There are two ways this loss could have happened. Option one was that I had ignored all this beauty because I had been sequestered in the tiny, dark world of my family dysfunction. I’d been so overwhelmed with the responsibility of keeping myself and my parents alive that I didn’t have many moments to look out the window and appreciate the hummingbirds and clover.
Option two was that I had lived it. My skin had always been a deep copper tan when I had lived here. I’d laughed with friends in fields year-round and slipped the pointy ends of foxtails into the cushy heads of pineapple weed to make little darts. I’d skateboarded down these enormous, wide sidewalks with the sun on my face. I’d gone cherry-picking with Auntie in the summertime; she’d lifted me up with her arms and I’d taken the sweet, dark fruits straight from the branches into my mouth. I’d held all the nourishment and warmth of this place, but my memories of Eden were wiped. In these blurry intervening years, my entire childhood had disappeared along with the family photos I destroyed when my mother left.
I had not only thrown out the bad.
I had thrown out all the good.
* * *
—
This is heartbreaking.
I walk back to my rental car and shut the car door before letting the grief hit me. The steering wheel carves a dent into my forehead as the tears keep coming. The loss is enormous. An entire childhood’s worth of happiness. The bedrock for a happy life. A smart girl with a gap-toothed grin who conversed easily with strangers at the checkout aisle. Wiped. What a waste. Outside, the birds sing. It is a perfectly warm day, the sky a shameless expanse of blue.
The doubt bloats heavily in my stomach. If I could twist mountains into hills, then what else did my traumatized brain dissolve?
Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?
* * *
—
I take a breath and start the car up again, cruising toward Piedmont Hills High School. A few blocks away, I watch at a light as a group of middle schoolers walks by, shuffling slowly under the weight of their oversize backpacks, extra-large hoodies obscuring their eyes. Every single one is Asian. It’s just 1:30 p.m. Have they gotten out early? And then, out of a corner of my eye—is that Carter Wu? I blink. It isn’t, obviously. Carter Wu would be approaching his mid-thirties right now. But there he is, crossing the street, his bottom lip jutted out into his signature angsty pout.
I have never been prone to flashbacks or seeing ghosts. But then again, I have not been here in a long time. And the flashbacks are the entire point. They are what I came for.
* * *
—
The large parking lot in front of PHHS is covered now with elegant solar-harvesting canopies, which I resent. I had gone to a shabby, underfunded public school. I enjoyed that narrative. How dare they challenge that by making it nice all of a sudden?
The common areas are abandoned; everyone is in class. Like San Jose itself, the campus feels like a sprawl that has slowly gotten wider over time, new buildings and portables added to the original building until it seems more like a dilapidated college than a high school. The biggest hallway is covered with butcher-paper posters just like the ones we used to make. There are some new clubs now, though. The Tea Club, which has a boba fundraiser on Thursday. The Military Club. I pause by a large series of photographs taped to the wall. It features the kids in student government—the class presidents and secretaries and publicists and treasurers. The elite ruling class of the school. I count. There are forty Nguyens and Chans and Enriquezes. Not one single white kid. All of them have black hair; clear, golden skin; and massive, confident smiles.
Near the art room, I see the ghost of myself. She is wearing Weezer glasses, an Invader Zim T-shirt, and cargo pants, and as she passes through me, scowling, she imbues me with her resentment. In my imagination, the quad fills up with the shadows of the jocks, the skaters, the popular Viets, the FOBs, the preps, the anime geeks, the cholas, the aZn cholas, all of them threatening, none of them my friends. This isn’t magic, right? I mean, some philosophers believe that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. That everything that ever happened before is just a dimension away, occurring just beyond the grasp of our feeble human brains. And so we careen foolishly and helplessly toward catastrophe, like lemmings over a cliff that we don’t know is there.
The science wing has no ghosts because it is brand-new. I poke my head through the door marked 2A and see a classroom full of students. Mr. Dries waves me in. “Don’t worry about them. Class is almost over.”
I step inside. The children all ignore me. The situation is even more extreme than when I had attended: Every kid is Asian, except for one blond boy. And of course, Mr. Dries. “How about this, huh?” he says gleefully, ripping open Amazon packages of camera equipment for his upcoming vacation. “I have skylights and open cabinets now. Remember those skanky portables? It’s not a portable if you’re there for ten years.”
Mr. Dries has aged a bit over the years, but he feels the same. He has the look of a man who must have been bullied in high school but the confidence of a man who came out the other side not giving a single fuck. He has the student body’s total respect because he is very funny, his wife is very hot, and he has all twenty amino acids tattooed on his arm. On our first day of AP Bio, he told us all, “Yeah, I cuss in here. You can cuss in here. I don’t give a shit. It’s not getting in the way of you learning science. If you go tell your parents, ‘Wah, wah, my teacher says bad words,’ nobody will care, certainly not me, so you might as well not fucking bother.” This made me trust him immediately.
When the bell rings and the kids clear out for the day, I nervously swivel on a metal lab stool. “Um, so first of all, do you remember me?” I ask.
“Yeah, of course I do.”
“It’s okay if you don’t. I only had you for like three weeks before switching out to physics. But if you do…what do you remember about me?”
He cocks his head to one side. “You were bright,” he says. “You seemed like you had your shit together. I don’t know much more than that.”
“Okay.” I take a breath. “I don’t know if you knew through the grapevine that I lived by myself. That my parents weren’t around when I was a kid—my mom left the summer I came here, and my dad pretty much left my junior year. I don’t know if the kids talked about the ragers I used to have at my house and stuff.”
“No, I didn’t know about that. That’s terrible. God, what awful parents,” he says, which I admire, because few people have the balls to acknowledge something so cruel and so true. “No, I had no idea. You hid it really well when you were here.”