After another moment, he moved back toward the steering wheel, turned over the ignition, and without a word, we drove back to Houston.
That Monday at school, Harrison broke up with me. It was our third breakup, and this time, it stuck. No one sent love notes or flowers. I didn’t feel sad. I figured we’d always stay friends, and I continued to masturbate to my poster of Keanu Reeves. As during our other breakups, I still saw Harrison and his group at school events, and I realized he used to come to the football games in part to support me. At the halftime show, when from the podium I’d conducted the hundred-member band moving in choreographed steps across the field, I imagined his eyes on the back of my head and felt we could still be friends, as we were when he was my boyfriend—a boy who was my friend.
The bell rang signaling the end of AP English, taught by Mrs. Loring, who was only a few years older than her students. She liked to flirt with Harrison, her favorite student and editor of the yearbook, where she acted as faculty sponsor. It was spring. College applications were behind us, and across the senior class, a jadedness had set in about school and our teachers.
Emilia was gathering her books when she mentioned something to our friend Schuyler about Harrison and Nora.
“What about Harrison and Nora?” I asked. Schuyler, who was Nora’s best friend, scurried away.
“They’ve been going out,” Emilia said, turning squarely to face me.
I felt myself flush. Emilia, who always had a lot to say, didn’t utter a word. Finally, I asked how long.
“A month or so maybe.” She averted her eyes.
“How come none of you told me?”
“We didn’t want you to be hurt.” That’s when she told me about her lunch with Harrison at Wang Chung’s over the summer.
She smiled tenderly and walked out of the classroom. I wasn’t as good at math as Emilia, but I could figure it out, could count the weeks: Harrison had started going out with Nora immediately after our last breakup. I knew who he was, and that was all the confirmation I needed. As I made my way down the corridors of the high school, I mulled over Emilia’s lunch with Harrison in which they weighed my attributes against Nora’s, and the conspiracy my friends participated in, keeping the news hidden. A flood of past clues overwhelmed me: Nora sitting with his group of friends at lunch (I had thought she was there for Lawrence); Nora and Harrison in the parking lot after school; Nora, whose mother liked to say yes.
Suddenly, I became very wise. She is putting out, I’m sure, and Harrison is getting what he didn’t with me.
5.
BACK IN THE AUTUMN, SOMETHING I’d never experienced before and did not understand was happening inside me, and I stopped going to most of my classes.
I ran with the crowd who owned the school, not the crowd who skipped, but suddenly, I couldn’t bring myself to care. I returned home from school, where I might have been for an hour or two. At dinner, whatever went in my mouth was already dead, making me feel deader still. Arthur was on the couch or in his room, Umma flitted about, a blur, cooking or dealing with Sarah. Only Appa ate with me at the table. The characters of his Korean Journal seemed to run in watery streaks into the food below him, and I read the Hangul as through an ocean.
The laugh track on the episode of Friends penetrated the muffling fatigue, and I retreated to my bedroom. There, I closed the door, which I was not permitted to lock, and leaned tiredly against the frame. I shut my eyes, holding them for a count of one, two, three. At four, I opened them, and the room was still a mess of books, papers, and projects. I dropped, breathless, onto my bed. Please God, I entreated. I just want it to close, like a play at curtain, like the end of an opera where all the characters have died and Don Giovanni is sucked into the maw of hell and disappears. Eventually, I let myself lose consciousness, sleeping fitfully until one in the morning, when my alarm went off so I could get through the mountain of homework I needed to complete in order to maintain my class rank. I was nine of 324 students in the graduating class. I needed to stay in the Top Ten.
I had to leave the house at six forty-five in the morning for quiz bowl practice. Classes ended at three, followed by after-school activities until dinner. Occasionally, I made it to second or even third period, turned in my homework, powered down my brain, and spent the remainder of the class registering nothing. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I raised my hand to go to the restroom; once, I simply stood up in the middle of the teacher’s lecture, grabbed my bag, walked out, beelined it to my Jeep in the parking lot. Always, I drove to the Loews.
