It was the summer before middle school, right after the Fourth of July, that my dad first started to slip away to where no one else could follow. He’d stopped working on his experiment years back and I knew he missed it, but he was still working in the lab and as far as I could see, our lives were the same they’d been for years now. Something happened, though, inside him; it was like all the color bled out from the world around him and what was left over was muted and dull. For days every time you tried to talk to him he’d mutter back monosyllabic answers in this flat tone that shamed you for thinking you had anything worth telling him, and anytime you asked for anything you could feel the weight of the burden you were being. It’s a profoundly lonely feeling when someone who’s supposed to love you doesn’t have it in them to be around you. My mom cried sometimes in her room when she didn’t think either of us could hear.

And then he’d come out of it again and he’d be sorry, I think, because he’d joke with me in this kind of desperate way or he’d bring home new plants for my mom’s garden. Or he’d help her weed, or he’d talk me into coming out there, too, and we’d eat microwaved dinners sitting on a blanket on the grass even the nights it was freezing cold, my dad chattering loudly like he was afraid of the silences, trying to pretend to each other everything was okay. And of course you couldn’t talk about all those times you had to spare him your presence, you couldn’t blame him for it in case it sent him spiraling again, and so those were almost worse than the times he was just withdrawn.

I’d known about my sister a long time, but that year was the first time I really started to understand what it meant for my parents, and for me, too, that she’d been there and then she’d died. I worried that that was what my dad was reacting to, some kind of delayed grief catching up to him, and that it wasn’t something that could ever be fixed. All that summer I looked backward for clues, trying to remember any news stories I’d heard come on the TV that could’ve been what reminded him: a house fire in Los Altos Hills or a plane crash in Spain or a toddler in San Francisco falling out of a hotel window on a family vacation.

He’s just weak, Mr. X would whisper to me. He’s never going to pull it back together. You’re not good enough for him, you and your mom. This is it. This is the rest of your life.

It was the first time I understood what it was like to feel hopeless, for that space you hold inside yourself for good things to close up. I lost whole days to League of Legends, which I honestly don’t even really like, and had to watch Netflix to fall asleep. I hated nights, when everything felt amplified, and I got a stomachache each day at that hour when the sun went down but the leftover streaks of color were still hanging in the sky.

But: that was also the year I met Harry.

The first day of seventh grade, my backpack stuffed full of crisp notebooks and a new set of Micron pens, I was in the middle of the pavilion talking with Regina. I’d been telling her how bad things had been at home lately, and she’d put her hand on my forearm and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

I looked around. “Uh, like, right now?”

“No, no, not right now. I meant for your dad.” She looked flustered. “Unless you want me to?”

Regina went to a Taiwanese church by school. Her parents were never religious, but when they first moved here her mom went just to meet other Taiwanese people, so Regina grew up going. A few times she’s invited me to go with her, but I never have.

This, I knew, was why Regina believed in God: When she was ten years old her father had gone into his office and found one of his employees, a man named Robert, lying facedown on the floor. The hospital said he was in a stroke-induced coma, and told his family he wouldn’t likely survive the night. Regina found out and felt something—a voice in her head that wasn’t her own—tell her to pray. So she prayed and she kept praying, and she skipped dinner so she could pray for Robert to live. At nine she heard the same voice tell her she could stop now, and a few minutes later the phone rang. Robert had woken up. We’d never talked about religion all that much, although I knew it was important to her, and even though I wouldn’t have minded—I don’t think there was much I could’ve told Regina about myself then that she would’ve judged me for, and if you really believe in something, on some level it makes sense to want to convert everyone. My dad told me that once, closing the door after a Jehovah’s Witness he’d spoken politely with and then offered coffee. I’d thought back to that afternoon in his lab—my dad has always been an evangelist at heart.

And I wished sometimes my parents believed in something that way. I wished they believed my sister was in heaven, somewhere they’d see her again and I’d meet her someday, instead of just dissipated into atoms circling back into the universe; I wished my dad had something to hope for and I wished my mom had less to fear.

“That’s okay,” I’d told her, and then wondered if maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t in a position to be turning anything prayer-like down right now. “I’ll pass.”

“Okay. I—” And then she stopped talking, and her face lit up, and then there was Harry, bounding in like an aggressive puppy and pulling her in for a hug.

“Regina Chan!” he said. “Where were you all summer? You were supposed to hit me up in Taiwan, homegirl. I was there for like two months.”

“I tried calling you when I was there,” she said. “You never answered your phone.”

“Oh, whaaaaat, that’s a lie. It must not have gone through.” He was grinning in that almost manic way he has sometimes—I know it now, even if I didn’t recognize it then—when he’s going to change the subject and just talk at someone so fast all they can really do back is laugh and (nine times out of ten) feel hopelessly charmed. And in that moment, I believed I saw him perfectly.

