I wake up early to get ready for the Journalism field trip to San Francisco that Regina’s making us all go on, and there’s a note on the kitchen table, my mom’s loopy lettering scrawled on the back of a junk mail envelope saying my parents went to Costco. They always come back weekend mornings laden with cardboard flats of frozen chicken breasts and dumplings and greens.

I’m low on cash, like always, so I should bring something to the city in case I get hungry. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing packs of beef jerky in the hall closet, and so I go to look. When I open the closet door, a barely contained twelve-pack of Costco paper towels tumbles out. My parents—I’ll just put this out there—are like one Great Depression away from being full-on hoarders. They keep everything. They’ve always been too Asian to throw away things like plastic bags, but they also keep stuff like expired coupons just in case, plastic utensils and packets of condiments that come with fast food, single socks where the other one’s missing.

I start to put the paper towels back. Behind where they were stuffed is this medium-size box labeled with just my dad’s name. And something about the careful, centered way my dad’s name is lettered on, like someone took the time to do it, and also the way the box is jammed in the closet like it’s supposed to be out of sight, catch my attention. I pull it out to look at.

It’s taped, and I peel the tape up gently so none of the box comes off with it. Inside there’s a little stuffed bear I used to play with that I haven’t seen in years. My dad gave him to me when we moved to California, and I named him Zhu Zhu, which at the time I thought was hilarious, a bear named Pig. I hold him a moment, finger his synthetic fur, and get that rush of nostalgia, your memories compressed into some intangible feeling mixed with the searing longing you get for a time that’s lost to you now. For a long time after I outgrew Zhu Zhu, my dad kept him on his pillow. I’m kind of touched my dad saved him.

Zhu Zhu was resting on the type of piles of clutter that steadily collect everywhere on our counters and in our drawers: a few old carbon copies of checks made out to people I haven’t heard of and a handful of what look like some kind of loan documents, a sleeve of pictures that must be from China—some roads and scenes from a car trip, a high-rise apartment building, a pharmacy—and two small unsigned watercolors, good but not quite professional, one of a dark blue bird and one of a multicolored dragon, not at all the kind of art I’ve ever known my dad to collect. I flip the dragon one over to see if there’s anything on the back, but it’s blank. Underneath all that is a bulging file in a yellowed rubber band labeled, in my dad’s handwriting, Ballards. When I slide off the rubber band, a news clipping flutters out onto my desk. It’s a real estate article about a house for sale in Atherton, which is where all the venture capitalists live, thirty or so minutes north of here.

I try to lay everything out on my desk, but there are too many papers, and that’s where things get—weird. Nearly everything is about a guy named Clay Ballard. There are a few dozen pictures printed off what looks like a Google Images search: some headshots, him at some kind of awards banquet or something shaking hands with a balding man in a suit, a picture of him and his wife at some kind of gala. He looks like a generic white dad—mostly trim, straight white teeth, kind of weathered-looking like maybe he plays a lot of golf. There are all kinds of printouts of public records and also ones that I think you’d actually have to, like, go to some kind of city office to get—a marriage license, copies of a sale of a home in Atherton, a six-bedroom mansion with a wine cellar and a guesthouse that sold for seven million dollars. Toward the bottom there are a few printouts on Sheila Ballard, who I assume must be his wife.

I’ve never seen either of them or heard their names come up once. I don’t know what to make of it. They aren’t anyone from UT or either of the labs at San José State that my dad worked with, and the sheer volume of it all, the obsessive detail, is staggering.

In the bottom of the box there are a bunch of letters in Chinese. For all the years of Chinese school I sat through on Saturdays as a kid (and despite the fact that my parents hardly speak English at home), I still can barely read Chinese worth crap, and it isn’t until I paw through them, and then in one of them there’s a drawing—a child, a grubby fist grabbing a rice paddle—that I realize these must be letters from my grandfather, that probably those watercolors were his too, and this drawing is my sister. I go cold and then hot all over all in a split second, and my heart stutters against my chest. It feels like meeting ghosts.

I’m an only child now, and thought I was one for a long time, but I was supposed to have a sister. Did have a sister, actually, who came and then died before me, a sister who exists now in her absence. I know almost nothing about her except the very fact of her.

I’ve spoken with my parents about this exactly once. When we moved here in kindergarten, I found drawings of her lodged in one of my parents’ old books and brought it to my mom to ask who it was. My mom was in her garden, her garden gloves pulled over her sleeves and her face shielded by her giant plastic visor, when I brought the pictures out to her.

“Who drew these?” I asked.

She froze for a moment and grabbed the papers, the color pooling like watercolor in her cheeks. Her mouth worked without sound. “Where did you find this?”

“In the garage.”

She closed her eyes. Her lips were trembling. “It’s—that was not for you to find.”

“Did you draw them?”

“No. Your grandfather.”

I’d never known that any of my relatives liked to draw, too. My parents never brought it up. I’d wished they had. “Who is it? It’s not me, right?”

“Another baby.”

“Another—your baby?”

She nodded.

“And Ba’s?”

“Yes.”

“So I have a brother? Or—”

“No. Sister. Dead.”

All my life I’d been an only child, and in that moment the person I’d been disappeared. The world tilted around me. “When?”

“In Wuhan.” She opened her eyes without looking at me. “Before you.”

She didn’t mean to tell me, and if I hadn’t caught her so completely off guard, I don’t think she ever would have. Maybe if she’d had more time she would’ve come up with a better story. She could have told me the baby was her, or my dad, or a friend. I would’ve believed her.

