This Time It’s Real

And now comes the real damage control.

After I get home, I write out a quick email to Sarah telling her that I have a plan for my second piece. It’ll be different from my personal essay, I explain, and much longer in length, but I’m ready to pour my whole heart into it.

All of this is true.

There’s an idea that’s been brewing in the back of my mind ever since I entered the cleaning closet with Caz, and it’s risky and absolutely terrifying, but I’m learning that most valuable things are.

Around midnight, Sarah sends me a reply.

I look forward to reading it.

Once I have the green light, I get to work right away. I open up a blank Word document and title it “THIS_TIME_IT’S_REAL.docx.” Then I start from the very beginning. The actual beginning, including—

The English assignment I didn’t want to do. The parent-teacher interviews. Stumbling across Caz out in the corridor. Every awkward, heart-pounding, embarrassing detail.

It’s a confession and an apology and a love story all wrapped in one, and the more I write the more I realize that I was wrong before. Writing isn’t a form of lying—not the good kind anyway, the kind that makes you feel something.

Writing is a means of telling the truth. Both the beautiful and the ugly.

It also occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, I meant half the things I wrote in my original essay. Maybe there is some small, weak part of me that wants to be wanted, to hold hands with someone beautiful in the blue-dark, to breathe and hear its echo, to walk through the alleys of Beijing with another shadow falling naturally beside mine.

No, not weak. This is what I need to get into my head. Hope is not weakness. It’s oxygen, a crack in the window, the pale slash of moonlight across a dusty room.

Maybe I should start learning to invite it in.

•    •    •

Between my writing sessions, I paint my bedroom walls blue.

Emily and Ba come in to help. We blast music from my laptop and wear old raincoats fished from boxes and cover the floor with last month’s newspapers and we paint and paint and paint. Emily loves this task more than anyone. Her brush flies everywhere over the white canvas, splattering droplets of color onto her rosy cheeks and bare feet, so her toes look like they might be an alien’s. We know Ma is going to scold her for making a mess when she sees, but Ba just laughs. There are specks of paint in his hair too. In the creases of his skin when he smiles.

I smile back at him, grateful for everything.

We finish painting less than an hour before lunch, and we all stop to admire our work. I’ve chosen a bright, cheerful shade of blue, as blue as the spring sky outside my window. As blue as fresh cornflowers. And when the sun hits the room at the right angle, lighting up everything from within, the walls look almost turquoise, the same shade as the shallowest ends of the ocean, or a cliffside pool.

I want to wake up every day and look around my bedroom and feel what I feel now: Happy. Hopeful.

After the paint has dried, I hang up the string of fairy lights I bought on Taobao and carefully arrange a series of photos onto the wall beside my bed.

In the first few photos, I’m with Zoe. Both of us are laughing so hard our faces look close to distorted, hands clutching our sides.

There are more photos: of the frozen-over compound lake in winter; my family crowded together at the seafood restaurant, chopsticks in hands; the Westbridge school buildings at sunset, the sky blushing pink over the courtyard. Of me and Caz that day in Chaoyang Park, my lips touching his cheek, his eyes wide with faint surprise.

I stare at the photos on the wall and lie back down on my soft covers, and this strange, tender feeling in my chest—it feels a lot like home.

•    •    •

I’m sitting on the rooftop again, but this time, I’m not alone.

“Hey,” Caz says, hopping onto the swings beside me, a folder in his hand. He’s grinning, and I can’t tell if something incredible has happened or if he’s just glad to be here. I mean, that’s definitely why I’m grinning like an idiot. It’s weird how everything feels new and familiar at once, the future stretching ahead of us both like a gleaming, open road. New, because I’m not afraid to open up to him anymore, and maybe, eventually, other people too; I’ve already made plans to go shopping at Indigo with Savannah and have lunch the next day with all of Caz’s friends.

And familiar, because it’s him.

“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at what he’s holding.

“A college application.”

“I thought I already helped you write all of them,” I say, confused.

“This is different.” He drums two fingers over the folder, a small, nervous habit of his that few others seem to know, then holds it out for me to read. “This one—this is for the Beijing Film Academy.”

It takes a moment for the name to register. Then my eyes widen. “Caz. Wait, you mean—”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said,” he explains as I open the folder, flipping carefully through the pages inside. They’ve already been filled out in his messy handwriting. Warmth rushes through my chest. I know better than anyone how hard it is to share your writing with others, how vulnerable it leaves you.

“And I still want a college education,” he continues. “I’m sure of that, but I guess … it can’t hurt to study something I’m actually interested in, can it? A bunch of famous actors have graduated from here too.”

“Oh my god. Caz. That’s amazing.”

He shrugs and rubs a hand over the back of his neck like it’s no big deal, but he’s so clearly trying not to smile. “I might need your help with it, though. You don’t have to write anything—just read over it, tell me what you think, if it’s not too inconvenient—”

“Of course I’ll help,” I say. I almost start to justify this with a clause from our arrangement, or a complete lie about how I enjoy editing people’s college applications anyway. Then I remember that we don’t have to pretend anymore, we can both just be ourselves, and it’s relief and sharp delight all at once, the very best feeling in the world. “Caz, I’d love to be inconvenienced by you. I wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced by you for the rest of my life.”

“Thank you.” He sounds almost shy. “I seriously owe you—”

I hold up a hand before he can say any more. “Okay, stop being so polite. It’s scaring me.”

He scoffs. “What, you’d prefer if I never thanked you for anything?”

“See?” I point a finger at him; he makes a half-hearted attempt to bat it aside. “That attitude right there? That’s much better.”

“You’re so weird sometimes,” he says, and it somehow sounds more affectionate than I love you. He kicks the swing back, and my stomach dips pleasantly with the motion. “Anyway, what about you? How’s the writing?”

“I’m about two-thirds done. But, like, I have no idea how people will respond to it.”

And that’s the thing. That’s always the thing: It might not go well. It might go terribly. I might wake up one day having given my heart to the world, revealed all those vulnerable and embarrassing parts of me, spelled out my innermost thoughts, and discover that no one likes them. Or worse, that no one cares in the first place.

It’s the same with Caz. There’s still every chance that what we have won’t last the year, or even the season. Maybe we’ll graduate and end up on opposite ends of the world and slowly drift apart. Maybe he’ll change irrevocably, shedding the self that once wanted me and discarding it like an old winter coat. Maybe I will.

But certain joys, I’m discovering, are worth the potential pain.

“Are you happy?” I ask Caz, tilting my head to properly look at him, to study the familiar curve of his jaw, the deep dimples in his cheeks when he smiles and pulls me closer. The city rises up behind him, and if someone were to assign me an essay about home again, I know exactly what I’d write.

“I am,” he says softly. “Are you?”

I breathe in the sweet scent of magnolias from the gardens, feel the spring air on my skin, the scratch of his jacket against my neck. His presence beside me, warm. Whole. My heart threatens to overflow.

“I’m so unbelievably happy right now,” I tell him.

And I mean every word.