That was the thing, that back then I was always trying to see people for who they really were because it felt like if you were an artist, that’s what you were supposed to do. I wanted to draw people stripped of their outer layers, and so I was always looking underneath for truth. (Honestly, I was probably kind of insufferable.) At any rate, in that moment it felt clear that Harry’s trick to getting people to like him was to pretend he liked them: to wield his fake enthusiasm as a kind of currency. I would’ve bet my life savings that Regina did call him, probably more than once, and that he hadn’t given her call a second thought; I bet he hit IGNORE and forgot all about it until just this second, the same way he’d forget about his conversation with her he was having right now. And I would never come up to people having a serious conversation and present myself that way, like a gift. When he was gone I said, “Who’s that?”

“That’s Harry Wong.” She said it like she was surprised I didn’t know him already, like it was my bad. Then she added, “It’s his birthday pretty soon.”

Birthdays in Harry’s family, it turned out, were a bizarrely huge deal, and for the milestone ones, like thirteen, his parents went all out. They had (I would learn all this through social osmosis) rented out one of the private banquet rooms at Dynasty that people usually booked for weddings or red egg and ginger parties, and apparently a bunch of important people Harry’s dad knew from his years in politics and business were going to be there, and apparently Harry’s mother was determined to book a band with at least one radio hit, and apparently the invitations had been custom-printed and had cost eight dollars apiece. Sandra Chang referred to it as Harry’s wedding to himself.

I was staying late at school as much as possible those days, stretching out the part of the afternoon where I could avoid going home for as long as I could, and we were sitting on the bleachers overlooking the blacktop. Sandra said, “I heard they’re blowing like ten thousand dollars on this party.”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“I heard it from—”

“No, I believe you. I just think it’s bullshit anyone would spend that much money on a party. It’s gross.”

“You think it’s gross? I would one hundred percent do the same thing if I had the money. You would, too. Admit it.”

“I definitely would not.”

She laughed; she didn’t believe me, probably. She leaned back so her elbows rested on the row behind us. She tossed her hair and then carefully smoothed it back into place, her nails glinting in the sunlight. She always had elaborately painted fingernails, tiny patterns or colorblocks or sometimes even scenes. One time I’d asked if she did them herself and where she got ideas from. She’d just looked at me in this way that felt condescending and also almost defensive somehow. Is this because you’re all into art? she’d said. And you think this counts, or something? And then she’d changed the subject.

“Anyway,” Sandra said, “he invited Regina.”

It is exactly how junior high works that whenever someone gets invited to a party, everyone else knows. Sandra and I had a running bet going on his unfolding guest list. I said, “Of course he did.”

“I called it.” She held out her hand. “Pay up.”

I took a dollar from my wallet and handed it over. “That means you’re next.”

She laughed. “Is that an official bet? You’ll earn your dollar back.”

“You would totally go if he invited you, wouldn’t you.”

“Of course I would. You would, too.”

“I wouldn’t.” Obviously I would have. “I don’t get why Regina likes him.”

“It’s because Regina’s a nice person,” Sandra said. “She has no standards. She likes everyone.”

It was true; Regina’s always been a nice person. In second grade—we still tease her about this—we had class pet bunnies. A couple months into the year, the one girl bunny got pregnant, and one day we came in for class and found out the mom had eaten all her babies. Regina cried so hard she literally got sent home. Sandra had been Regina’s very best friend since first grade, and if you were friends with Regina you understood that was part of the deal, that you’d always be in second place. They had this whole language built on inside jokes and do-you-remembers and vague references that meant nothing to anyone else. They had a way of talking about everything, endlessly dissecting even the smallest interactions, that made it seem like what they were talking about was something important.

I wasn’t in Sandra’s class until second grade, and at first, I didn’t like her. Sandra wasn’t what you would ever describe as nice and she had a disquieting ability to hone in on the things you didn’t want to talk about, didn’t want anyone to notice about you (which Regina always did, too; the difference is Regina never brought them up. But maybe they talked about all those things in everyone else to each other). But she grew on me; she always said things no one else was willing to and she made me laugh, and there’s something to be said for always knowing where you stand with someone. She was the only one of my friends who was an only child like I was, and she always complained that it wasn’t fair for it to be just you against both your parents, although she said several times she’d trade hers for mine, or for anyone’s. Once in fourth grade I saw her arguing with her mom in the parking lot—they were in the car and Sandra had just buckled her seat belt and she said something I couldn’t hear, and her mom whirled around from the front seat and slapped her. I never told her I’d seen. She could find the dark streak in anything, in those cheesy inspirational posters hanging around the school or in movies everyone else loved or in people, too. Her house backed up against a creek and once, the summer we were eleven and she was home alone, she invited me over and we went down through the gap in the fence. It was almost dry in the creek bed, just standing pools of water everywhere and crackly dead leaves, and we played with the tadpoles all afternoon. She’d said they reminded her of Mrs. Polnicek—“Tadpolniceks!” she’d said, cackling in triumph while I rolled my eyes—our teacher that year who I’d liked, actually. “Sludgy and useless,” she’d said, chasing one around the water with her finger. “Sound familiar?” I liked Mrs. Polnicek, but, I mean, I could kind of see it; I laughed. Sometimes I wondered if Regina always stuck by her so closely because next to Sandra she got to feel like a better person, the nice one, the one who saw the best in people.