That was the first time I ever saw her have a panic attack: there in front of me she went clammy and pale, and she rocked forward and dropped her trowel and clutched her chest. I thought she would die. I thought it was my fault.

Afterward she felt bad about it, I think—she was brusque in that way she gets when you make too much of a fuss over her, and she told me not to tell my dad any of it. I didn’t. And I never brought up my sister again.

I’ve never stopped thinking about her, though. The question that most consumed me at first—still does a lot of the time—was what happened. Every time I heard sirens I thought about her, imagining her falling from an open window or getting struck by a car. When I learned to swim, I wondered if she’d drowned. In AP Bio this fall we studied genetic diseases and I spent the whole unit low-key worrying that my parents couldn’t bring themselves to tell me that I too had whatever degenerative and fatal disease had killed my sister. Whenever I see headlines of kidnappings or child abuse I wonder if she was old enough to realize what was happening to her, whatever it was.

And I wonder about the rest of it, too. I wonder where it happened. I wonder if they held her body. I wonder when she was born and how much older than me she would’ve been. I wonder what her name was. When we moved to California, my parents changed our last name from Tseng to Cheng because it was easier for Americans to pronounce (I still remember my mom’s tight smile every time white people mangled Tseng, the same way she reacted once when some of the other kids spoke nonsense syllables at me pretending it was Chinese or when people spoke loudly and slowly to her like she was a child), and I think about that sometimes now, bubbling in my name on Scantrons or typing it for college forms—how my sister died with a name the rest of us gave up. Sometimes I imagine her older, nine or ten or fifteen or twenty or however old she’d be now. And I imagine her filling all the air in every room of the house.

I look at my grandfather’s drawings in the letters for a long time. They’re good—confident pen strokes, not a single extraneous one.

The rest of it, obviously, I understand why he’d keep—Zhu Zhu, the letters from my grandfather. But that file on the Ballards is beyond my understanding, and it makes me wonder. I guess I didn’t necessarily think I knew their whole story; I knew I didn’t. I just never thought there might be that much more to know.

My parents come back from Costco weighted down with bags, and I go out to help unload everything from the car. In the back seat there are three paper sample cups my mom saved me: a square inch of coffee cake, seven Jelly Bellys, a teriyaki meatball. That careful way they’re balanced there—I take a picture with my phone to draw sometime later before hauling the bags inside.

They brought home frozen burritos, and I microwave one while I’m waiting for Harry. My mom goes out into her garden, and through the window I can see her kneeling to check on her kabochas. She has six raised garden beds my dad and I helped her make, pomegranate and persimmon and citrus trees she planted when we first moved in, an herb garden that runs along the back fence, and in the front yard all her favorite flowers: hydrangeas and gardenias and tuberoses in the spring. Our house itself is old and run-down, and I remember what the yard looked like when we first moved in—hard, parched dirt and dead weeds, the yard of an old couple who drew the curtains and never looked outside. One of my bedroom windows looks out on the backyard and sometimes outside when she thinks no one’s watching I see my mom stand up with her hands on her hips and survey it all, satisfied and proud and amazed.

My dad sits down at the kitchen table with the laptop, typing what I can see from the short lines of text is some kind of list. He adores lists. Once, when I was a kid, I found a notepad on his desk with this one: School. Friend. Sport interest. What are your favorite celebrity. Imagination and opinion. The list was titled Question to ask Daniel for conversation. None of his lists, though, ever felt as obsessively gathered as what I found in the closet.

When the microwave beeps I say, “Hey, Ba, question—who are the Ballards?”

His head snaps toward me. “Excuse me?”

“I was just wondering. I, ah, found a box of yours in the closet with some files—”

His face lights up. Not in the way you say it when you mean someone’s happy, but more like an explosion in the night—a sudden flash of heat and noise.

He rises. “Were you looking through my belongings?”

“No. I saw it in the closet. I was looking for beef jerky.”

“Why did you go into that box? It was taped shut. You went into my personal things without permission.”

I put up my hands. “I didn’t know what it was. I thought—”

“Daniel, you know better. I don’t want to hear about it again. And I don’t want you to ever bring that name up with your mother. Is that clear? Don’t ever—”

My mom comes in through the sliding door then, holding a bunch of beets, and my dad stops. Did he say not to bring it up with her because it’s something she doesn’t know about, or something she does? I hear the familiar sound of Harry’s car pulling into the driveway, and hoist myself off the chair.

“I’m going,” I say. “Bye.”

They both start talking at the same time. “Where are you—” my mom says, and my dad says, “Did we say you could—”

“I’m going with Harry.” I edge toward the door. “I asked you already earlier in the week.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just to his house.”

“What for?”

“Just school stuff.”

They exchange that look that means they’re weighing something I’ve asked for against all the threats of the world—a cell network glitch that means they can’t reach me if they need to, a blind curve up in the hills by Harry’s house. “Well, all right.” My mom drops her beets in the sink. “Come back in an hour.”

I definitely can’t get to San Francisco and then back in an hour. “We have to work on some Journalism stuff, so it’s going to take all morning. Maybe until after lunch.”

“Aiya, Daniel, I don’t like you to be gone so much. If something happens, and we can’t call you—”

“I know.” I’ve long since stopped trying to argue or to promise that nothing will ever happen, even when I’m going to be just a few minutes away. “I’ll be careful.”

“Well—” She makes a tsking sound with her tongue. “All right. Go study with Harry. Just be careful.”

