She was a little drunk, I could smell the tequila on her breath, and she leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek and told me that I was her best friend and she was my best friend. And that one day I’d be the maid of honor at her and Marcus’s wedding and that she loved me so much (right about then she belched so loudly I thought she was going to vomit all over both of us but she didn’t, she just blew the air all over my face) that she wanted me to walk down the aisle right before her.
“With Aaron, because he’ll be the best man, of course,” she added, and I felt my heart expand inside me, expand so much I was certain it was going to burst right out of my chest and keep growing and expanding until it burst through the walls of our little house and it wouldn’t stop, it would grow, grow, grow, so full, until it took over all of Atlanta and maybe Georgia and it wouldn’t stop there, it would float up into the air, my big beating heart, and it would go higher and higher until it was up among the stars, creating a new constellation. That is how happy I was. Just imagining Marcus and Monica’s wedding, and me being a part of it, the maid of honor, and Aaron being the best man. My mom says they can’t get married till they both graduate from college because we aren’t backwoods hicks, but I wish they could get married right now.
And at their wedding, unlike in the cafeteria, I would sit with them.
Because, going back to my imagining, if I were to walk up to the table now, Marcus would bolt up, eyes wide, and think that I needed him. Really needed him. And Monica would rush toward me and cry out, “Wing, Wing! Baby girl, what’s wrong?” and the rest of the table would go as still as statues and watch, and their judgment would be like dark smoke coming at us, enveloping us, because even if Marcus is my big brother, I’m still a sophomore loser. But Monica and Marcus wouldn’t notice the smoke, because they have their anti-judgment gas masks on that they always wear, that they’ve been wearing since they first kissed in the gym in eighth grade. I’ve figured that’s the only way they’ve gotten this far, wearing their masks to keep the poisonous fumes from going into their mouths and their noses and up to their brains. So they wouldn’t be able to smell it coming off their friends at their table, but I would. I don’t have a handy anti-judgment gas mask.
And then when nothing was wrong, if I just smiled and said, “Oh, I just thought I’d join y’all for lunch,” Marcus would frown, not in an upset way, but in a confused way, because why would I want to sit with the seniors for lunch? It isn’t that he doesn’t care that I don’t have friends, he just doesn’t really know what to do about it. Because even though he’s my brother, it would be weird for me to sit at the football table with a bunch of seniors. But he’d tell Trey to scoot down and say, “Of course, come sit,” and then I would sit and the table would be silent except maybe for Trey snapping Dionne’s bra strap or something, and I would try to smile but the smoke would be stinging my eyes and I wouldn’t be able to stop them from watering, not crying, never crying, from all the poisonous fumes.
It isn’t that everybody hates me. I just don’t really fit in anywhere. It might be 1995, but at my school the white kids sit with the white kids, the black kids sit with the black kids. Only exception being Marcus and Monica, but Marcus is the exception to everything. There isn’t a table for half-Chinese, half-black kids. There aren’t even any other Asian kids at my school except for my brother, and the school hierarchy rules don’t apply to him.
It wasn’t always like this. I used to have a best friend.
April Tova Roth. Only Jewish girl I’ve ever met.
April and I met in the seventh grade, at the mandatory seventh-grade cotillion. We were both hiding in the bathroom from Heather Parker. Sure, I’d had some friends before that, but no one who got me. It was like all the friends I’d had before were polyester and April Roth was imported silk. Neither of us belonged with anyone else, so we belonged together. There wasn’t room in my life for any other friends, not with April around. Between her, Marcus, and Aaron (always Aaron, he was always there, I can’t remember him not being in my heart), my heart was always full to bursting.
Other than Heather, April wasn’t scared of anybody. She was born in New York but moved to Atlanta when she was ten, and said that the hobos in Atlanta have got nothing on the hobos in New York. She would talk back to teachers and tell them that they were wrong and she knew because her mother was a professor and her father was a banker and didn’t those professions require more brains than it took to be a seventh-grade science teacher?
And freshman year, when Ryan Cork asked our biology teacher how someone like me could possibly have come into the world, using nasty names for both my mom and my daddy, April threw a textbook at him.