Anyway, at the beginning of junior high, the bulk of my friendship with Sandra was talking crap about Harry. Harry had gone to Blue Hills for elementary school, so this was the first time everyone I knew had been exposed to him, and it was, to put it mildly, a strange feeling watching all the people you thought you knew flock to someone you despised, someone phony and cheaply charismatic. Of Course People Like You If You Con Them Into Thinking You Like Them: The Harry Wong Story.

But Harry was, for whatever reason, completely magnetic. He was (I had to admit it) objectively good-looking, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones and a quick, easy smile that he knew how to aim for maximum effect; he had a friendly self-deprecating way of talking and could, without warning, slip into saying things that were constantly hailed as really deep (once, when Aaron Ishido joked about Brett Lee being the most punch-worthy person in our grade, Harry was like, Nah, man, violence is never cool, and I once heard him argue with a straight face that all racism was rooted in misunderstanding). He was forever laughing and joking around with people, always changing the tenor of every circle he walked into. He was the kind of person conversations stopped for. Which was baffling because, to me, underneath the veneer of aggressive perfection, he seemed thoroughly mediocre. There was nothing interesting or different about him; he was just exactly the perfect prototype of everything Cupertino wanted you to be: smart, polished, rich. He wasn’t different or unique, he was just what everyone else was, only more so, like someone took the rest of us and turned us up to Technicolor.

Also, a full month into the school year (a school year in which we had not one, not two, not three, but four classes together), we were funneled into the same test-review group in history and he’d turned to me with that plastered-on smile and said, “Remind me your name again?”

I know it all sounds petty. To this day I’m not entirely sure why I took such an instant dislike to him, why his very existence felt so personal to me. In my defense, I was a seventh grader, and there’s no such thing as a good seventh grader; all seventh graders are assholes, even the nice ones. Maybe it was just rampant hormones, who knows. Maybe it was how sometimes he bought things at Goodwill and him doing it was somehow cool, proof of him being down-to-earth and unique and environmentally conscious, whereas I knew that if I did it because I didn’t have money it would be a different story altogether. Maybe I was jealous.

But when I really think about it, I wonder if maybe it’s more than that; maybe it’s something that hits close to the deepest core of who I am. I’m not a religious person, but what I have with Harry is the closest thing I have—when I’m with him is when the world is at its clearest for me. I didn’t understand that yet, though, sitting on the bleachers with Sandra, blazing with all those ways I hated him.

Whenever there’s some kind of prize of any kind up for contention, I don’t care who you are: you always imagine yourself winning it. So I imagined Harry saying things like, Hey, I’ve always thought you seemed cool. You want to come hang out at this thing I’m having Saturday? I imagined him bringing up the party at lunchtime. I resented him for taking up so much space in my mind, and resented myself for giving it to him, but that didn’t mean I stopped. I also: liked a few of his posts online and then kept checking to see if he’d reciprocated in any way, nodded at him a few times in class, played four or five pickup basketball games with him and some other guys after school.

The last one was the Friday before the party. We were dispersing, sweaty and spent, when I heard someone call, “Yo, Cheng!”

I turned around and Harry was coming after me. “Wait up,” he said. “I want to ask you something.”

There was a spark in my chest like a lighter. Maybe I’d been wrong about him after all. I would take back all the hateful thoughts I’d had about him and all the things I’d said to Sandra; I would take back my assessment of him as fake. “Yeah, what’s up?”

“Do you have the homework assignment for first period?” he said, hitching the straps on his backpack higher. “I was late.”

The next morning, the morning of his party, Harry posted a selfie of him giving two thumbs up. Celebrating my birthday at Dynasty today at noon, come on by! he wrote. All welcome!!

That was it for me. My rage ballooned. Harry Wong wanted literally everything for himself, including, apparently, the credit for being friendly and inclusive and magnanimous, which—screw that. No one was going to go and feel welcomed because of some vague throwaway comment online.

Did you see Harry’s post? I texted Sandra. I should go just to call him on it.

I’m going! she wrote back. With Regina. You should just come. My mom can come pick you up if you want.

You’re going? What the hell, I thought you hated him.

