Picture Us In The Light(32)
I didn’t, though. I said, “Mm.”
You would think, perhaps, that eleven out of twelve would be enough of a run and that it wouldn’t matter to him all that much if he got to do it a final time, but you would be dead wrong. I knew how desperately he wanted to win the election. I knew because of how much he didn’t like talking about it. He did all the campaign stuff—he made posters, he went around at lunch and talked to people, joking around with the freshman guys and flirting with all the girls. He emailed me about eight drafts of his speech to read over. But then when you actually asked him about it, he’d change the subject. We all have those things, I think—those things we want too badly to speak about aloud for fear someone’ll swoop in and tell us we’re just dreaming, those things we hold close and fantasize about at night and swear to the world we don’t care that much about, the way I feel about art, the way I want to believe my parents are grateful I was the child who survived. What Harry wants above everything else is to know the world is behind him.
Most years I don’t think anyone even ran against him, but last year, kind of out of nowhere, Sandra decided to. We had our various cliques-within-cliques but for the most part we had all the same friends, so it felt like a weird move on her part. For one thing, Harry and Regina were going out at that point. Sandra had been the VP since freshman year, which seemed like it was working fine for everyone, but I guess apparently not. “It’s all Game of Thrones up in here,” Ahmed Kazemi had teased, looking between them while they stapled rival posters to the side of the gym. Ahmed had been in love with Sandra forever. I always thought it was a weird pairing—Sandra was a huge partier, for one thing, and even though he went just to hang out, Ahmed was Muslim and didn’t drink. And he was always messing around, always at the nucleus of some joke. Once sophomore year he came to school wearing a T-shirt that said DAMN STRAIGHT, and in second period Mrs. O’Neill made this big deal about it being inappropriate. They argued back and forth until finally Ahmed wrote an R on a Post-it note and taped it over the M on his shirt. “Darn straight,” he announced, flinging his arms in a come-at-me-bro motion, and everyone applauded except Sandra. Mostly Sandra acted annoyed with him, and Ahmed tried to make her laugh. But all the same it seemed like there was a kind of happiness between them, or at least a comfortable set of roles to settle into.
Anyway, the election was something people talked about a lot—who they’d vote for, whether Sandra was being a bitch by running against him (public verdict: yes, if you already didn’t like her, which a lot of people didn’t), whether it was going to be really embarrassing for whoever didn’t win, etc. It was, I think, borderline agonizing for Regina, who always just smiled when Sandra would link arms with her and say, “Regina’s my campaign manager. Hos before bros.” Regina came over once that week and we sat at my kitchen counter drinking the chrysanthemum tea my mom makes in hot weather and discussed whether there was ever going to be any form of competition that Harry would look at and decide he didn’t care if he won. No, was our consensus. Probably not.
“Is that exhausting to be with someone like that?” I said. I couldn’t quite look at her when I said it—I swirled the tea around in my cup and watched the little whirlpool it made instead.
She shrugged. “You’re his best friend. You’re probably with him more than I am. Is it exhausting for you?”
“It might be if I were as success-driven as you are.”
“I’m not success-driven,” she protested, and it was such a ridiculous statement I laughed out loud. I teased her about sitting here in my house this way and lying to my face, and she got all snappish the way she always does when you tease her. I remember thinking, in that moment, if my sister had lived it would’ve felt like it always has with Regina.
“It’s not because Harry doesn’t like other people,” I said. “It’s the opposite. It’s because he wants them to like him.”
Regina said, “I know.”
Something in her tone—there was something static about it, something I couldn’t relate to. “Are you happy with him?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Everyone has good and bad to them.”
“Whoa, whoa, let’s keep it PG, can we? Get a handle on those hormones, Regina.”
She kind of laughed. “It’s true, though, right?”
“I guess, sure. I just think that’s a weird way to look at things with your boyfriend.”
“Maybe. It’s probably the most fair way to look at everyone.” Then she said, apropos of not very much, “You know, I really think you and Sandra could be pretty tight again if you got over your feuding,” and I got up and cleared our empty cups. I said, “Mm.”
My relationship with Sandra was, at that point, nonexistent most days and awkward/residually negative the others. This is what happened, or at least this was the first thing: The day before school started freshman year, I was supposed to hang out with Sandra. Since none of us could drive yet and Regina and Harry were way up in the hills, she and I had seen a lot of each other that summer. Which is what I told myself when Harry called me that day—he’d just gotten back from a few weeks in Taiwan—and I told him I was free, and a few minutes later I let Sandra’s call go to voicemail.