Illinois autumn rolled in hot and thick the week I went back to school. On the first day, I meandered to my classes. I’d left myself extra time to wander around the campus and refamiliarized myself with its layout and architecture, its odd mixture of imposing nineteenth-century stone facades and modern, gleaming, window-walled buildings. Though my skin was sticky from the humidity, I didn’t mind; it was a relief to feel anything after my year of bolted-down numbness. Evanston was just one-hundred miles from my hometown, but the muggy air was different from the oppressive air in Oakville; it was palpable and promising, like a kiss from a new boyfriend in a warm rain shower.
When I began, four years earlier, Northwestern was an intoxicating upgrade from my homogenous hometown. It was really something to be on a big college campus after eighteen years in a suffocating suburb.
From sheet-linen ivory to piano-key black and all shades between, a multicultural mishmash of animated, eager students strolled, skated and biked around, and bantered, debated and laughed. A year ago, I’d been one of them, lively and full of light. Now, I was a year behind schedule for graduation, but at least I was there.
I headed toward my English class, patting at my flyaway curls, pushing my hair behind my ears, off my sweaty neck. I arrived at the back of a dim, squat building I’d never been in before; it had Lysol-scented hallways and not enough windows. When I got to the classroom, Rose sat green-washed by the fluorescent bulbs, and I hugged her, inhaled a double noseful of her latest fragrance. She’d tried a new one every month for the past four years and told me she’d eventually settle on a favorite.
“Juliette Has a Gun,” she said, as I took the seat next to her. “That’s the name of the perfume.”
Rose and I had been best friends for fifteen years, enmeshed by our shared passions for good books and bad T.V. We read highbrow contemporary fiction—Lorrie Moore, Louise Erdrich and George Saunders—watched lowbrow T.V.—Real Housewives of Anywhere and Catfish—and were superfans of K-pop music. She could be surly but accepted my insecurity and my compulsion to be nicer than necessary.
Her father was an alcoholic, like mine, and died of liver failure when we were in grade school. By unspoken agreement, we never talked about our fathers, and took comfort in knowing the other one understood. I felt guilty saying so, but I told Rose I hoped my mother would be happier now that my father was gone, perhaps relieved a little. Rose understood what I meant and commiserated.
Rose had taken a year off college too, not because of a family tragedy, but to work as a steakhouse waitress and earn more money to pay tuition. Her high school grades had been decent, but not the four-point-two-five marks I earned in advanced placement classes, good enough grades to garner me a full scholarship. Rose spent the summer after high school taking the remedial prerequisite to English 101 so that we could take it together; we’d studied English together ever since, always in the same classes. Her explanation for her poor achievement in high school English despite being an avid reader of difficult modern literature was, “I’d do better if the school let me read anything decent.” She couldn’t afford to room in the dorms, so we scheduled our senior year classes together and ate lunch together most days.
That first day, her eyes were dark with tired, puffy circles underneath. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “And you look even more pink than usual.”
It was a reference to my cheeks, which blushed an embarrassing fuchsia when I was nervous. A teacher once asked if I had a fever because my face was so flushed after I gave an oral report.
“No. I’m good,” I said. “Trying to be.”
She nodded. Ever since we were little, we’d dreamed of attending Northwestern. During my year of concrete and darkness, I’d forgotten how this place could light me up, prompt me to visualize my future. Before my year off, I’d majored in journalism, and wrote for the student news website, North by Northwestern. I loved poetry and literature and would’ve majored in English, but my mother convinced me journalism was more practical.
“You can support yourself as a reporter,” she’d said, “not so much as a poet or novelist.”
My father had been my cheerleader. He said, “Follow your passion and it will lead to a living.” He was prone to tipsy over-optimism, so I didn’t completely believe him, but I hoped he was right. To be safe, I studied both literature and journalism, semi-expecting to become a reporter after college. I was anxious and eager to succeed, and generally chose safety over risk.
Rose started to ask how I felt but stopped when the door swung open. A slouchy crepe-faced professor took his position in the front of the classroom, made a slow turn, checked out each student one-by-one. He was about to speak when the door flew open again. A slender guy dressed all in black, even black-soled sneakers with black laces, strode in. He was tall, maybe six-feet-three-inches, with spiky black hair and light olive skin. The front of his black t-shirt was emblazoned with red calligraphic characters. Rose and I caught each other’s eyes and she raised one eyebrow.