“Wait,” my dad says. He looks around, his voice infected with false cheer, like he wasn’t just mad at me. “Where’s your sweatshirt? Wear it to show Harry. Show it off.”

“Oh, ah, right.” It’s on the kitchen table (I left it there last night, and someone, probably my mom, folded it carefully with the letters facing out), and I shrug it on. “Look good?”

“Perfect.” My dad smiles, a real smile; the sweatshirt’s worked its magic. “Have a good time.”

I make it outside just as Harry’s coming up our walkway (Harry isn’t the kind of person who just pulls up and honks, even if he’s been your best friend four years), and I hustle him back into the car.

“I didn’t want you getting all chatty with my parents,” I say over his complaining.

“Aw, your parents love me.”

I roll my eyes. It’s true, though; all parents love him. “Well, too bad for them I’m too selfish to let you.”

“You’re not selfish.”

“In your professional opinion.”

“Don’t get so sarcastic. You’re, like, the opposite of a selfish person. It’s a compliment.”

I feel the words blooming on my cheeks. “I just didn’t want them roping you into a conversation. I know you’re a shitty liar.”

“What would I have to lie about?”

“I told them we’re just going to your house.” Harry lives too far up in the hills to walk, so I always get a ride if I’m going up there. “You know how they are. They’d flip out if I said I wanted to go to San Francisco.” Also, it’s true: Harry lies terribly. At his core, I think, he’s too noble to have any real sense of self-preservation.

Inside the car, Harry unbuttons the cuffs of his sleeves and rolls them in precise, even segments before laying his hands on the steering wheel. A few times—I would die before I told him this—I’ve sketched his forearms, the map his veins trace over them, the tan he keeps even in winter. He says, “I am not a shitty liar.”

I click my seat belt on. “Um, you can’t even say that without your voice getting all weird and defensive, so I think I’ve made my case. Hey—question.” As he backs onto the street, I tell him about my dad’s files. “That’s not weird, right?”

“Uh, a stalkery box of information about some rando? It’s definitely weird.”

“You think so?” I make a face. I wanted him to tell me I was overreacting.

“Yeah, but your parents have always been weird about things.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s weird how they’ve never once taken you home to China, for one thing. Haven’t you been, like, all over the US and—”

“I think China’s probably just too sad for them now.”

“I guess I could see that, yeah.” He shrugs. “Still. They just kind of seem like people with secrets. You went years without knowing you even had a sister, right? And don’t they still never talk about her?” Check and check. “Who were the people?”

“Nobody I know. I don’t even know how my parents would know them.” It’s probably nothing. All the same the road blurs in front of me a second, and I feel a little bit carsick. “So you’d maybe worry at least a little, then?”

“If someone explicitly told me not to? It’s like if I say don’t picture me naked—what’s the first thing you do?”

My cheeks go hot, and then the rest of me. It’s enough to pull me back from the ledge, though, back onto solid ground. I say, “I could’ve done without that visual, thanks.”

He grins. “Be nice. Don’t make me pull over.” We stop at a light on Stelling, and he skims his eyes over me. “Hey, so, uh…nice sweatshirt.”

“Yep.” That was definitely not a compliment. I swear if he says one word about my sweatshirt, I’ll kick his ass.

“That new?”

“Yep,” I say again. I don’t need Harry to confirm for me that in its hugeness and overenthusiastic newness it looks as dweeby as I know it does. I want the gift my parents gave me to be worth what they paid for it, worth how excited they were.

“Rocking those creases. Are you, uh, wearing that when we get there?”

I wasn’t going to, I was going to take it off once I got in the car, but as soon as he says it my plans make an abrupt U-turn. With any luck he’ll spend the whole ride worrying every single person he sees today will think, Why is Harry Wong best friends with a loser in a giant creased sweatshirt? I will wear this sweatshirt at him the entire day. “Yeah. Why?”

“It just looks so…new.”

I know this about Harry: he thinks it’s pathetic in an overeager kind of way to wear anything right after you bought it, or at least to look like you did, so every time he gets something new he washes it twice before he puts it on. “It is new.”

He takes his hands off the wheel to hold them up in defeat. “Okay, whatever. You do you.”

“You’re so generous. Has anyone ever told you that? So generous.”

“Says the guy getting a free ride to San Francisco.”

I roll my eyes. “You’d be going anyway.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’m just going because you’d be stranded at home otherwise.”

“Okay, (a), you would definitely go because otherwise Regina would kill you, and (b), don’t pretend like you’re not glad to have an excuse. What would you be doing at home all day instead? Going to tutoring?”

He grins in that self-deprecating way of his, his eyes crinkling up. It is, I’ll admit, one of the more charming habits he has. “For your information, I’d be probably going hog wild studying for the SAT IIs. So hold up on your smugness there.”

He probably would be, too. There is basically nothing Harry won’t do in service of Princeton, which is the only Ivy that rejected his sister and, therefore, the only school he wants. It’s why he’s the managing editor of our school paper, second-in-command to Regina, despite being someone who has no real love of writing and who (I’ll just say it) has a crap eye for design. He’s also, this year: ASB president, treasurer of National Honor Society, and the director of the Students Reaching Out tutoring club. He got a near-perfect score on his SATs and has a 4.8 GPA and is nationally ranked (low, but still) in tennis doubles. And this is still as true as it’s been as long as I’ve known him: he’s always the most popular guy in any room he’s in. When I list it all out like that I kind of remember why I used to really hate him.

