by Mike Jung
“It’s your fault. You and Mom.” My tone was strong enough to make Dad lean back from the table.
“Okay,” he said, frowning slightly. “I don’t understand, can you explain?”
“Explain what? You and Mom lied to me, like, over and over and over.”
“I know, honey,” Dad said with a wince. “I know you’re struggling with that, I just don’t understand what it has to do with Shelley. Did you …” His eyes opened a little wider. “… Did you tell her about it?”
I crossed my arms and let out a deep sigh.
“Yes, Dad. Mom already knows I told Shelley. She’s my best friend, you know.”
Was my best friend, anyway, and I dropped my slice of bacon onto my plate, tried not to start crying, and started crying anyway.
“Oh, Chloe,” Dad said. He got up and came around the table, but I shoved my chair back from the table, scrambled to my feet, and backed away from him. He stopped in his tracks.
“It’s YOUR FAULT!” I shouted, furiously pressing my knuckles against my eyes to try and stop crying. “She was only friends with me because I was Korean, and now I’m not and we’re not friends anymore!”
“Whoa, hold on,” Dad said. He held his hands straight out from his body, palms down. “I have a hard time believing Shelley feels that way.”
“How would you know? She’s not YOUR friend!”
Dad smiled.
“Honey, I’ve known you and Shelley for your entire lives. I was there when you first met each other in day care. I was there for your first playdate at Shelley’s house.”
I still had my hands up in a keep-off-the-Chloe gesture, so Dad looked behind him, pulled a chair out from the table, turned it around, and sat on it. He put his hands together like he was praying, and leaned forward.
“Did Shelley actually say those things?”
I slowly lowered my hands and thought about it. What exactly had Shelley said?
“…”
“I’m sorry, honey, I can’t hear you.”
“No,” I grumbled.
“Has she ever said those things?”
I thought about it some more.
“No.”
I looked at my feet, and my whole body kind of sagged as I stood there.
“I know how hard this is for you, Chloe, and none of it’s your fault. Okay? You haven’t done anything wrong, and you haven’t actually changed, right?”
“It feels like it.”
“You DIDN’T and you HAVEN’T,” Dad said, putting some extra oomph into it. “Think about it, honey. Why are you and Shelley best friends? Why did she pick you?”
“I told you, because I’m Korean. And probably also because nobody else will hang out with her.”
Dad stood up, put his hands on his hips, and put on his “Wut?” face.
“In preschool?? Do you really think Shelley had some kind of Asian fetish when she was three years old?”
It did sound kind of silly when he said it like that.
“Do you know why kids become best friends at three years old?”
“No,” I grumbled.
“Because they like playing with each other,” Dad said. “Which is actually not as simple as it sounds, because not every kid likes playing with every other kid. You and Shelley had a bond right from the start, and it only grew over time.”
“Yeah, but the Korean thing — ”
“Honey, Shelley isn’t best friends with you because she’s interested in your Korean ancestry. She’s interested in your Korean ancestry because you’re her best friend.”
“But she thinks I’m someone totally different from who I am!”
“No she doesn’t. No.”
“So then what, Dad, are you saying where we come from doesn’t have anything to do with who we are??”
Dad scrubbed his forehead with the heel of one palm.
“That’s not what I’m saying. Of course it’s part of who we are. But it’s not why you and Shelley are friends.”
“But …”
But what if you’re wrong?
“I don’t know what you girls said to each other the other night, but my guess is that Shelley feels as bad about this as you do. I know your mom and I have betrayed your trust, and I’m sorry. We have some work to do to fix that. But that’s got everything to do with us, and nothing to do with Shelley.”
“But I just … I wanted …”
I covered my face and sucked in a long breath through the crack between my hands.
“You wanted what?” Dad said, and his voice was super gentle, and I knew he loved me, and I was so, so sad.
“I liked being Korean,” I said. “It was like … I knew who I was, at least kind of. And now I don’t, and we don’t have any family, and we can’t ever visit the places you and Mom lived when you were kids, and … I don’t get to have any of that.”
Dad was silent for a minute, then walked over and slowly put his arms around me. I didn’t throw my arms around him in return or anything like that, but I didn’t stop him either.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he finally said. “It’s a huge loss, sweetie. I know it is. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“I was about your age when I got my first aquarium,” Dad said.
I looked up at him, startled.
“On Tau Ceti?”
“Yes. On Tau Ceti. There was a store I really liked near our home — I belonged to a club that met there every day after school. I met some of my best friends in that club.”
“I wish I could see it,” I said.
“I wish I could take you there,” Dad said. “And I wish you could meet my old friends.”
“Do you think about them a lot?”
“Every day.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
I snuffled, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and stepped away from him.
He looked at the clock on the wall, which made me look at the clock too, and I was shocked to see it was only five minutes until the first bell at school. I was never that late, and a wild impulse to play hooky and force Dad to tell me more stories jumped into my head for just a second. Then my academic ninja training reasserted itself.
“I’m late,” I said with a sniffle.
