“If you feel anything even the least bit weird toward Lucia, tell me right now because I’m going to kill you if you hurt her in any way,” Lucia’s mother said.
Bobby must have taken her seriously because he didn’t even laugh. “Shit, Nat, you know there’s nothing like that. I’m not into little girls. I know, I know, you gotta worry. You’re a mother with a daughter. That’s what she is to me too, like a daughter.”
“I mean it,” Lucia’s mother said. “Don’t fuck with me.”
Now Bobby did laugh. “You are the sexiest mother cat in the whole fucking world,” he said. And then silence, which meant—gross—kissing between them.
Later, Lucia told me, her mother took her out to Friendly’s for a banana split and apologized for not having told her about Bobby’s moving in beforehand. She said she had been selfishand blind. She thought that just because she felt so close to Bobby and so close to Lucia, it meant they felt close to each other. But that made no sense. Of course they didn’t feel comfortable with each other yet. They didn’t know each other. This initial awkwardness was all normal and to be expected. When Bobby looked at her, it was because he was trying to get to know her. He wanted them to spend more time together as a family. He suggested a weekend in Hampton Beach.
It was my first weekend without Lucia in a long time. My mother felt bad for me and watched The Love Boat and Fantasy Island with me, though she asked so many questions I wished I’d watched them alone. I read A Separate Peace and felt melancholy all weekend.
When Lucia returned, she said she’d had a good time and they did all seem closer. She said they were one of the only few people there because it was the off season and cold, but Bobby had rented a house with a fireplace and they’d kept that going the whole time and it was warm and cozy. They took walks along the water and looked for shells and jumped when they felt how cold the water was. Her mother bought her a new Lite-Brite and at night she and Bobby spent hours poking the tiny jewel-colored pegs through sheets of paper, which turned into boats and rockets and gardens of flowers. Her mother looked really happy, Lucia told me.
I always saw less of Lucia once school started. We went to different schools and I always seemed to have more homework than she did. Also, eighth grade was my last year at St. John’s. I wanted to win as many awards as I could at graduation, both for the money and to beat my nemesis. This girl and I vied for top spot every year. I started biting my nails because she did.
My social life picked up too. Some of the kids at school started having parties and I got invited to some. It was so different being in their homes. Everything was organized and in place. These homes had things like foyer tables and dining room buffets. At Hillside Apartments people were too transientto have furniture with specific functions. Instead, every piece had multiple jobs—for example, chairs were side tables, jars were vases, and magazines were coasters.
The kids were different too. Even with the most confident kids at Hillside, including Russell, you could sense an insecurity there, an internal bruise that kept them vulnerable. They were damaged—they came from broken homes, their fathers abusive or uninterested, mothers who were young and uneducated, burdened with kids they couldn’t take care of. Men came and went with the seasons.
The confidence my school friends had, especially the popular ones, was unshakeable. They lived in a cocoon created by their families and church, believing they were suns around which everything turned. They didn’t realize yet that there were bigger suns and other galaxies. They didn’t know how small and insignificant they really were, and not just them, but the whole of the human race.
What we did at the parties depended on whether boys were there. If they were there, then we’d watch movies like Caddyshack and Fletch, and for the next few weeks, the boys would go around quoting parts of the movie to each other. If it was just girls, we’d put makeup on each other, play music, dance like maniacs, and then talk about who liked whom. I hated that part because nobody ever liked me. I didn’t know if it had to do with being Korean or just being me. I felt I looked okay. I wasn’t a knockout, but I wasn’t a dog either.
I missed Lucia then because we didn’t talk about things like that. She never cared about how she looked or pined for anybody or wondered what it would be like to be married and have babies. We never talked about the future. Instead, at night, with the lights out, we’d watch the headlights from passing cars travel around the room and imagine we were Laura and her sister, Mary, out among the snow and trees, collecting buckets of maple sap to turn into candy.
Halloween arrived, my favorite holiday. I would have loved Christmas if my parents understood it more. We did put up a tree each year, but it was small and fake and I knew what all the presents under it already were because I had been the one to pick them out. Each year, a couple of weeks before Christmas, my parents took me to the mall and let me choose my own gifts. Then my mother wrapped them up, slapped bows on them, and put them under the tree. “See?” she’d say. “So much better this way. You get exactly what you want. Exactly!”
“But there’s no surprise,” I’d say glumly.
“Surprise? Surprise no good. Might be a bad surprise, you never know.”
I wanted to complain but didn’t because my parents had