When he pulls onto Regina’s street he looks in the rearview mirror like he’s making sure no one’s in the back seat listening and says, “Has Regina seemed kind of—off to you lately?”

“What do you mean off? You see her more than I do.”

“Yeah, but you guys talk. Maybe I’m just imagining it.”

I don’t think he’s imagining it. “We don’t talk that much lately.”

“Ah,” he says. “Did you know she stopped going to her church?”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. And, I mean—the one year’s coming up, so—”

I feel that same old catch in my heart. “Right.”

“On March seventh.”

“I know when it is.”

He glances at me in a way I can’t quite read. I feel the color rise in my cheeks. He says, “Regina wants to put something in the paper.”

“Yeah, no, they will definitely not let us put something in the paper.”

“You don’t think if—”

“No. Definitely not. Zero chance.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He sighs. “Such bullshit. She really wants to. You know how she is.”

I do know how she is. Except maybe that isn’t true; I know how she used to be.

He gets out of the car to go knock, and they come back together. Regina looks put together as always, in bright lipstick, tight dark pants, a billowy white top, and a dark floppy hat that makes her look vaguely 1920s-ish. She has a model’s high, angular cheekbones and full lips—she’s striking, and I’ve always liked drawing her. (For her part, she dislikes being drawn. I think it makes her self-conscious.) She’s pretty in that way that makes people assume your life is going well.

I open the door to give her the front seat, but she waves me off. I smile hello, hold my breath a little. She slides into the back seat.

“Congratulations on RISD, Danny,” she says in a way I can’t call anything other than nice, but that also doesn’t exactly flood the car with warmth. “You’ve wanted this for so long.”

I say, “Thanks, Reg.” And I think how last year I would’ve told her right away about all those files I found, too.

Then, like she read my mind, she leans forward and touches my elbow. “I knew you’d get in.” And maybe that’s the most she has right now. Maybe I shouldn’t read into it.

“You think this’ll be the kind of talk where they have like donuts or anything?” Harry says. “Or you think we have time to stop somewhere?”

Regina rolls her eyes. “No and no. We can’t be late. Everyone probably hates me already for making them go to this.”

He grins at her in the rearview mirror. “Technically it’s not too late to cancel.”

“The talk sounds important, right?” Harry was teasing—he’s careful around her a lot these days—but Regina says it as if he wasn’t. “I just want to make sure we know we have the right to say what we want.”

“Pretty sure people are mostly still writing about, like, their buddies on the tennis team,” I say lightly. Harry glares at me. I must have gotten the tone wrong.

“Mostly, sure, but what about the times they’re not? It’s like that stupid story about starfish,” she says, adjusting her seat belt. “There’s hundreds stranded on the beach and you throw a few back because it makes a difference to those particular few.”

“Aw, you think that’s stupid?” Harry says. “I think it’s kind of nice.”

“It’s a parable of rampant apathy. Why is there only one guy out there rescuing millions of suffocating starfish? It’s a story about how horrible things happen because ninety-nine point nine percent of people can’t be bothered.”

“Not you,” Harry says cheerfully. He twists around and backs out of the driveway. “There is nothing too small for you to be bothered by.”

If I’m being honest, I still don’t totally get the two of them, and they’ve been together since sophomore year. I will concede that in a way it felt weirdly inevitable, a mash-up of ambition and popularity and attractiveness, a test-tube match, all roads leading to each other. Harry asked her to homecoming—a flash mob, a bouquet of peonies because that’s her favorite flower, a platter of chocolate-covered strawberries with letters that spelled YOU + ME?—and then after that they just kind of stayed together, swapped all their profile pictures to ones of the two of them, and in a way it felt weird that they’d ever been separate entities altogether.

But then I always wondered, always still wonder. All that time last year when they were ensconced together—what all happened between them? I can’t exactly imagine her breaking down in front of him, pouring her heart out to him, and from comments he makes sometimes I don’t think she ever really did. And, like—does he think of her first all the time? She’s who he imagines calling first when he gets his letter from Princeton, the audience he pictures when he’s collecting all the important and also the stupid insignificant parts of his day to give to someone? When he imagines disasters happening, cancer or nuclear fallout or the Big One we’re supposed to get in California, at night when it’s quiet and he feels all the weight of his own life pressing in on him, she’s the lurch in his stomach and the hand he gropes around for in the dark?

But maybe it’s just that I don’t want to see it. I would do anything for Harry—and have—and sometimes I picture what it would look like to come up against the hard wall of the limits of how far he’d be willing to go for me.

Which I know is crappy. They’re together. And Regina’s my friend too. At least, I think she still is.

“Anyway, no one hates you for making us go,” Harry says. “It’ll be interesting to hear the guy talk.”

“It should be. I heard his TED talk about all the things at schools that get censored,” she says. “Like banned books and dress code issues. And…”

She trails off. We both know what she means, though; there’s not a single person in our grade who doesn’t recognize that tentative pause, the guilt you always feel plunging everyone around you back into the same dark territory. You always wonder if people just want to forget.

I wait to see then if she’ll trust me with what she told Harry, the story she’s planning to write. She changes the subject instead, and we talk about personal statements for the next ten or twelve miles north.

We hit traffic then, a sea of red taillights, and Harry swears softly under his breath. He can give a speech in front of all two thousand people at our school, he can go months without saying anything negative about another person, but it’s always been the little things that set him off—stick him in traffic, or let his phone run out of battery, and it’s like his whole conception of the world collapses: how is this possibly happening to him?