“Come on, I’ll drive — you can still make it on time,” Dad said.
Being driven to school wasn’t unprecedented, but it was unusual enough to feel weird, especially when we got there and nobody was hanging around outside. The bell rang as I was getting out of the car, and I instinctively bolted for the door, leaving the car door open and not saying bye to Dad. I did look back as I opened the front door of the school and went in, and saw Dad with his hands pressed to his head, the car still sitting at the curb.
There were still kids in the hallways, some of them hurrying like me, others just kind of moseying along like they weren’t in school at all. It was like watching a movie about the ocean where they show all the different kinds of creatures that come out at night instead of the day. I didn’t even recognize everyone. It was like seeing life on another planet, har de har har. I dashed to homeroom and made it through the door just as the second bell rang.
Everybody was staring at me like I was some kind of zoo animal — and hey, maybe I was. It was weird, since at least three other kids came in right after me, and I would have just stared everyone down like usual, except for some reason I couldn’t. So I put my head down and headed for my seat, moving on autopilot. Except when I got there, somebody was already sitting in it. Because I was looking down, at first I only saw the backpack on top of the desk. It took hearing Shelley’s voice for me to look up.
“Sorry, that seat’s taken.”
I looked up. The first thing I saw was Shelley’s face, looking very angry and very nervous at the same time. Then I looked at the person sitting at MY desk.
“Hi, Chloe.”
It was Lindsay Crisp. My best friend, the other smartest kid in school,
had replaced me with the dumbest kid in school.
“That’s my seat, Lindsay.”
“We cleared it with the teacher,” Shelley said in her mad-but-scared-but-trying-not-to-show-it voice.
“Sh-Shelley said you didn’t want to sit here anymore,” Lindsay said, looking at me and Shelley by turning her head back and forth like a hummingbird.
Ow, OW, why did Shelley do that?? What a liar!
“Oh she did, huh?” I said, not showing how badly it hurt.
“Yeah, I did.” Shelley wasn’t backing down.
“So what, you two are best friends or something now?”
“Um, I don’t — ” Lindsay said, but I cut her off.
“Fine, who cares. You’re right, I don’t want to sit here.”
“Fine,” Shelley said.
I walked past them both without a second look, and sat in Lindsay’s old seat, three seats behind Shelley. It felt wrong sitting there, not just because I wasn’t sitting with Shelley, but also because everything was farther away, the announcements sounded different, and I could hear stuff from the back of the room that I was able to ignore before.
The bell for first period rang, which was when I realized Shelley and I were in three other classes together. Did she want to sit separately in all of them? I decided I better get there first and defend my seat — if Shelley wanted to sit separately, SHE should change seats, not me!
It turned out Shelley thought the same thing, because when I elbowed my way through the crowds to get to physics she was sitting on the opposite side of the room, again next to Lindsay Crisp.
“Hey, Chloe,” Tom Wolcott said. He smiled a big, toothy, crocodile smile, and I thought about the rumors that he had a crush on me. It looked like they were true. I smiled back at Tom, not because I had a crush on him too, but because he was being nice to me, and who knew how much of that I could expect to get?
It didn’t even help that Mr. Goodyear was at the top of his game that day. He showed us how levers and fulcrums work by flipping a whole series of “gremlins” (the weird-looking stuffed monsters he made out of felt and cotton) around the room, putting the fulcrum at different places under the lever. Okay, it helped a little — it’s hard not to be entertained by Mr. Goodyear when he’s really on.
The gremlins really hit the fan when it was time for social studies, though.
“Why not?” Shelley said to Ms. Lee. The rest of the class was still filing into the room, but I was in my seat. Shelley was standing next to her seat, on the opposite side of it from me.
“Shelley, it’s much too late to change partners,” Ms. Lee said with a frown. “It wouldn’t be fair to force anyone else to disrupt the work they’ve already done together.”
She looked at me, and I looked to the side and shrugged.
“I can see something happened with you two, but we can’t discuss it right now.”
“Okay, well, I want to talk about it after class,” Shelley said.
“I’m afraid I can’t today, I have a parent meeting. But I think it might be a good idea to talk after school. In the meantime, I’m sorry you two are experiencing some challenges, but you need to work it out for yourselves today — changing partners just isn’t an option.”
Shelley huffed out a long breath and looked around the room, scanning and then stopping to look at someone. I struggled grimly not to look, but after a second I gave up and looked anyway. Lindsay held out her hands in an I-can’t-help-it gesture, then pointed at the seat next to her, where Allie Grossman was very deliberately not looking back at Shelley.
Shelley turned back around and stared hard at the chalkboard for a second, then dropped her backpack on her desk and sat down. Ms. Lee looked at her, then me, then Shelley again. She was still frowning as she started talking to the whole class, but dropped the frown after the first few words.
“Let’s get started, people. It’s a work day, and if you need my help just raise your hands. We’ve done a lot of work to establish your country profiles individually, so really the most important thing now is to really dig into the diplomatic relationship between your two countries and work — ”
Ms. Lee flicked a glance at me and Shelley again, her frown reappearing.
