If You Could See the Sun (35)

Jake yells back some name I can’t quite catch, and shoves his flushed face into the camera. Then, raising his voice, he adds, “She’s so—she’s so-oo fucking hot.” His lips stretch into a sloppy smile. “Like, dude. Have you seen her ass? She could sit on my face and I’d—”

Mr. Chen quickly shuts his laptop, but the damage is already done.

“Jake,” Mr. Chen says after a long pause. He stands up, the screech of his chair cutting through the silence—and even then, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the class this quiet before. “A word outside, please?”

Jake’s face looks almost as red as it did in the video. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, his head bowed at an angle, he shuffles after the teacher into the corridor.

The door has barely closed behind them when the class erupts into chaos. Loud whispers and notes of laughter swirl around the room, friends leaning far over their desks and jumping out of their seats with wide eyes to discuss what they just saw:

“Oh my god.”

“I can’t believe...”

“What the hell was he thinking? Did someone hack his phone?”

“The secondhand embarrassment is real. Like, I’m literally cringing so hard right now—”

“Did you see Mr. Chen’s face? He looked like he was ready to resign—”

“I always knew Jake Nguyen was a fuckboy. You can just tell by the hair—”

“No wonder Rainie dumped his sorry ass. Seriously.”

“Ugh, I can’t believe I used to have a crush on him in Year Seven. Someone kill me now...”

As my classmates continue talking over each other, Henry peers at me silently from the seat next to mine, and I read the question in his dark eyes: Was this your doing?

I say nothing, just shrug and pretend to focus on my Macbeth notes, underlining the words revenge and desire and guilt.

But I know, somehow, that he can read the answer in my eyes too.



* * *



“I heard Jake Nguyen has detention every day for the rest of the month,” Henry tells me on our way to class the next day, “for deliberately distributing inappropriate content and”—he makes air quotations with his fingers—“behaving in a way that doesn’t represent Airington’s school values.”

“Good,” I say, unable to help feeling a sharp surge of triumph. Hopefully the punishment will teach Jake to be a little more careful about his actions—and if not, then at least the other girls at our school might think twice before dating him.

As we round a corner in the crowded hall, I turn to Henry. “Oh yeah. Speaking of Jake—I probably should’ve said this earlier but...” I pause, the words I’ve prepared since yesterday burning in my throat. Why is it so hard to be nice to him? What is it about the words thank you that makes me feel so disgustingly vulnerable?

“But?”

Just say it, I command myself. Looking away and resisting the overwhelming urge to cringe, I tell him, “I just wanted to thank you for that little performance you pulled the other day. Guess you’re a pretty decent actor or whatever.”

Great. Even when I’m trying to be nice, it sounds like I’m mocking him.

But Henry’s lips tug up at the corners as if I’ve just paid him the biggest compliment in the world, and says, “Well, of course I’m a great actor. It’s one of my many strengths.”

“Is humility one of them, too?” I say dryly.

“Naturally.”

I roll my eyes so far back in my head I almost see stars. But as we exit the building and walk past a group of tiny Year Sevens who stare after us as if we’ve just stepped out of a magazine cover—one of them saying in an awed, breathless kind of voice, “Damn, I didn’t know Henry Li and Alice Sun were friends”—my faint annoyance is pushed aside by pleasure. It’s nice being noticed. Really nice.

“You know,” I muse out loud, “if it weren’t for the fact that we hated each other’s guts, we’d probably make an impressive power duo.”

I expect Henry to raise his eyebrows at me as usual or make a cutting remark, but his footsteps suddenly slow beside me.

“Wait. We hate each other?”

He says this as if it’s actually news to him. As if we haven’t spent the past four years exchanging little snide remarks and glares across opposite ends of every room. As if I didn’t drag myself to last semester’s optional chemistry revision sessions with a thirty-nine-degree fever just so he wouldn’t beat me on the final exam.

I whirl around to face him, squinting into the sunlight, and for the briefest moment I catch something almost like hurt flicker across his features—

No. I must be imagining it. There are few things in this world that have the power to hurt Henry Li—things like a sudden drop in SYS’s stocks, or his name coming last on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Certainly not me.

“What did you think this was?” I demand, motioning to the space between us.

“Well, I’m not entirely sure.” He stares at me a beat. Slides his hands into his back pockets. “A fun competition?”

“Fun,” I repeat in disbelief.

But then again, of course he sees our four-year rivalry as a fun competition. For someone like Henry, who will always have his father’s business, his family’s wealth as a safety net, everything is just a game. There are no true consequences. No real threats. He could fail a thousand times in life and still sleep easy, knowing there will be food waiting for him at home, medical insurance for his parents, more than enough money in the bank.