Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sabrina
The bus route from Manayunk to Chestnut Hill was almost entirely straight.
Aside from a few turns through the Roxborough district, past a famous cheesesteak restaurant, Dalessandro’s, there were no more turns.
Sabrina liked to sit by the window up front and listen to her music on her headphones as loud as she could.
Sometimes when she pulled them off for a moment, she realized how loud the music was.
Today she was playing the Doors. Dave was obsessed with Jim Morrison and had made her watch the biopic with Val Kilmer.
Her favorite song was “Love Her Madly.” And she imagined this was how Dave Harrison might feel about her one day.
The opening sounds of thunder and rain began as the electric piano riffs of “Riders on the Storm” started, and she thought about how the song felt strange, played in daylight.
Lee Lee hated this type of rock ’n’ roll and suggested that she return to her Whitney Houston or even that Beyoncé gyrating is better .
Sabrina felt like she was rising outside of herself.
That she was finally a woman, that she would take a shot at Princeton.
We go all out, kid, Eva had assured her.
And now Sabrina was on her way to meet a boy who was actually smart and handsome.
And it didn’t matter to him that she had to apply for full funding for college or that she worked at the country club where his family held a life-term membership, and his grandparents too.
Since Stuart McKluskie’s party, she had been battling with a decision. If Dave cared enough about her to punch a guy, he must feel something for her. Something meaningful had started to grow between them.
Sabrina couldn’t talk to anyone about Dave, not even Kit.
In fact, Kit and Sabrina had started to lose touch, they had barely texted each other.
As Sabrina understood it, Kit had Ryo, and she didn’t yet know that Sabrina had Dave.
And her feelings were escalating by the day.
She would feel a desolate sadness overwhelm her when she hadn’t spoken to him.
When he arrived at the country club, she saw him in her peripheral vision, but she waited, heart in mouth, until he walked over to her.
Everything she did led to seeing him. But why had he not kissed her?
Why had they not moved their relationship forward?
She wouldn’t even stop him from putting his hand up her shirt.
She would let him. She felt daring and confident with him, though she sat on the periphery of this recklessness because nothing had happened between them.
It was the fear of what could happen to her if she turned to him and he rejected her that stopped her from acting.
Because somewhere inside, she knew that if he was too embarrassed to own up to his fumbling with Kit during senior year, he would never own up to the undocumented Asian girl who worked in the clubhouse all summer in a stained uniform.
She saw him sometimes, sitting with friends, and he smiled at her, a hand raised in a wave.
But he never asked her to join them. At first, she thought it was the protocol of the club.
After all, there was a dress code for the bar.
But soon, she suspected it was her and not the rules they kept to.
She thought she might love Dave, but her feelings were ferocious; they scared her.
But she also hated him a little for being the coward he was.
···
Sabrina’s other great fear was that Dave would see Kit, and he would fall immediately under her spell again.
Kit and Sabrina had hardly been in touch in the last three weeks, but when Kit finally messaged to say she was back home and to invite her over, Sabrina knew that the tectonic plates of their friendship had already shifted too far.
Something had changed for both of them over the summer.
The bus tumbled up the cobbled streets of Germantown Avenue and Sabrina prepared to get off at her usual stop before the left turn that would take her down to the country club.
It wasn’t time for her shift yet, but Dave might be there by now.
“Your toes look so cute with that color on them,” Sabrina said, sitting beside Kit, barefoot on the wall facing Gravers Lane by the Herzog garden.
“Oh thanks. Yeah, my friend, Amy, out there, she took me to have them done. They had these cool nail bars. Maybe we should start a tradition doing this too?”
“Sure.” Sabrina knew she would never go to a manicurist. She would never pay someone to do something that she could do herself. She could hear her mother’s voice in the inner recesses of her brain. A song on a loop she could not turn off.
“So how has it been? Your summer?” Kit asked.
“Oh it’s been okay. I mean, I was disappointed not to go away, but it’s been fine. The job at the country club has been fine. And this internship I did all summer was actually awesome. The lady I work for is incredible.” She paused and added, “And I’ve been hanging out with Dave a bit.”
“Yeah, we saw Mrs. Harrison yesterday. She mentioned. How is he?”
