THEN
On the nights when Seth wasn’t out with his friends, he called me, on FaceTime so he could see me, even if we’d already spent the whole afternoon together. I got the impression Seth didn’t have much homework or student activities to keep him busy. He also didn’t seem to sleep all that much either. Luckily, Mai and my bedrooms were upstairs, so my parents, for the most part, couldn’t monitor what we were up to.
I was laid out on my bed with pillows propped behind my head when Seth asked me if I was out at school.
“No, I’m not out to anyone.”
“Not even your parents?”
“Nope.” I didn’t want to tell him I was still figuring things out. He seemed so confident in who he was while I was still muddling through.
“Would they kick you out?” Seth asked.
“I don’t think so, but it would make things a lot harder around here. Especially with my dad. We don’t have the best relationship.” I’d be happy to graduate high school and move out without ever saying anything to him about it.
Seth probed me on the subject, and I told him a little bit about how it was between Mai and me. How she was really smart and a hard worker and had, like, a photographic memory. She could memorize all kinds of stuff, which meant her test scores were always off the charts.
“I didn’t talk much in kindergarten,” I told Seth. “I was shy or whatever. The teachers thought I had a learning disability, so they held me back. I think that set the tone with my dad.”
“Must be hard living in your sister’s shadow,” Seth said sympathetically.
I told him about how my sister was the district champion speller for three years in a row. My dad went with her to the National Bee in D.C. every time. Then, thinking he was the reason for her success, he tried to mold me in the same way. “I can’t spell for shit,” I told Seth. Seth laughed his ass off at that. I tried to join him, but I could still see my dad sitting across the dining room table from me, drilling me with words and getting frustrated when I made a mistake. My mom finally had to step in.
I said this to Seth, “It’s like he expects the worst of me and even when I do something good, it still isn’t near as good as what Mai can do, so it’s still a disappointment.”
“That’s shitty,” Seth said. “What about your photography?”
I’d sent Seth a few links to my various online galleries. He raved. It shouldn’t have affected me like it did, but I wasn’t confident in my art the way he was. His praise seemed to count for more than any of my other friends.
“My dad’s not really interested in that.” I explained to Seth our immigrant lineage and how the view in our household is that anything that doesn’t translate to a steady job or prosperity isn’t really a priority. My mom grew up in Japan and moved to the U.S. to pursue an accounting degree, so both my parents had similar mindsets on that.
“It’s like they don’t even know you,” Seth said, and in a lot of ways, he was right. He asked me if I wanted to come out at school, and I told him it would just make things harder. I was the only Japanese kid in just a handful of Asians. I didn’t really need another thing that set me apart from everyone else.
“But that’s what makes you so cool,” Seth said. I believed he meant it. Seth was counter-culture, a rebel and an artist. He had tattoos and broke rules and was not heterosexual. He also seemed to have a taste for the exotic, which worried me as well because being Japanese was only one part of my identity. I didn’t want to be a fad for him.
My door opened a moment later, and Mai stood there. “Who are you talking to?”
“Just a friend from class.” Seth could still see me, but he couldn’t see Mai.
“You never talk on the phone. To anyone,” she said.
“It’s for a project,” I told her. The lies slipped out so easily. I omitted a lot of information with my parents to keep my dad out of my business, but I was usually pretty honest with Mai. She glanced at her wristwatch—it was nearing midnight—and gave me a suspicious look.
“All right but keep it down. I’m studying for a test I have tomorrow.”
She left, and when I looked at my phone, Seth was shaking his head with a mischievous grin. “So many secrets, Hiroku Hayashi.”
I sighed in relief. Confessing my sins to Seth made the weight of my deception a little less heavy.
“You have no idea.”
I was able to maintain my double life in part because Seth didn’t acknowledge me at school, not in an obvious way at least. No one knew we were…whatever we were. Not my parents, not my sister, and to some extent, not even Sabrina, so I was surprised when Seth sought me out at school a few days after our FaceTime exchange.
Ours was a fairly big public high school located between our suburb and downtown Austin—one of the oldest in fact—with a magnet program for the arts, which included music, visual and digital arts, recording, theater, and dance. Over the years the art kids had slowly been taking over, which meant our football team sucked, but the marching and symphonic bands were outstanding.