It’s clear and cool when we get into San Francisco, the streets swollen—brogrammers in their gym clothes, Asian grandmas carrying pink bakery bags, tourists with their fanny packs and DSLRs, white moms in yoga pants pushing bulky strollers with Philz cups in the cup holders. We park in the Portsmouth Square garage and emerge from the rickety elevator back into the sunlight among all the kids clambering up play structures and the Chinese grandfathers playing chess. Regina, who is excellent at time management and therefore looked up walking directions while we were in the elevator, strides toward the corner so fast it takes me and Harry a few seconds to catch up.

Regina could do anything, I think, become a doctor or an engineer or the lawyer her parents want, but she’s dreamed her entire life of going to Northwestern, which has the best journalism program in the nation, and becoming a reporter. She can spend literally hours reading through headlines and going down current-events rabbit holes. She told me once when she was small she knew the names of TV anchors before she did her grandparents and relatives. But reporters make, like, ten dollars, and her parents have made it abundantly clear they have no interest in sending her to major in communications or broadcast journalism. She’s supposed to go into pre-law.

“I wish my parents would’ve moved here instead,” Regina says as Google Maps steers us through a back alley, the word DEFIANCE tagged across the wall in a bright, arresting blue. I like the lines of the lettering, the way they reach around themselves and keep your gaze captive. “I’m so ready to be done with Cupertino.”

“Really? You like this better?” Harry says, gesturing toward a clump of garbage cans. “It smells like piss.”

“I don’t mean I wish they’d moved right here to this alley. But, yes, I like it better.”

“Why? It’s, like, dirty here. I bet you’ll miss Cupertino when you’re gone.”

We’re walking fast still, and she’s a little out of breath. “Really? I’ll miss driving down the street and seeing nothing but tutoring centers? I’ll miss everyone else’s parents knowing exactly what I got on my SATs and teachers having to commute from like Morgan Hill because Cupertino is full of rich NIMBYs who refuse to build more housing? I’ll miss the hundred percent rule?”

Cupertino’s hundred percent rule is this: if you go out in Cupertino, there’s a hundred percent chance you’ll see someone you know. (Its corollary is the two hundred percent rule, which is that if you’re wearing pj’s/haven’t showered, your odds double.)

“Come on, it’s not all bad. Other cities are just easy to romanticize because we don’t live in them. It would be a pain to live in San Francisco. There’s like zero parking.”

“People should use transit more often anyway. Didn’t your dad vote against high-speed—”

“Okay, yes, but that’s just because the particular proposal wasn’t fiscally responsible. He’s working on another one.” Harry always gets defensive about his dad, even though I know it’s not like he agrees with him all the time anyway. (Mr. Wong retired after making a bunch of money and went into politics and is a state senator now, after a term on the school board and two as our mayor.) “But also, people like you there. You know? It feels kind of crappy to talk about how much you hate it when that’s where all your friends are.”

“When do Northwestern decisions come out?” I say quickly, before she has to answer him—I recognize that slight rise in his voice.

“I don’t know exactly when,” she says. I’m pretty sure she’s lying. “Sometime in the spring. I doubt I’ll get in. Even if I do my parents probably won’t let me go.”

“I’m sure you’ll get in. I hope it all works out okay,” I say. Which—I can hear how formal it sounds. I feel like that sometimes with her now, stiff and awkward and overly careful. One time in junior high Sandra told me her irrational fear was that she’d drop a diary with all her secrets in it. You keep a diary like that? I’d said, surprised—I couldn’t imagine her having the patience—and she laughed. Of course not, loser. I said it was an irrational fear. But that’s how it feels with Regina sometimes now, too, that I’m worried I’ll slip and just randomly blurt out everything I’m guilty of.

“You ever been to Northwestern?” Harry says to me. “It’s like—rich white kid central. It’s different from Cupertino, sure, but maybe it’s not better. Most places aren’t. Everywhere’s just different.”

“You’ve been there?” she says. She knows he hasn’t.

“I’ve looked it up.”

“You’d live here forever, wouldn’t you?”

“I mean, yeah, it’s a nice place to live.”

“Nice like what? Nice like easy?”

“Sure.” He tries to mask it with a smile, but there’s a tightness in his voice. “It makes sense. You know what’s expected. I like people to tell me what they want from me, sue me. It’s fine here.”

We’re meeting everyone outside the International Hall on Larkin. I was maybe 30 percent nervous everyone would bail at the last minute, but nearly everyone’s there already by the time we show up. Regina slips into what I think of as her Editor Mode—circling the crowds with a smile for everyone and this certain, ardent way of listening to people, even just in throwaway conversation, that makes you feel like she’s incredibly glad you’re there.

Reemu Kapoor turns around and lights up when she sees me. “Danny! You got into RISD!” She gives me a hug. “That’s so awesome.”

Harry grins. “I, uh, maybe told people.”

And then a crush of people all surround me, jostling and high-fiving and hugging. Harry wasn’t kidding. I think literally everyone comes up to me to say congratulations, weaving me into their net of goodwill. I can feel my face going all red, my smile stretching wide enough that it starts to hurt.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that this whole universe we’ve inhabited nearly all our lives is going to dissolve itself in just six months, all of us flung to the far reaches of the world. I’m not like Regina—I love Cupertino. I love the trees and the quiet streets and the way the hills glow behind everything in the late afternoon; I love how contained it all is, how you can spend your whole life in a two- or three-mile radius and not feel like you’re missing very much. I love the people at school. I even love the hundred percent rule.

