“Are you sure?” I ask. “It’ll get wrinkled.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. He guides me off to the side so we’re not blocking the other pedestrians, and suddenly we’re standing pretty close. I don’t remember noticing his shoulders before. Were they this broad a second ago? I pull my eyes away from his chest and up to his face, but that’s not any better for my equilibrium. His eyes are even clearer and browner in the sunlight. They are kind of beautiful.
I slip my backpack off my shoulder and place it squarely between us so he has to back up a little.
He folds the jacket neatly and puts it inside.
His shirt is a crisp white, and the red tie stands out even more without his jacket on. I wonder what he looks like in regular clothes, and what regular clothes are for him. No doubt jeans and a T-shirt—the uniform of all American boys everywhere.
Is it the same for Jamaican boys?
My mood turns somber at the thought. I don’t want to start over again. It was hard enough when we first moved to America. I don’t want to have to learn the rituals and customs of a new high school. New friends. New cliques. New dress codes. New hangouts.
I scoot around him and start walking. “Asian American men are most likely to die of cancer,” I say.
He frowns and double-steps to catch up. “Really? I don’t like that. What kind?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We should probably find out,” he says.
He says we as if there’s some future of us together where our respective mortalities will matter to each other.
“You really think you’ll die of heart disease?” he asks. “Not something more epic?”
“Who cares about epic? Dead is dead.”
He just stares at me, waiting for an answer. “Okay,” I say. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. I secretly think I’m going to drown.”
“Like in the open ocean, saving someone’s life or something?”
“In the deep end of a hotel pool,” I say.
He stops walking and pulls me off to the side again. A more considerate pedestrian there’s never been. Most people just stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait,” he says. “You can’t swim?”
I shrink my head down into my jacket. “No.”
His eyes are searching my face and he’s laughing at me without actually laughing. “But you’re Jamaican. You grew up surrounded by water.”
“Island heritage notwithstanding, I can’t swim.”
I can tell he wants to make fun of me, but he resists. “I’ll teach you,” he says.
“When?”
“Someday. Soon. Could you swim when you lived in Jamaica?” he asks.
“Yup, but then we got here, and instead of the ocean they had pools. I don’t like chlorine.”
“You know they have saltwater pools now.”
“That ship has sailed,” I say.
Now he does make fun of me. “What’s your ship called? Girl Who Grew Up on an Island, Which Is a Thing Surrounded on All Sides by Water, Can’t Swim? Because that would be a good name.”
I laugh and thump him on the shoulder. He grabs my hand and holds my fingers. I try not to wish he could make good on his promise to teach me to swim.
I AM A SCHOLAR COMPILING the Book of Natasha. Here’s what I know so far: She’s a science geek. She’s probably smarter than me. Her fingers are slightly longer than mine and feel good in my hands. She likes her music angsty. She’s worried about something having to do with her mysterious appointment.
“Tell me again why you’re wearing a suit?” she asks.
I groan long and loud and with feeling. “Let’s talk about God instead.”
“I get to ask questions too,” she says.
We walk single file underneath more sidewalk scaffolding. (At any given moment approximately 99 [give or take] percent of Manhattan is under construction.) “I applied to Yale. I have an interview with an alum later.”
“Are you nervous?” she asks, when we’re side by side again.
“I would be if I gave two shits.”
“But you only give one shit?”
“Maybe half a shit,” I say, laughing.
“So your parents are making you do it?”
A sudden yelling from the street grabs our attention, but it’s only one cabdriver shouting at another.
“My parents are first-generation Korean immigrants,” I say by way of explanation.
She slows her walking and looks over at me. “I don’t know what that means,” she says.
I shrug. “It means it doesn’t matter what I want. I’m going to Yale. I’m going to be a doctor.”
“And you don’t want that?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say.
From the look on her face, that was the worst thing I could say. She turns away from me and starts walking faster. “Well, you might as well be a doctor, then.”
“What’d I do just now?” I ask, catching up to her.
She waves me off. “It’s your life.”
I feel like I’m close to failing a test. “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A data scientist,” she says, with no hesitation.
I open my mouth to ask WTF, but she fills me in with a practiced speech. I’m not the first person to have WTF’d her career choice.
“Data scientists analyze data, separate the noise from the signal, discern patterns, draw conclusions, and recommend actions based on the results.”
“Are computers involved?”
“Yes, of course,” she says. “There’s a lot of data in this world.”
“That’s so practical. Have you always known what you wanted to be?” It’s hard to keep the envy out of my voice.
She stops walking again. At this rate, we’ll never get where she’s going. “This isn’t destiny. I chose this career. It didn’t choose me. I’m not fated to be a data scientist. There’s a career section in the library at school. I did research on growing fields in the sciences, and ta-da. No fate or destiny involved, just research.”
“So it’s not something you’re passionate about?”
She shrugs and starts walking again. “It suits my personality,” she says.
“Don’t you want to do something you love?”
“Why?” she asks, like she genuinely doesn’t understand the appeal of loving something.
“It’s a long life to spend doing something you’re only meh about,” I insist. We scoot around a combination pretzel/hot dog cart that already has a line. It smells like sauerkraut and mustard (aka heaven).
She wrinkles her nose. “It’s even longer if you spend it chasing dreams that can never, ever come true.”
“Wait,” I say. I put my hand on her arm to slow her down a little. “Who says they can’t come true?”
This earns me a sideways glance. “Please. Do you know how many people want to be actors or writers or rock stars? A lot. Ninety-nine percent of them won’t make it. Zero point nine percent of those left will make barely any money doing it. Only the last zero point one percent make it big. Everybody else just wastes their lives trying to be them.”
“Are you secretly my father?” I ask.
“I sound like a fifty-year-old Korean man?”
“Without the accent.”
“Well, he’s just looking out for you. When you’re a happy doctor making lots of money, you’ll thank him that you didn’t become some starving artist hating your day job and dreaming pointlessly about making it big.”
I wonder if she realizes how passionate she is about not being passionate.
She turns to look at me narrow-eyed. “Please don’t tell me you’re serious about the poetry thing.”
“God forbid,” I say with mock outrage.
We pass by a man holding a sign that says PLEASE HELP. DOWN ON MY LUCK. A cabbie on a mission honks long and loud at another cabbie, also on a mission.
“Are we really supposed to know what we want to do for the rest of our lives at the ripe old age of seventeen?”
“Don’t you want to know?” she asks. She’s definitely not a fan of uncertainty.
“I guess? I wish I could live ten lives at once.”
She waves me off again. “Ugh. You just don’t want to choose.”