It was during lunch, and I was sitting with Sabrina and some of her band friends outside the orchestra room where there were a few picnic tables. The arts disciplines tended to be turfy like that—band geeks stuck together, as did the theater kids and the dancers. Technically, I should be hanging out with the arteests as Sabrina and I called them, but I didn’t get along too well with my own crowd. As individuals, they were tolerable, but as a collective, they were a bunch of pompous, know-it-all assholes. Perhaps because art kids rarely had to work as a team, they were all super competitive with everyone hating on each others’ artwork behind their backs.
I saw Seth coming down the sidewalk that lined the front of the main building. He strutted up to us with confidence and introduced himself formally with, “Greetings, freshmen, my name is Seth Barrett, and I’d like a word with Hiroku Hayashi.”
“We’re sophomores,” Sabrina said—most of them were—and fixed her cold gaze on Seth. By this time she knew I’d been hanging out in Seth’s garage and watching his band practice. I hadn’t told her yet about the physical stuff, but she was protective nonetheless.
I unfolded myself from between Sabrina and a saxophonist name Rico.
“Bring your stuff.” Seth smiled when he said it, but I sensed from Sabrina’s face she didn’t like his tone.
I crammed the rest of my lunch into my backpack and threw it over my shoulder. At our school the freshman got the shittiest lockers, way up on the third floor, which was a major inconvenience, so most of us carried everything around with us like pack mules. It was even worse for the kids who had to lug their instruments to and from school every day. Regardless, it meant I had everything with me already.
“What’s going on?” I asked Seth when we were on the sidewalk heading in the opposite direction. I thought something bad had happened.
“Impromptu field trip. I want you to come with us.”
I didn’t know who “us” was or where they planned on going. I only knew that it meant I’d be skipping school. “They’ll call my dad’s cell. The school will, I mean.”
Seth shot me a confused look as though that hadn’t even factored into his decision. “Oh…right. Well, can’t you just make up something?”
There were things I left out when it came to my parents, but I tried not to deceive them outright. “Like what?” I asked. Nothing seemed plausible.
“How about this? Sabrina is having a bad day—she broke up with her boyfriend or got her period or something—and you went home with her to comfort her, and you ended up staying the night at her house.”
“This field trip is overnight?” I still hadn’t said no, even though it was sure to lead to trouble.
“I really want you to come with us. Please, Hiroku?” He actually batted his eyelashes at me. It actually worked.
“But…” I’d never skipped school before—that just wasn’t something I did. I might get into trouble—big trouble—with my dad, not to mention I still didn’t know where we were going. “I don’t have anything with me.”
“We’ve got everything packed already. You don’t need a thing.”
I hadn’t realized where he was leading me until we were at the edge of campus. Mitchell was idling on a side street in his maroon Chevy Malibu, and there were already four people in the car.
“There’s no room for me.” I gripped the shoulder straps of my backpack like it was the last parachute.
“You can sit on my lap. Come on before someone sees.”
I glanced around the campus and considered backing out, but this felt like a test. I had to prove to Seth I was one of them or risk him losing interest. Besides, it was just one afternoon, and Seth’s excuse did sound pretty believable. And it could be a lot of fun—definitely better than balancing algebraic equations.
“Okay, fine.” I handed him my backpack.
Seth squeezed into the back seat and shoved my backpack between his knees. He patted his lap.
“What about seat belts?” I asked as I wedged myself into the small space.
Seth smiled affectionately. “Everyone, this is Hiroku Hayashi, and he’s here to make sure everything is OSHA-approved.”
They laughed at me, but it wasn’t in a mean-spirited way, more like I was a novelty to them. Seth situated me right on top of his crotch, which probably wasn’t an accident—he loved to make me squirm. The two girls in the back seat scooted closer together and didn’t complain about being squished.
Mitchell introduced me to his older brother Caleb and their girlfriends, Jeannie and Sasha. Sasha had died black hair, thick black eyeliner, and so many piercings she was probably magnetic. Jeannie had a pretty heart face and warm brown eyes with a dainty piercing in her right nostril. Except for Seth, they all called Mitchell by his first name, but I couldn’t get used to it, so I stuck with what I knew.
