What We All Long For

the girl in Remedios’s painting. The wraithlike face, the high cheekbones, the reddish hair, kinked in Carla’s case not by electricity but by her father’s genealogy; and the dark hues of her skin put there also by him. But the surprise on her face, the startled, knowing look, was another alchemy altogether her own. Tuyen rightly saw that Carla inhabited a world of fantasy, of distance, of dreams. Her bicycle, like the wheeled apparatuses of Remedios’s inventions, extending from her bones as she pedalled her way around the city, her winter sun–yellowed jacket and the courier’s knapsack on her back ballooning out like a sail. And the city’s smogged air around her seemed painted in decalcomania. All that was why Tuyen was attracted to Carla. The hidden energy, the little shocks secreted in inconspicuous places. The times she came upon Carla in her sparsely appointed apartment next door, standing still as if in the middle of a conversation with unseen people, she fell silent watching. If she were to paint Carla, and she had tried, it would be to copy every painting of Varo’s.

In every one of Tuyen’s installations—she’d had six now, and had a growing reputation in the avant-garde scene—there was the figure or some aspect of Carla. Sometimes her eyes with their luxuriant lashes, sometimes her mouth in that rich sombre pout. And in each installation her hand on Carla’s figure had grown more erotic, painting the escarpment of Carla’s cheek or her ankle or her back like a lover.

Tuyen had been drawn to her since the first day of high school. They were both intense, bright girls who kept quiet in class but always had a quirky yet correct answer when asked a question. As when Carla blurted out in class that To Kill a Mockingbird was maudlin and embarrassing and why did people need to feel pity in order to act right. Or when Tuyen in a small voice from the back of the history class, during what she thought was a tedious intonement by the teacher about Normandy, said that she was sick of the Second World War and it wasn’t the world anyway, it was Europe, and asked what had happened in the rest of the world, did anybody else die? Was anybody else heroic?

Their friendship escalated and expanded to include Oku, a studious guy, when he told the phys. ed. teacher, Mr. Gordon, to eat shit when he invited him to run track. He was suspended for a week because he didn’t apologize, and as a matter of principle, Tuyen and Carla, and even Jackie, who was different and odd all on her own, decided to take the week off with him. It was a wonderful week. They played video games at Jackie’s house, and Jackie’s mother taught them how to play euchre. They ate pizza at Joe’s on College, they got high on one tiny toke and giggled at everything and everyone they saw. That was grade eleven. Now that friendship of opposition to the state of things, and their common oddness, held all of them together.

They shared everything: money, clothes, food, ideas. Everything except family details. There was an assumption among them that their families were boring and uninteresting and a general pain, and best kept hidden, and that they couldn’t wait for the end of high school to leave home. Only once in a while did they sigh in resignation at some ridiculous request from their families to fit in and stop making trouble.

“Yes, Ma. I’ll get a blonde wig and fit in all right!” Tuyen once yelled at her mother. At which her mother looked wounded and told her to stop making jokes and try harder.

They had an unspoken collaboration on distancing themselves as far as possible from the unreasonableness, the ignorance, the secrets, and the madness of their parents. They carried around an air of harassment or impatience about matters at home. “Anyways!” was their signal for dismissing whatever had happened in the hours between going home and coming back to school.

Loners before they met, they were all skimming across high school, all bored with the adolescent prejudices of classrooms. They couldn’t wait to get out of school, where they had very early realized, as early as grade three, that nothing there was about them. Their parents didn’t understand anything. They abandoned them to the rough public terrain that they themselves couldn’t handle but out of which they expected their children to emerge with good grades and well adjusted. So they settled in as mainly spectators to the white kids in the class.

Tuyen noticed the scythe-like, limber, sharp blade of Carla’s body, her strange whisper of a voice, and fell in love immediately. Carla would dream off in class—engrossed in a long-ago moment when she had heard a chair falling—Tuyen would nudge her when the teacher spoke to her. Because Tuyen saw a similarity. At home, she herself was caught by a kind of lapping shame. This is what drew them together. They each had the hip quietness of having seen; the feeling of living in two dimensions, the look of being on the brink, at the doorway listening for everything.

They all, Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie, felt as if they inhabited two countries—their parents’ and their own—when they sat dutifully at their kitchen tables being regaled with how life used to be “back home,” and when they listened to inspired descriptions of other houses, other landscapes, other skies, other trees, they were bored. They thought that their parents had scales on their eyes. Sometimes they wanted to shout at them, “Well, you’re not there!” But if any of them had the temerity to say this, they would be met by a slap to the face or a crestfallen look, and an awful, disappointed silence in the kitchen. Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents. Breaking their doorways, they left the