With winter break in full swing, I’ve got at least ten hours each day to dedicate to Ride for Our Lives. By mid-morning the first day back home, my hsuan has morphed into command central, notepads of lists and notes everywhere. After I get off the phone with Meghan, who, true to her word, has figured out most of the logistical details—“It’s the least I can do for everything your mom’s done for me”—I know that if I were up in my bedroom looking into my ghost-detecting mirror, my eyes would be gleaming, I’m having so much fun. But I don’t have time to preen and instead pick up the phone for my check-in call with Lillian.
“How are the babies?” I ask.
“Zoe isn’t sleeping, and Amanda’s bouncing off the walls. So it’s chaos here, but no one’s got the heart to tell Amanda to pipe down, not when she’s going to be quarantined for a couple of weeks, you know.”
“So when’s her chemo starting?”
“Tomorrow.” Lillian laughs mirthlessly. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Dr. Martin told me that they have to basically kill the patient in order to save her.”
“Like avalanche control.”
“What?”
“Sometimes you have to set off a couple of small avalanches so you don’t have a huge one.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” After a moment’s pause, Lillian continues, sounding a fraction more upbeat, “So I need some good news. Anything. Please tell me you were wicked enough in Whistler for the two of us.”
“Well, if you really want to know…”
“I do.”
“I was.”
“No way!” Lillian shrieks.
“Way!” I shriek back. And then I give her the abridged version of my past. While I’m not ready to provide full disclosure about Jared, something tells me that I’ll spill all to Lillian when the time is right. Still, we do the “ewww” girlfriend shriek together when I get to the part where Jared starts bragging about all his accomplishments. And she does the “you did not!” scream when I tell her about my “no free lunch” comment to him.
“But I need your advice on something,” I say, pacing a circuit from the door to my light table, past the bathroom door, and then around the sofa.
“You? You, Miss I’m-No-Free-Pass-to-Paradise? You need my advice?”
I laugh. “Well, there’s this other boy.…”
“God, Syrah, how many are you juggling?”
“It’s not that.” But then I realize, it is, sort of. “It’s my best friend.”
“Let me guess, that guy at that board shop? I knew you had a thing for each other!”
“Wait, wait—he’s dating someone else, remember?”
“Who is so freaked out by you that she’s signed, sealed, and delivered a restraining order on you,” says Lillian.
“Something like that.”
“And now you’ve finally realized that you want a free pass to his paradise.”
“Lillian!”
But we’re both laughing, and it is almost worth having Age be dating Natalia just to have this conversation with Lillian. Almost.
“Seriously, though, what do you do when you love somebody enough to set him free, and he never comes back?” I stop doing laps around my studio to stand by the window overlooking an arched bridge.
“Well, why don’t you tell him how you feel?”
“Definitely not an option. Let’s just say I’ve seen what happens when someone comes between a couple.” Fifteen years of being blamed for breaking up a family is all this girl can take. But then it occurs to me that Bao-mu might be on the right track. While I’m not about to take Age away from Natalia, I can ask for his friendship. “How about if I let him know that just because he has a girlfriend doesn’t mean he can’t have a girl who’s his friend, too?”
Lillian is quiet, and I know it’s not because she’s tuned me out but that she’s weighing my idea. Slowly, she says, “I think that’s great. You’re not telling him to break up with her and you’re not coming between them. But I still vote for telling him how you feel.”
After debating other possibilities (“putting a feng shui curse on Natalia is not an option”), circling back to Amanda (“let me know if there’s anything I can do”) and Zoe (“when can I meet her?”), and giving each other a pep talk, since there’s still so much to do for Ride for Our Lives (omigod!), I know as far as Age goes, I have to do what I’m comfortable with.
At my light table, I begin to draw a letter manga-style for Age, inviting him to participate in the amateur snowboard rail jam at the event, unless he’s afraid that I am going to whip his burly-burly butt in the competition. Then, abandoning all bravado, I write the truth, plain and simple and unadorned with any pictures: Age, it would mean so much to me if you just showed up. And then I attach VIP tickets for him, his dad, and his little brothers. And one for Natalia, too. I just hope that he’ll read that as a sign that I want him to be my front-door friend.
One day, our timing will be right, the stars will align, and Hong Kong will be a distant memory. And when that time comes, I’ll tell Age everything. As I’m about to seal the envelope, I stop, because the hallmark of our friendship has always been about telling each other things we can hardly admit to ourselves. Like how I’ve been a closet snob, too spineless to stand up to my parents and introduce them to Age, the boy who has always had my heart.
So I rip out the pages in my manga-journal, the ones that I wrote back in Whistler with the blow-by-blow account of The Jared Episode, and slip them inside my letter to Age. I don’t want to hide that old history anymore, at least not from Age.