Between Here and Forever

“I think you’re a person,” I say, stung. “I just …” I swal ow, because I can’t say You’re beautiful and I’m afraid of you. “I’m sorry I’m not drooling al over you like everyone else must, but I guess I can fix that. How’s this?” I arrange my face into a slack-jawed look of awe (sadly, it comes quite easily) and look at him.

“I can’t help how I look,” he says, like he’s got horns growing out of his head or something.

This is making me nervous. He’s making me nervous. “Okay, I—I think you’re perfect for Tess, and yeah, it’s because of how you look. Or it was, before I realized that you’re nice too. But you—I mean, you know what you look like. You’ve seen a mirror before and everything after al , right?”

“Okay,” he says, shrugging.

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, and then hesitates for a moment. “Are your—are your parents like you too? Do they come visit every day?”

“Yeah,” I say, and finish my soda, pushing the can’s sides in. “They pretty much live here.”

“I haven’t seen my parents since last year,” he says.

“Oh, so you board at Saint Andrew’s?”

“No,” he says. “I live here, in Milford. I just—I haven’t seen them since … it’l be a year in two weeks and one day. They both travel a lot, and thought I should … they thought sending me to school here would be good.”

“Is it?”

He shrugs. “It’s different. Milford is very …”

“Scenic?”

“Smal ,” he says. “Milford feels smal to me.”

I bet he’s from L.A. or something. “Where did you live before?”

“Connecticut.”

Not what I expected. But then, this whole conversation has been like that, hasn’t it? I toss my soda into the trash can near us. “You miss it?”

“Not real y,” he says. “But at least there people didn’t—I get tired of explaining what I am to people here.”

“Wel , even in Milford, there aren’t many people as—I mean, you’re like good-looking times a hundred,” I say. “When Tess wakes up, she can help you deal with it.”

He stares at me.

“I mean the fact that I’m not white,” he says. “I get tired of explaining that.”

“Oh. I hadn’t—I mean, I didn’t think …”

“You think people here don’t care?” Eli says. “They care. Everyone’s always, ‘Oh, it’s so great that Saint Andrew’s embraces diversity,’ which means, ‘Oh my God, there’s a non-white boy attending, test scores might slip, and my darling Winthrop might not get into Yale!’”

I laugh because he’s right, that is how people over here talk, and when he looks at me, I say, “No, it’s not—it’s just—that is how they talk. Once in a while the school sends their choir over to sing at the town retirement home, and the guys act like walking through town is so daring. Like, ‘Look at me! I’m in a place where people don’t have numbers after their names!’ I just never thought—I mean, I wouldn’t think you—”

“I know what you think about me,” he says, and for the first time, there’s something sharp in his voice.

I swal ow, hard, and wonder why there’s such a look of confusion and longing in his eyes. Must be about how things are for him here. I can understand that, and take a deep breath. “It real y sucks that people are assholes to you. How come you don’t tel your parents?”

“My dad grew up here,” he says. “So it’s not like he didn’t know what would happen to me.”

“Wait, your dad grew up in Milford? Do you have relatives here? Wait, of course you do. Why don’t they tel al the assholes to—?”

“It’s … complicated,” he says. “Have you ever known someone who lived in their own little world?”

“Like, an imaginary one?”

“No, just like—I don’t know. The past, basical y.”

I shake my head.

“Wel , that’s how my family is. They al want things to be like they used to be.”

“I guess I do get that,” I say slowly. “I want Tess to wake up because—I mean, I want her to wake up just because, but I also—it’s like everyone’s life is frozen because Tess is that way.”

“You don’t like the word ‘coma,’ do you?” he says.

“I know she’s in a coma, I know what the doctor says. But you don’t—‘coma’ is this word without hope, this word that means gone, and Tess isn’t gone.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yeah, you did.”

He pauses for a moment. “Here’s the thing. I … I’m half Japanese, part black—and this is what counts in Milford—part white,” he says quietly.