“Cute,” she mouthed.
I turned back and examined his striking shirt. He noticed, lifted his lips in a slight smile, and came over.
“Beware of perverts,” he said, and his small smile expanded to a grin. I couldn’t articulate a response. “That’s what my shirt says,” he continued. “It’s a popular slogan in Tokyo. Perverts grope women on trains there.”
I may have said, “Wow,” but I can’t remember. My face was hot. His knife-edge cheekbones were so much manlier than most baby-faced college boys, and his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence. I struggled to take in the whole of him, his sallow skin against the solid blackness of his attire, perfect small teeth, still smiling. He stood close to me and it was hard to form perspective, to put him into context. His energy, foreign and electrically attractive, raised goosebumps on my arms.
I was so surprised by his black-clothed coolness and his odd comment about perverts, I hadn’t noticed he was Asian. Was he Chinese or Japanese or Korean or…? Wait, he’d said Tokyo, so maybe Japanese? My face was on fire, as if he were privy to my internal dialogue about his nationality, as if he sensed the wash of pheromones surging over me.
“My name’s Owen,” he said.
Rose barged in and said, “Hello.” And I opened my mouth, but before I could speak the professor cleared his throat and started class.
Owen took the only empty chair, across the room. I half-listened to class that day. Owen’s directness and striking appearance had jolted me. I was sure the searing chemistry that coursed through me was visible and palpable to the whole room. Rose smirked as she noted my effort to keep my eyes focused anywhere but Owen.
Is this how things happened? Just like that, people fall in love, or lust? A stranger walks into a room and, well, that’s that? This had to be more than lust, certainly, deeper, a cellular-level connection, I told myself, though what in our one-minute interaction justified more than lust? I’d had boyfriends over the years—tepid, proper relationships that included first dates and first kisses, but no sex. My introversion and insecurity motivated me to abstain. When I was thirteen, I decided sex would have to wait until my heart, mind and body were all aligned, ready for such closeness on all the necessary levels. I knew I couldn’t handle doing anything with my body that my spirit didn’t agree with. It wasn’t a popular stance, and Rose teased me about it, calling me “non-loosy Lucy.” Rose and other friends followed contemporary norms and treated sex like the equivalent of sharing a soft drink, but I held out. I wasn’t scared of sex exactly, but I wasn’t ready. At least not yet. But none of my early boyfriends had spurred this type of searing poker stab in my gut.
The professor rambled off the syllabus; I continued to not look at Owen. I pondered what he’d said, people grope women on trains in Tokyo, the idea of public transit feel-ups, women fending off the probing, grimy hands of strangers. I was certain on-train groping happened in the U.S., too, though I’d never heard of it. Certainly, I’d have read about it if I needed to worry.
Rose texted me. “Perverts on trains? LOL!” Amused by the drama of my reaction to Owen, she strained not to let out a guffaw.
During class introductions Owen boasted he’d been educated at the best international school in Tokyo, that his mother was a bigwig at a wireless company, and his father and brother were still in Japan. “Northwestern is the best college in Illinois,” he’d said with authority and no discernible accent, “and my mom had to move here for work, so I came too, to experience the United States. In Tokyo, some people try to dress and act like Americans. My parents named me Owen because it’s an American name. They deny this, but it’s true,” he said with a wry laugh, and like teenagers mesmerized by reality TV, the other students laughed in unison. Humble-bragging was intriguing when Owen did it.
Standing tall, speaking to our small English class, Owen had the radiance of a sparkly minor league star. He was cool and sophisticated, not like other nerdy boys, with their baggy jeans and floppy hair. Owen was an exotic to my small-town sensibilities.
I left my first senior English class with my emotional landscape crazily tilted by this stranger from Japan, a country I’d rarely thought of before. Now I knew things I could never unknow, that Japan had a groping problem, some Japanese people wished they were American, and the country was inhabited by supremely hip and well-spoken men. When class was over, Owen gave Rose and me a little wave and disappeared out the door.
“Wow,” Rose said, as if channeling my thoughts. “He’s something.”