They had two movies going, but I chose Sense and Sensibility. The other movie was Jumanji. The story of a fantasy board game coming to life didn’t interest me in the least; ordinary life was complicated enough. If I left school early, if the morning had been too painful, I watched the 10:45 a.m. Jane Austen and the 1:30 p.m. after. I didn’t mind. There was something comforting in knowing what was coming, in watching Emma Thompson exercise too much sense, Kate Winslet too much sensibility, until the end when the sisters found moderation, and love.
It was like this until April, when one afternoon I received three letters in the mail—an acceptance to Princeton, an acceptance to Yale, and a rejection from Harvard. I’d already made my peace about Harvard, so I was glad about the others and felt, finally, some relief.
The next day, the seniors sauntered around school as if they were completely done with it. Mrs. Willis raised her eyebrows in unconcealed astonishment when I told her where I had been accepted. She didn’t think much of me because I skipped Calculus and didn’t do as well as Emilia or Harrison on exams.
The acceptances provided a slight bump for a day or two, but ultimately my dark internal weather held on. I was shaken I wasn’t more vindicated. Hadn’t college, and escape, been what I was working toward all this time? Yes, perhaps I had lost the social acceptance afforded by a golden-haired boyfriend and hadn’t gotten into Harvard, but I was going to Princeton—why weren’t things clicking into place? Why did I still want to die?
Because I felt betrayed by Emilia, Nora, and my friends, I reached out to Macy, whose life now revolved around track-and-field and her track-and-field boyfriend. My old friend was one of the only people who truly saw me, but I couldn’t even tell her everything: a few months before, I’d retrieved a prescription pad from Umma’s hospital jacket. I scribbled illegibly on the sheets and flashed them to the senior office administrator when I signed in late to school. “I forgot to get a doctor’s note, but here’s my prescription with the date on it.” If I received more than a certain number of unexcused absences, I couldn’t graduate and escape this confounding tangle that was Houston, that was this neighborhood, that was my family.
Umma and I fought harder during this time. When I was dating Harrison, the fights had to do with curfew. I came in around eleven after a football game, and I would have been at Chili’s with my band friends. Umma considered eating out a waste of money, and then she demanded to smell my breath. I had never had a sip of alcohol in my life. That she couldn’t see past teenage stereotypes to my real self was yet another betrayal. She proceeded to call me a slut and told me in Korea only prostitutes and sluts came home late. But I knew what I was doing and it was not being a slut with Harrison but rather eating an Awesome Blossom at Chili’s with Owen, who was going to the University of Chicago, and Timothy, who was going to MIT, and Delilah, who was going to Duke, and the Awesome Blossom I paid for with my tutoring money.
Umma felt betrayed, too. For her, the betrayal was the loss of my regular disposition—the fire. The fire I had received from her, and now it was all but extinguished. After a lifetime of requiring only three or four hours of sleep before being bright, awake, and present—all of a sudden, at dinner, I was falling into my soup. Umma threw up her hands saying, “This must be what it’s like to be a teenager!” but she didn’t really believe it. When she finally asked, “Do you need to go see a counselor?”—I was both surprised and relieved.
I visited the counselor twice. I did not know it wasn’t normal for my mother to be present in the sessions, but the counselor was a man in his forties—she’d never let me sit alone in a closed room with any male besides my father. I figured I would talk about Harvard, or even Harrison, but neither came up. Instead, as Umma sat across from me, bouncing my sister on her knee, I screamed at her, condemning her for her expectations of me, for having given birth to me but not knowing who I was. So this is what it was always about, I discerned, astounded at this violent swell of emotions. I turned to the counselor and in a desperate bid to have this stranger validate the supreme existential matter of my life, I asked him, “Don’t I deserve a chance at being happy?” But Umma cut in before he could say anything, declaring, “Happiness is what you want when you can’t get anything real.”
