Picture Us In The Light Read online

  I look at my grandfather’s drawings in the letters for a long time. They’re good—confident pen strokes, not a single extraneous one.

  The rest of it, obviously, I understand why he’d keep—Zhu Zhu, the letters from my grandfather. But that file on the Ballards is beyond my understanding, and it makes me wonder. I guess I didn’t necessarily think I knew their whole story; I knew I didn’t. I just never thought there might be that much more to know.

  My parents come back from Costco weighted down with bags, and I go out to help unload everything from the car. In the back seat there are three paper sample cups my mom saved me: a square inch of coffee cake, seven Jelly Bellys, a teriyaki meatball. That careful way they’re balanced there—I take a picture with my phone to draw sometime later before hauling the bags inside.

  They brought home frozen burritos, and I microwave one while I’m waiting for Harry. My mom goes out into her garden, and through the window I can see her kneeling to check on her kabochas. She has six raised garden beds my dad and I helped her make, pomegranate and persimmon and citrus trees she planted when we first moved in, an herb garden that runs along the back fence, and in the front yard all her favorite flowers: hydrangeas and gardenias and tuberoses in the spring. Our house itself is old and run-down, and I remember what the yard looked like when we first moved in—hard, parched dirt and dead weeds, the yard of an old couple who drew the curtains and never looked outside. One of my bedroom windows looks out on the backyard and sometimes outside when she thinks no one’s watching I see my mom stand up with her hands on her hips and survey it all, satisfied and proud and amazed.

  My dad sits down at the kitchen table with the laptop, typing what I can see from the short lines of text is some kind of list. He adores lists. Once, when I was a kid, I found a notepad on his desk with this one: School. Friend. Sport interest. What are your favorite celebrity. Imagination and opinion. The list was titled Question to ask Daniel for conversation. None of his lists, though, ever felt as obsessively gathered as what I found in the closet.

  When the microwave beeps I say, “Hey, Ba, question—who are the Ballards?”

  His head snaps toward me. “Excuse me?”

  “I was just wondering. I, ah, found a box of yours in the closet with some files—”

  His face lights up. Not in the way you say it when you mean someone’s happy, but more like an explosion in the night—a sudden flash of heat and noise.

  He rises. “Were you looking through my belongings?”

  “No. I saw it in the closet. I was looking for beef jerky.”

  “Why did you go into that box? It was taped shut. You went into my personal things without permission.”

  I put up my hands. “I didn’t know what it was. I thought—”

  “Daniel, you know better. I don’t want to hear about it again. And I don’t want you to ever bring that name up with your mother. Is that clear? Don’t ever—”

  My mom comes in through the sliding door then, holding a bunch of beets, and my dad stops. Did he say not to bring it up with her because it’s something she doesn’t know about, or something she does? I hear the familiar sound of Harry’s car pulling into the driveway, and hoist myself off the chair.

  “I’m going,” I say. “Bye.”

  They both start talking at the same time. “Where are you—” my mom says, and my dad says, “Did we say you could—”

  “I’m going with Harry.” I edge toward the door. “I asked you already earlier in the week.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just to his house.”

  “What for?”

  “Just school stuff.”

  They exchange that look that means they’re weighing something I’ve asked for against all the threats of the world—a cell network glitch that means they can’t reach me if they need to, a blind curve up in the hills by Harry’s house. “Well, all right.” My mom drops her beets in the sink. “Come back in an hour.”

  I definitely can’t get to San Francisco and then back in an hour. “We have to work on some Journalism stuff, so it’s going to take all morning. Maybe until after lunch.”

  “Aiya, Daniel, I don’t like you to be gone so much. If something happens, and we can’t call you—”

  “I know.” I’ve long since stopped trying to argue or to promise that nothing will ever happen, even when I’m going to be just a few minutes away. “I’ll be careful.”

  “Well—” She makes a tsking sound with her tongue. “All right. Go study with Harry. Just be careful.”

  “Wait,” my dad says. He looks around, his voice infected with false cheer, like he wasn’t just mad at me. “Where’s your sweatshirt? Wear it to show Harry. Show it off.”

  “Oh, ah, right.” It’s on the kitchen table (I left it there last night, and someone, probably my mom, folded it carefully with the letters facing out), and I shrug it on. “Look good?”

  “Perfect.” My dad smiles, a real smile; the sweatshirt’s worked its magic. “Have a good time.”

  I make it outside just as Harry’s coming up our walkway (Harry isn’t the kind of person who just pulls up and honks, even if he’s been your best friend four years), and I hustle him back into the car.

  “I didn’t want you getting all chatty with my parents,” I say over his complaining.

  “Aw, your parents love me.”

  I roll my eyes. It’s true, though; all parents love him. “Well, too bad for them I’m too selfish to let you.”

  “You’re not selfish.”

  “In your professional opinion.”

  “Don’t get so sarcastic. You’re, like, the opposite of a selfish person. It’s a compliment.”

  I feel the words blooming on my cheeks. “I just didn’t want them roping you into a conversation. I know you’re a shitty liar.”