We drove out to McKinney Falls, a place I hadn’t been since I was a kid. The park has this huge limestone table where the water from Onion Creek flows over its edges into pools large enough for swimming. The distance from the stone ledge to the water below was about twenty feet. My parents were too afraid for our safety to let me or Mai jump when we visited, so we ended up splashing around in the water and having a picnic on the rocky bank.
But I remembered watching the older kids jump off the cliff and wishing I could too.
I didn’t have a bathing suit with me, but neither did anyone else, so we all stripped down to our underwear and acted like that was normal. Seth, for once, had worn boxer briefs. Black ones that clung to his ass like a second skin. Seth caught me checking him out and smiled roguishly, further evidence that my thoughts were completely transparent to him.
I never liked cursing in front of little kids, and our bunch was pretty foul-mouthed, but luckily there weren’t many other people out, so we could be as obnoxious as we wanted. They’d been to the falls several times before, so they all raced to the ledge and then debated as to who should go first. Mitchell grabbed Jeannie, lifted her easily over his shoulder, and threatened to toss her in. Jeannie screamed bloody murder until finally he let her go. She was still laughing though, and I thought the whole ruse was just an excuse for him to touch her. I wished Seth would do something similar because I wanted his hands on me.
“I’ll go first,” I offered because the longer I waited, the more my anxiety grew. Whenever I was confronted with a situation such as that, I always preferred to grit my teeth and get it over with, rather than dick around.
“I’ll go with you,” Seth said. “Count of three.”
We perched at the edge of the rock. The adrenaline thrummed inside me like vibrations through a taut wire as I surveyed the water below to estimate its depth. The surface looked farther away from up here, and it made my insides a little squirmy, but there was no way I could back down now.
“One…” Seth took hold of my hand. “Two…” He glanced over at me, held my gaze. “Three…”
We jumped, releasing each other just before we hit the water. I dropped in like a pencil. The water was cold and sliced right through me. I stayed there for a moment in the deep, letting the thrill of it roll through me, tickling me all the way to my toes.
When I surfaced, Seth’s eyes were electric. “Like that?” he asked, and I nodded enthusiastically.
The girls went next and then Mitchell and Caleb. Each time I was perched at the edge of the cliff, I expected the thrill to be dulled somehow, but my adrenaline spiked every time, the water shocked me, and my body responded.
“You might be an adrenaline junkie,” Seth said after my ninth go-round.
I was the last to jump. The five of them were all laid out on the rocks, warming themselves in the late afternoon sun like lizards. Nearly naked with their limbs draped casually across one another so that it was hard to tell where one body ended and the other began. I used the camera on my phone to snap a couple of pictures, wishing I had my real camera to properly capture the pastoral quality of our surroundings and the group of them lounging there like river nymphs.
Seth motioned me over. I dropped down, and he guided my head to his stomach. The rock was rough but warm against my back. My chest and arms had goose bumps and my nipples pebbled from the cold. Seth draped his arm casually over my chest and stroked my belly, which tickled a little, but I didn’t dare stop him. I luxuriated in his touch.
Mitchell and Caleb talked about some of the crazy shit they’d seen working at the gas station, and the girls’ laughter tinkled like wind chimes. A lazy smile stretched across my face. Even though I didn’t say much to contribute, I felt accepted and part of something in a way I never had before.
After a while when we were all dried out, the guys wanted to go make camp. We got dressed, and I started to go with them, but Jeannie grabbed my hand. “We’re keeping Hiroku here with us.”
Seth eyed Sasha in particular and seemed about to argue, but Sasha cut him off with, “Hurry back now, boys.”
We stayed there on the rocks, sitting with our legs crossed in a huddle like schoolgirls gossiping during recess. They wanted to know what grade I was in, how Seth and I met, whether we were together or not. I couldn’t answer the last one conclusively. “We’re together for now, I guess.”
Sasha laughed. “That sounds just like something Seth would say.” Jeannie nodded, but I could only worry at what that meant. I didn’t like to think about it.
“Seth’s a player, huh?” I asked them.
Sasha nodded enthusiastically. “Total slut.”
Somehow that sounded worse.
