
Dave was nothing like his mother, nor the image Sabrina had of him from Kit’s descriptions.
They took a walk together through the Wissahickon one early morning before her shift was due to start.
Summer was exploding around them, gigantic trees weighed down, branches abundant with leaves, and magnolias hung heavy as the silky pink-edged petals scattered the well-trodden earth.
The flowers popped out, pinks and violets.
Some were weeds, Sabrina knew from the yard work she did at home, but they were still beautiful, and they still persevered, pressing through.
They walked past an elderly man with a cane and two slow-moving Labradors.
One of them pushed his wet nose into Sabrina’s hand as he rubbed his body along her legs.
“Dogs like you, hey?”
“What makes you say that?” she asked, a smile on her lips.
“Can tell. It’s a good thing.”
“You don’t have a dog?”
“We did, Gordon. He was my best friend growing up. Always had my back when Brad would beat the shit out of me.”
“He did that?”
“Who, Brad? Yeah, always. He’s kind of an asshole. Don’t know if you noticed.”
“I noticed,” she said quietly.
The sound of their steps over the path became louder, and she heard her breath shorten as they walked up the hill, back toward the school parking lot.
She noticed his white tennis sneakers bore a mark from the dirt path.
In the distance, they saw a deer quietly nibbling on the branches and buds.
They stood beside each other, just the rise and fall of their breath moving between them as they watched her, the doe.
“Can I ask you something? And I mean this totally from just wanting to know more about you. So your family are from China, right? That’s your ethnicity?
” Dave asked as they reached a narrow road that split the vast green expanse of the country club golf course behind the parking lot and main entrance.
Sabrina paused and smiled at the way he asked her. There was a thoughtfulness in it.
“Well, yeah, insofar as my blood. But I’m kinda fake Chinese, because I’ve been here in Philadelphia all my life and my Mandarin sucks.”
“Faux Chinese,” he said and smiled. There was an immediate intimacy when he teased her, and the fact that she couldn’t go and visit her real ancestral home over the summer felt less and less disappointing.
“Better than my family.”
“What fake are you? Fake Irish?”
“Nah, we’re like phonies, you know? Like, look at all of us at CHA.
All the money goes into whatever it is the parents think is useful.
Most of our parents can still afford to send their kids to a private school but insist on calling themselves real or whatever because they have us all attending this fake public school.
I mean, do you think low-income families who can’t afford to even eat properly care that we have the council advocating for gluten-free pasta? If you think about it…”
“Do you think about it?” Sabrina asked.
“I do, yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m still as bad.
I’m the one eating the gluten-free pasta, I’m the one going on the school trips to Europe, while attending a public school I can attend because of my mom’s rental property off Germantown Avenue.
My parents have made my life pretty comfortable, and I guess as a result I am not aware of the challenges other people have to face. ”
“Whoa…”
“What?”
“I just never knew you were aware.”
“Yeah? You thought I just cruised along and took it all? But I do, so I’m kind of even worse than the rest. I take it all and I hate myself for it. Because I’m not really standing up to say no thanks. You know?”
“I would probably be the same way if I had everything you had.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you go to a public school in the fanciest district of Philadelphia, and you live in a brownstone in Society Hill. You know about Asian American issues but not really, you’re just a voyeur.
I know you did your history paper on Vietnam and the war and immigration rights, but how can you really know about the Vietnamese or the Chinese or any of us Asian American minorities really? There are hardly any of us at CHA.”
“I thought that Asian Americans were the fastest-growing group in America.”
“Is that what you really think, Dave? What do you really know about the Chinese in America? Like seriously. You are in your own comfortable bubble here.” She heard her voice sharpening at the edges.
“Whoa, burn, Chen…What is that statistic about the Chinese population in America today?”
“I think you mean Chinese restaurants, Harrison.”
He laughed and a silence fell between them, interrupted by the sound of car horns turning the corner up to Lincoln Drive. She couldn’t leave it alone though.
“You know the truth is that school is predominantly Caucasian with just a sprinkling of African American students. And I’m not talking the African American community from North Philly, which is just a fifteen-minute drive away.
And as for me, and being Chinese, well, in all honesty I don’t have a clue.
Because I’m a phony too. I’m Chinese but I don’t know what it is to be anything but Lee Lee Chen’s daughter, or whoever I was at school. ”
The words tumbled out of her from a place she didn’t know had started to grow. Among the dusty folders of Eva Kim’s office, it sounded like Eva’s voice, but it wasn’t. It might have been her own.