Maybe Regina blames Cupertino, though. You can play what-ifs forever. Maybe everything would’ve been different in a different place, with different people, with different pressures. I can’t fault her for wondering. I wonder too.

The talk is behind schedule; the doors still haven’t opened. There are maybe a few dozen other people here, not exactly the crowd that screams must-see event!! Behind me Chris Young and Andrew Hatmaker are getting bored.

“This talk better blow my mind,” Chris says. “It better change—”

“Why?” Harry says sharply, whirling around to stare at Chris. His eyebrows go up and stay there.

“Come on, there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing with your Saturday?” Chris says. In middle school Chris was in love with Regina. He used to corner me in the locker room sometimes and demand to know whether I was dating her.

“I’m in this great city with a lot of friends, so yeah, I’d say this is pretty good.”

“I wanted to sleep in.”

“Sucks to your assmar, then, doesn’t it?” Harry’s tone is friendly, but his expression is hard. “I thought it was a really good idea Regina came up with.”

Chris backs down. “Right,” he says. “Yeah, okay.” He offers Harry a smile. Harry doesn’t return it, and stares him down a few more seconds before turning back around. That’s new since March with Harry, that hair-trigger protectiveness at the slightest hint anyone might be somehow in opposition to something, anything, Regina wants.

The doors open then, and we go in. At the front of the room there’s a thirtyish white guy in a blazer writing something behind a podium. The only three sophomores in Journalism, Esther Rhee and Lori Choi and Maureen Chong, sit in front of me. Esther has a fashion blog, and every now and then I glance at it—she has a good eye, lots of clean text and white space, whimsical outfits with Bible verses Photoshopped along the borders and sale alerts and every now and then posts about fighting child trafficking. She always writes feature stories, usually about people she knows going on missions trips or spearheading volunteering orgs.

I see Esther’s expression change when the first slide goes up, the ACLU logo, and she leans over and whispers something to Lori and Maureen. They’re all close friends, insular in a way that feels familiar to me. (Also, I’m like 95 percent sure they all have a thing for Harry.) The three of them squint at the screen and duck their heads together, conferring in the way you do when you don’t want anyone else to hear what you’re saying. I can’t tell if Regina notices.

The guy speaking, to put it delicately, is full of crap. Basic slides, mansplanations about legal implications of the First Amendment, and then a long, smug humblebrag about how he represented some school that challenged free speech rules and text message records. I let my mind wander to RISD instead. Regina’s watching sharply, a notebook ready, but I never see her actually write anything down.

“Great talk,” I tell her as we’re filtering out of the theater. “Did you like it?”

She looks around, then drops her voice. “I can’t believe I made everyone come watch this.”

“Yeah, maybe don’t say that in front of Chris.”

When we’re all back outside, blinking in the sunlight, everyone gathers at the corner and Regina turns on her bright public smile.

“Thanks everyone for coming,” she says. “Okay, so the guy was kind of douchey, yes?” People laugh. I see Esther whisper something to Lori and Maureen. “That aside, I thought he had some really good points about how important it is to not let your school or anyone else dictate what you can and can’t say.” I obviously have no standing to say this since I actively stopped listening, but the parts I did hear—that didn’t quite sound like his point. And she’s done controversial stories before—one about this mom who always complains to the school board about sex in books we read, an interview with an anonymous classmate (she wouldn’t even tell me and Harry who it was) who’d had an abortion. I don’t remember getting this same speech any of the other times, even though there were people, Esther especially, who didn’t think we should publicize abortion. “I just think it’s so important that we—that we be brave in the stories we want to write. And that we remember we have this platform and this influence, and if we aren’t using it to tell people what matters, even if it’s risky, then what’s the point?”

“Every city should be laid out as a grid,” Harry says as we’re trying to find our way back to the car. “Like, seriously”—he motions to the map pulled up on his phone—“the hell is this?”

“I like San Francisco,” I say. “What kind of dull city is all straight lines?”

“New York, for one.”

“You’re just crap with directions.”

He elbows me. We find Jackson Street. I doubt where we are here in Chinatown looks anything like Shiyan; still, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the few things I’ve heard my parents talk about. When I was a kid my mom used to tell me sometimes about the food they grew up eating there, savory donuts and sea cucumbers and shaomai. We go by clothing stores with touristy sweatshirts spilling from the storefronts, cheap blue Chinese vases and bamboo cuttings and bright plastic toys all laid out on sidewalk displays, and when we pass by a bakery, its windows steamy, Regina turns to Harry and says, “You know the way you were talking to Chris today? Don’t do that.”

Harry stiffens. “He was just being so negative.”

“People are allowed to be negative.”

“Why bother? There’s so much crap in the world already. Suck it up and find the good.”

“You’re so…optimistic,” she says after a little while, and it doesn’t come out sounding like a good thing.

Harry watches her a moment, then says, more mildly than I was expecting, “True.” He’d never say it, but I think he’s a little hurt. And, I mean, I get what she’s saying, because it annoys me about Harry sometimes too—in his world there’s always a right solution, always a reward waiting if you put in the work, always a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. But it’s one of the best things about him, too. It’s nice to have someone in your life you don’t have to worry about as much, someone you know will always be okay.

It never used to be like this with her. I would never in a million years describe Regina as mellow, or laid-back, but there was always a kind of easiness to her intensity, too. Or maybe that’s the wrong word; maybe it’s just that just about anything feels easy when you believe your friendship with someone is unshakable.

