I charged.
As I crashed into him, the guitar slipped from his grip and landed hard against the wall. A discordant complaint rang out from the strings. My hand found the acrylic paint, forced it out of Caskey’s fingers, and somehow I had the presence of mind to cap it before flinging it in a generally backward direction.
Then, out of nowhere, Caskey’s curled knuckles found my face. They slammed my jaw with enough force to make glass shatter somewhere deep in my head. My teeth clocked together. Lights burst in the corner of my eye, and my glasses slipped askew, then off my face altogether.
More in shock than pain, I clutched at the pulsing site of impact. All logic, all reason, all thoughts abandoned me. Energy surged from my core into my blood, and suddenly I was wildfire, needing to get the rage out. Man up, yelled a voice in my head, and I threw a fist. It found its target, smacking deliciously into Caskey’s temple.
He reeled sideways, spat a curse, and bulled forward. I tried to push back, but there was so much of him, six and a half feet of wiry limbs and cream-colored sweater. My spine hit the elevator doors, a dart of pain that scrabbled down my back. I flung out a hand. The flat of my palm found the side of Caskey’s neck, and I dug my nails in, driving my knee up toward his crotch. It missed the mark, hitting his thigh.
He staggered, face ugly with rage, and sunk his fist in the soft bowl of my stomach. The wind flew out of me. I hunched over and gasped for breath, a cold rush flooding up to my collarbones.
He grabbed me by the hair, angled my face up, and the second hit landed on my cheekbone. The impact reverberated through my skull, sending a red shadow over my vision. Caskey’s grip ripped hairs out of my scalp. Tears pricked my eyes. I lurched forward, righted myself, started to lift my fists—
His third punch careened in like a battering ram and smacked me square in the nose. I crumpled back. Blood trickled over my lips into my open mouth, warm and coppery. The stream felt like it was coming down from my eyes, or my brain, or from the center of my head, and I cupped the dark liquid in one hand as it dribbled off the tip of my chin.
I was bent double, chest heaving.
“Good talk,” Caskey’s voice said. “Know what? Keep the guitar.”
I straightened up. “Fuck you.”
He clapped me on the back, but for once, he looked dead serious. “Have fun singing tomorrow.” He reached for the Door Open button, but I lurched in front of it.
“Come on, Zhang,” he said, sounding tired. “Move.”
“No,” I said, spraying flecks of blood toward him. He recoiled.
I drew slow breaths through my mouth. “I want to know what your problem is.”
A mulish look settled on his face. “And I don’t want to still be here talking to you.”
“You know what people say about you?” I caught my breath and gave him my best sneer, as much as I could with blood seeping over my mouth. I wiped my upper lip with the back of my hand. “You’re just bitter you didn’t get into the Sharps. Kind of sad, isn’t it, holding a grudge over that for four years?”
“Shut up.” A purplish flush rose into his white cheeks. “It’s not—you don’t understand.”
“Fine. Then explain.”
Caskey’s lips scrunched up. It clearly took everything he had to keep quiet.
My eyes fell to the guitar. “What, do you think you’re better than Isaac?” I said. “Think you should’ve gotten it instead of him, when you guys were freshmen? ’Cause I hate to break it to you, but nobody’s better than Isaac, man. Not me, not you, n—”
He burst. “It’s not Nakahara, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yeah? Then what is it?”
“I’m a Sharps legacy, okay?”
My mouth drooped open. We stared at each other for a second.
I couldn’t help it. I burst into laughter. It made my head pound—I had to stop. Get ahold of myself. “Are you fucking serious?”
His face purpled even more. He looked like a ripe plum. “I knew you wouldn’t get it,” he said, obviously trying for scorn, but it didn’t sound right. There was a desperate edge to his voice. “My dad was a Sharps president. My grandfather was in it, class of ’65. It’s not some stupid thing to laugh at, okay? It’s our life. Like you could ever understand tradition. You can’t—you don’t get it!”
The outburst rang around the elevator. Embarrassment flashed across his expression. Then he straightened up, fixed his face into unconcern, and tucked his dark hair into place behind his ear.
As I studied him, the comedy of it curdled slowly, leaving something foreign to me. What did I know about tradition? When I looked back on my own history, I had to trace a jagged path full of leaps and shifts, starting with that first transpacific jump: my dad’s parents emigrating from Beijing in the eighties, leaving everything they knew behind to give my teenage father California. Then I had my mother, traveling alone from Hong Kong in 1995. What had I inherited from her, really? What had carried over from my parents to me? There was such a massive divide between us, so much difference that they hardly had the cultural currency to relate to what my life was like, born and raised American.
But Connor: Suddenly I imagined his life in Boston, in the mansion Nihal had told me about, raised in the same ancient rooms his family had occupied for a century and a half. I remembered how slight Connor had looked on the Arlington stage as he stood opposite his father and played the part: the arrogant Princeton aspirant who would never fall short, never fall behind, and never fall for a sarcastic boy from New Jersey. I could still hear Dr. Caskey waxing nostalgic, trying desperately, pathetically, to relive everything through his son, to mold him into just what he wanted.
All at once I could see the crippling sameness of those generations. Connor turned transparent for a moment, and under his skin, I saw a patchwork of his father, his grandfather, and his grandfather’s father, Massachusetts men with only the smallest variations, pieced together from such a strict and immediate tradition that there was nothing left of him.
“You’re right,” I said. I felt distant from myself and from what we’d just done. “I don’t get it.”
I stepped aside from the panel of buttons. He looked at me a long time. A bruise was clouding into life on his proud forehead, where I’d gotten revenge. I regretted it, but it felt inevitable for him to wind up blue with bruises and hard with scar tissue. His father had been so proud of getting hurt. Growing up meant inheriting all your parents’ injuries.
He punched a button, the door slid open, and he disappeared.