Picture Us In The Light(16)

“Regina Chan!” he said. “Where were you all summer? You were supposed to hit me up in Taiwan, homegirl. I was there for like two months.”

“I tried calling you when I was there,” she said. “You never answered your phone.”

“Oh, whaaaaat, that’s a lie. It must not have gone through.” He was grinning in that almost manic way he has sometimes—I know it now, even if I didn’t recognize it then—when he’s going to change the subject and just talk at someone so fast all they can really do back is laugh and (nine times out of ten) feel hopelessly charmed. And in that moment, I believed I saw him perfectly.

That was the thing, that back then I was always trying to see people for who they really were because it felt like if you were an artist, that’s what you were supposed to do. I wanted to draw people stripped of their outer layers, and so I was always looking underneath for truth. (Honestly, I was probably kind of insufferable.) At any rate, in that moment it felt clear that Harry’s trick to getting people to like him was to pretend he liked them: to wield his fake enthusiasm as a kind of currency. I would’ve bet my life savings that Regina did call him, probably more than once, and that he hadn’t given her call a second thought; I bet he hit IGNORE and forgot all about it until just this second, the same way he’d forget about his conversation with her he was having right now. And I would never come up to people having a serious conversation and present myself that way, like a gift. When he was gone I said, “Who’s that?”

“That’s Harry Wong.” She said it like she was surprised I didn’t know him already, like it was my bad. Then she added, “It’s his birthday pretty soon.”

Birthdays in Harry’s family, it turned out, were a bizarrely huge deal, and for the milestone ones, like thirteen, his parents went all out. They had (I would learn all this through social osmosis) rented out one of the private banquet rooms at Dynasty that people usually booked for weddings or red egg and ginger parties, and apparently a bunch of important people Harry’s dad knew from his years in politics and business were going to be there, and apparently Harry’s mother was determined to book a band with at least one radio hit, and apparently the invitations had been custom-printed and had cost eight dollars apiece. Sandra Chang referred to it as Harry’s wedding to himself.

I was staying late at school as much as possible those days, stretching out the part of the afternoon where I could avoid going home for as long as I could, and we were sitting on the bleachers overlooking the blacktop. Sandra said, “I heard they’re blowing like ten thousand dollars on this party.”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“I heard it from—”

“No, I believe you. I just think it’s bullshit anyone would spend that much money on a party. It’s gross.”

“You think it’s gross? I would one hundred percent do the same thing if I had the money. You would, too. Admit it.”

“I definitely would not.”

She laughed; she didn’t believe me, probably. She leaned back so her elbows rested on the row behind us. She tossed her hair and then carefully smoothed it back into place, her nails glinting in the sunlight. She always had elaborately painted fingernails, tiny patterns or colorblocks or sometimes even scenes. One time I’d asked if she did them herself and where she got ideas from. She’d just looked at me in this way that felt condescending and also almost defensive somehow. Is this because you’re all into art? she’d said. And you think this counts, or something? And then she’d changed the subject.

“Anyway,” Sandra said, “he invited Regina.”

It is exactly how junior high works that whenever someone gets invited to a party, everyone else knows. Sandra and I had a running bet going on his unfolding guest list. I said, “Of course he did.”

“I called it.” She held out her hand. “Pay up.”

I took a dollar from my wallet and handed it over. “That means you’re next.”

She laughed. “Is that an official bet? You’ll earn your dollar back.”

“You would totally go if he invited you, wouldn’t you.”

“Of course I would. You would, too.”

“I wouldn’t.” Obviously I would have. “I don’t get why Regina likes him.”

“It’s because Regina’s a nice person,” Sandra said. “She has no standards. She likes everyone.”

It was true; Regina’s always been a nice person. In second grade—we still tease her about this—we had class pet bunnies. A couple months into the year, the one girl bunny got pregnant, and one day we came in for class and found out the mom had eaten all her babies. Regina cried so hard she literally got sent home. Sandra had been Regina’s very best friend since first grade, and if you were friends with Regina you understood that was part of the deal, that you’d always be in second place. They had this whole language built on inside jokes and do-you-remembers and vague references that meant nothing to anyone else. They had a way of talking about everything, endlessly dissecting even the smallest interactions, that made it seem like what they were talking about was something important.

I wasn’t in Sandra’s class until second grade, and at first, I didn’t like her. Sandra wasn’t what you would ever describe as nice and she had a disquieting ability to hone in on the things you didn’t want to talk about, didn’t want anyone to notice about you (which Regina always did, too; the difference is Regina never brought them up. But maybe they talked about all those things in everyone else to each other). But she grew on me; she always said things no one else was willing to and she made me laugh, and there’s something to be said for always knowing where you stand with someone. She was the only one of my friends who was an only child like I was, and she always complained that it wasn’t fair for it to be just you against both your parents, although she said several times she’d trade hers for mine, or for anyone’s. Once in fourth grade I saw her arguing with her mom in the parking lot—they were in the car and Sandra had just buckled her seat belt and she said something I couldn’t hear, and her mom whirled around from the front seat and slapped her. I never told her I’d seen. She could find the dark streak in anything, in those cheesy inspirational posters hanging around the school or in movies everyone else loved or in people, too. Her house backed up against a creek and once, the summer we were eleven and she was home alone, she invited me over and we went down through the gap in the fence. It was almost dry in the creek bed, just standing pools of water everywhere and crackly dead leaves, and we played with the tadpoles all afternoon. She’d said they reminded her of Mrs. Polnicek—“Tadpolniceks!” she’d said, cackling in triumph while I rolled my eyes—our teacher that year who I’d liked, actually. “Sludgy and useless,” she’d said, chasing one around the water with her finger. “Sound familiar?” I liked Mrs. Polnicek, but, I mean, I could kind of see it; I laughed. Sometimes I wondered if Regina always stuck by her so closely because next to Sandra she got to feel like a better person, the nice one, the one who saw the best in people.