holy shit. And you know the worst part?”
“I can’t imagine what’s worse than seeing it with my own eyes.”
“Gordon is totally in love with Frances.”
“No!”
“Yup. I wouldn’t miss practice tonight for all the money in the world.”
We all showed up. Mr. Phillips could sense there was some tension in the room, but he truly had no idea.
Frances was wearing Sung’s varsity jacket. And suddenly I didn’t mind it so much.
Gordon glared at Sung.
Sung glared at me.
I avoided Damien’s eyes.
When I looked at Wes, he made me feel like I might be worth saving.
Amazingly enough, during practice we were back in fighting form, as if nothing had happened. I felt like I could admit to myself how much I wanted to win. And not just that, how much I wanted our team to win. More for Wes and Frances and Gordon and Damien than anything else.
After we were done, Damien asked me if we could talk for a minute. Everyone else headed back to their rooms and we went down to the lobby. Other quiz bowl groups were swarming around; those that hadn’t made the semifinals were taking the night for what it was—a time when, for a brief pause in their high school lives, they were free from any pressure or care.
“I’m sorry,” Damien said to me. “I was completely off base.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have been so mean to Sung and Frances. I should’ve just left.”
We sat there next to each other on a lime-green couch in a hotel lobby that meant nothing to us. He wouldn’t look at me. I wouldn’t look at him.
“I don’t know why I did that,” he said. “Reacted that way.”
It would take him another four months to figure it out. It would be a little too late, but he’d figure it out anyway.
We lost in the semifinals to Iowa. I knew from the look Sung gave me afterward that he would blame me for this loss for the rest of his life. Not because I missed the questions—and I did get two wrong. But for destroying his own invisible plans.
Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever hated any piece of clothing as much as I hated Sung’s varsity jacket for those few weeks. You can’t hate something that much unless you hate yourself equally as much. Not in that kind of way.
It was, I guess, Wes who taught me that. Later, when we were back home and trying to articulate ourselves better, I’d ask him how he’d known so much more than I had.
“Because I read, stupid” would be his answer.
We lost in the semifinals, but the local paper took our picture anyway. Sung looks serious and aggrieved. Gordon looks awkward. Frances looks calm. Damien looks oblivious. And Wes and me?
We look like we’re in on our own joke.
In other words, happy.
When I am eight, Valentine’s Day is a Sunday. There is no certain minute I have to wake up, no bus to catch, no homework that needs to be handed in. Sleeping can blur itself into waking, and that is exactly what it does.
I wake up with my face against Yoda’s, my arm gently across Obi-Wan Kenobi. I take in the Star Wars sheets, the Star Wars blanket, the lightsaber lamp beside my bed. I have never seen any of the Star Wars movies, so this is all very strange to me. As I sit up in bed against a robot I will later learn to call a droid, I do my mental morning exercise, figuring out that my name is Jason today and that this is my bedroom. My mother’s room is on the other side of the wall; from the silence, I assume she’s still sleeping.
I know it’s Valentine’s Day because yesterday was the day before Valentine’s Day. I watched yesterday’s sister decorating her cards, putting extra glitter on the one belonging to her crush. She let me put stickers on the cards she cared less about, hearts I laid out in haphazard trails. I tried to imagine each kid opening his or her envelope, knowing full well I would be gone by the time they were delivered.
Now I get up and walk to the mirror. I don’t really pay attention to what I look like, but I do stare for a good long time at the pattern on my pajamas. If you’ve never seen Wookiees dancing before, it’s a very confusing sight.
On my desk, I find a dozen sealed white envelopes, each the size of a playing card. They are all addressed to MOM, the Os shaped into hearts.
It’s as if Jason has left me an assignment. I gather the stack in my hand and leave the room.
Holidays were important to me when I was young, because they were the only days almost everyone could agree upon. In school, there would always be a lead-up, the anticipation gathering into a frenzy as the day grew closer and closer. With Valentine’s Day, the world grew progressively red and pink as February began. It was a bright spot in a cold time, a holiday that didn’t ask much more of me than to eat candy and think about love.
Because of this, I liked it a lot.
Jason’s room is clearly his home base—the rest of the apartment holds fewer representatives from outside our universe. It isn’t a large place—just the two bedrooms wedged together with a kitchen and a den. Big enough for two people, but I feel it’s meant for at least one more.
I try to stay quiet—over the years, I’ve learned to wake a parent only if it’s really, really important. Back before I realized I was waking into a different life each morning, I stormed carelessly into my various parents’ bedrooms, no matter what time it was. Most told me to go back to bed. Some used it as an excuse to get up. And enough lashed out at me that I stopped doing it, terrified that I’d landed in the wrong kind of life, and that my excitement at being awake would be used against me.
On tiptoe steps, I enter the kitchen and find a valentine wonderland awaiting me. The room is aswarm with hearts—dropping from the ceiling, constellated across the cabinets, blooming from the countertop. There have to be hundreds of them, and to my eight-year-old eye, it looks like thousands. They peek out from drawers, scale the refrigerator, conga across the floor. In the silence of my sleeping, my mother has constructed this for me. There are hearts popping out of the toaster. Hearts running away with the spoons. Hearts swimming above napkins and hopscotching the paper towels.
I can’t help but pick one up, feel the red paper between my fingers. Already, the heart in my hand is forming a personality in my head. This heart—a little squat, a little heavier on the left side—is a bit slower than the rest, but he tells good jokes. I name him Bruno. (I don’t know where the name comes from; it’s probably the dog or cat from a house I once lived in, the name all that remains in my memory.) Immediately, Bruno makes two friends, Sally and Lucy. They talk a valentine language, but luckily I can translate it into English.
