“Yeah.”
“Best friend?” She holds up the photo of Trish and me.
“Meh. Used to be.”
She holds up the phone number.
“Someone my dad knows. I don’t know why it’s in there.”
Now she’s playing with bits of sea glass in her palm. “Where’d you get these? They’re so pretty.”
“I know, right? I used to like to collect them whenever we went to the beach—Lake Michigan. When I was little, I’d pretend they were like, magic stones from an underwater kingdom and I was actually the long-lost princess . . . kinda silly, I know.”
“No.” Jamie looks up and smiles. “It’s not silly. I was thinking the same thing. Like, they’re pieces of your soul that got lost or something. Like who you really are, like the princess. Or like people who make it through a tough time—you know, like you start off sharp and broken, and then over time you become smooth and beautiful and like, your own piece.” If I didn’t have a crush on her before, I definitely do now. A girl-crush, I mean. “You’re laughing at me. You think I’m a total nerd. I can tell from your face,” she says.
“No! No, I think you’re . . . cool.”
“Oh, right. I heard you hesitate there. You totally think I’m a nerd.” She smiles. “That’s okay. We can be nerds together. Poetry nerds.”
“You saying I’m a nerd, then?”
She looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “Your own personal volume of Emily Dickinson?”
“Oh, okay, fine. You win. Nerds together.”
I lie on the bed and Jamie sits on the floor as we do our trig homework. She finishes ahead of me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her stretch, shut her textbook, and slide it into her backpack. So unfair. I turn back to working out how deep I would have to dig to reach a bed of coal that is tilted at twelve degrees and comes to the surface six kilometers from my property. Right. Like that would ever happen in real life. I struggle to put together an equation involving opposite and adjacent sides, angles and tangents. Or maybe cosines. Algebra and geometry were easy, but I just can’t put the pieces of trigonometry together in a way that makes sense to me. I don’t even really understand what some of the pieces are.
I look up to see Jamie watching me. Ack. Please let me not have been doing something embarrassing without realizing it, like making a funny face or picking a zit or something. I don’t think I was.
“What?”
“Oh! Nothing,” she says, looking away. “I was just, you know. Nothing.”
Omigod. Is it my imagination, or is she blushing? I feel my own cheeks grow warm, and I pretend to play with my hair so I can cover my face. Could it be? Maybe. But I could be wrong. Slow down. Make some space. Redirect. “God. I cannot do this trig homework. How is it so easy for you?”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“It’s not hard.”
“It is for me.”
She groans dramatically and climbs onto my bed. “Scoot over. I’ll help you.”
Both of us on the bed. Okay. I scoot over as directed, and I’m still lying down and she’s sitting, but my bed isn’t that big, so there’s a pretty significant stretch of my body that’s touching hers. She didn’t have to get on the bed and sit this close, but she did. She’s so close I can feel her thigh on my ribs. But she’s just helping me with my math homework. Still, there’s the way she was looking at me before—she wasn’t just staring off into space and I happened to be in her line of sight. She was gazing at me—at me—I know she was. Well, I think she was. Was she?
“Hey, pay attention!” She nudges me with her knee.
“Sorry. It’s just so . . . boring and confusing.” And thinking about you is just as confusing, but so much more interesting.
“It’s not. Just listen.” I make a superhuman effort to focus on trigonometry. Tangent, sine, cosine. All too soon, it’s six thirty, time for Jamie to go back to school and catch her bus. As she packs up to go, she holds out the Emily Dickinson. “Can I borrow this?”
“Sure. Nerd.”
“Thanks. Nerd.”
We walk to the bus stop together, and lean against the little bus shelter, so close we’re almost touching. We gaze down the street in silence. The bus appears, and as Jamie stands up and hoists her backpack, it throws her off balance and she stumbles sideways a little.
“Whoa! Sorry,” she says, catching herself on my arm. A shivery little zing! shoots up my spine. A good zing. A great zing. I try to catch her eye, but she’s already headed toward the curb. She climbs onto the bus while I stand there with my heart bang-bang-booming like a bass drum, and she waves good-bye as the door closes behind her. My hand waves back, but my mind seems to have left the premises. I turn and walk home, alternately feeling like I’m going to levitate and float away on a pink cotton candy cloud, and feeling like I’m teetering on the edge of a huge cliff, looking down into a wild and windy abyss.
I like her. Like, like her-like her. No doubt. Even more than I liked Trish. She’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s real, she’s romantic. She thinks pieces of sea glass are like pieces of a lost soul, for crying out loud. I like her so much I can hardly even breathe.
But I so don’t need this. After a lifetime of feeling different and out of place, I finally fit in. I’m finally comfortable. I can finally work on the subtler points of being uniquely me, instead of having to explain the obvious Asian flag that everyone can see. I don’t want to fly a new freak flag. I really, really don’t.
When I get back, Mom is using her little wooden pestle to grind sesame seeds in a special ceramic bowl. She’s making broiled mackerel for dinner—my favorite—with sides of vinegar-sugar cucumber salad, boiled spinach with ground sesame seeds and sea salt, and, of course, rice and miso soup. I wonder if I should have asked Jamie to stay for dinner, but then decide that the mackerel would probably have grossed her out. Broiled mackerel is served with its head and tail on, and you basically pull the meat off the bones in little chunks until there’s just a skeleton and a fish head left. You’re pretty much face-to-face—literally—with the fact that you’re eating a dead fish.
“Did you finish your homeworks?” asks Mom.
“I have a little Spanish left to do, and a couple of chapters to read for English.”
“Dinner is in twenty minutes. You can do some more homeworks or set the table.”
Not a word about Jamie. Which is a little strange because she often has something to say about the few friends that I’ve ever brought home—usually that they’re prettier, taller, smarter, or more polite than me. But still. I’m curious.
When we sit down to eat, and after I serve myself some mackerel, I hand it to Mom and ask, “So what do you think about Jamie?”
Mom pokes her chopsticks into the fish and tears out a piece. “She wears lot of makeups.”
“So?”