I don’t have anything against him as a person. I just like watching you freak out about it. A few seconds later she texted, again, You should come.

My heart plummeted down my chest like it was falling through a trapdoor. I had to put my phone down. The weekend spanned itself in front of me. My mom was at the Lis’ house with the twins, who were babies then, because the parents were both out of town on business and so I’d be stuck at home with my dad, who was worse than ever on weekends, answering questions in a grayish monotone voice and staring blankly at the TV, cocooned on the couch in his ratty sweats and unwashed hair.

My dad found me in my room, furiously drawing ugly-looking caricatures of Harry. He watched me for a little while, then patted his stomach. “Want to go get donuts, Daniel?”

“No.”

He watched me draw. “Who is that?”

“Just a guy at school.”

“You don’t like him?”

“No.” He waited for me to elaborate. Finally I said, “He had this party today and everyone was acting like it was this huge important thing. I don’t know. It’s stupid. He’s kind of full of himself.”

I immediately regretted telling him—my dad can be so advice-y, and I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, though, he said, “Let’s go on a hike.”

“I don’t feel like hiking.”

“Fresh air will be good for you. Put on some shoes. It’ll be fun.”

So we drove up into the hills and went hiking at Fremont Older. You drive up Prospect where it winds into the hills and is barely big enough for two cars to fit, park under the oak trees next to the country club, the branches gathering you away from the sunlight, and you hug the side of the hill and pass some shut-off wooden homes and then the trail spills you onto a wide dirt path in a clearing. The dusty path leads up bare grassy hills until you get to Hunter’s Point and you can see the whole Bay Area sprawled out below, all gray-green and red-roofed, from so high up blurred in a way that always makes me think of an artist I like named Dashiell Manley, who makes these explosive, haunting oil-on-linen paintings, textured dabs of color that make your eyes feel thirsty and inadequate. I hadn’t wanted to come, but my dad was right—it was nice being up here, kind of like being in another world. Literally above it all. My dad was making an obvious effort to be in a good mood, and we saw hawks and a few deer and I watched the way people looked hiking, the lines their bodies made from their tiredness and determination. Any other day it would’ve been fine; it wouldn’t have felt like a consolation prize.

We were headed back to the parking lot, coming around a narrow switchback with a steep drop-off, when he hit a root and stumbled. My mind flashed forward. I could see the accident before it happened—him tumbling down the ravine, the search parties I’d try to flag down, the guilt I’d feel for all the times and all the ways I’d holed up in my room quarantined from his obvious sadness, what it would do to my mom to lose a daughter and then a husband, too. But I was wrong about it—he flailed his arms and grabbed at a shrub, and steadied himself. When he pulled his hand away his palm was bleeding, but he was laughing.

“That was close,” he said. “Hey, it’s not so bad, right? You aren’t at your party, but we’re not lying at the bottom of a ravine.”

My heart was pounding. I was embarrassed by my own fear. “If you say so.”

“Say it’s better or I’ll throw you down this hill. Now I know the way down.”

It made me laugh in spite of myself. Afterward, we went to go get donuts at Donut Wheel. My dad ate two. My dad, who deserved a party and a celebration and happiness and instead all that went to Harry, who’d done nothing to earn any of it.

Monday was Harry’s actual birthday, a fact I learned when I showed up for school that morning and it was like a balloon store threw up all over campus and Harry’s face was plastered all over the halls. People decorated like this for their friends’ birthdays, but I’d never seen anyone take it this seriously. There were flyers with his face taped to pretty much every bank of lockers, including my own. When I went to get my books, there was his extraordinarily satisfied face, staring right at me.

I thought: NOPE. I pulled my Sharpie from my pocket, glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and drew over the flyer. I edited his features—I made his eyes more leering, more pleased with themselves, and then I zoomed in on his mouth, trying to shape it to make it look self-congratulatory and smug as all hell.

“You didn’t like the original?”

I knew before I turned around. I turned around anyway. Harry was watching me, his arms folded across his chest.

“What is this?” he said. “Is this supposed to be me?”

Of course it was. There was no use denying it, either. It looked like him. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

He let his arms drop and then reached in front of me and tore the paper off the lockers. The expression on his face—at the time I thought it was disgust. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Uh—” I tried to grab for the paper, but he held it out of my reach. “It’s nothing. I was just screwing around.”

“Why?”

What are you supposed to say to that? Finally I said, again, “I was just messing around.”

He stared at me a long time. It occurred to me to wonder if maybe he was going to hit me. He didn’t, though. He said, “Can I keep this?”

It caught me off guard—it was the last thing I expected—and I nodded before I could stop myself. Anyway, it’s not like I could’ve asked for it back.

