Picture Us In The Light(38)
“Reg, are you—”
“Get a tray,” she hissed. Her voice was streaked through with hatred. I got a tray.
We all sat there in Harry’s living room as it got dark, clouds rolling over the hills and obscuring the treetops of Cupertino below. Every now and then someone would start crying. A couple people went home, and each time someone did it hurt, kind of, in this lonely way I was pretty sure everyone else felt, too, or maybe I was wrong and it was just me. Around dinnertime we ordered pizza. Well, Regina ordered it, and when people tried to chip in, she refused. No one ate any when it came.
It was around six when Regina broke down—the only time I’ve seen her do it. Ahmed was the first one to grab her and hold on to her, whisper something in her ear, grip her shoulders and rock back and forth with her. When he did it I could feel a kind of tightening in the room, like someone pulling on some kind of string that knotted us all together. I cried, too.
I was the last one to leave that night. I helped Harry straighten up, and lingered until I couldn’t anymore. I would be okay as long as I was here with him, I thought, but as soon as I left it would all hit me. When all the pillows were back in place and all the uneaten pizza slices thrown away and I was at the door to go, my mom waiting outside the gate, I said, “Ahmed thinks—” and then I couldn’t go any further with it, couldn’t say it aloud.
Harry didn’t make me. I have always loved him for that.
“No, I know you,” he said. “He’s wrong. I know you better than Ahmed. I know you better than anyone.”
That saved me in that moment, I think, that absolution. I’ve never told him that. It wasn’t enough to erase the rest of it—a part of me still shrivels whenever I’m around Ahmed, that same part that worries the universe chose wrongly in keeping me here—but in that moment it was enough to hold me. I said, “Okay.” I turned to go.
“Wait.” He reached for my hand, and then he put his arm around my waist and pulled me closer. “Promise me you won’t ever do that. What happened to Sandra, I mean.”
My mind had flashed blank for a second when he’d touched me like that, and it took me a second to recover and answer. “I won’t.”
“No, Danny, I mean—” He looked frantic. “Promise me.”
“I meant it. I promise.”
He scanned my face. There was a heat creeping into all those cold places I’d been sinking into all day, and a tingling that ran through me like a shock. I held myself still and let him look. I wanted, in that moment, to give him the entire world.
Finally he said, quietly, “Okay.” He dropped his arm. When he did it was like a cold gust of air blew over me and I wanted, kind of desperately, to ask if he’d found whatever it was he was looking for. He repeated, “Okay.”
I would have stayed there forever. And it didn’t mean anything, I don’t think, it was just that the world had spun out of control around us and when that happens you reach for literally anything you can to steady yourself. But the moment had moved on, and also maybe part of me was scared of it, or maybe scared of ruining it, which is a different thing. I wished I wasn’t, though, because the thought of leaving and being home without him felt like a small death.
Right before I closed the door behind me, though, something happened. Harry said, “Danny, wait—”
He stepped over the threshold and stood there for a moment in front of me. His breaths were shaky. He opened his mouth and I thought he might say something, but then he didn’t. Instead he reached out and cupped his hand on my cheek, then he held it there, and then very gently he brought my head closer and touched his forehead against mine.
“You promised,” he said finally, stepping back. “I’m not going to forget.”
There are twenty-eight of us in Journalism this year and we’re pretty self-sufficient; people mostly trust a bunch of kids stocking their transcripts with a UC-approved elective course. Our advisor, Mr. Renato, primarily teaches AP English and has a never-ending stack of essays to grade in his classroom next door and is in there at least 50 percent of the time, including today. We put out one paper a month and it’s mostly Regina running everything, assigning stories and cajoling local tutoring companies and restaurants into buying ad space, badgering everyone not to write stories directly in InDesign and to remember hairline framing around photos.
Today is story assignment day. Most people always want to write, like, profiles of their friends or movie reviews, but Regina likes big, demanding stories: refugee crises and hate crimes and police brutality, all the deep fissures in the world. I’ve always thought they give her energy and purpose, and—paradoxically, I guess—a place to rest.
She seems a little nervous perched in front of the room—her voice is pitched higher and she keeps running out of breath. She’s wearing a striped blazer with the sleeves rolled up, tight jeans and heels, and she looks professional and adult, and she makes me wish everyone else here cared as much as she did. In here I can imagine a whole future around her—a life where she got out of Cupertino and built something else for herself, where I can turn on my TV each night and watch her distill all the chaos of the world into measured, narrated segments.
“As we know, we’re coming up on the anniversary of Sandra Chang’s death in March,” she says, holding her hands still in her lap, “And I know that’s still a little while out, but I wanted to see what everyone thought of doing a tribute to her in that month’s issue.”