I pull Regina aside at the latenight to give her my picture, all nerves. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Finally I stick my hands in my pockets and say, “What do you think?”

Her eyes go wet. “Oh, Danny.”

I nudge at a rip in the carpet with my foot. “It’s all right?”

“Thank you,” she says. “I mean it. Thank you.” Regina’s not a hugger, but—impulsively—she hugs me. When she does, something lifts off my shoulders, the ground leveling underneath me. She lets go and wipes her eyes, and then I can see her gathering herself, plunging whatever was behind those tears and that hug back down inside. “I’ll go scan it. I’m almost done with the layout.”

We’d talked about all the different things we could include in the center spread, interviews or hotline numbers or a photo collage, but in the end Regina wanted something stark and simple, lots of white space. Before we send it off Francesca guards the door to make sure Mr. Renato doesn’t come in and we all gather around the computer to see how it came out. There’s an essay Regina wrote about the day she watched from across the academic court as they cleared out Sandra’s locker, shoving everything into a garbage bag that they knotted closed, and on the opposite page, the full page, is my drawing of her. We left my name off it, just in case, and it feels better that way, too, less like I was doing it for my own sake.

Our gamble is that the administration will let it go. (And maybe a part of Regina’s gamble, I think, is that they’ll feel shamed by the knowledge that they would’ve stopped us if they’d known about it. Or maybe she doesn’t care either way, maybe she wouldn’t mind getting in trouble for it.)

When we’re finished that night, all the lights off and all of us dispersed through the dark parking lot, Harry drives me home. We still have to look up how to get to my new place.

I’m exhausted. Usually getting the paper sent off to the printer in time is a rush, but it was more subdued this time, and my energy is sapped. Harry’s quiet as we drive down Bubb toward the freeway, and at first I think it’s just because he’s tired, too, but then when we turn onto Stevens Creek he says, “You know Regina knew, right?”

“She knew what?”

“Sandra talked about it sometimes.” He stops at the light before 85, and when we go under a streetlamp the shadows carve deep lines in his face. “She’d say things like she’d rather be dead or how it would be easier to just kill herself. Regina never thought she meant it.”

My organs all constrict. I don’t have to ask why Regina thought that. It seems obvious now, now that we’ve sat through all the assemblies and panicked every time anyone seemed especially down about something or bombed a final or had a bad breakup, but before that I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say basically the same thing. I probably wouldn’t have taken it seriously, either.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. When she told me—it was a few days after—I had this feeling she was just never going to be okay again.”

“You still think that?”

“I don’t know.” The light turns green, and he eases the car onto the freeway. “I think Regina keeps thinking about—you remember that one woman who came to talk to us from Stanford psych or whatever? The lady who made everyone put the crisis hotlines in our phones? Honestly, partly I think she was full of shit because she doesn’t understand what Sandra’s family was like, but I think Regina keeps thinking how she said if you’re depressed enough to kill yourself it’s a treatable illness. So Sandra died of a treatable illness. And, I mean, how do you get past that, right? How do you not just lose yourself in all the ways it could’ve gone differently? I hope—” His voice cracks and he smiles a little, embarrassed. “I hope Regina gets what she’s looking for in this. You know?”

I do know. I say, “You think it’s a good idea?”

“No.” He taps the fingers on his left hand gently against the steering wheel. “But I still want her to have it.”

If they really love each other, if they’re right for each other and they flood all those empty spaces around one another with enough warmth and light to hold at bay all the worst trappings of the world, then if I care about them, that should be enough for me. I know that. And I hope I’d be a big enough person to let it lie.

But I just—I don’t see it. And I know you can see things as you decide, shift the objects in your world so the light falls on them the way you want it to, but there are different ways to love someone and I’m pretty sure Harry feels the same way toward Regina as I do.

We go by the Vallco exit, a few minutes later the exit for the Winchester Mystery House and Valley Fair. “Okay, seriously,” Harry says, his voice lighter in a way that seems not forced, exactly, but something maybe closer to determined. Harry believes in positivity. “How are we still not to your house? We’ve been driving like thirty years.”