He didn’t crumple it up, either. He folded it carefully in half, then swung his backpack around and unzipped it and slipped the drawing into his binder. Then he walked away, taking the drawing with him: tangible proof he could fold up and keep of what a petty, vindictive person I was, something that would leave me always on the hook.

My heart was still thudding as Harry rounded the corner out of sight. I had to stop walking to let it slink back into its normal patter. Which seemed like a massive overreaction, except that I think, when I try to re-create that flash of time, I’d done it on purpose for him to see—for a split second there I’d imagined the worst and then wanted it. Or brought it into being, at least, which in the end might as well be the same thing. I’d like to say I lost myself for a moment, and that’s why. But that’s the easy way out. It seems equally possible that in those moments you just let go, when you give in to your impulses, that those are the moments that are most you.

Originally, my parents weren’t going let me go on the eighth-grade science camp trip to Yosemite. My mom was too worried the bus would crash, or I’d get lost in the snow and freeze to death, or I’d slip off a cliff hiking and plunge to the rocky ground hundreds of feet below.

Besides that, things always felt unstable at home. My dad still wasn’t himself, although it was starting to feel like this faded version we had to tiptoe around was his real self after all. It’s hard living with someone who’s never happy—a dark mist hovers over everything that happens in the household and you feel guilty when you want to be happy yourself. I worried about him, and I worried maybe he was going to divorce my mom or that she’d decide to divorce him. I had my cycle down pat: I’d be sullen and quiet around them, upset I had to worry about any of this, and then at night lying awake I’d be guilt-stricken and resolve to do better in the morning. It was draining, and I was pretty close to desperate to get to Yosemite even if for no other reason than to get out of the house.

It was Auntie Mabel, my mom’s best friend, who talked them into it, saying science camp was good for my education and that I’d love going. I did love going. Sometimes even now it chills me to think how much of my life would’ve never happened if I just hadn’t gone.

I stayed in a cabin with Maurice Wong and Aaron Ishido and Ahmed Kazemi, other denizens of the group of us who hung out in the middle of the pavilion at lunch—loud, visible, sending ripples into all the peripheral groups gathered around the outskirts. After that drawing I’d kind of thought Harry would muscle me out of his circle, and he could’ve, too, but he hadn’t. Since last year we’d mostly ignored each other, and I always tried to avoid him, but middle school doesn’t let you do that; once earlier that year we’d walked into Geometry at the same time (I’d seen it coming and tried to change my pace, but it hadn’t worked), and he’d dipped his head in acknowledgment and held open the door and motioned for me to go ahead. I’d felt him watching me as I went past him, and sometimes in class I would’ve sworn I felt him watching me, too, although every time I checked he moved his head too quickly for me to see if I was right.

Daytimes in Yosemite we were assigned to hiking groups and we traipsed through practically frozen creeks and did trust falls and foraged miner’s lettuce and we were all given trail books to sketch what we saw (I drew portraits of all the other people in my group and gave them to everyone at the end of the week), and ever since then I’ve been pretty friendly with the random collection of people who were in my group, and I still think of them—Jinson Tu and Jefferson Choy and Helena Heggem and Serina Kim and Annie Chong—as a single unit.

We weren’t allowed to take cell phones out on the hikes with us, and Thursday, the day we hiked Yosemite Falls, when I got back to the cabin thirsty and sore before dinner there was a message from my mom.

“Hello, Daniel, it’s Ma. I’m taking your father to the doctor. Just so you know. He’s all right, but he’s very sad.”

He’s very sad. It isn’t fair to resent a dead baby, but in that moment I did.

I wished I didn’t have to go back home; I wished I could just stay here and pretend everything was fine. I didn’t see a way out of my dad just always drowning in his sadness, and I didn’t see a way out of me having to carry that with me my entire life.

It was Thursday night, the night before we’d all get up and stumble bleary-eyed out of our cabins by seven the next morning to get to the dining hall and then check onto our buses, that I couldn’t take the feeling anymore. All the guys in my cabin were asleep and it was after midnight, definitely after the nine p.m. curfew, but I figured there probably weren’t any chaperones wandering around outside and so I slid as quietly as I could out of my sleeping bag and grabbed my ski jacket and went out into the cold.

It was close to freezing outside, my breath puffing in front of me, the moon behind the clouds turning the whole sky a pale, glowing gray. There were small patches of snow under the eaves and on the ground where even during the day it was mostly shadow, and it was bracingly quiet—no wind rustling trees, no cars. The moon was bright enough to light the snow fairly well, and so I walked past the cabins. I had some vague idea of getting to the clearing by the dining hall, where there were some benches carved out of logs, but I’d only gotten twenty or thirty feet when, from the near dark, someone said, “Hi, Danny.”

I whirled around, my heart thudding, ready for I don’t know what—and then it was Harry sitting mostly hidden in the shadows on a rock, a scarf wrapped around his neck and his beanie pulled all the way down over his ears. It caught me entirely off guard. I said, “What are you doing out here?”

