One year later …
If there was anyone in the world who could live without love or compassion, it was me. I spent a lifetime starved of it and yet I remained a perfectly well-functioning person. I have a stable mood profile, satisfactory hygiene, and above-average cognitive ability. Put me in front of a team of medical professionals and not a single one of them will say that I exhibit a symptom of mental illness, never mind depression. Things rarely upset me. In fact, I have a hard time crying. Not that I would choose to be the kind of girl who cries easily.
Free will is an illusion.
There, I said it. Well, I thought it, in this case. Because if I were truly depressed, I would have never chosen to be that way. But I was starting to suspect I was because of what had happened with Natalie Lee.
Even the thought of her name made me tense. But I couldn’t talk about my brain chemistry without mentioning her.
Natalie was my friend during my freshman year at Two Bridges. Whether we were friends because of choice or circumstance is still up for debate. On one hand, I chose to go to the school. On the other, I had no say in sharing nearly all my classes except for art with her.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to be her friend. When I first met her, I noticed she had kind eyes and a smile that transformed her face from human to angelic. She was also one of the few people in my year who was East Asian. There was a moment when we made eye contact at the beginning of that year and I swore we both thought the words you’re just like me at the same time.
Our last names put us only a few seats away from each other in most classes, with her “Lee” close to my “Ng.” Her name was the Korean Lee, not the Chinese Lee like I had originally assumed. I could hardly be faulted for thinking that since the other students with my eyes and pin-straight black hair were Chinese or Chinese-adjacent. The difference hardly mattered to our peers except that she was asked if her family was from the North or South and I was asked if I lived in Chinatown. We’d roll our eyes at these stupid questions, but when we were alone, we’d laugh at how these were supposed to be the city’s smartest students. No amount of international math exams and prestigious science competitions would make my peers less racist. Such idiocy still existed among the future Einsteins of society.
But it didn’t take genius IQ to see that Natalie was prettier than me. And I meant that in the realms of Western and Eastern beauty standards. She had better skin that glowed rather than broke out into half a dozen red pimples across her nose. She was paler and skinnier while somehow magically having more womanly proportions than I did. Her hair was longer and shinier, shimmering obsidian and indigo while mine lay raven flat.
Logically, it followed that I was the one who asked her to be my friend first by borrowing a slim stick of lead to refill my mechanical pencil as a segue to something more between us. She doesn’t remember it that way, but I had the sharper memory. I was proud of how subtle and elegant that approach had been, put off by the way another classmate tried to be my friend by following me everywhere.
Anyhow, first impressions tended to slip from the minds of most people. Yet life continued to prove that I wasn’t most people. It is a known fact that girls my age want to fall in love. It couldn’t just be any kind of love bought from the dollar store. It had to be the special brand, a pink, fluffy gushy cavity-inducing love that they sold in the movie theaters of chick flicks and between the pages of romance novels. And no one wanted this more than Natalie.
She wouldn’t admit it then, but she was a hopeless romantic. Still is, but I couldn’t be sure since we’d gone back to being strangers now that I’m a sophomore. We used to go to Barnes & Noble together and she’d linger by all the love stories. Modern Romeo & Juliet, cold vampire boyfriends, hot werewolf mates – perfectly tucked into her armpit by the time we made it to the cash register. It baffled me, but I went along with it in the way friends are supposed to.
Halfway through our freshmen year, Natalie liked a boy. His name was Louis Beaufils. He had dark wavy hair and ocean blue eyes, courtesy of his English mother and French father. He was good at science and bad at social studies, sitting three rows ahead of me in both classes. Natalie confided to me that she thought he was handsome and I begrudgingly admitted he had a good jawline.
If I had to pinpoint what Natalie liked the most about him, I’d say it was his eyes. One of life’s greatest unfairnesses was the way boys always had prettier eyes. His were bright and framed with long, thick lashes. But, for reasons that I will soon explain, I thought he was a little bitch.
Louis might have had beautiful eyes, but I didn’t like the way he looked at Natalie or the other girls in our class. There was a coldness in his gaze, a disinterest that unsettled me. I didn’t know what drew my friend to him. He whined at the slightest discomfort, once making a scene out of getting a papercut. Louis also emitted a high-pitched squeal when he couldn’t get his way, whether it was group projects or the food we were served for lunch. I found nothing magnetic or reassuring about him in the slightest. Natalie remained steadfast about him being made of the stuff of fantasies.
But what did I know? I hardly understood romantic love. I couldn’t even comprehend why my parents got married and I didn’t want to think about the feelings they had for one another, although I suspected it was vastly different from what my brain tried to imagine those sentiments were. Sometimes I saw my mom kiss my dad on the cheek and I wondered what it meant.
I asked them why they got married and the answer was just as unromantic as I anticipated it would be. They had arrived in the U.S. lonely and not knowing anyone. It happened that they were from the same village so her parents and his parents introduced them to each other. He liked that she was smart. She liked that his family owned property. And that was sufficient reason for me and my siblings to exist.
Natalie didn’t want anything like that. She wanted excitement and mystery, for some force to compel Louis to sweep her off her feet. She stared at him as if her eyes could plant feelings in him and I was surprised he didn’t melt at her feet.
What was wrong with him? I decided to find out when he asked me about some of our physics homework questions in homeroom. It wasn’t uncommon for students at Two Bridges to compare or exchange answers and in the little time I spent in the school, I already garnered a reputation for being brilliant in most of my classes. It was more of a curse than a blessing and people were constantly trying to take advantage of me.
Especially people like Louis, who so desperately wanted the whole world to think they were smart. But before I helped him with any of the questions, I asked what he thought of Natalie.
“Who?”
“Natalie Lee.”
“I don’t really notice her. She’s that quiet girl in class, right?”
Bullshit. Every guy noticed her, even the ones who were gay. Girls like Natalie didn’t walk through this world without people staring at them.
“Do you think she’s cute?”
He looked away. “I don’t see her that way. Why are you asking me these questions?” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Does she have feelings for me or something?”
“You don’t think she’s cute?”
“She’s pretty,” he conceded. At that moment, Natalie walked into homeroom and heard those words. Her mouth quirked into a hopeful smile.
“But she’s not girlfriend pretty,” he added. “I would never date someone like Natalie. Now if she were open to doing other things …”
Crack. My right palm landed a slap across his face. Tears welled up instantly in his eyes. His cheek instantly turned a satisfying shade of red.
“I’m sorry,” I said insincerely. “I thought there was a mosquito in the room.”
His jaw dropped in outrage. “There’s no bug in here. You just–”
“Really? Because I see one buzzing in front of me right now.”
I slapped him again, partly because the teacher hadn’t arrived and partly because I could.
“You’re crazy,” he seethed.
You’re weak, I thought.
But he was also a conniving little bitch. Later, he would tell Natalie that he would only date her if she abandoned me. I would know because she would tell me and ask me to forgive her for choosing him, even when I told her what he said about her.
They would go on to date for a week and he would dump her in the cafeteria in the most humiliating way: by kissing another girl in front of the student body.
She was absent from school for about a month after that. A classmate who lived near her whispered to me that she was hospitalized and placed in the psych ward. Apparently, I was the only one who cared enough to ask.
When she came back to school, we didn’t speak to each other. She couldn’t even look at me. I was friendless, all in the name of love.
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