Prologue
The cops arrive in the middle of precalculus. My eyes are riveted on them as they speak to Mrs. Woods at the door. Mrs. Woods turns to look over her shoulder, and her eyes land immediately on mine. My stomach twists painfully. Are they here for me? Then she looks at Haven and nods at her. We have been summoned.
Whispers rake through the classroom as Haven and I stand up and walk toward the door. I keep my eyes down, fear jolting through my veins.
We’re led down the hallway, our footsteps painfully loud in the silence. I can hear every single sound—my own breathing, the jangling of the cops’ equipment, their heavy footsteps. I sneak glances at them, my terror growing with every detail I take in about them. They’re so tall, so large, so present.
Our principal, Ms. James, is waiting outside her office. She nods grimly at the cops, then gestures at me and Haven. “Come inside, girls.”
By now, I’m so scared that when I’m offered a chair, I practically collapse into it. In my mind, a single thought repeats itself: What’re they going to say? What’re they going to say?
The cops settle down across from us. One of them clears her throat. Her gaze is steady as she leans forward and says, “Danielle Wilder was found dead this morning.”
Next to me, Haven gasps. My mouth is open, my face frozen.
“We’re here to talk to you girls,” the officer continues, “because we were told you were her closest friends.”
At this, I blurt out, “I’m her best friend.” It strikes me, then, what a ridiculous thing it is to say. How childish and stupid. I’m her best friend, as though I were a kid. Then it hits me that Dani and I were best friends when we were kids, and the thought of her back then, her hair always done up in French braids, stabs through my mind, and I burst into tears. “She can’t be dead,” I sob. It sounds like a whine, a plea.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” the officer says. The kindness in her voice only makes me cry harder.
“What happened?” Haven says. Her voice is shrill, so unlike her.
“Well, that’s what we’re here to figure out.” The officer’s gaze ping-pongs back and forth between me and Haven. “Was Danielle struggling with anything? Did she mention to you girls anything to do with her mental health, maybe feelings of depression or anxiety?”
Now, both Haven and I are staring at her with open confusion. “Wait,” Haven says slowly. “Are you saying ... she killed herself?” Her voice breaks then, and she covers her mouth.
“We’re trying to determine the cause of death,” the officer says. “Is there anything you can tell us that might help us understand how this happened?”
I look down at my hands through a blur of tears. Then I glance at Haven, who is crying, too, now, and a wave of virulent hatred surges through my entire being. It’s all her fault. If she hadn’t been such a cruel bully, none of this would’ve happened. I want to jump and scream it out loud, point my finger at Haven and tell everyone what she’s really like. But when the officer repeats the question, the words refuse to come out of my mouth. They catch in my throat like a fish bone. And I can’t say anything, not even a word, because Haven is right next to me, and I am terrified of what she might do if I tell them the truth.
Chapter 1
The only reason movies and TV shows and books are so obsessed with stories about the underdog triumphing over their bullies is because that kind of thing never happens in real life. In real life, the underdog remains the underdog. The wounds of childhood trauma have broken them, and they are unable to stand up straight and smile convincingly for the camera. Meanwhile, their tormentors carry on as they do, carefree and blissfully ignorant of the permanence of the damage they’ve wreaked on others. Or maybe they’re not ignorant, maybe they know exactly what they’ve done, and it’s a secret knowledge that heightens their sense of power. Maybe it’s something they get off on, a dirty little memory that they return to in the darkness of night, to caress lovingly, savoring the ephemeral shot of endorphins that comes with the thought: I did that to that loser, and I got away with it.
Because at the end of the day, isn’t that what life is all about? Getting away with things. There is pleasure that comes from that, from having a secret that you know full well isn’t quite a good thing, a healthy thing, like sneak-eating ice cream straight from the tub at 2:00 a.m. I don’t care what the laws of physics say; ice cream tastes better when you eat it in secret at 2:00 a.m. It just does. Because you’re getting away with it, with something naughty. A guilty pleasure, women’s magazines call it. And I get it. I may be a mess, but I’m a mess wrought out of low self-esteem and stitched together by thin strands of guilty pleasures.
It is possible I am getting too abstract for my own good. I tend to do that sometimes. It’s the effect of having been Haven Lee’s target. Growing up, my parents often called me Space Cadet, because I was always floating off into space. Actually, if they took the time to get to know me, they’d know I wasn’t so much floating off as I was desperately shutting out the rest of the world because, thanks to Haven, it had gotten too awful for me to exist in. But they never took the time. Nor did they have the energy. I don’t blame them.
Meanwhile, Haven Lee maintains the most beautiful relationship with her parents. Every Sunday morning, they meet up for brunch—sometimes at a fancy place with bottomless mimosas; sometimes, when they’re feeling nostalgic, at a dim sum place in San Gabriel.