“But he seems to really like you,” Jeannie said. “He doesn’t usually introduce us to his…” She stole a glance at Sasha. “Friends.”
I wondered what it was she was going to say.
“Your skin’s so clear,” Jeannie said, perhaps trying to change the subject. “What do you use?”
I shrugged. “Soap.”
“Not fair,” Sasha groaned. “It’s so pretty. I wish I was…what are you?”
“American,” I answered in a flat tone.
“No, what else are you?”
“Japanese.”
She nodded with satisfaction. I’d been bullied so much as a kid that I never knew how to respond to compliments about my appearance. There was also a fine line between flattery and fetishizing. I asked Sasha how many piercings she had to shift the conversation away from me, and she detailed all of them—where they were on her body, how old she was when she got them, and who she was with at the time. Then she lifted her shirt and pulled down her bra to show me her twin nipple piercings, a silver hoop in one and a barbell in the other.
“Didn’t that hurt?” I asked, instinctively shielding my own nipples, both fearful and fascinated. Needles made me nervous.
“Yeah, but even that feels good sometimes too, doesn’t it?” She winked like it was a shared secret between us. “I know a guy if you’re interested.”
Then Jeannie started complaining about Mitchell, which felt slightly awkward since I considered Mitchell a friend. Still, I offered a sympathetic ear. The gist of her grievance was that they’d been dating for about two years and were supposed to graduate in the spring. Jeannie was planning to go to cosmetology school and wanted Mitchell to find a job that paid more than working at Sunoco.
“I mean, if you want to make it big in music, there are worse places to be, but with Skull Necklace breaking up…” Jeannie turned to me. “You were there, weren’t you? Do you know what happened? Mitchell never talks to me about band business.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Perhaps because my parents were so career-oriented, it never occurred to me that Skull Necklace was anything more than a fun diversion. To learn that Seth and Mitchell were planning to make it their post-high school career seemed slightly naïve to me.
Or maybe I lacked commitment as an artist.
“I think the band is going in a different direction,” I said noncommittally. It seemed as if Seth hadn’t said anything about my contribution to the band breaking up, and I preferred it that way. I was saved then by the guys returning to tell us camp was made. I shielded my eyes from the sun’s glare to look up at them. Seth shifted a little so that he was blocking the sun, and it created a full-body halo effect. His eyes roved over me, and he licked his lips in a wicked way. The effect on me was pretty much instantaneous.
“Hiroku and I will catch up,” Seth said to the others. Sasha and Jeannie exchanged a knowing look, which made me feel a bit like a tool, to think this was something Seth did on the regular. How many other pretty boys had Seth lured into nature, revved up on the adrenaline of cliff jumping, and then later deflowered? At the same time, I couldn’t help but be aroused by the thought of it. My body had absolutely no reservations.
My conversation with the girls was front and center in my mind as I followed Seth along a trail into the woods. They’d welcomed me and made me feel like part of their pack, but if I was just Seth’s latest fuckboy, I kind of wanted to know it up front so I didn’t get too emotionally invested.
As if reading my mind, Seth said, “You and the girls talk about anything interesting?”
Somehow Seth knew my faith in him was wavering. He could sense my insecurities like a bloodhound picking up a scent trail. “Sasha’s thinking of dyeing her hair again,” I said.
“What color?”
“Red. Not a cherry red, more like a dark auburn.”
Seth nodded. “I can picture it.”
“Jeannie offered to do it for her. She said she’d do mine too. Her suggestion for my hair was purple.” I was stalling. Hair dye was much easier to talk about than what was really on my mind.
Seth turned back to eye me. “Light purple, like a vintage violet more so than a plum.”
I’d never before entertained the idea of dyeing my hair, but suddenly I was.
Seth led me to a thicket of trees that was several yards away from the trail, secluded and private. I knew he’d brought me there for a reason—the tension between us had been building all day, in his sly smiles, his hands lingering a beat too long on my bare skin, a slow caress along the slope of my back.
I wanted to be used by him, but I didn’t want to be discarded.
“Is there anything you want to talk about?” Seth asked as he trailed his hand down my arm, all the way to the tip of my index finger, which he hooked with his.
There were so many things I wanted to talk about, but I decided to start with something easy. “Are you gay?”