I don’t quite have it in me to match that level of jokiness, but I give it my best shot. “We’ve been driving, like, four freeway exits.”

But then we both lose the energy for it, I think, and we’re quiet again. We pass the 880 interchange, the point where it always starts feeling like you’re leaving the boundaries of the known world.

“Every now and then at night,” Harry says, “when I’m trying to sleep, I’ll feel all weird and I swear to God, it’s knowing that you’re, like, ninety miles away.”

Something catches in my heart. I try to keep my voice steady. “It’s not even twenty miles. It says it right there on your map.”

“It feels like ninety.”

“It does.” Except there are only ten more minutes now before I’m home and he drops me off and leaves. I wish it were ninety, just for tonight.

I lean back against the seat. We go under an underpass, into what starts feeling like the heart of San José to me. I feel that same spreading, frightened sadness of being home by yourself after dark, something I don’t usually feel when he’s there.

“So you still don’t know why, huh?” Harry says. “You never found out if you were right about your parents trying to run out on their debt?”

“No.”

“Did you ever find out more about those people your dad was obsessed with?”

“Not really.”

“Who are they? I wanted to look them up.”

“I did that already.” I reach out to change the radio station, but Harry swats my hand away.

“So who are they?”

I give him their names only because Harry’s stubborn; I can’t imagine actually saying no and then expending the necessary energy to stave him off until probably the end of time. When I do, a weird expression goes over his face.

“Like, Clay Ballard as in that billionaire guy in venture capital or whatever?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Dude, I know them, kind of.” He sits up straighter. “Or my parents do. The guy donated to one of my dad’s campaigns.”

For some reason this never occurred to me—that Mr. Wong might know them. I should’ve wondered. He knows everyone, and, especially if you’re up at a certain level, I think, the Bay Area’s only so big. “You know him? You’ve talked with him?”

“I met him once at one of my dad’s fund-raisers. He was hosting it at his house. That’s…really strange it would be him. He was kind of weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Just like, socially awkward. He has this really harsh laugh that sounds like a machine gun.” Harry demonstrates: ehh-ehh-ehh-ehh-ehh. “And he cornered me and gave me this long spiel about how he has Chinese American daughters and how important it is for his daughters to get to see Chinese American leaders and how he’s very passionate about China and Chinese Americans in America. I was like, um, all right, thank you?”

“That’s awkward. How well do your parents know him?”

“Not very, I don’t think. I can ask. I’ll ask.”

“Yeah, no, don’t. You ever see him besides that one time?”

“Not that I can remember.”

I think about that fear that sparked in all the lines of my dad’s face when I asked about their debt. “Did he seem threatening? Can you picture him trying to ruin someone’s life if they owed him money?”

“I didn’t get that vibe. Maybe a little bit cutthroat like every VC ever, but he was also kind of—earnest. He’s that guy who genuinely thinks the startups he’s investing in are going to change the world. He was weird but in the way that like—I don’t know, like Mike Narvin will probably grow up kind of weird. Like a rich white guy kind of way.”

“I love Mike Narvin.”

“I know you do. But he’s a little weird, right? Picture him twenty years from now with a shitload of money and a hot wife and a job where all day people tell him he’s all smart and important, and that’s Clay Ballard.” Harry pauses. “Honestly, he doesn’t really strike me as the kind of guy your dad would know. He was like…really Silicon Valley.”

I take a second or two to answer that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means—” He winces. “Come on, Danny, not like that. You always think I’m such an elitist. He was just like extremely venture capital-y, you know? I can’t imagine your dad, like, getting steaks with him in Palo Alto or whatever. Do you think maybe your mom—didn’t you say for a while your mom—”

I stare at him hard until he looks away. “Didn’t I say my mom what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

He means, obviously, did my mom ever clean their house or something. Mrs. Wong is the VP of some tech firm, and I remember how she tried to cover her surprise when she asked what my parents did. At the time I definitely kind of hated her for it, but in a way she was right—my mom runs herself ragged working and look what good it did her, did any of us.