“Eh, I just couldn’t sleep.” I could see puffs of air when he spoke. He didn’t look as surprised to see me as I was to see him, which meant, probably, that he’d been watching me for a little while. “You?”

“Uh—same.”

He jostled his shoulders up and down a few times. “It’s freezing out here, though. I can’t feel, like, ninety percent of my body anymore.”

“How long have you been sitting out here?”

“An hour, maybe. Two.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to get in hella trouble if you get caught?”

“Aren’t you?”

I mean, yeah, okay. “Touché.”

“Well, anyway—” To this day, what he did next surprises me: he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small metal flask and offered it to me. Harry was not—he was absolutely not—the kind of guy you found drinking alone in the snow after curfew, and I blinked at him, my eyes trying to make sense of all the pieces. “Uh—I’m not sure if—”

“You don’t drink? Don’t worry about it, it’s cool. I brought it for my cabin, and then we just—there was never a good time.”

“It’s not that, I just—” I looked at him closer. “Are you, like, okay and everything? Is something wrong?”

“No, yeah, everything’s fine.” He flashed an extremely unconvincing smile. He pocketed the flask again without drinking from it. “Everything’s cool. I just couldn’t sleep.”

I could’ve gone back inside. There were a lot of things I could’ve done, actually—I could’ve left him there, or I could’ve reported him to someone or held on to the information to dole out like currency. And he knew that, I think. It didn’t feel like arrogance that had made him say hi or ask me to drink with him; it felt more like, for whatever reason, while he was sitting there on that log knowing I wasn’t alone as I thought I was, he made some kind of choice to trust me. Or not trust me, maybe, but at least to put some small part of his fate in my hands. And I owe the past four years to that decision, honestly. I don’t think I would’ve done the same.

Anyway, it felt like I owed him, at least a little bit, for that. I said, “How come you couldn’t sleep?”

It felt like a risk. Maybe it always does talking to someone you don’t like, because they could turn it on you in any of several ways. I spent the next few seconds of his silence regretting it, picturing a way to extricate myself from this conversation. Then finally he said, “Sometimes—” He stared out into the dark. “Do you ever get tired of all of this?”

“All of what?”

“You know. Just the always—just everything. Like school. Cupertino. You know.”

“Tired of it how?”

“Just having to do all of it all the time. Even when you’re worried you’ll never pull it off or it feels like what’s your reward in the end—you just get to do more of the same for longer? You know? And then nothing you do is ever good enough anyway. You ever feel like that?”

“Sometimes, I guess.” Then I added, “It never seems like you do.”

“Why not?”

“You’re so, like—peppy all the time.”

He cocked his head and grinned at me. He has a grin that can change the whole mood in a room; I’ve seen it happen so many times, but that was the first time it happened to me. “Peppy?”

“Ah—maybe that’s not the best word. I’m just surprised, that’s all. You play the game pretty well.”

“Peppy, huh.” He rubbed his hands over his arms, then tucked them under his armpits. “Regina told me you want to be an artist.”

Was he thinking of the picture I’d drawn of him? I was glad it was mostly dark. “Yeah.”

“That’s kind of cool. It’s like a big F-you to the system, right?”

“Nah, it’s just that I suck at math.”

He laughed. “Like Asian suck, or actually suck?”

“No, like actually suck. I still don’t understand how to graph a line.”

“What do you mean you don’t understand? You just take the slope—”

“I know, I know. Or, I mean—I don’t know. But I can recite the words like that too. Slope-intercept. Rise over run.” This was unexpected—maybe it was just the weirdness of the whole situation—but I was kind of smiling. “I can draw a line. That’s good enough.”

“No, that’s not good enough, what the hell?” He looked around. “Find me a stick or something. I’ll write it out for you in the snow. This night is going to end with you learning how to graph a line.”

“That’s not—”

“No. I’m on a mission. We’re doing this.” He propelled himself off the rock in an athletic kind of way and went for one of the trees until he found a stick to snap off. This was that same condescension, wasn’t it? But why did it feel so different all of a sudden?

He did it, too—he drew his axes in the snow and explained it about a dozen times until—small miracle—I did mostly understand. Then he tossed the stick to the ground and raised his arms in triumph. “Mission accomplished.”

And that was the first time I had the same feeling I’ve felt probably thousands of times with him since then—that small panic about the moment ending. My heart felt kind of strange, sort of galloping against my chest. It made me wonder if maybe quantum entanglement felt like a prickling extra-awareness, like all your atoms poised for action and humming with desire—like a thing between you that’d never quite lie still. I felt hyperaware of how, if I leaned a few inches closer, our arms would brush together.