Seth shook his head with a rueful smile. “Sasha, right?” He sighed and looked past me. “I’m… omnivorous.”
I assumed that meant bisexual or pansexual. His orientation wasn’t really that important to me, but it was a start to understanding his end game.
“Are you seeing someone?” I asked.
His eyes widened, and he looked offended. “I’m seeing you, I thought.”
I took that as a positive sign, “Anyone else?”
“No, but I got to tell you, Hiroku, I don’t think I’d make a very good boyfriend.”
I gave him points for being honest. Still, there was something that was eating at me. It wasn’t about being his only lover or having him make any kind of commitment to me—not then, at least. I needed some assurances, but I was never good at asking for what I wanted.
“Just say it, Hiroku,” Seth said impatiently.
If I was going to be played by him, I wanted to know how.
“Is this a thing where you’ve never been with an Asian guy before, and you’re using me to try and test the waters?”
Seth’s eyebrows lifted like he wasn’t expecting that. And then he frowned with his whole face settling into it. “I’ve been with an Asian guy before. I don’t think he was Japanese, but it was close enough.”
That wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for, though I learned pretty early on with Seth, not to ask questions if you didn’t want to know their answers.
“Is that it?” he asked when I didn’t respond right away. “Or is there something else you want to know?”
Of course, I wanted to know more, but I didn’t feel it was my place to interrogate him. He was allowed to have secrets.
“Yeah, that’s it,” I said.
He eyed me a moment longer as if debating with himself whether or not to say more. Then he leaned in close enough to kiss me, so close I could feel his breath on my face and smell the sunshine on his skin, but at the last moment, he turned his head. “We’d better get back before all the food is gone.”
I looked away so he wouldn’t see the wounded expression on my face at what felt like a rejection.
“Yeah,” I said hollowly, biting back my disappointment. “We better.”
I followed him back to the campsite, neither of us saying much at all, but I knew somehow that by asking those questions, I’d done something wrong.
All they’d brought to eat were hotdogs and I was a vegetarian, so I ate a couple of buns with ketchup while they all took turns asking me why I didn’t eat meat. I was a little sensitive about it already—my parents had never been very supportive of my dietary decision, which I’d made when I was thirteen after watching a documentary on industrial chicken farms. I tried to be patient about it because people always had questions, but when Sasha asked if it was because of the cute widdle bunny wabbits, I kind of exploded.
“Look, I don’t like the thought of an animal having to die just so I can eat a burger or a chicken wing or a hotdog—if that’s even meat. It’s just not worth it to me when there are other alternatives.”
They all turned to Seth, perhaps thinking I’d gotten too mouthy, but he didn’t comment on it either way, just eyed me with a curious expression. It seemed he was letting his friends interrogate me so that he didn’t have to. Later on, when we were collecting wood for a fire, he told me he had some meat I could eat. My whole body burned, from my toes to my ears, and I couldn’t come up with anything clever to say. I couldn’t even meet his eyes. Seth laughed.
They smoked and drank and talked shit into the night. I assumed we were sleeping on the rough blankets they’d spread around the fire because no one had brought a tent or sleeping bags. My dad bought the excuse that I was staying the night at Sabrina’s, which I’d done on occasion since elementary school, and Sabrina agreed to cover for me if I told her tomorrow what the hell was going on. I was zoned out watching the fire when Seth poked me in the ribs. He’d stopped strumming his guitar. They hadn’t packed any camping equipment, but they’d somehow managed to fit two guitars in Mitchell’s trunk.
“We need more wood,” Seth said. I glanced over at the stack where there was still plenty.
“Come on, Seth,” Sasha said. “He’s not a baby.”
I glanced up at their faces, orange hued from the firelight and just a little bit demonic looking.
“Did I miss something?” I asked.
Seth set down the guitar and handed me a flashlight. “Go get some wood. I don’t care what you come back with, just stay out there for twenty minutes or so.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Sasha huffed.
“Sasha,” Caleb warned in a low rumble. She rolled her eyes.
“He’s already skipped school for the first time today,” Seth said. “He doesn’t need to witness all of our bad habits.”