Harry chews on his lip for a few seconds, then he says, “Danny, I didn’t mean—”

“Forget about it.” I guess it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility. “I should just stop speculating, probably. What’s the point.”

Harry starts to say something, stops. I say, “What?”

“Nah, never mind.”

“Okay.” I know him well enough to know if I don’t take the bait he’ll probably just say it anyway. I’m right; it takes about forty seconds. He clears his throat. I say, dryly, “There it is.”

“Yeah, shut up. I was just going to say if it were me and I really thought it had something to do with why my parents moved me to the boonies or if they were really trying to hide out, I wouldn’t let it go. But I guess you’re you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. I can just see you letting it go, that’s all.”

“I’m too tired to feel insulted, but check back in the morning after I’ve slept.”

He laughs softly. “You don’t sleep anymore. You have to be up in like four hours.”

We’re on my street now (it will never feel like mine) and he turns into the parking lot. The unprotected left I hate is easy when it’s late at night, when you wouldn’t mind it taking longer. I say, “Thanks for the ride.”

“Yeah, anytime.”

“You won’t fall asleep on the way home, right?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

I’m reaching to shut the door when he says, “Hey, Danny, wait.”

And I turn back, something in his voice drawing my pulse faster a few ticks. He says, “Ah—I go right out of the parking lot, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He was going to say something else, I know. I heard it there. But he doesn’t; he smiles kind of tightly and then lifts his hand in a goodbye and waits for me to close the door instead.

When I get home it’s empty, and there’s a note on the table saying my dad won’t be home until three in the morning. I am, it turns out, more hungry than tired; also, I have a hard time sleeping when it’s just me here. I boil water for instant ramen and crack a few eggs into it, and then throw in some frozen broccoli, too, which always feels kind of like a bid for karma. I microwave some frozen dumplings and then lose my appetite two in. They’re better when my mom cooks them. She actually uses a pan.

There are two stairwells going up to our floor and they’re usually propped open, which defeats the purpose of them having a lock. The street we live on is mostly businesses, and everything starts closing down around five or six—by nightfall the street has emptied, gone thin with stillness. Out the window the streetlights make everything look darker, somehow, like the yellowish light is only there to show you all the shadows, and there aren’t any sounds tonight from the apartment next door. It’s strange how in a building of so many people—it’s three floors—you can feel so completely alone.

I never even had to realize how safe it always felt in Cupertino. Idyllic, even: there were literal deer wandering around our neighborhood sometimes—they’d come down from the foothills and scavenge in people’s yards, garden pests—and I never fully absorbed how comforting it was to live in the center of my life, my school and all my friends and all the places I frequented all huddled together in their safe, tight radius.

I take a shower—I hate showering when I’m by myself here; it creeps me out—and brush and floss and turn on all the kitchen and living room and bathroom lights and get into bed, and then I lie awake listening to cars pass by outside, watching their headlights trace swaths of yellow across my walls. I wish every noise from the hallway didn’t remind me of overhearing my mom say she’d be safer at the Lis’ house and of my dad’s practiced, instinctive fear.

But this is stupid. I am eighteen years old. I’m a legal adult. People my age fight in wars and have kids and work full-time. I can vote, and buy cigarettes, and I can damn well sleep in an apartment by myself at night.

Three hours until my dad comes home. Less than three. I picture him walking through the dark empty parking lot at the mall, coming up those unlocked stairwells here. I picture someone closing in on him, the stack of files he collected to protect himself hidden uselessly in a box somewhere. My heart is going kind of wildly, and I resent it, especially because I know all this would feel so different if it were daylight now.

Back in Texas, Ethan, who was a year older than me, was afraid of the dark. Afternoons in Austin all the kids would play out on the common lawn and I remember the day I announced that and watched that wave of glee roll over everyone, that immediate consolidation of forces against him. It was the first time I remember understanding that something someone told you in implicit trust could hold so much power, and I wish I could say I understood it only after the fact. A second grader named Stan Smith latched on to a chant of Ethan’s afraid of the dark, Ethan’s afraid of the dark that he kept running, almost methodically, while he climbed on the monkey bars and chased after a soccer ball, and all day two of the older kids kept running after him and putting their hands over Ethan’s eyes and laughing, asking if he was scared. He was someone who got quiet when he was upset—maybe he still does—and his face turned hard and finally, when the parents who were out there that day (they all traded off teaching sections and writing dissertations and watching all of us) weren’t paying attention, he kneed me in the crotch. By then I understood I deserved it. His expression was pure betrayal as he surveyed me rolling on the ground and said, quietly, “You’re afraid of the dark, too.”