“He’s cool. I mean, nice. You know. So tell me more about Tokyo, come on. You’ve hardly said anything about it yet.”
“Oh it was so amazing. I mean, it’s like, so different than here. It’s super busy but quiet. It’s super modern but then people are kind of old-fashioned. The food is awesome.”
“And this guy?”
“Oh yes, Ryo.”
Kit pronounced his name in a way that Sabrina had never heard, ly-o. Short and sharp, Lyō .
“What’s he like?”
“He’s gorgeous. Like so hot. He’s half Japanese, half American.
He’s about, I guess, Dave’s height. Real tanned.
He speaks Japanese, totally fluently. Like a Japanese person, but he’s American, you know?
Like, he grew up all around the world, but goes to an American high school there.
Well, he did. And now he’s coming out here before college starts, to check out Penn.
I don’t know, we’re talking about trying a long-distance thing maybe to start. ”
“What? He is? So you guys are like a thing? Going into college?”
“Yeah, we’re going to try. He’s got a place in Berkeley now but is going to look at Penn in case he wants to transfer later this year. So, we’ll see, I guess, if we want to be together.”
“That’s huge, Kit. Does your mom know?”
“Yeah, she knows. They’re kind of being weird and not talking about it. But he’s coming over with his dad, like soon. I really liked his parents too. Like, I connected with them, you know?”
“And did you, you know? With Ryo?”
Kit nodded, her mouth crooked in an awkward smile.
But there was no superiority or showing off in how she delivered this news.
Sabrina would have preferred Kit to gloat in the way the old Kit would have.
Then she would know how to handle her. But this reserved version of Kit left Sabrina feeling like an animal cornered.
Was Kit about to turn on her? She felt unsure and frozen.
“Yeah, we did, I don’t know. It’s pretty serious,” Kit said, not looking at Sabrina as she spoke.
“Wow. Do you like, love him?”
Kit shrugged and looked down at her toes. Sabrina wondered if she was admiring her own pedicure. Sabrina’s thoughts went straight to Dave. How will he feel when he learns this? Would Dave and Ryo meet? It was likely they would.
“Rina,” Kit said, breaking Sabrina’s swirl of emotions. “If I ask you something, will you answer me honestly?”
Sabrina looked at her, tilted her head, and nodded. But the inside of her stomach was falling. She knew what was coming.
“Did Dave talk about me when I was gone?” It wasn’t what she was expecting Kit to ask. And yet, of course, Kit wanted to know about herself before anything else.
“Yeah he did. But nothing that is worth reporting, you know? Like, he asked if you’d been in touch.”
“He asked if I’d been in touch?”
“Yes. He also just said things in passing. But never things that were like, interesting or anything.”
“Right. I guess I understand. He’s probably been seeing someone over the break.”
“I don’t know. He didn’t seem to be with anyone when I hung out with him.”
Kit was silent, and Sabrina thought about asking another question about Tokyo but stopped.
She wanted to change the subject. She was not ready to tell Kit about her friendship with Dave.
She was not prepared to own up to the evenings they spent together talking about everything they were afraid of in college the next year.
She was not ready to tell Kit about how Dave judged his mother for how she treated the Asian woman who worked in their house and felt embarrassed by it.
She was not prepared to tell Kit that Dave didn’t know about Ryo, at least not from her.
And she was not prepared to tell Kit that she was seeing Dave that afternoon after his tennis tournament down at the club.
They were going for a drive up to the Morris Arboretum.
She wanted to keep him for herself just a little longer.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Ryo. You’ll love him, Rina.”
“Yeah? You have any pictures of him?”
“I do, we took this in a booth in Shibuya. It’s this cool part of Tokyo. Loads of shopping and restaurants. It’s the famous crossing, you ever see a picture of that place?”
Sabrina shook her head and watched her friend flick through her phone.
The picture was bleached out with a heavy filter, the way Kit had started to take pictures since she left for Tokyo.
Ryo draped his arm around Kit’s neck. Sabrina hadn’t imagined his hair so dark, his skin so tanned.
She swiped across the photos slowly, zooming in on his face.
In the final shot, they kissed, and he held her face in his hands, his fingers around her jaw and neck.
“Wow. He is so cute. And he’s eighteen? He looks like a man.”