Picture Us In The Light(21)
I wasn’t ready to go back to my stuffy cabin and Aaron and Ahmed and Maurice passed out in their grimy sleeping bags, back to the house where my dad was slowly mummifying himself in his sadness that I was pretty sure a doctor wouldn’t be able to magic him out of. I said, “I know what you mean about being tired.”
His expression changed. He toed at the stick in the snow, then stepped on it with his hiking boot until it crunched in half. “Yeah. Well.”
“This week was better, though, right? Like, it was nice to be here.”
“I guess. Sometimes I just don’t think it’s all worth it. Like maybe it would better to just go live in like, Ohio or something and just be a coal miner.”
I leaned against the wall of the cabin. I could hardly feel my face. “Is that a thing? Somehow I doubt they’re just waiting for some random Asian kid to show up from Cupertino ready to coal-mine.”
His eyes crinkled into a smile, enmeshing me in the joke. “I’d do Taiwan proud.”
“Okay, then. Represent.”
He let go of the smile. “It’s probably crappy there anyway. That’s the worst part. This is probably all there is. So if you don’t play, it’s just—” He lifted his arms and then let them fall to his sides.
And I knew exactly what he meant. Any one of us standing out there with him would’ve, because Cupertino really gets to you. It’s not like it’s this friendly, squishy, huggy place where mediocrity is fine and it’s cool if you fail or just aren’t that good at anything, and everyone here knows it. We were all tired and stressed out all the time, all of us worried we’d never be good enough, many of us explicitly told we weren’t good enough, so it wasn’t like his problems were special or different or more tragic than anyone else’s. We all felt it, the relentless crush of expectation, the fear of not measuring up—even me, and I like it here, and as Asian parents go mine are about as chill as they come.
So it didn’t have to feel like some big moment between us; it could’ve felt like talking to basically anyone in my grade. I guess it was just that I knew it wasn’t something he ever showed to anyone, but that night, for whatever reason, he did to me. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Hey, Harry?”
“Yep.”
I could feel my frozen face turning red. “Hey, I’m, um, I’m sorry about that picture thing last year. Drawing on it.”
“Oh—whatever. Don’t worry about it.”
“It was just kind of a dick thing to do.”
“It’s cool, really.” He kind of laughed. “I think I still have it, actually. Somewhere on my desk. You’re really talented. It looked more like me than the picture did. I always hated that picture.”
“The picture was fine.” I kicked at some snow. “I thought you might try to ruin my life over that.”
“You thought what?” He looked legitimately startled. “Why would I do that?”
And I believed him. It was genuine, that confusion, and that was the first time I really saw him, I think—when I understood that his social persona was concealing none of what I’d always thought it was, but actual niceness instead, that there was a kind streak at his core.
It wouldn’t be until a few weeks later that I’d understand about the rest of it, but that would happen, too, in Honors History when Mr. DiBono passed back our midterms. I’d see Harry turn his over without looking at it and then sit super still for a long time, his eyes trained on the teacher like he was trying to will himself into not looking. He lasted twenty minutes, and then he looked down and peeled back just the top corner of the page where the grade was written. From across the classroom I saw the way his whole body deflated, and then I saw the way he gathered himself up and hid that, and something about it was so practiced, so automatic, that I understood for the first time how much this was a part of him. I mean, it was a small moment: it was over fast, and it wasn’t something we ever talked about. But I saw everything differently after that, I think because it’s hard to turn away from someone after you’ve really seen them. You carry that part of them with you, and it becomes your job to protect it, too.
But that was later. For the time being, in the snow, Harry clapped his hand on my shoulder. I could feel it through all the layers of jacket and glove, could feel it like there wasn’t all that fabric in between us.
“We should sleep,” he said, and something about the way he said it, something about that we—I think I knew in that moment how much I’d want to always be covered by it, how I’d always want there to be a space for me inside it, how I would maybe be willing to do things I wouldn’t have imagined in order to make it so.
We walked together back to the cabins. And that was the first night.
My dad wasn’t seeming very much better by the time eighth-grade graduation rolled around; it had been a rough couple months. The doctor hadn’t helped because my dad didn’t believe in taking the antidepressants he’d been prescribed or in going to the counseling she’d suggested, so he didn’t. All through the ceremony my mom was wiping her eyes, and when I found my parents after on the lawn, all the guys roasting in dress pants and dress shirts and all the girls tottering as their heels sank into the grass, she was crying. I’d been with Harry, taking pictures with different people and all that, but when we saw my parents Harry whacked me on the back and said he’d catch me later. And maybe it was “Pomp and Circumstance” still playing all emotionally in the background, but seeing my mom’s tears I felt, for the first time, the true weight of all the dreams they held for me. Those dreams crystallized that day into something hard and heavy, came to rest on my shoulders. Because I felt it in a real way then what they’d lost, that there should’ve been another eighth-grade graduation before mine, another batch of pictures no one was ever going to look at, and there was never going to be any way to fix what had happened to them. I’d grow up and have my future ahead of me still and still have my dreams out there to reach for, and we’d be different, because I would have the world, I would have my whole life ahead of me, but all they’d have was me.