I wasn’t ready to go back to my stuffy cabin and Aaron and Ahmed and Maurice passed out in their grimy sleeping bags, back to the house where my dad was slowly mummifying himself in his sadness that I was pretty sure a doctor wouldn’t be able to magic him out of. I said, “I know what you mean about being tired.”

His expression changed. He toed at the stick in the snow, then stepped on it with his hiking boot until it crunched in half. “Yeah. Well.”

“This week was better, though, right? Like, it was nice to be here.”

“I guess. Sometimes I just don’t think it’s all worth it. Like maybe it would better to just go live in like, Ohio or something and just be a coal miner.”

I leaned against the wall of the cabin. I could hardly feel my face. “Is that a thing? Somehow I doubt they’re just waiting for some random Asian kid to show up from Cupertino ready to coal-mine.”

His eyes crinkled into a smile, enmeshing me in the joke. “I’d do Taiwan proud.”

“Okay, then. Represent.”

He let go of the smile. “It’s probably crappy there anyway. That’s the worst part. This is probably all there is. So if you don’t play, it’s just—” He lifted his arms and then let them fall to his sides.

And I knew exactly what he meant. Any one of us standing out there with him would’ve, because Cupertino really gets to you. It’s not like it’s this friendly, squishy, huggy place where mediocrity is fine and it’s cool if you fail or just aren’t that good at anything, and everyone here knows it. We were all tired and stressed out all the time, all of us worried we’d never be good enough, many of us explicitly told we weren’t good enough, so it wasn’t like his problems were special or different or more tragic than anyone else’s. We all felt it, the relentless crush of expectation, the fear of not measuring up—even me, and I like it here, and as Asian parents go mine are about as chill as they come.

So it didn’t have to feel like some big moment between us; it could’ve felt like talking to basically anyone in my grade. I guess it was just that I knew it wasn’t something he ever showed to anyone, but that night, for whatever reason, he did to me. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Hey, Harry?”

“Yep.”

I could feel my frozen face turning red. “Hey, I’m, um, I’m sorry about that picture thing last year. Drawing on it.”

“Oh—whatever. Don’t worry about it.”

“It was just kind of a dick thing to do.”

“It’s cool, really.” He kind of laughed. “I think I still have it, actually. Somewhere on my desk. You’re really talented. It looked more like me than the picture did. I always hated that picture.”

“The picture was fine.” I kicked at some snow. “I thought you might try to ruin my life over that.”

“You thought what?” He looked legitimately startled. “Why would I do that?”

And I believed him. It was genuine, that confusion, and that was the first time I really saw him, I think—when I understood that his social persona was concealing none of what I’d always thought it was, but actual niceness instead, that there was a kind streak at his core.

It wouldn’t be until a few weeks later that I’d understand about the rest of it, but that would happen, too, in Honors History when Mr. DiBono passed back our midterms. I’d see Harry turn his over without looking at it and then sit super still for a long time, his eyes trained on the teacher like he was trying to will himself into not looking. He lasted twenty minutes, and then he looked down and peeled back just the top corner of the page where the grade was written. From across the classroom I saw the way his whole body deflated, and then I saw the way he gathered himself up and hid that, and something about it was so practiced, so automatic, that I understood for the first time how much this was a part of him. I mean, it was a small moment: it was over fast, and it wasn’t something we ever talked about. But I saw everything differently after that, I think because it’s hard to turn away from someone after you’ve really seen them. You carry that part of them with you, and it becomes your job to protect it, too.

But that was later. For the time being, in the snow, Harry clapped his hand on my shoulder. I could feel it through all the layers of jacket and glove, could feel it like there wasn’t all that fabric in between us.

“We should sleep,” he said, and something about the way he said it, something about that we—I think I knew in that moment how much I’d want to always be covered by it, how I’d always want there to be a space for me inside it, how I would maybe be willing to do things I wouldn’t have imagined in order to make it so.

We walked together back to the cabins. And that was the first night.

My dad wasn’t seeming very much better by the time eighth-grade graduation rolled around; it had been a rough couple months. The doctor hadn’t helped because my dad didn’t believe in taking the antidepressants he’d been prescribed or in going to the counseling she’d suggested, so he didn’t. All through the ceremony my mom was wiping her eyes, and when I found my parents after on the lawn, all the guys roasting in dress pants and dress shirts and all the girls tottering as their heels sank into the grass, she was crying. I’d been with Harry, taking pictures with different people and all that, but when we saw my parents Harry whacked me on the back and said he’d catch me later. And maybe it was “Pomp and Circumstance” still playing all emotionally in the background, but seeing my mom’s tears I felt, for the first time, the true weight of all the dreams they held for me. Those dreams crystallized that day into something hard and heavy, came to rest on my shoulders. Because I felt it in a real way then what they’d lost, that there should’ve been another eighth-grade graduation before mine, another batch of pictures no one was ever going to look at, and there was never going to be any way to fix what had happened to them. I’d grow up and have my future ahead of me still and still have my dreams out there to reach for, and we’d be different, because I would have the world, I would have my whole life ahead of me, but all they’d have was me.