At that, I fell back on the couch. Delivered in the form of an aphorism, what Umma said sounded true, but was she right? Maybe Harvard would have made me happy, but was human happiness so fragile? I looked at her. Her lips were set tight in victory. The victoriousness I wanted to slap off her face, her determination I wanted to shake. Would we never understand each other? In that moment, there was no larger unfairness than living inside my family, set up for me to avoid missteps because my parents had made so many themselves. Life would not be for play or self-fulfillment; it would not be for wonder and curiosity, for all that space had already been taken up by my father. And there was my mother now, the mother of the Poverty Math, steering me toward a life that was a guarantee. Would she never see beyond all the things I lost and won? She swiveled her head on her neck, flashed her eyes. But I, too, was alive with my convictions. It was the only fire I had felt for a long time.
The HMO paid for six counseling sessions, but we only went twice, and both times it was exactly the same. No one mentioned I might be depressed.
6.
IN MAY, THE SOCIAL FLURRY ramped up again and because I was president of several clubs at school, I was pulled in. It never occurred to me to step down from my leadership positions. Such was the recourse of impeached presidents, disgraced politicians, underperforming CEOs—not teenagers. Assemblies for National Merit Semifinalists, club pictures for the yearbook, end-of-year parties, senior send-offs, dances, and prom—I attended them all, but I felt some very important part of me had been engulfed.
One afternoon in the final weeks of school, the yearbook committee seniors came into AP Bio and passed out the Superlatives sheets. Over the years I’d seen the Superlatives supplements published with the yearbooks. “Most Popular” and “Best-Looking” were always the homecoming king and queen, traditionally also the quarterback and head cheerleader. “Most Likely to Be President” was usually someone in Model UN, not too dorky but still cool enough to be on people’s radar.
Now it was my class’s turn. I put my head down. In the background, guys punched each other, making jokes. The teacher told them to shut up. I gripped my pencil. I would rather die by firing squad than write in Grace Cho for “Smartest Girl.” That’s whom most of the senior class would write. Grace was the Other Korean Girl in the senior class. We played the same instruments, and her parents had gone to Seoul National like my mother. Her own brother had been voted “Smartest Boy” three years ago before his ascension to Harvard.
Mr. and Mrs. Cho were also richer than my parents. Whenever I visited Grace’s sprawling house in a more exclusive subdivision, her mother refused to lay eyes on me and instead fussed over Emilia or Nora. When Umma came to pick me up, Mrs. Cho smiled and did not invite her in, a cardinal sin in Korean culture. Mrs. Cho thought I was the competition, and she wasn’t going to make it easy for me. It was to her credit my mother never did the same to Grace; because Mrs. Cho was so obviously terrible to me, mine was extra nice to Grace whenever she came around. She knew the daughter wasn’t the mother. Besides, this was how Umma showed that while she might not have as much money as Mrs. Cho, she had more class. By the time senior year rolled around, Grace and I were in all the same classes, only she was set to be valedictorian. When a group of us was called into the senior counselor’s office at the beginning of the year, Mrs. Jerrigan had cupped my hand and intoned, “Congratulations on your immense achievement.” I knew immediately what mistake she’d made, and replied icily I wasn’t Grace Cho but the other Korean girl. Grace was number one, and I was number nine.
I looked down at the Superlatives sheet and at the last second wrote in myself for “Smartest Girl.”
I happened to be at school the week before graduation when the seniors convened on the hardtop outside the cafeteria. From a row of mics, Mrs. Loring, the yearbook sponsor, called up Ryan Smiling as the first Superlatives were announced.
“No surprise there,” Macy said as I joined her at a table. Ryan had just won “Best-Looking Boy.”
As expected, the blond homecoming queen and head cheerleader was voted “Best-Looking Girl.” Emilia, who had aspirations of being a lawyer, was pronounced “Most Likely to Be President.” As names were called out, a dread bloomed in my body. I tried to dismiss it, as there was no way I would be announced “Smartest Girl.” After all, the entire senior class had voted. Year after year, the valedictorian was always the “Smartest Girl” or “Smartest Boy.” Lawrence Gimball was announced “Smartest Boy,” and then Grace Cho stood up for “Smartest Girl.”
There was a pause before the title of “Thinks He’s Smartest” went to Matthew Cusack, who did not have the same social skills as Lawrence, who was well-liked and headed for Harvard. Matthew interrupted conversations with far-fetched hypotheticals or abstruse facts, but he was also the reason our quiz bowl team would win the national championship later that summer. Matthew sat down, holding up his baggy jeans by the waist.
