Picture Us In The Light(58)

Harry calls at seven. “What are you doing?”

I tell him I’m packing.

“I’ll come help you pack.”

“Don’t do that,” I say, but he’s hung up already, and he ignores my seriously, don’t come text, too. Fifteen minutes later, while I’m stuffing the contents of my dresser into plastic Ranch 99 bags, the doorbell rings.

My dad makes it to the door while I’m still coming down the hallway. He peers through the peephole first. “It’s Harry,” he tells me, then opens the door and says, in a jovial tone that feels like someone spilled bright paint all over a finished portrait, “Hello, Harry!” My dad’s always liked Harry. Parents always do.

Harry lifts his hand. “Hey, Mr. Cheng.” He ignores me. I always liked when he did that—not ignored me, obviously, but ignored me with the tacit understanding that it’s because I’m the one who matters, the default one who doesn’t require the pleasantries that intimacy replaces.

“Harry,” my dad says, and squares his shoulders in that way that means he has a speech to give, “you’ve been a very good friend to Daniel.”

I hiss, “Ba,” by which I mean, Stop.

He ignores me. “A very good friend, all these years. Friendship is a very important thing. But you’ll still see each other sometimes. And you can talk on the phone, so it’s essentially the same as before.”

“Sure, yeah, thank God for phones, right?” Harry says easily. He smiles, a friendly smile, but I know him well enough to know which smiles are fake. “Danny’s been a great friend to me, too. Good luck with the move.” He’s probably the only person I know who could say that without it coming out snarky.

My dad starts to say something else, but I say, “Okay, I have to keep packing,” and motion Harry down the hallway.

My dad says, “Harry, would you—”

“I said I have to pack,” I snap. My voice comes out ugly.

My dad’s smile flickers. He stops himself from saying something, I think, and nods wordlessly and shuffles off.

“Well,” Harry says, and pats my arm a few times in a way that makes me pretty sure he thinks I was an ass, “let’s do it.” His footsteps echo behind me, all the creaky spots rising up on cue—those sounds that form the backbone of my childhood, the kind of thing you never realize how much you’ll miss.

“Aren’t you grounded?” I say when we get into my room.

“Yeah. But my parents are out tonight and Cindy promised she’d cover for me.”

I didn’t believe him that he’d actually help—I envisioned him sprawled out on my bed watching me do it—but he gamely tapes boxes together and pulls clothes from my closet and folds them like the perfectionist he is. It’s an odd feeling having him all over my closet that way, like showing more than I meant to. And maybe it’s that—or maybe it’s everything, that tomorrow I’m leaving home—that makes me feel off-kilter, like the center of things has melted and the rest of the world is teetering around the edge of the sinkhole. After a while my dad pokes his head in to tell me he’s going to buy more packing tape. I say, “Okay,” in the most neutral voice I can muster.

The house feels different with him gone, with just me and Harry in it. We’re both quiet a little while, and I feel a little like I did that first night at Yosemite—all my atoms buzzing at a higher frequency, spinning on their axis, or whatever it is atoms do. It’s the first time we’ve been alone alone, not just alone in those spaces you carve out in a crowd, in a long time.

Harry touches the silence first, the words like how it used to feel jumping into the water back in Texas when we’d go to swimming holes. “When did you paint your walls?”

“I did it yesterday.”

“Did that suck? It seems like it would suck.”

“It sucked.”

“Yeah, sounds about right.” He abandons the box he was filling and sinks down on my bed. “It’s definitely going to suck here without you.”

“You have Regina.”

“Right, but—” He cuts himself off then, and I want—desperately—to know what worlds would’ve unfolded inside that but. “Right, yeah. She’s going to really miss you, too. I bet your new school is going to suck ass.”

“I bet so too.”

“I’ll come drive down there every weekend.”

“Please do.”

Then quiet again, a fragile, crackling quiet. I’m pretty sure that, even all the way across the room, I can physically feel him here. He doesn’t move back toward the boxes. That molten center expands, sucks up a little more of the firm ground around it. I say, “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.”

My mouth feels dry. “Are you in love with Regina?”

He looks at me sharply. “Am I what?”

“Um—” Shit. “Never mind. Forget it.”

“No, why?”

“No reason.”

“You don’t just ask someone that without a reason.” He trains his gaze at me, his eyebrows raised, until I have to look away. My insides feel like water. He says, “Do I act like I’m not?”

“Seriously, forget it. It’s not my business. I’m sorry.”