I was. He knew because the day before when I’d played at his house he’d summoned me into the bedroom he shared with his baby sister and, from inside a tattered box of Star Wars Legos, pulled a roll of wintergreen Life Savers.

“Are you scared of the dark?” he’d asked. When I’d said yes, he’d carefully peeled the wrapper away and plucked one Life Saver and handed it to me.

“If you chew it really hard in the dark and look at a mirror, it lights up. That’s what I do when I’m scared.” I’d tried it that night. He’d been right—the wonder of it, the unexpectedness, were strong enough for the moment to banish the dark. Sometimes, every now and then, I try to draw him. Usually when I do it’s him in the dark staring at a mirror, Life Saver in hand.

I wish my parents, both of them, would just come home. It’s hard to hold on to your anger when you’re scared and lonely, when you miss someone at night.

It’s around two in the morning and I’m still awake when I get out of bed, finally—it’s clear it’s a losing battle anyway—and open up the laptop. My search auto-completes for me as soon as I type eth. Guess I look him up even more than I realized.

I could just keep not doing this forever, I guess, just like I’ve been doing, but lying awake here I’ve been telling myself I’d go through with it. So I send him a friend request, regret it immediately, google whether you can undo a request, find out you can’t, refresh the page a billion times to see if he’s accepted even though it’s the middle of the night, and then all night and all the next day—through my Spanish quiz and lunch and the bus ride back to San José—live in that very specific hell of waiting for someone to see something you can’t take back.

It’s five-thirty California time, and I’ve just gotten home, when Ethan accepts the request. I have just a few seconds to catch up on his profile—he goes to Howard University and has an extremely pretty girlfriend, a serious-faced Black girl with close-cropped hair and the kind of frame that makes her look tall, although it’s impossible to scale her next to someone I haven’t seen since I was six—before he messages me: Hey, sorry, who’s this?

My heart does its plummeting-elevator thing inside my chest. I am the loser king of Losertown. No one cares what happened when you were six years old; I bet he didn’t spend a second thinking about me after I left. I waste too long thinking of the least pathetic way to get out of this, and finally write back, Are you the Ethan that used to live in UT family housing? Came across some old UT stuff and just wondered what you were up to these days. Looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself.

He writes back about three seconds later: DANNY TSENG, HOLY SHIT. And then, right after: What’s your phone number???

I send it over. Almost instantaneously my phone rings.

“Danny Tseng. I can’t believe this,” he says. I haven’t heard that name in years. I wouldn’t have recognized his voice, I don’t think, but maybe I can still hear him inside it. “Danny, I swear to God I never thought I’d hear from you again. We never stopped wondering what happened to you. Seriously. My family still talks about you guys. I can’t wait to tell my parents you found me on Facebook after all these years. They won’t believe it. Where have you been? And how come you changed your name?”

I tell him how we’ve been living in California. He seems surprised in a relieved kind of way, like he’d expected much worse, and then he tells me what he remembers and what he learned from his parents over the years: how that last time I stayed at his house my parents had told his mom, Auntie Monica, they were flying out to California. They didn’t say much about the trip—every time Auntie Monica asked about it my mom laughed it off and said oh, it was nothing, just a little jaunt. She’d been happy and excited about it, and had gone to Monica’s the day before they left to borrow a few pieces of clothing. Monica had thought it was some kind of anniversary trip.