“ — together.”
Shelley and I spent the whole class working together, if you define “working together” as “working separately without any idea what the other person was working on.” That wasn’t completely true, actually —at one point Shelley knocked a book off the top of the stack she’d pulled out of her backpack, and I instinctively looked at it when it hit the floor. It had a picture of an old white guy and the French flag on the cover, so it was obviously a book about France.
I had a book about Korean political history open in front of me, but I was only pretending to take notes. What I actually did was scribble random questions to myself.
Does looking Korean but being from another galaxy mean I’m a big faker?
Should I keep telling people I’m Korean even though I’m not?
Who cares?
Et cetera.
Ms. Lee didn’t stop to help me or Shelley, which was just one more thing that made it obvious something was going on between us. At one point Ms. Lee went back to her desk, where I caught her looking at me with a crinkle in her forehead. She caught my eye and smiled, then got up when two girls behind us called out for help.
At the end of class I shot out of there like a crazed ferret, but once I was out in the hall I realized I didn’t want to go to the lunchroom, but I also didn’t want to pass Shelley going back in the direction of the library, so I kept going and went into the nearest bathroom.
I was just about to come out of my bathroom stall when I heard the bathroom door open again and at least two girls come in. I stopped and stayed in the stall, putting down the lid and sitting on the covered toilet so at least it would look occupied if someone, I don’t know, looked under the door or something.
One of the girls was Shelley.
“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” she said.
“I’m not worried,” said a voice I recognized as Lindsay Crisp’s. Oh great, now I had to listen to the new BFFs talk smack about me. Wonderful.
“I just don’t want you to be mad at me,” Lindsay said. “I mean, you’re not like Chloe that way, you know? She’s always mad about something.”
???
“No she’s not.”
“Well, she’s mad at you now, isn’t she? Did you guys have a fight or something?”
“No.”
Here’s the thing about being best friends with someone since you were babies: You know when they’re putting on a big show so nobody will know how upset they are. Shelley was definitely upset.
“Anyway, don’t worry about it,” Shelley said. “I understand.”
I almost sucked in a breath, but managed to clamp my hands over my mouth. Was Shelley being rejected by Lindsay? Lindsay Crisp? Lindsay dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers Crisp?? I felt an unexpected glow of relief, then a totally expected burst of guilt. Why did Lindsay Crisp always make me feel guilty??
“It’s just, you know, I have other friends,” Lindsay said. “I don’t mean it like YOU don’t have any friends …”
“It’s not a big deal,” Shelley said in her it’s-totally-a-big-deal voice, but of course how would Lindsay recognize that voice? She hadn’t spent almost every day with Shelley since preschool. She hadn’t slept over at Shelley’s house a thousand times. She wasn’t Shelley’s best friend.
I was Shelley’s best friend.
“Chloe seems … cool,” Lindsay said, sounding like a giant faker.
“She’s the best,” Shelley said, and aw man, I felt a little twinge, like my Popsicle of a heart was starting to thaw.
“Is it … hard hanging out with her?” Lindsay asked. Sigh. That didn’t sound like a promising question.
“Sometimes,” Shelley said.
“I’d worry about, I don’t know, offending her,” Lindsay said, getti
ng it right for once. “Like, do you have to bow to her parents and stuff like that?”
AAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH … and then Shelley stepped up.
“That’s stupid,” she said, and I heard Lindsay huff out a breath of air.
“Why is that stupid??” I could almost see the expression on Lindsay’s face — upside-down U of a mouth, eyebrows in an upside-down V, and a general sad panda kind of vibe.
“Because Chloe’s parents are like everyone else’s parents, that’s why. They’re just normal people.”
“But they’re, like, foreign and stuff, so I — ”
“What are you talking about? You think Chloe is foreign?”
I could hear in Lindsay’s voice that she was starting to get mad.
“She IS foreign, you know — ”
“Chloe’s not foreign, Lindsay. She was born in the exact same hospital you were born in, and she’s three months older than you, which means she’s lived in this country three months longer than you have. And it doesn’t matter, because she’d be my best friend even if she was from another planet or something.”
Good one, Shelley, I thought, trying to ignore the fast-growing lump in my throat.
“Is she your best friend?” It was Lindsay’s turn to put razor blades into her voice. “Because I thought you were trying to get ME to be your new best friend.”
Shelley was silent.
“If I’m so stupid, how come you’re the one who’s practically begging me to listen to music and work together and stuff? I mean, it was fun the first time, but it’s kind of creepy that you keep asking.”
Wow, so mean — who knew Lindsay Crisp had it in her? I waited for Shelley to arm her missiles and blow Lindsay out of the water, but she didn’t. The only sounds that came out of her were … what were those sounds?
Oh no. Shelley was crying.
“Are you crying?” Lindsay sounded alarmed. “Oh, Shelley, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry!”
She actually sounded like she meant it, which was probably the only reason why I didn’t wring her neck right then and there.
“I’m really sorry, Shelley, I didn’t mean … are you okay? Are you …”