I glanced over to where Caleb was holding a baggie in his hand, kind of hiding it behind his palm but not very well. I wanted to prove I was one of them, that I could be trusted to at least sit around the fire while they did…whatever they were planning on doing, but the look in Seth’s eye was determined.
I took the flashlight and stalked off into the woods, far enough to where they couldn’t see me, but I could still hear their laughter and the muted sounds of their voices. Even though I knew Seth was trying to protect me, I was mad that I’d been dismissed.
Like a little kid.
I gave them forty minutes instead of twenty, partly because I wanted Seth to come looking for me, but he didn’t. When I got back, their eyes were all glazed over, and they had doofy expressions. Caleb’s eyelids kept fluttering like he couldn’t stay awake. Seth just had a wide shit-eating grin on his face.
“What are you guys on?” I asked him.
“A little this, a little that,” Seth said. “You sleepy?” He turned his head toward me, and it took his eyes another second to catch up.
“Yeah.” I was exhausted and also irritated that they were in la-la land, where I was not.
Seth shook out our blankets and made a little nest. He told me to put my head on his lap and he’d sing me a lullaby. Then he sang an acoustic version of “Tonight, Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins like I’d never heard it before. So beautiful it made me want to cry.
“You sing like an angel,” I told him as I was drifting off to sleep.
Seth smiled. “An angel, huh?”
“Yeah, but dark too…like a fallen angel.”
“So…like Satan?” Seth asked with amusement.
I chuckled at that, drunk with fatigue. “Yes, exactly. You sound just like Satan.”
At some point in the night, I felt Seth at my back with his arms wrapped around me. I awoke in the morning to his erection pressed up against my ass cheek.
“Morning,” he whispered in a scratchy voice as the sun rose over our messy, thrown-together campsite. Seth tightened his arms around me, and I arched back into him so that our bodies made complete contact. He placed one hand flat against my chest and ground his pelvis lazily against me as my own erection swelled in my pants. The urge to reach down and stroke myself was overwhelming, but all around us, people were starting to stir.
“Something to look forward to,” Seth whispered and rose from our blankets, stretching his arms dramatically above his head, leaving me cold and aching and alone. A little bit bitter too, if I was being honest.
We ate whatever food was left over from the night before, which for me was another hotdog bun. They dropped me off down the road from my house midmorning. Before he opened the door to let me out, Seth drew me to him and kissed me long and hard on the lips.
“Jeeze, Seth,” Sasha said, “Let the kid come up for air.”
Jeannie fanned herself dramatically like a swooning Southern belle. Seth broke away and stared at me like he was looking for my reaction. It was a cruel thing to do, leave me with all of that unquenched thirst.
I had to wonder if Seth was building the suspense for our next sexual encounter, the same way he did in conversations and in songs. So many times he’d rev me up with a word or a calculated touch, only to drift off to other matters. Part of me thought I should just make my desires known, but I didn’t have the courage to do it, so instead I was stranded and waiting—always waiting—for him to make the next move.
“Think of me,” Seth said with pursed lips, and I hoped his friends didn’t catch on to the unstated portion of that sentiment.
Outside their car, I pulled my backpack onto my shoulders like Atlas bearing up the world and watched them speed off with a hollowness in my gut and a low frequency humming in my balls.
My mom was on the phone with my grandma in Japan when I came inside the house. It was something like midnight over there, so I just waved at her and headed upstairs. Dad was in his study, thankfully. I needed a shower to wash the campfire smell off of me and a real meal because I was starving. I was gathering up a change of clothes when Mai came into my room.
“You forgot to knock,” I said. Mai and my mother didn’t always follow protocol for privacy.
“No, I didn’t.”
I detected attitude in her voice, rare for Mai. She wasn’t like your typical teen girl, more like a middle-aged woman. She shut the door behind her. Her phone was in her hand as she approached me.
“How’s Sabrina? Mom told me she’s going through a breakup.” Mai tilted her head like a songbird and waited for my response, her arms held akimbo.
Mai knew enough about my social life to know Sabrina didn’t have a boyfriend. I suspected Sabrina might even be into girls but, like me, hadn’t made it known.
“She’s fine.” I chose not to elaborate any further.
“So, why’d you lie to Mom and Dad about hanging out with her last night?”
