Picture Us In The Light(71)

I was. He knew because the day before when I’d played at his house he’d summoned me into the bedroom he shared with his baby sister and, from inside a tattered box of Star Wars Legos, pulled a roll of wintergreen Life Savers.

“Are you scared of the dark?” he’d asked. When I’d said yes, he’d carefully peeled the wrapper away and plucked one Life Saver and handed it to me.

“If you chew it really hard in the dark and look at a mirror, it lights up. That’s what I do when I’m scared.” I’d tried it that night. He’d been right—the wonder of it, the unexpectedness, were strong enough for the moment to banish the dark. Sometimes, every now and then, I try to draw him. Usually when I do it’s him in the dark staring at a mirror, Life Saver in hand.

I wish my parents, both of them, would just come home. It’s hard to hold on to your anger when you’re scared and lonely, when you miss someone at night.



It’s around two in the morning and I’m still awake when I get out of bed, finally—it’s clear it’s a losing battle anyway—and open up the laptop. My search auto-completes for me as soon as I type eth. Guess I look him up even more than I realized.

I could just keep not doing this forever, I guess, just like I’ve been doing, but lying awake here I’ve been telling myself I’d go through with it. So I send him a friend request, regret it immediately, google whether you can undo a request, find out you can’t, refresh the page a billion times to see if he’s accepted even though it’s the middle of the night, and then all night and all the next day—through my Spanish quiz and lunch and the bus ride back to San José—live in that very specific hell of waiting for someone to see something you can’t take back.

It’s five-thirty California time, and I’ve just gotten home, when Ethan accepts the request. I have just a few seconds to catch up on his profile—he goes to Howard University and has an extremely pretty girlfriend, a serious-faced Black girl with close-cropped hair and the kind of frame that makes her look tall, although it’s impossible to scale her next to someone I haven’t seen since I was six—before he messages me: Hey, sorry, who’s this?

My heart does its plummeting-elevator thing inside my chest. I am the loser king of Losertown. No one cares what happened when you were six years old; I bet he didn’t spend a second thinking about me after I left. I waste too long thinking of the least pathetic way to get out of this, and finally write back, Are you the Ethan that used to live in UT family housing? Came across some old UT stuff and just wondered what you were up to these days. Looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself.

He writes back about three seconds later: DANNY TSENG, HOLY SHIT. And then, right after: What’s your phone number???

I send it over. Almost instantaneously my phone rings.

“Danny Tseng. I can’t believe this,” he says. I haven’t heard that name in years. I wouldn’t have recognized his voice, I don’t think, but maybe I can still hear him inside it. “Danny, I swear to God I never thought I’d hear from you again. We never stopped wondering what happened to you. Seriously. My family still talks about you guys. I can’t wait to tell my parents you found me on Facebook after all these years. They won’t believe it. Where have you been? And how come you changed your name?”

I tell him how we’ve been living in California. He seems surprised in a relieved kind of way, like he’d expected much worse, and then he tells me what he remembers and what he learned from his parents over the years: how that last time I stayed at his house my parents had told his mom, Auntie Monica, they were flying out to California. They didn’t say much about the trip—every time Auntie Monica asked about it my mom laughed it off and said oh, it was nothing, just a little jaunt. She’d been happy and excited about it, and had gone to Monica’s the day before they left to borrow a few pieces of clothing. Monica had thought it was some kind of anniversary trip.

The strange thing, though, was my parents hadn’t bought tickets back yet, and hadn’t been able to say exactly when they’d be home to get me. It was unlike them; usually they were hyperorganized. They called a few times a day to check in on me and it wasn’t until the last day, last-minute, that they’d booked a flight back to Texas. When they came back they were rushed; they got in after my bedtime and Auntie Monica had offered to let me stay until morning so I wouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night, but my parents said no, no, they wanted to come right away. Auntie Monica thought it was sweet that they’d missed me. She offered to pick them up from the airport so they could all have drinks together and the Parker-McEvoys could hear about their trip, but my parents took a cab and came back rushed and quiet. They woke me up and thanked Ethan’s parents for taking me, and said goodnight. It was the last time his parents ever saw us. My dad didn’t show up to the lab that Monday. At first everyone thought my parents were probably just tired out from their trip, but when people knocked on our door no one was there and then a few days later the university started cleaning out the apartment to give to the next family on the waiting list.

I have that growling, acidic kind of pain in my abdomen you get when you’re up too late, and it surges then. I say, “Huh.”

“You know, something else kind of weird happened, too. Someone came around a few weeks after you guys left. I was, what, seven? So I had no idea until a couple years ago when we were talking about you and my parents told me. The guy wouldn’t say who he was with. Like, if it were a police detective, he would’ve just said so, right? But he was all hush-hush about it, so my parents didn’t tell him anything. They didn’t think your parents were the criminal type. Plus they still thought they were going to hear from your folks again.”