Picture Us In The Light(99)
Joy takes a long time buckling her seat belt and adjusting the mirrors. She looks calm, but I keep getting a sense that she isn’t, actually. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
But it’s her, right? It’s her? She hasn’t technically confirmed it, but she would’ve told me if it wasn’t. I wonder if it would be different if Harry weren’t here—if she doesn’t want to say anything in front of him right away. Which is fair; she has no idea who he is.
To be fair, maybe I don’t, entirely, either. I haven’t been able to meet his eyes since the car. Pretending things are fine is a physical effort. If I ruined everything—but I won’t think about that yet. I erase it from my mind, visualize scrubbing the eraser dust to wipe the paper clean, and focus on Joy. My sister. I can hardly breathe.
Joy starts the car and we pull out onto the dirt road. “Your car did okay on the way in?” she says pleasantly. “All of ours have all-wheel drive. It’s pretty bumpy out here.”
“Yeah, it was okay.” I add, “It’s really beautiful out here.”
“It is, isn’t it? It’s also so dry. High desert. I get eczema.” My mom does, too. “Unfortunately, ticks love it here too. All the grass. Byron—that was one of the guys you just met—got bitten last week and had to get tested for Lyme disease. Negative, fortunately.”
She chatters about that, the ticks and the Lyme disease and the native grasses here, the whole ride back into town. I don’t know what I expected her to be like—like me, maybe, or maybe like my parents—but it’s odd fitting the reality of someone around your (unfounded) expectations. She’s nice, though, talkative and self-assured, but she also seems on edge. Which I want her to not be. I want her to not be small-talking like we’re strangers at a bus station, to not be creating a kind of hedge of pleasantries around herself so that it would be strange for me to bust past that with everything we actually need to talk about.
But maybe she’s just nervous. It’s hard to blame her. I mean, I’m nervous as hell. So I’m polite in return, and I tell myself that I’ll wait until we’re settled in the restaurant and then we’ll talk, and then everything will be fine. There are years and years to catch up on.
By the time we’ve pulled back onto paved roads again I’ve learned more than I ever would’ve imagined myself knowing about the ecosystem of the high desert up here, but basically nothing about Joy except that she’s really into all this. There is—improbably—a Thai restaurant in the middle of downtown, and when we go in they exclaim over Joy (she must come a lot) and ask who her visitors are. She introduces us by name, not by description. When we sit down Joy says, “I’d recommend the drunken noodles. That’s what I’m getting.”
“You’re getting—oh.” Ordering a plate of noodles for yourself that way instead of family-style is something I’ve only ever seen white people do, and I don’t know why that feels so jarring. I guess it’s because for as much as she looks like me, I can still feel on the periphery all those little fractures I can’t quite put my finger on. Like that Harry and I could speak Chinese in front of her (me crappily, but still) and for all I know Joy wouldn’t understand a word, like all those missing commonalities I can’t assume about her past.
It feels weird to get basically anything on the menu and eat it just by myself, but I don’t want to try to negotiate splitting anything on the menu with Harry in front of her, or maybe at all. When the woman who greeted us comes back to take our orders I get a green curry, my mom’s favorite, and Harry gets pad thai. And then the woman goes back, and then there’s a lull.
I take a long breath and try to gather all the things I’ve been practicing saying. Exactly at the same time, though, Joy says, “So you’re both in high school?”
“Yeah, seniors.”
“And what are you doing next year?” The question’s polite still, the way it would come from a friend of the family, an adult making conversation at the store.
Harry tips his head toward me. “Harry’s going to Princeton,” I say. “And I’m, ah, still deciding.”
“Isn’t the deadline pretty soon? My sister did the college application thing a few years ago, so it’s fresh in my memory.”
My sister. That aches. “Yeah, it’s next week. I’m trying to figure some things out with family first, actually. Which is part of why—that’s a big part of how I even found out about you.”
Her expression shifts almost imperceptibly, fast enough that I only see the quick cover-up and not whatever’s lying underneath. “It must be a huge choice!” she says brightly. “I remember trying to pick colleges. It’s hard to picture what a place is really like until you actually go there. Everything looks so different in the brochures than in real life.”
“Yeah. Look, Joy—my parents—it’s kind of a complicated situation right now. They’ve had a rough year and we’re all kind of trying to figure out what comes next, and—”
“I see.” She reaches for her glass of water and drinks half of it. Her expression is anything but inviting, but I pretend not to notice.
“But they finally sat me down and told me the truth about everything that happened with their daughter that they lost and then with the Ballards. Which—it’s you, right?”