“Okay, Elaine cares.” Hanh turns to her and says, “Elaine, everybody has a gay friend. Jonathan Luckhurst is gay. Danny Nguyen is gay. Chimere Hackney is gay. And that’s just in our class. Besides, she’s not a trophy. You don’t get points. God, I just can’t with you sometimes.” Hanh shakes her head. Reggie does, too.
“Well, she’s my first good friend who’s gay.” Elaine glares at both of them.
“Yeah, I don’t want to be everyone’s new gay friend. Just keep it quiet, okay?”
“Okay.” They all nod.
“But thanks for trusting us. It’s good to talk about it, isn’t it?” Reggie says.
Yeah. It is.
There’s one thing we don’t talk about, though, and that’s Dad. I thought I’d spent the night awake and fretting about Dad, with brief commercial breaks to think about Jamie, but it seems that I fell asleep at some point, and that’s when Hanh and Reggie told Elaine about Dad. The three of them start to press me to talk about the karaoke disaster.
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” I tell them, which is true. If I even think about that photo, my stomach lurches like the floor has dropped out from under me, and I start feeling light-headed.
And yet I need to have it. I need to examine it. So I ask Hanh to text me the photo she took, which she is only too happy to do, so that she can then erase it from her own phone. Her paranoid parents check her phone periodically to make sure she’s not doing anything she’s not supposed to.
“Well,” Reggie points out—as she always does, “it’s not like they’d be wrong.”
22
MOM COMES TO PICK ME UP FROM THE APARTMENT at eleven o’clock. I go right to bed and take a nap. When I wake up, there’s a series of texts from Jamie.
Hey
Sana?
Just txtng to say I shouldn’t have put my arm around u at the gym wo asking. Sry. Got a lil carried away, I guess Tmb Aww. So I text her back:
Hey, s’ok. Just took me by surprise. I think I’d have been jumpy even if u were a guy. I guess I’m kinda shy about that stuff in public, sry No problem
xoxox
xoxox I spend most of the rest of the day in my room, finishing my homework, texting with Jamie, daydreaming about Jamie, and fretting about Dad’s whereabouts.
By five o’clock, I can’t take it anymore, so I text Dad: How’s New York?
Fifteen minutes pass and there’s no reply.
I can’t sit still, I can’t look at the picture anymore, I can’t focus on my homework, and I definitely can’t talk to Mom. I pace around my room like an animal at the zoo and finally change into shorts and a T-shirt and tell Mom I’m going for a little run.
Once outside, I take off down the street. Good long stride. Get your heels up. Breathe. I can feel my head starting to clear already. I run faster, breathe harder, feel my ponytail brushing against my back, feel my feet on the ground, the muscles in my quads, my heart and lungs pumping blood and oxygen, just run, just run, just run.
I don’t know how long I go like this, just running, feeling glad to be away from my brain, from my ridiculous life for a while.
Which is why I practically jump out of my skin when a car horn honks at me and someone yells, “Hey, doll!”
Caleb slows down and pulls over and I walk to the curb to yell at him. My heart, already working hard from my run, is now hammering a hole in my chest.
“God, Caleb, don’t do that!”
“Sorry,” he says, but he’s working hard not to smile, I can tell. That jerk. “No, seriously. I didn’t mean to scare you. Just wanted to say hi.”
“Okay, well, hi.”
“How’d the karaoke caper go last night?”
Great. And here I thought I’d escaped it for a while. “Oh, fine,” I say, but I can’t look him in the eye.
“Fine?” He’s leaning across the front seat, peering intently at me. Suspiciously.
And then I hear myself saying, “Yeah, pretty much. Except for the part when my dad showed up with his girlfriend.” It’s meant to sound flippant and ironic but my throat closes like a fist on the word “girlfriend” and it comes out as a squeak and suddenly I’m crying again. Godammit. In public. Out on the sidewalk. And here comes an old couple walking their dog. “Can I get in?”
“Sure.”
Once I’m safely inside the car, I start crying for real. Not horrible wracking sobs, thank goodness—I’ve still got a little pride—but definitely a steady stream of tears, and some pathetic sniffly, weepy little hiccups every now and then for good measure. It’s embarrassing, making Caleb sit there and watch me dissolve in a puddle of tears when all he did was ask how last night went. But I’m too tired to care very much. Eventually I dry out and tell him the whole ugly story of seeing Dad with That Woman at PopStar last night.
“That sucks,” he says. I shrug. “What are you going to do?” I shrug again.
“Would you mind driving me home?”
Caleb obliges and we stop a couple of driveways down from my house. On a sudden impulse, I reach for his hand.
“Thanks.”
“Anytime, doll,” he says, and winks.
“Stop calling me doll! And don’t do the wink. It’s not a good thing.” He winks again. Ugh. I get out of the car, wave good-bye, and jog home. When I get back, my phone has a message on it from Dad: NYC is good! Very exciting. How was the homecoming?
Liar! I want to type. Where are you really? But I don’t. I can’t. I don’t know what I’ll do if he texts me back another bald-faced lie. I think of the dance, of kissing Jamie, of how everything should have turned out. How Dad and his girlfriend ruined what should have been a perfect evening. I type, Homecoming was fun Mom misses you, tho. You should call her There. How’s “NYC” now, you evening-ruining cheater? For a moment, I feel sort of vengefully happy for hopefully ruining his evening.
But as I reread my text, the righteous anger fades, the truth of what I’ve just typed comes through, and all I feel is sad.
23
OH. MY. GOD.
Jamie’s left the poetry notebook in my locker, with a new poem: “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson. And a note:
This makes me think of you. Not just because of the wild nights part (haha), but also because you’re like my harbor in a wild ocean.
Love, J
I reread the last part of the poem:
Rowing in Eden
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!
I’m her harbor. My heart is melting. Other parts of me are heating up, too, but in a different way. Wild Nights. Wow.
I don’t think I can put this one in Ms. Owen’s journal.