The strange thing, though, was my parents hadn’t bought tickets back yet, and hadn’t been able to say exactly when they’d be home to get me. It was unlike them; usually they were hyperorganized. They called a few times a day to check in on me and it wasn’t until the last day, last-minute, that they’d booked a flight back to Texas. When they came back they were rushed; they got in after my bedtime and Auntie Monica had offered to let me stay until morning so I wouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night, but my parents said no, no, they wanted to come right away. Auntie Monica thought it was sweet that they’d missed me. She offered to pick them up from the airport so they could all have drinks together and the Parker-McEvoys could hear about their trip, but my parents took a cab and came back rushed and quiet. They woke me up and thanked Ethan’s parents for taking me, and said goodnight. It was the last time his parents ever saw us. My dad didn’t show up to the lab that Monday. At first everyone thought my parents were probably just tired out from their trip, but when people knocked on our door no one was there and then a few days later the university started cleaning out the apartment to give to the next family on the waiting list.

I have that growling, acidic kind of pain in my abdomen you get when you’re up too late, and it surges then. I say, “Huh.”

“You know, something else kind of weird happened, too. Someone came around a few weeks after you guys left. I was, what, seven? So I had no idea until a couple years ago when we were talking about you and my parents told me. The guy wouldn’t say who he was with. Like, if it were a police detective, he would’ve just said so, right? But he was all hush-hush about it, so my parents didn’t tell him anything. They didn’t think your parents were the criminal type. Plus they still thought they were going to hear from your folks again.”

“Folks.” In spite of my lungs compressing at what he said, all the air squeezed out in a whoosh, I can’t help smiling. “You sound…really Texan still.”

“Oh, sure,” he says, and I can hear that he’s smiling, too. “Sure. You vanish into thin air and call me up out of the blue twelve years later with no explanation, and you make fun of my accent? I see how it is.”

It’s surreal to be talking to him. I’ll worry about what he told me when I have the space for it, because I think it’ll take a lot. For now I ask Ethan to fill me in on his life since we left. He tells me when he was eleven his family moved to Ann Arbor, where his parents both got jobs at UMich, and he’s at Howard now, wants to intern for a congressperson, loves DC. And then for a long time we stay on the phone, excavating old memories from Texas, and that world I lost takes on shape and form again—the humidity bearing down on you in summers, the way the gravel in the landscaped pits outside felt against bare feet, the Popsicles Mary Peelen’s mom used to give us when we played outside. It’s like being given back my childhood, and it reminds me what I always felt I had in drawing: how it can hold this same power, can capsule up that same rush of texture and memory that we all carry and can never fully share.

“You still draw?” he asks. “I remember how good you were at drawing.”

“I do. I’m going to design school next year, actually.”

“No way, man, that’s awesome. You’re going for it all the way, huh?”

“Something like that, yeah.” That small flash of joy each time in claiming it aloud for myself, the way it shines through the haze of everything he told me about us leaving—I hope that never goes away.

“What about your parents?” he says. “How are they doing?”

Less joy. I tell him.

“Your father’s a security guard?” he repeats. “At a mall?” There’s a long silence, and my shame blooms bright and hot inside it. I want to explain it’s not like that, but, I mean, it is like that. “He could’ve gotten a job anywhere,” Ethan says. “My mom always said he was so brilliant. And wasn’t your mom taking business classes? Didn’t she want to open a hotel?”

“Yeah, well.” Not much else to say there. “Hey, Ethan, this is going to sound really stupid, but do you remember their names? My parents?”

“Do I remember your parents’ names? Sure. Anna and Joseph Tseng.”

“Or—right. I mean their Chinese ones they used. I’ve never been able to remember, and they stopped using them when we moved.”

“Why don’t you just ask your dad?”

“Ah—it’s kind of a long story.”

This is a tribute to our past together: all these years later, Ethan accepts that as an answer. “Ah, I got you. I can ask my dad. He’d probably know.”

“All right. Hey, tell him hi for me, will you?”

“Yeah, of course. He’ll be thrilled. He’ll never believe I actually found you.”

He texts me about ten minutes later. Mr. Parker didn’t know my mom’s legal name, but he knew my dad’s: Tseng Huabo.

I google it. And there staring back at me is the truth, what they’ve been hiding from me all this time: for the last twelve years, since right around the time we moved here, my parents have been wanted for false imprisonment and assault.