And I would’ve said ours was. I’ve known Regina forever, ever since I moved here and wound up in the same kindergarten class as her and Sandra. Regina and I were both new to Cupertino that year, me from Texas and her from Taiwan, and I knew I wanted to be friends my first week of school when Mrs. Welton yelled at Jincent Wong for knocking over a stack of papers on her desk and Regina gave her a look of such disgust it would’ve withered my heart. “It was an accident,” she said, and then sat glaring at her desk with her arms crossed the rest of the day. At Regnart we were always pretty segregated by gender, and I spent most of my time roaming the blacktop and the field in noisy clumps of boys. But Regina’s was the friendship I’ll always look back on as the most important one I had growing up, the person who always knew me best and whose opinion I always needed before I was sure how I really felt about anything.

We both went to Primary Plus for after-school care and we’d hang out at the tables and I’d draw and she’d write news stories about the people in our class. Sometimes we’d make little books together (I still have some) and we’d imagine a whole future for ourselves, bringing what we wanted to life on our stapled pages. You know people by what it is they want most. When I broke my arm in sixth grade she bought me a left-handed notebook so I could try to sketch with my left hand; she knew how restless I felt, my mind all congested, when I couldn’t draw. And she used to come over sometimes when she was fighting with her parents, which was often. Nothing she did was ever good enough for them, her schoolwork or her violin or her helping around the house or her attitude, the way she looked or the things she wanted for herself. One time, I remember, sophomore year just after she’d gotten her license, it was the middle of the night and she’d gotten into a screaming match with her mom about the future and her mom—who said a lot of awful things to her, but this one always stands out for me—told her she was too ugly to be on TV. I snuck out of the house with a blanket and we lay out on my front lawn and looked up at the stars. It occurred to me to wonder if I should feel guilty (by then she was with Harry already), but lying there like that with her didn’t feel like anything, so I didn’t. She never liked talking about whatever was going on at home, so after we got bored of stargazing (ten seconds, probably; not much to stars when you’re this far away) we watched cat videos online and laughed about stupid stuff for hours and then I woke up at dawn, damp with dew, and then I had to shake her awake and hurry inside, all clammy in my shirt, before my parents came out and saw us.

The light turns red and we stop at the corner. A pungent, earthy smell that reminds me of my mom’s pantry wafts toward us from an herbal shop behind us, sandwiched between a souvenir store and a produce market. I think about what to say. Having to work this hard around them is so foreign to me, like landing in a country I’ve only ever heard people talk about. A taxi goes by.

“Here’s the thing,” Harry says abruptly, and we both turn to him. “I—”

But before he can finish, Regina says, “What’s that?”

We look where she’s pointing. It’s a corner of a building painted all black with giant windows that’ve been elaborately tagged over, and there’s a hanging sign labeling the place as NEIGHBORHOOD: A GALLERY.

“You want to go in?” Regina asks me.

I spend a pretty significant chunk of my time following art galleries online and browsing museums’ virtual collections, but I hardly ever get to go in person these days. I don’t want to drag them, though, if they’d rather not, feel their polite impatience hovering in front of the paintings. “Oh—we don’t have to if—”

“No, let’s go in,” Harry says. And I can feel their earlier tension evaporate; I feel both of them swivel instead toward this thing they know will make me happy. “This totally looks like your kind of thing. Let’s do it.”

There are more people inside than I would have expected, probably forty or fifty. It’s small, not in a way that makes you feel crowded but more that makes you feel a part of the surroundings. And the installation inside—everyone has those moments, I think, that take them out of themselves, when something you come across makes you see everything around you in a new way. Maybe this is how Regina always felt in church.

Whoever the artist is paints on overhead projector sheets and then casts them all over different parts of a room so they overlap and they look different, mingling differently, depending where you’re standing. I could stay in here forever, possibly, looking at the way the images layer on each other and also watching people take everything in, watching the projections flash across them. It’s a kind of living exhibit, all these real people sliding in and out of the projections, all these lives twined and tangled. The contrast between the physical people and the shaky, flimsy images stirs something in me—lifts from the private recesses of my heart and gives shape to what it feels like to walk with ghosts.

I can feel my mind expanding, all the possibilities filling new crevices in my consciousness. But then I also feel kind of frantic and awful in a way it takes me longer to pin down: it makes me feel desperate. He’s done what I always wanted to do and he did it first, and probably better. In fact, standing here, the three of us experiencing this together—this feels like more of me I could show Harry than anything I could ever draw myself.

Harry swivels his head around slowly, then motions toward the wall. “This is really cool.”

There’s a white guy dressed all in black opening the door for people who I assume works here, and I lean toward him. “Excuse me,” I say. “Who’s the artist?”

“Her name is Vivian Ho.” He points to the other side of the gallery. “She’s here today for the opening.”

I shouldn’t have assumed it was a guy. And I definitely did not expect her to be Asian. I know most of the prominent Asian artists these days because I collect the knowledge of them, imagine myself among them, and I’ve never heard of her. She’s in her midthirties, probably, stocky, with spiky, blue-tipped hair and black plugs in her earlobes, attractive in a guyish kind of way, and she’s ducking her head toward a few women who are saying something about one of the projections.

“You should go talk to her,” Regina says.

“Nah, she looks pretty busy.”

“No, you’re into this, right?” Harry says. “How often do you get to meet actual artists? Go say hi. Oh, look, she’s coming over by here.”

“That’s all right. We should keep going.”

“Excuse me, Vivian!” he calls. I elbow him and hiss, “What are you—”

But Vivian Ho is coming over and saying, with a friendly smile, “What’s up?”

