Page 70 of This Time It's Real
“Of course I’m not jealous,” I tell him, and even manage a little laugh as my nails curl into my sheets. “Why would I be?”
“Okay. Okay, good.” A pause. “If you’re sure.”
“I am sure.Very.”
“Okay,” he repeats slowly.
I pull the phone away from my ear for a second, stare at it, then bring it back. What evenisthis conversation? Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I feel like I have whiplash every time I talk to him? “Okay,” I say too, after a pause. “Well, this was—fun. If you were just calling to confirm that . . . Bye? I guess?”
“Sure” comes his eventual reply. I wish I could see him, his expression. Wish I could figure out what he’s thinking. “Bye, then.”
I hang up first, chucking my phone across the bed and burying my head beneath my pillow with a groan. “What the hell,” I mutter out loud, still half-convinced Caz had called me by mistake. And even if he hadn’t, there’s no way he would want to call me again after this.
But as always, Caz Song manages to surprise me. Because he does call me again the next night, at roughly the same time, and the night after that, and after that. I don’t know if it’s as a fake boyfriend, to continue our chemistry training sessions while he’s away, or as a friend, which I guess is what we are now. I’m too scared to ask. Too scared to ruin another good thing.
At first, the conversations are more awkward than not—at least on my part—and limited to your typical, polite topics:What did you do today? How was shooting? Did you see this per- son’s latest post?
Yet the calls get longer and longer, passing the one-hour mark and continuing until the streets outside are perfectly quiet and I can only hear my own breathing in the night. Soon, they become a habit.
Sometimes we talk until my phone runs out of battery. Sometimes I fall asleep with his voice in my ear.
Without meaning to, I start telling him stories about my life overseas. Stories I’ve never told anyone else before, that I’ve kept locked up inside me for so long they feel more like a scene from an old film I once watched than something that actually happened to me. I tell him about the last dinner we had with family before we left Beijing, how my laolao had cried and I didn’t understand why. I tell him about the classmates I hated, the teachers I loved, if only because they were understanding when I wore the wrong uniform or got lost around campus.
And in exchange, he tells me the things he leaves out of interviews. Like how he secretly searches his own name online every day and very occasionally reads fanfiction about himself. How he hates heights, and is afraid of the dark. How he knows exactly what he dislikes, but doesn’t always know what he wants.
“Is that why you’re planning to go along with the colleges your mother picked out for you?” I can’t help asking.
A pause. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Caz,” I say quietly, staring up at the ceiling and wondering how the ceiling looks from his hotel room. It’s probably fancier, taller, chandeliers glittering everywhere. “I was there when I wrote those college essays with you, remember? You couldn’t tell me asingle thingyou were looking forward to—I had to make it up for you. But when you talk about acting—you’re like a different person. You love it. And you’re good at it.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he protests. “My mother—”
“Seemed fairly reasonable. Maybe it’ll take some convincing, but if you really tried totalkto her . . .”
“But that’s the problem.” He swallows, and I imagine him tugging his hair, pacing the room in circles the way he did that day outside the parent-teacher interviews. “If this were just about discipline or making me miserable, I wouldn’t feel bad doing whatever I wanted, you know? Except she’s not like that. She’s just trying to look out for me, help secure a good, stable future—and sometimes . . .a lot of the time, I think she has a point.
“Because I have so many friends who wanted to be actors, but never landed a major role, or who worked their asses off and landed the role but completely failed to break out and—I mean, I love acting, but it’shardand unpredictable. And besides, how can I even be sure this is what I want to do for the rest of my life? I’ve only lived, like, a quarter of my life so far. What if I turn down an offer from a great college now only to realize in two years that I’m not interested in acting anymore? What then?”
He stops talking abruptly, his breathing louder than normal, as if he’s been running the whole time he was delivering his monologue.
Caz Song isn’t only good at hiding physical pain. He’s good at hiding the emotional stuff too. Just from looking at him, seeing the way he acts at school, I’d never guess he thought so much about the things he’s just said.
“Just consider it,” I tell him when his breathing has slowed. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he says reluctantly, after a beat. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, and Caz?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for keeping your promise.” I clear my throat, hating how awkward I sound. “From that night at your place. I know it’s hard for you to talk about all this, but I’m—I’m glad you did.”
“It’s no big deal,” he says, though I can tell it is. Then he pauses. In a voice so soft I barely hear it, he adds, “The same for you.”
My heart stutters. “What?”
“That thing about . . . being there for me. I want to be that for you too.”