“Now for ‘Thinks She’s Smartest,’ ” Mrs. Loring announced. A moment later, I heard her say my name. As if in a dream, I watched myself stand and float toward the mics, saw Mrs. Loring pat me on the back and smile as she handed me a Memorial High School T-shirt with a mustang on the front pocket. I observed myself taking it, as if I had just won a prestigious award.
When I woke up to what happened, I was sitting back at the picnic table, the ceremony was over, and everyone was chatting in their cliques. Macy said something to me, which I could not register; then, she was gone. I gazed across the way. Grace Cho wore her mustang T-shirt and was laughing with Emilia. Lawrence Gimball was in the midst of his signature move, which he had done when he’d gotten into Harvard early: shaking his arms above his head like Rocky Balboa.
I grabbed my shirt. A classmate from band appeared in front of me and tried to say something, but I waved him away. On the way to the parking lot, I stuffed the T-shirt into a trash can. I ran the rest of the way to my car, where I slammed my head into the steering wheel over and over. I wanted to hurt myself any way I knew how. I clapped my chest, inside of which hung my beating heart, and wished that it would stop. I had grown up with these people, had tried to be their friend, had wanted to be something I could endorse to myself and to this small world who knew me, and in the end that world thought I was a fraud.
It was after eleven. I didn’t think of going to see Sense and Sensibility. Instead, I drove to the hospital like an insane person. I was president of the junior volunteers there, a powerful Memorial charity, but hadn’t done my shifts with consistency in months because I could not drag myself to the hospital. The director now refused to speak to me when I did show myself.
Umma was the charge nurse on a station close to the hospital entrance, but I couldn’t keep the tears in. Making my way toward the station, I sobbed, holding on to the handrails of the hallway. I ignored the onlookers who regarded me with either alarm or sympathy. They thought someone had died and that was why I was upset. But someone had died. I wanted to die. I had worked all my life to be the best in that sliver of life in Memorial where everyone was rich and white and we were not, and my identity had been entirely tied to my intelligence. My idea of myself had been set ablaze.
Umma was speaking with another nurse when she saw me. I imagine I was hysterical. She didn’t understand what was going on at first. In fact, my mother did not understand many things. Like when we first moved to the neighborhood from Sugar Land, the girls throwing elaborate cooking parties in private dining rooms in restaurants, or fashion shows with professional makeup artists, or slumber parties at lake houses—she hadn’t understood any of that. When I’d been invited to a kidnapping party in fourth grade, she’d woken me up at five in the morning and told me to wash my face and put on nice clothes because friends would be picking me up for breakfast. She didn’t understand the whole point of a kidnapping party was the joy of pouncing on your sleeping friend in her bed before whisking her off in a stretch limousine to eat pancakes at Le Peep in pajamas.
But this time, Umma would have to understand. She understood that someone had hurt me. Dropping everything, she walked me into a room. A bed awaited a sick person. Someone died in this room, I intuited. I tried once again to explain that Grace Cho won “Smartest Girl” and I was voted “Thinks She’s Smartest.”
“What’s wrong with that? You do think you’re the smartest because you are the smartest.”
“I’m not the smartest! I didn’t win that title. If I had won that, too, then maybe that would be true.”
She shook her head. “I know Grace. She is not smart. You are smart.”
“Stop telling me that! No one but you thinks that!” I insisted. But that is what I needed to hear. Even though she didn’t understand me—thought I drank alcohol or did sluttish things with boys—she knew who I was. Didn’t she?
She normally didn’t let us touch her at home until she was out of her hospital clothes, but there, in the empty room where someone had died, my mother held me and I sobbed hard into her shoulder. I smelled the faint scent of the dryer sheet on her nursing jacket, and felt everything I had known to be true to be false.
When I was calmer, Umma walked me out of the hospital and into the parking lot slowly, as if I were an invalid. An old man shuffled down the hall, tubes trailing from his translucent arm to an IV pole. He has reason to sob, I narrated to myself. He is dying. No one has died here. NO ONE HAS DIED HERE, I screamed inside.
