Picture Us In The Light(40)
I stay quiet. There’s a cold dread spilling into me, that same feeling I get when I sit down to draw and start panicking or when I imagine my dad just never finding another job, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why I want everyone (or even someone, even just Esther) to say we shouldn’t do it. Maybe it’s that I’m not sure what Regina wants from this. Or I’m not sure it will fix anything or do anything, and when you think you want something, and you do it, and then it turns out it wasn’t what you wanted—where does that leave you?
“What about her family?” Advaith says. “Will this violate their privacy?”
“It won’t be anything new,” Regina says tightly. “This isn’t, like—reporting. It’s a tribute. It’s not really about privacy. Should we vote on it?” She looks at Harry uncertainly. “Or—”
“I don’t think we need to vote,” Harry says, looking around the room to dare anyone to argue. After he says that, of course, no one will. Everyone knows Regina was Sandra’s best friend.
“Regina, it’s admirable that you’re taking a stand on this,” Harry says. “It really is.”
Something twists in me, watching him say that, and almost immediately I’m ashamed of myself. Because, what—do I not want them to be happy? They’re my best friends.
Maybe I’m just not convinced by his performance. Harry loves rules, the safety of them around him, context to operate within or—rarely—against. And why shouldn’t he? Rules have always been kind to him.
Regina says, “What do you think, Danny?”
I sit up straighter, my heart lurching against my chest. I didn’t expect to be directly asked.
“Ah—” I say. “I think, um—” I imagine Sandra unimpressed, tainted by the cheapness of our gesture. Regina would mean it, of course, with all her heart. But there are definitely people in here who wouldn’t. Kathryn Liu, I mean—did she ever talk to Sandra in her life? But you can’t say that, definitely not to the whole class. I of all people can’t say it.
“I think yeah, definitely,” I lie. “If that’s what you think we should do, then yeah.”
“Will you draw a portrait of her?”
I blanch. Regina’s gazing at me evenly, her expression carefully constructed, and I can’t read enough in it to know whether this is supposed to be some kind of punishment or some kind of test.
But, again, how can I say I won’t do it? There’s only one answer here. Regina knows that, too. She could’ve asked me in private, she could’ve not asked me at all, but she chose this.
“Yeah, sure,” I say quietly. The muscles in my back bunch together, a slow sort of cramp. “Just tell me whatever you want.”
On the night of your birth in Wuhan the moon is a sliver in the sky, and you slip into the world beneath a fraction of moon. It’s an omen, perhaps, a banner unfurled over you to declare that your life, too, will be marked by fractions, divided into pieces of a whole.
Your parents are nervous, young, excited. Your mother is running on no sleep and an adrenaline high, staring at you swaddled in your tiny bassinet. Your father is afraid to hold you. He keeps breaking into incredulous giggles, then trying to make himself sober and solemn again, especially when the nurses or doctors sweep into the room. Nine months has been a long time to wait, long enough to make you seem a fiction of their imaginations. And yet here—warm and wriggly and perfectly formed—you are.
Already, this night you enter the world, many are leaving it; it’s possible, in a sense, to imagine that you have displaced them. You arrived on a wave of joy, dispelling old ghosts from the room you entered, and for now it’s easy to miss the ways time is already etching itself into your new, tiny body. But people vanish every day. They vanish into new towns and countries, into death and illness, into the past and into different presents; they vanish all around you, they vanish sometimes slowly and sometimes with no warning. And so too it will soon happen to you.
But that first night, the three of you there on your very first night into the world, no one knows this. Your parents marvel at you. They inspect you, your tiny perfect fingers and toes, a hundred times. Perhaps, holding you there in her arms, amazed at the heft of you, the fact of you, your mother can fool herself into believing she’ll hold on to you like this all your life.
Before Christmas break we have a group video project in Spanish, which I hate for the tediousness of the editing but like for the excuse to hang out with people I wouldn’t otherwise. I spend a week at Ruby Lau’s house after school darting around in a Harry Potter costume we appropriated from her little brother and saying we hope for dinner Hogwarts will serve cacahuetes (we all found the word irrationally satisfying to say freshman year, all find excuses to work it into our dialogues still) to hit our four examples of the subjunctive tense. On the last day, we go into Ruby’s bedroom to find something Allison Dannon can wear as Hermione and there’s a picture of a junior-high-aged Ruby and Sandra on the desk. The picture’s carefully angled and there’s a moat of emptiness surrounding it, separating it from all the papers and photos and two crumpled sweaters tossed haphazardly onto the desk. I didn’t expect to see Sandra here. I’d never thought of her and Ruby as good friends.