Page 83 of This Time It's Real
“How . . . how did you know?”
“You’re my daughter” is all she says, like that’s explanation enough. Maybe it is.
“I’m sorry.” I rub my eyes, still sniffling. “Are you mad at me?”
“I suppose I should be,” she says slowly, tucking my hair behind one ear. Then she grabs a tissue from the kitchen counter and wipes my face dry, and it’s such a natural, motherly thing to do that I almost burst into tears again. “But no, I’m not.”
We stay like that in silence for a while, her arm warm around my shoulders, bits of wet tissue stuck to my cheek. And it’s nice. It’s peaceful. I still feel like the apocalypse is happening, but I’m grateful that there’s shelter here.
“I just—I don’t know what to do,” I croak out at last. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“That’s okay,” she says.
“No. No, it’s not. No one likes me and I keepruining every- thingand—” I stop short before my voice can crack.
Ma studies me for a moment, then she moves to the couch and sits me down beside her, her mannerisms suddenly businesslike, serious. “Do you know,” she begins, folding one leg over the other, “the first time I announced that we were moving all the way across the world, to a country where you couldn’t even speak the language, I expected you to throw a tantrum. Smash something, or at least slam a door. You were only a child, after all; it would’ve been understandable. But you know what you did?”
I sense that this is more of a rhetorical question, but I shake my head anyway.
“You simply nodded, with complete calm, and asked me if you could bring your favorite sweatshirt. At first I thought you were maybe too young to understand the—thesignificanceof a move like that, but then I realized that you understood it very well, and that you cared deeply. More than any of us. You just didn’t want to cause any trouble for me or your father.
“You hold everything in here, Ai-Ai,” she says sternly, pointing to her own heart. “For better or worse. But not everyone is going to guess at what you’re thinking like I do. No one is going to know how you feel if you don’t tell them. And until you do—you can never really know what’s going to happen.”
I don’t go to sleep after that. Ican’t.Ma’s words keep clattering around my brain, until the noise gets so loud I find myself reaching for my phone. Opening it up to my last conversation with Zoe.
My fingers hover over the keys. My pulse speeds.
This whole reaching-out-to-the-people-you-care-about thing feels as counterintuitive and masochistic as sticking my hand into an open flame.
But this isZoe. The girl who suffered through Ms. Betty’s biology lectures and pop quizzes with me; who once lent me her jacket to cover up an embarrassing food stain even though the weather was freezing; who always cheered the loudest when I did the smallest things, like hit the volleyball over the net in PE class. The girl who threw me a surprise farewell party at the end of ninth grade before I left LA and listened patiently to my pointless rants and understood my dry humor and irrational fears when no one else did.
If I can tell anyone how I really feel, it should be her.
So I hug my knees close to my chest, draw in a shaky breath, and type out:
hello! i just wanted to say that i really miss you and
And what? Where do I go from there? Besides, who starts a spill-your-heart-out message with ahelloand an exclamation point? She’s going to think I’m someone from customer service. She’s going to think my phone was hacked, or I’ve lost the ability to text like a normal teenager.
No.
I delete the entire message and start an email.
Hey, it’s me.
I know we’ve both been kind of distant lately so I guess I just wanted to reach out. Give you an update on my life.
These days I’ve been listening to that playlist we made together in eighth grade, and it got me thinking about all those car rides back to your house when we played our music so loud your dad would pretend to get mad at us, even though he was always smiling. And also that day after Carrot dumped you (and since we’re being totally honest here, I never liked him anyway—he always wore his muddy shoes inside your house, and he absolutely does NOT look like a young Keanu Reeves), when we had our school trip to the beach and you were chucking rocks into the waves as if the sea had personally offended you while I went through every post-breakup cliché I knew, and the water was the same flat gray shade as the sky, and everything was both horrible and wonderful because afterward we shared a packet of salt-and-vinegar chips and added like twenty depressing songs to our playlist. Then I said something that made you laugh for the first time that day and soon we were both laughing at nothing until our stomachs hurt. We did that a lot, actually. Sometimes I felt like we could turn anything into an inside joke.
And so I guess the point of my nostalgic rambling is that I miss you. Obviously. And I realize that it’s hard for us to make new memories like the old ones when we’re not even in the same country, and so many friendships drift apart after one of them moves schools/ cities/ gets a job etc. But . . .
I figured it’d be better to just tell you all this, instead of writing more sad, dramatic monologues in my head. And I figured there might also be a (small) chance that you’ve been listening to the songs on our old playlist too. Or at least thinking about it.
Besides, even if this does happen to be the last message I ever send you, I’d much rather we leave it on a good note. Though of course, I’m hoping we don’t have to leave things on any note at all.
Just shoot me a message if you want to talk. Or give me a call. Anything. You know how to find me.
Hope is such a terrible thing.