  “What would I have to lie about?”

  “I told them we’re just going to your house.” Harry lives too far up in the hills to walk, so I always get a ride if I’m going up there. “You know how they are. They’d flip out if I said I wanted to go to San Francisco.” Also, it’s true: Harry lies terribly. At his core, I think, he’s too noble to have any real sense of self-preservation.

  Inside the car, Harry unbuttons the cuffs of his sleeves and rolls them in precise, even segments before laying his hands on the steering wheel. A few times—I would die before I told him this—I’ve sketched his forearms, the map his veins trace over them, the tan he keeps even in winter. He says, “I am not a shitty liar.”

  I click my seat belt on. “Um, you can’t even say that without your voice getting all weird and defensive, so I think I’ve made my case. Hey—question.” As he backs onto the street, I tell him about my dad’s files. “That’s not weird, right?”

  “Uh, a stalkery box of information about some rando? It’s definitely weird.”

  “You think so?” I make a face. I wanted him to tell me I was overreacting.

  “Yeah, but your parents have always been weird about things.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s weird how they’ve never once taken you home to China, for one thing. Haven’t you been, like, all over the US and—”

  “I think China’s probably just too sad for them now.”

  “I guess I could see that, yeah.” He shrugs. “Still. They just kind of seem like people with secrets. You went years without knowing you even had a sister, right? And don’t they still never talk about her?” Check and check. “Who were the people?”

  “Nobody I know. I don’t even know how my parents would know them.” It’s probably nothing. All the same the road blurs in front of me a second, and I feel a little bit carsick. “So you’d maybe worry at least a little, then?”

  “If someone explicitly told me not to? It’s like if I say don’t picture me naked—what’s the first thing you do?”

  My cheeks go hot, and then the rest of me. It’s enough to pull me back from the ledge, though, back onto so
lid ground. I say, “I could’ve done without that visual, thanks.”

  He grins. “Be nice. Don’t make me pull over.” We stop at a light on Stelling, and he skims his eyes over me. “Hey, so, uh…nice sweatshirt.”

  “Yep.” That was definitely not a compliment. I swear if he says one word about my sweatshirt, I’ll kick his ass.

  “That new?”

  “Yep,” I say again. I don’t need Harry to confirm for me that in its hugeness and overenthusiastic newness it looks as dweeby as I know it does. I want the gift my parents gave me to be worth what they paid for it, worth how excited they were.

  “Rocking those creases. Are you, uh, wearing that when we get there?”

  I wasn’t going to, I was going to take it off once I got in the car, but as soon as he says it my plans make an abrupt U-turn. With any luck he’ll spend the whole ride worrying every single person he sees today will think, Why is Harry Wong best friends with a loser in a giant creased sweatshirt? I will wear this sweatshirt at him the entire day. “Yeah. Why?”

  “It just looks so…new.”

  I know this about Harry: he thinks it’s pathetic in an overeager kind of way to wear anything right after you bought it, or at least to look like you did, so every time he gets something new he washes it twice before he puts it on. “It is new.”

  He takes his hands off the wheel to hold them up in defeat. “Okay, whatever. You do you.”

  “You’re so generous. Has anyone ever told you that? So generous.”

  “Says the guy getting a free ride to San Francisco.”

  I roll my eyes. “You’d be going anyway.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’m just going because you’d be stranded at home otherwise.”

  “Okay, (a), you would definitely go because otherwise Regina would kill you, and (b), don’t pretend like you’re not glad to have an excuse. What would you be doing at home all day instead? Going to tutoring?”

  He grins in that self-deprecating way of his, his eyes crinkling up. It is, I’ll admit, one of the more charming habits he has. “For your information, I’d be probably going hog wild studying for the SAT IIs. So hold up on your smugness there.”

  He probably would be, too. There is basically nothing Harry won’t do in service of Princeton, which is the only Ivy that rejected his sister and, therefore, the only school he wants. It’s why he’s the managing editor of our school paper, second-in-command to Regina, despite being someone who has no real love of writing and who (I’ll just say it) has a crap eye for design. He’s also, this year: ASB president, treasurer of National Honor Society, and the director of the Students Reaching Out tutoring club. He got a near-perfect score on his SATs and has a 4.8 GPA and is nationally ranked (low, but still) in tennis doubles. And this is still as true as it’s been as long as I’ve known him: he’s always the most popular guy in any room he’s in. When I list it all out like that I kind of remember why I used to really hate him.

  When he pulls onto Regina’s street he looks in the rearview mirror like he’s making sure no one’s in the back seat listening and says, “Has Regina seemed kind of—off to you lately?”

  “What do you mean off? You see her more than I do.”

  “Yeah, but you guys talk. Maybe I’m just imagining it.”

  I don’t think he’s imagining it. “We don’t talk that much lately.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Did you know she stopped going to her church?”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah. And, I mean—the one year’s coming up, so—”

  I feel that same old catch in my heart. “Right.”

  “On March seventh.”

  “I know when it is.”

