Fiona and Jane(20)
“This is so weird,” Fiona said. “I’ve never sat here before.” She turned her head to look at me. “It’s like—I’m you!”
Ever since Fiona got Shamu, my butt has been a permanent fixture in shotgun. A new level of freedom had suddenly opened up. No more running to catch the bus, no more begging our parents for rides. Sometimes we cruised down PCH to Seal Beach and tried to sneak into one of the fancy hotel pools, parking blocks off so no one would suspect us of trespassing. At night we drove up to Signal Hill, where the rich white families lived, to steal their views of the Long Beach basin glittering all the way to the Queen Mary, that old haunted ship. When it was especially clear, you could see lights from Catalina Island winking out of the ink-black water.
And now, here we were, drunk for the first time. I’d wanted to give up after the swap-meet debacle, but she pressed on, insisted we call up Won. Fiona always knew what to do.
“You ever gonna learn to drive?” Won said.
I found his eyes in the rearview mirror and stuck out my tongue. So what if I’d failed the driving test a couple times? I just needed a little more practice.
“Tell the truth. I heard you hit a hydrant—”
“The DMV’s racist,” I said. “They didn’t even make Tim Lockwood parallel park, and that other wrestler guy, what’s-his-name? I heard he ran a stop sign but they passed him anyway.”
“Naw,” said Won. “You just suck at driving.”
I kicked the back of his seat. “I hate you so much. Shut up!” But I was laughing, too.
“You love me. Been in love since Miss King,” he sang. “Give it up, Jane. Never gonna happen!”
“You think Miss King ever misses us?” Fiona said. “You guys, I have the best idea!” Her voice was breathless, full of ardor. “We should go visit her—”
“Quit hogging the taquitos,” I said.
We passed the Albertaco’s sack between us all the way to the beach. Fiona had a mixtape playing, a cassette one of her admirers had made: Whitney Houston, Tony! Toni! Toné!, Salt-N-Pepa. Slouched in the back of Shamu, I crunched on those thick greasy sticks, the wind brushing my cheeks and the bass thrumming through my back. The air started smelling of salt. I took it in in big gulps. Won pulled into a parking lot, empty of cars at this time of night. Fiona turned the music off. We sat there, cradled inside Shamu, listening to the waves beat against the sand and roll back out. We couldn’t see anything out there at all. For a while, no one said a word.
I recalled a Bible story from years back, when I used to go to church with my parents, before Baba moved back to Taiwan. Jonah trapped inside the whale, waiting for God to rescue him. The moral was something about betrayal and repentance, forgiveness and second chances. Here with Fiona and Won, I didn’t want to be saved. I made a silent wish to stay like this forever, the three of us, perfect.
A shiver went through me. The weight in my shoulders disappeared. Won was wrong about me and what he’d said earlier, the two drunk personalities: I was happy.
* * *
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After that first time, the three of us started posting up every Saturday. Won taught Fiona and me a few phrases: “Go-mahp-soom-nida” when Sung brought our order, and to add “oppa” after Sung’s name as a sign of respect. Won tried to get us to call him “oppa,” too, but we said no way. He sneered back and said he heard Taiwanese girls had stanky pussies. “Wouldn’t you like to find out,” I retorted. “Stop coming on to me,” Won said. “I don’t like you like that, Jane!”
We chased soju shots with frothy glasses of Hite; sucked down Marlboro Lights one after the next, filling the plastic ashtray on the table with a pack’s worth of butts. Buzzing was a place to get to, and we were constantly asking each other if we were there yet.
“Do you feel it?”
“How about now?”
“After this one, for sure.”
“You buzzing yet? You good?”
“I love you—I love you guys so much—”
When we drank, we felt wild. Here, there were no parents, no teachers to tell us to sit down, be quiet, listen up. We stepped through the tinted-glass door of that sooljip as if crossing a portal, becoming new and more ourselves, simultaneously. “Sixteen was the best of times, and the worst of times,” Fiona said one Saturday night. “The age of wisdom, the age of foolishness.” I didn’t figure out she was quoting from a book until way later. She was taking AP English, and I was in regular. When she said that, anyway, I’d thought it was just another typical Fiona thing: dramatic, beautiful, and true.
Another shot of lemon soju. More beer. Clink glasses. Cheers! Ganbei! Jjan! Which led to: Shit, I gotta puke.
Together, we’d sway out to the parking lot behind the bar. The one who needed to purge squatted next to the green dumpster while the other two chanted encouragements until we heard a splash hitting the pavement. A ritual we repeated, week after week; if it wasn’t so gross, you might’ve called it religious, transcendent.
* * *
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Sung learned our names, and when the bar wasn’t too busy he sat down with us. He was twenty-two, we found out. When he wasn’t working as a waiter, he held down shifts as a security guard at the Arirang Supermarket nearby. We shared our cigarettes with him, which he accepted readily, pinching them out of the pack two at a time: one to smoke now and another he’d tuck behind his ear for later.