My sister always knew when I was lying, for better or worse. The good thing about it was she usually didn’t tell on me.
“I was with some friends at McKinney Falls. We left school at lunchtime. Dad would have freaked out about it.”
Mai glanced down at her phone. “And since when are you friends with Seth Barrett?”
I came over and looked down at her phone. Seth had posted a video to Instagram of me jumping off the cliff in my underwear. #enjoyingtheview at McKinney Falls. Thank God my dad wasn’t on Insta. Anyone who followed Seth would infer things from that hashtag, just as Mai had. Seth had low-key outed me to our high school. I should probably be upset by it, but in a weird way, I felt relieved and even a little flattered. He’d more or less went public with his feelings for me.
“He lives in the neighborhood. We play basketball together sometimes.”
“And now you guys are going on overnight camping trips together?”
For whatever reason, I felt the need to guard our relationship like a dog with a bone. “What of it, Mai?”
She narrowed her eyes like she was put out by my attitude. “Seth Barrett is a loser, Hiroku. He’s probably not going to graduate because he skips so much school. He and his friends are into drugs. The bad kind. You’re a freshman and he’s a senior. If you’re doing this just to be popular—”
“I’m not.” I honestly didn’t give a shit about being popular, then or ever. I just wanted a place to belong.
“Then what’s going on?”
I had secrets, and I knew if I didn’t give Mai something, she’d take it to my parents, and they’d probably ground me and if not that, be breathing down my neck about every little thing I did, which would put a real damper on my growing fascination with Seth.
“There’s something you should know,” I told her. Her eyebrows lifted in a way that told me she was giving me her full attention. She was a patient listener. I’d always appreciated that about my sister. She knew how hard it was for me to express myself and didn’t pressure me to rush my words.
“I’m into dudes.” She blinked a couple of times, and before she could say anything, I followed it up with, “You can’t tell Dad. Or Mom.”
She came over and drew me into a hug. “I won’t, but you shouldn’t be sneaking around like this, Hiroku. Are you and Seth…together?” She sounded pained when she said it, like the word “together” left a bad taste in her mouth.
Technically, no. “We’re just friends. I have a lot of questions, and he’s…helping me through it.” In more ways than one.
“I’m glad you found someone to talk to, but I meant what I said about Seth. He’s a terrible influence.”
“Those are just rumors, Mai.”
She gave me a stern look. “Sometimes when stories get told so often, you can’t help but believe them.”
I wanted to say something to defend Seth’s honor, but everything Mai had said about him was true; not that he was a loser, but he did skip school a lot, and he was definitely into drugs. That didn’t mean I would do them too. People ate meat around me all the time. I just had to draw a similar line.
Mai grabbed my shoulders. She was shorter than me now but still had the ability to make me feel like a little kid. “I won’t tell Mom and Dad, but that means you have to tell me what’s going on. No secrets.” She bit her lip. “Wait right here.”
She left and came back a minute later with a fistful of condoms.
“Mai,” I protested. I didn’t want to think about why she had those condoms. My parents tended to avoid all talks about sex with us. My dad, in our brief and incredibly stilted conversations, made it seem like our family honor was at stake if I even considered having sex with a girl, and the idea that I might want to have sex with a boy had probably never even crossed his mind, which meant everything I knew about sex came from the Internet or friends or on occasions like these, Mai.
“I keep these in a shoebox under my bed,” Mai was saying, “tucked into my old ballerina slippers. It’s always stocked, so you can come in any time and get some. I don’t want you doing anything with anyone without one. Go it?” She held out the strip to me. I took them reluctantly, folded them up like raffle tickets, and shoved them into my back pocket.
“Yes,” I said moodily.
“And be smart about Seth, Hiroku. I know he’s exciting, but you have to be careful with your heart. Especially your first time.”
“I will,” I droned. My whole face was aflame. I’d said we were just friends, but Mai could guess at where we were heading, even if we weren’t there just yet.
As her final piece of advice she said, “And if I hear even a whisper that you might be into something you shouldn’t, I’m telling Mom and Dad everything.”
I nodded. In a strange way it was a relief to have at least one person know what was going on. Just in case I got into waters that were too deep, Mai would be watching from the shore, ready to step in and signal for help.
My lifeline.