  He glances at me in a way I can’t quite read. I feel the color rise in my cheeks. He says, “Regina wants to put something in the paper.”

  “Yeah, no, they will definitely not let us put something in the paper.”

  “You don’t think if—”

  “No. Definitely not. Zero chance.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He sighs. “Such bullshit. She really wants to. You know how she is.”

  I do know how she is. Except maybe that isn’t true; I know how she used to be.

  He gets out of the car to go knock, and they come back together. Regina looks put together as always, in bright lipstick, tight dark pants, a billowy white top, and a dark floppy hat that makes her look vaguely 1920s-ish. She has a model’s high, angular cheekbones and full lips—she’s striking, and I’ve always liked drawing her. (For her part, she dislikes being drawn. I think it makes her self-conscious.) She’s pretty in that way that makes people assume your life is going well.

  I open the door to give her the front seat, but she waves me off. I smile hello, hold my breath a little. She slides into the back seat.

  “Congratulations on RISD, Danny,” she says in a way I can’t call anything other than nice, but that also doesn’t exactly flood the car with warmth. “You’ve wanted this for so long.”

  I say, “Thanks, Reg.” And I think how last year I would’ve told her right away about all those files I found, too.

  Then, like she read my mind, she leans forward and touches my elbow. “I knew you’d get in.” And maybe that’s the most she has right now. Maybe I shouldn’t read into it.

  “You think this’ll be the kind of talk where they have like donuts or anything?” Harry says. “Or you think we have time to stop somewhere?”

  Regina rolls her eyes. “No and no. We can’t be late. Everyone probably hates me already for making them go to this.”

  He grins at her in the rearview mirror. “Technically it’s not too late to cancel.”

  “The talk sounds important, right?” Harry was teasing—he’s careful around her a lot these days—but Regina says it as if he wasn’t. “I just want to make sure we know we have the right to say what we want.”

  “Pretty sure people are mostly still writing about, like, their buddies on the tennis team,” I say lightly. Harry glares at me. I must have gotten the tone wrong.

  “Mostly, sure, but what about the times they’re not? It’s like that stupid story about starfish,” she says, adjusting her seat belt. “There’s hundreds stranded on the beach and you throw a few back because it makes a difference to those particular few.”

  “Aw, you think that’s stupid?” Harry says. “I think it’s kind of nice.”

  “It’s a parable of rampant apathy. Why is there only one guy out there rescuing millions of suffocating starfish? It’s a story about how horrible things happen because ninety-nine point nine percent of people can’t be bothered.”

  “Not you,” Harry says cheerfully. He twists around and backs out of the driveway. “There is nothing too small for you to be bothered by.”

  If I’m being honest, I still don’t totally get the two of them, and they’ve been together since sophomore year. I will concede that in a way it felt weirdly inevitable, a mash-up of ambition and popularity and attractiveness, a test-tube match, all roads leading to each other. Harry asked her to homecoming—a flash mob, a bouquet of peonies because that’s her favorite flower, a platter of chocolate-covered strawberries with letters that spelled YOU + ME?—and then after that they just kind of stayed together, swapped all their profile pictures to ones of the two of them, and in a way it felt weird that they’d ever been separate entities altogether.

  But then I always wondered, always still wonder. All that time last year when they were ensconced together—what all happened between them? I can’t exactly imagine her breaking down in front of him, pouring her heart out to him, and from comments he makes sometimes I don’t think she ever really did. And, like—does he think of her first all the time? She’s who he imagines calling first when he gets his letter from Princeton, the audience he pictures when he’s collecting all the important and also the stupid insignificant parts of his day to give to someone? When he imagines disasters happening, cancer or nuclear fallout or the Big One we’
re supposed to get in California, at night when it’s quiet and he feels all the weight of his own life pressing in on him, she’s the lurch in his stomach and the hand he gropes around for in the dark?

  But maybe it’s just that I don’t want to see it. I would do anything for Harry—and have—and sometimes I picture what it would look like to come up against the hard wall of the limits of how far he’d be willing to go for me.

  Which I know is crappy. They’re together. And Regina’s my friend too. At least, I think she still is.

  “Anyway, no one hates you for making us go,” Harry says. “It’ll be interesting to hear the guy talk.”

  “It should be. I heard his TED talk about all the things at schools that get censored,” she says. “Like banned books and dress code issues. And…”

  She trails off. We both know what she means, though; there’s not a single person in our grade who doesn’t recognize that tentative pause, the guilt you always feel plunging everyone around you back into the same dark territory. You always wonder if people just want to forget.

  I wait to see then if she’ll trust me with what she told Harry, the story she’s planning to write. She changes the subject instead, and we talk about personal statements for the next ten or twelve miles north.

  We hit traffic then, a sea of red taillights, and Harry swears softly under his breath. He can give a speech in front of all two thousand people at our school, he can go months without saying anything negative about another person, but it’s always been the little things that set him off—stick him in traffic, or let his phone run out of battery, and it’s like his whole conception of the world collapses: how is this possibly happening to him?