Most Chinese families I know only go to Sunday dim sum together, but Haven and her family are different. Aside from the Sunday brunches, she also drops by for dinners at their house on Wednesdays, where she and her dad make something labor intensive from scratch—dumplings or buns or handmade noodles. Haven’s mom makes the cocktails. She goes all out on these cocktails; she has a nifty little device that forms a giant bubble filled with scented smoke, for example, that she blows onto the top of the drink. Haven pops it with the tip of her nose, and the family dissolves into peals of laughter as lavender-or-orange-peel-scented smoke spills out.
The meals are accompanied by good wine, and at the end of it, everyone is red faced and full bellied, and there is so much camaraderie and love in the house I could just die. Meanwhile, the couple of times I see my parents throughout the year are vastly different. I still try to make cheerful conversation, but their sullenness will wear me down after fifteen minutes, and before long, we will accept the silence, our cutlery pinging against our plates with painful clarity while we eat. But, I remind myself, at least my parents are still able to have meals with me. Dani’s parents would probably give up everything just to have her back for one meal.
I live as far away from all the painful memories as I can, on the other side of the country, in New York City, but still I can’t keep myself from keeping up to date with Haven’s life. It’s next to impossible notto, especially when she makes her life so readily available for public consumption. Haven is an influencer. Not the type of influencer people love to hate. She’s a food influencer. Her food isn’t pretentious; there are no acai-and-matcha smoothie bowls with painstakingly arranged flowers on top of them. She cooks hearty meals, high-calorie foods that should stick to her bones but don’t. Sometimes they’re multistep dishes that take hours of preparation, other times they’re ten-minute dishes that she rustles up in her bright and airy kitchen. And they look absolutely delicious. Her followers, over one million of them, have been clamoring for a cookbook for ages. As much as I hate to admit it, if she came out with a cookbook, I would probably end up buying a copy, because her food looks so good. The thing that kills me is that back in school, I was the one who was into baking first. Haven had zero interest in anything involving the kitchen. It feels like yet another thing she’s stolen from me.
But unfortunately, I am not an influencer. I have a desk job and a very attentive boss. A fact that I am reminded of when said boss, Annette, barks at me to bring her coffee.
I swipe at my phone, closing Instagram—Haven with her fork midway up to her heart-shaped lips—and hurry to Annette’s kitchen. I slide a Nespresso pod out and pause. Today is Tuesday, and on Tuesdays, Annette takes theristretto. Right. I slide the pod back and spin the tower. After locating the correct pod, I push it into the Nespresso machine as Annette calls out, “Coffee ETA?”
Annette loves saying “ETA” because it makes her sound busy and important. I sometimes wonder why a prewedding photographer needs to sound busy and important, but maybe that’s just another thing I haven’t quite learned about the wedding industry. When I first started, I was so hopelessly ignorant that I didn’t even know what a prewedding photographer was. Then I learned that it’s a photographer who takes pretty pictures of couples before their actual wedding day. There is a huge market for it, especially with Asian couples. Ninety percent of Annette’s clients are couples from all over Asia who want glamorous pre-wed photos in Manhattan. They come with suitcases stuffed fullof gorgeous ballgowns and rented wedding dresses so stunning I often just stop and stare at them.
Annette takes these couples all over the city and photographs them at every iconic New York location. Every single time, she tells the couples that this spot is unique, that very few couples have gone for that spot. Thing is, though, she is lying. I know, because as her assistant, I’m the one who edits the actual photos, and they are all the same, every one of them, down to the poses. Annette believes in being well prepared, in never standing behind the camera at two wide-eyed people and not having a trusted pose to suggest. It’s a good strategy, actually, because most people don’t like standing in front of a professional-grade DSLR camera. The huge lens and the knowledge of how much they’ve spent on this photo shoot overwhelms them, and without Annette’s gentle guidance, most of them would stand there with frozen, terrified grins.
Annette is all gentle guidance when it comes to her clients, coaxing them into romantic poses (“Look down so we get a good shot of those beautiful lashes of yours, yep, perfect, and meanwhile, you put your arms around her and kiss her shoulder, yes, just like that, oh, you two are naturals!”) but with me, she is an army drill sergeant, shouting for ETAs and at me to give her the 35 mm or the 1D lens, and she never does it in a complete sentence, as though she can’t even spare the extra words. She never says, “Fern, can I have the thirty-five millimeter, please?” She simply gestures at me and says, “Thirty-five.” She doesn’t say, “Fern, can you flick the bride’s veil up, please?” She cocks her head toward the bride-to-be and says, “Veil.”
And—god, I’m embarrassed to share this—but here is the worst part of my job. The most demeaning. I go up to the bride-to-be, my shoulders laden with Annette’s massive camera bags, each one weighing at least twenty pounds, and I take the bride’s sheer lace veil and wait for Annette’s signal. Annette raises her camera and checks the lighting, then she nods. I throw the veil up and scamper as quickly as I can out of the shot. I do it without jostling the precious camera bags too much; each of these lenses costs more than my monthly wages. It’s not the weight of the bags that I find demeaning, even though they are brutal and havecontributed to my increasingly terrible posture. It’s the scampering. The way I am expected to do my job and then disappear as quickly as I can, running like a hamster to hide in the grass so that the real players in life, the Annettes and the Havens, can take their shot.
