Picture Us In The Light(10)
But maybe it’s just that I don’t want to see it. I would do anything for Harry—and have—and sometimes I picture what it would look like to come up against the hard wall of the limits of how far he’d be willing to go for me.
Which I know is crappy. They’re together. And Regina’s my friend too. At least, I think she still is.
“Anyway, no one hates you for making us go,” Harry says. “It’ll be interesting to hear the guy talk.”
“It should be. I heard his TED talk about all the things at schools that get censored,” she says. “Like banned books and dress code issues. And…”
She trails off. We both know what she means, though; there’s not a single person in our grade who doesn’t recognize that tentative pause, the guilt you always feel plunging everyone around you back into the same dark territory. You always wonder if people just want to forget.
I wait to see then if she’ll trust me with what she told Harry, the story she’s planning to write. She changes the subject instead, and we talk about personal statements for the next ten or twelve miles north.
We hit traffic then, a sea of red taillights, and Harry swears softly under his breath. He can give a speech in front of all two thousand people at our school, he can go months without saying anything negative about another person, but it’s always been the little things that set him off—stick him in traffic, or let his phone run out of battery, and it’s like his whole conception of the world collapses: how is this possibly happening to him?
It’s clear and cool when we get into San Francisco, the streets swollen—brogrammers in their gym clothes, Asian grandmas carrying pink bakery bags, tourists with their fanny packs and DSLRs, white moms in yoga pants pushing bulky strollers with Philz cups in the cup holders. We park in the Portsmouth Square garage and emerge from the rickety elevator back into the sunlight among all the kids clambering up play structures and the Chinese grandfathers playing chess. Regina, who is excellent at time management and therefore looked up walking directions while we were in the elevator, strides toward the corner so fast it takes me and Harry a few seconds to catch up.
Regina could do anything, I think, become a doctor or an engineer or the lawyer her parents want, but she’s dreamed her entire life of going to Northwestern, which has the best journalism program in the nation, and becoming a reporter. She can spend literally hours reading through headlines and going down current-events rabbit holes. She told me once when she was small she knew the names of TV anchors before she did her grandparents and relatives. But reporters make, like, ten dollars, and her parents have made it abundantly clear they have no interest in sending her to major in communications or broadcast journalism. She’s supposed to go into pre-law.
“I wish my parents would’ve moved here instead,” Regina says as Google Maps steers us through a back alley, the word DEFIANCE tagged across the wall in a bright, arresting blue. I like the lines of the lettering, the way they reach around themselves and keep your gaze captive. “I’m so ready to be done with Cupertino.”
“Really? You like this better?” Harry says, gesturing toward a clump of garbage cans. “It smells like piss.”
“I don’t mean I wish they’d moved right here to this alley. But, yes, I like it better.”
“Why? It’s, like, dirty here. I bet you’ll miss Cupertino when you’re gone.”
We’re walking fast still, and she’s a little out of breath. “Really? I’ll miss driving down the street and seeing nothing but tutoring centers? I’ll miss everyone else’s parents knowing exactly what I got on my SATs and teachers having to commute from like Morgan Hill because Cupertino is full of rich NIMBYs who refuse to build more housing? I’ll miss the hundred percent rule?”
Cupertino’s hundred percent rule is this: if you go out in Cupertino, there’s a hundred percent chance you’ll see someone you know. (Its corollary is the two hundred percent rule, which is that if you’re wearing pj’s/haven’t showered, your odds double.)
“Come on, it’s not all bad. Other cities are just easy to romanticize because we don’t live in them. It would be a pain to live in San Francisco. There’s like zero parking.”
“People should use transit more often anyway. Didn’t your dad vote against high-speed—”
“Okay, yes, but that’s just because the particular proposal wasn’t fiscally responsible. He’s working on another one.” Harry always gets defensive about his dad, even though I know it’s not like he agrees with him all the time anyway. (Mr. Wong retired after making a bunch of money and went into politics and is a state senator now, after a term on the school board and two as our mayor.) “But also, people like you there. You know? It feels kind of crappy to talk about how much you hate it when that’s where all your friends are.”
“When do Northwestern decisions come out?” I say quickly, before she has to answer him—I recognize that slight rise in his voice.
“I don’t know exactly when,” she says. I’m pretty sure she’s lying. “Sometime in the spring. I doubt I’ll get in. Even if I do my parents probably won’t let me go.”
“I’m sure you’ll get in. I hope it all works out okay,” I say. Which—I can hear how formal it sounds. I feel like that sometimes with her now, stiff and awkward and overly careful. One time in junior high Sandra told me her irrational fear was that she’d drop a diary with all her secrets in it. You keep a diary like that? I’d said, surprised—I couldn’t imagine her having the patience—and she laughed. Of course not, loser. I said it was an irrational fear. But that’s how it feels with Regina sometimes now, too, that I’m worried I’ll slip and just randomly blurt out everything I’m guilty of.