“Hi,” Harry says, “my friend is an artist, too, and he wanted to tell you how much he likes your work.”

“Oh yeah?”

I can feel my face turning red. “Ah—it’s really—”

“He just got into RISD,” Regina adds. “On a scholarship.”

I hate them both. “Your installation is incredible,” I say.

She smiles and crosses her arms over her chest, then leans against the wall. “Hey, thanks for coming. What do you do?”

“I like to draw.”

“What do you draw?”

“Ah—portraits, mostly.”

“Yeah? The gallery’s doing this 30 Under 30 installation next month. You should apply.”

“We’re going to go find a bathroom,” Harry announces. I glare at him. He smiles and waves.

“Nah, I haven’t even been to art school yet,” I say to Vivian Ho. “Thanks, though.”

“So? I never went to art school.”

“No?”

“No. I came up in street art.” She laughs. There’s a warmth and a generosity pulsing from her, which seems about right; I don’t believe you can put anything meaningful into the world without having a kind of innate generosity, something of yourself to give. “And I remember what it was like when everyone would preach you that life experience bullshit and I was like, fuck that, I have things to say now. You get a lot of that?”

“People not taking me seriously because I’m still a kid, you mean?”

“You know the story.”

“Nah, I kind of have the opposite problem, honestly.”

“You got tiger parents? Is that what this is?”

It’s the reverse that’s true, really. When I was in first grade, the Cupertino Lions Club had a district-wide art contest for elementary school kids, and I won. The Cupertino Courier wrote up a little article about it with a photo of me holding my picture and my mom went up and down the street asking all the neighbors for their copies to give to her friends, and then they started researching lessons nearby, the best art programs I could go to after I graduated. On weekends we’d go to museums. My mom talked about how when she opened her hotel, she’d only have artwork in it by me.

Believe me, I don’t take it for granted that my parents have always supported my dreams. I know you don’t always get that lucky; I know they could’ve blotted out the fuzzy outlines of my art ambitions with the sharp clarity of medical school or law school or business school, things that required much less faith in me and that offered a more concrete kind of hope, the kinds of things my friends’ parents push them into. And I’m also lucky, I know that, that what they want from me is what I want from myself, too—I’m just worried my talent doesn’t run deep enough. And I can’t fathom facing the world the rest of my life if it doesn’t.

“No, they aren’t like that. It’s a big deal to them that I’m going next year,” I say. “It’s more—I’m worried I’m a fraud. Like maybe everyone thought I had all this promise but I’ll go through all four years of art school and bomb and my parents will be crushed.”

“Well, it’s not like you go through four years of school and you’re made. You can’t just learn your way into it.” She pauses. “And you can’t do it because of your family, either. You do it in spite of your family.”

“You think so? Do you wish you were doing something else?” How could you, though, when you stand in here and see what she made—how could you erase it from the world entirely, stick her behind some desk or podium somewhere instead?

“No,” she says. “It’s what I chose. But it takes more from you than what it gives back. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. Like, my family all lives in SoCal, and they aren’t a part of my daily life. I just don’t have that room. And I know I’ll never have kids. Probably never get married.” She tugs at her earlobe. “You’re going to have to choose, too. You have to look at the world like—you get one shot in it, and at the end you’re going to have to look back and see whether you said all you needed to say and gave it back to the world to hear, or if you just let that shrivel up inside you to die with you. All of us have to make that choice.”

We’re all exhausted by the time we get back to Cupertino. On the way back Regina’s mood seemed to deflate. I know she thinks Are you okay? is one of the most annoying things you can ask people, that it means you think they’re being sullen or overdramatic. So I don’t ask her. She seems subdued as she says goodbye.

The air in the car feels different with her gone, when it’s just me and Harry again. Sometimes I think your truest self is the one that emerges after the day’s been scrubbed off you, the way it feels now.

“You going to apply for that gallery thing?” Harry asks, easing around the turn onto my street. The seat belt catches against my shoulder as he taps the brakes. I will be eighty, I think, and still remember that particular sound the seat belt makes. “You should.”

“I doubt it.”

“How come?”

Someday, maybe, I won’t see other art and feel threatened by it; I’ll feel in communion with it, part of the same ecosystem. “Eh, I just doubt my odds are any good.”

He shrugs. He pulls into my driveway and turns off the engine. “That way it made you feel when you walked in—that really hit you, right? And you could give that to someone else.”

Something crackles on my skin like a fire. He felt me in that moment; he understood what it was to me. “Maybe. I probably couldn’t.”

“Well, not with that attitude.” He grins. It’s our inside joke—he’ll toss it out when Regina says something like You can’t put out a paper with four stories when everyone’s missed deadlines, when I say You can’t get to San Francisco in thirty minutes. I wonder who he feels the most himself around—if it’s times like this, or moments like earlier today with Regina when he has to make a case for who he is. Maybe that’s what they have together, that he finds himself more sharply defined around her. Is that what people really want, though?

We sit there a few moments. I’m reluctant to get out of the car, but I can’t think of an excuse to give for why. Finally he says, “All those things Vivian Ho was telling you—you think that’s true? That you have to choose that way?”

“I hope not.”

“You think so, though?”

There’s a kind of fear I associate with truth, and I felt it when she was talking. “Probably. She’d know, I guess. What would you do?”

“If I thought I had to choose between my family and what I wanted to do?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably my family. Then they wouldn’t guilt me about it.” He kind of smiles, not in a way that makes him look happy. “Regina’s right about me, you know. I always like taking the easy way out.”