“Don’t cry,” I whispered to my mom, and patted her hand. I tried to smile. “It’s just eighth grade.”

At the graduation dance that night (butcher-paper palm trees taped to all the walls and the lights turned low, bottles of sparkling cider and those Costco three-flavor packs of cookies), when we were tired of dancing, a bunch of us sat on the bleachers and Harry slung his arm over my shoulders. He’s always been a kind of handsy person. He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the music and said, “How come your mom was crying so much today?”

I held still so he didn’t think I was moving to get him off me. “Long story.”

“What’s the story?”

Back then I never really liked talking about my family with most people—it was complicated, I was worried about fitting in, school was where I got to not think about it, etc., etc. But that night—maybe it was how hard it had hit me seeing my mom crying like that, or how before the dance we’d gone to dinner and my dad had given me a framed signed Dashiell Manley print. He’d watched my reaction eagerly, like he wanted to save it, and when he saw how pleased I was he was proud in a way that made him feel more like himself. Or maybe it was the way it felt to sit there on the bleachers with Harry and for him to have made that space for the two of us that way in that whole big sea of people.

So I told him what it had been like. My voice cracked a couple of times; luckily it was loud in there. I was nervous. I guess I’ve always believed that’s what a relationship is, this space you keep between you where you hold each other’s secrets. Or that it’s how you build something together, layering the things you’ve never told anyone else like bricks.

After I finished he was quiet for a long time. Ahmed came over to talk to us and I could see Harry snap into motion, grinning back and laughing, and I wanted to take back everything I’d told him. But then Ahmed went off to ask Sandra to dance and Harry’s grin slid off his face and he turned back to me. He put his hand on my knee.

“It’ll get better,” he said. Harry is an unrepentant optimist, and so I might’ve been willing to write off what he was saying as a cheap platitude, except for the hand on my knee and also for what came next. “It always does. They’ll figure things out and everything will get back to normal. Okay? And in the meantime, I mean—we’ll get you through it.” And there it was again—that same we.

That was when it all made sense to me—why I’d disliked him so ardently at first. It was because something in me recognized how much he would matter to me, all along. I’d just been wrong about the particular way.

I’m not going to try to pass the night off as in any way epic. It was hot in there and everyone was sweaty and you could feel a thousand middle schoolers’ worth of hormones everywhere, and everyone had braces and all the girls were teetering around in their heels and the teachers were skulking around in the corners trying to make sure no one was grinding on each other or otherwise getting too gross.

But still. The dance was also a retreat from the fear I’d been living in at that point. My worst fear about my family was that maybe I would never be enough to make up for what they’d lost, that I wasn’t supposed to be the one who’d lived, and that they’d wind up broken in a way I couldn’t put back together. Maybe they’d break apart from each other entirely. I felt that possibility heavy on my chest every morning when I woke up. By then I could see a future where my family never stopped being a grayer, paler, more trembling version of ourselves, and by then I couldn’t shake the possibility that maybe my fate, all our fates, had been sealed before I was even born when my sister died. It wasn’t hard to see how our future could get swallowed by the past.

And so it was the way he’d said we that felt significant to me—that same we from Yosemite I’d been holding on to all these months, the same one I’d been hoping I hadn’t just imagined. It’s both the best thing that can happen to you and the most dangerous, because what do you have except the people you belong to and who belong to you? But then you can also lose yourself to it; you can do things in service of those wes that end up haunting you.

Harry was, surprisingly, right: things did get better. Something rekindled in my dad—whether that was purpose or hope or something else, I’m not sure, but he felt like himself again. He’d go to social events again and hum in the shower or while making coffee in the morning and joke around with me. And my mom seemed relieved in her quiet, nervous way—that sort of holding her breath, that sense she gives off that she doesn’t quite trust the ground beneath her feet.

I’ve never told Harry how I feel, and daily, probably, I go back and forth about whether he knows. It’s what makes me wonder, too—maybe he’s more open than I am and I already know everything there is.

Or maybe not. Maybe he keeps some of that locked up, like I do.

Anyway, though, since Yosemite we’ve been basically inseparable, but there are ways I don’t let my guard down around him. Someday, maybe—I tell myself that all the time. We’ll see. Sometimes, actually, he’ll say something to me that feels so generous it throws me, but for the most part it’s not like we ever said that kind of thing to each other aloud. We always bickered a lot and also, I mean, the things that always bugged me about him didn’t necessarily stop bugging me once we got close; I just learned to contextualize them differently. They slid off to the side and allowed room for the rest of it in.