Notquitethe compliment I was hoping for. “Good different?” I prompt.
“Just different,” he says, neutral, and I feel a dull heat rise to my cheeks, the same choking, futile frustration that overwhelms me whenever I’m around him, as if we’re actors going over a script together, and he keeps messing up his lines.
“Well, I felt like switching things up,” I say with a shrug.
“But you weren’t like this on Sunday.”
“On Saturday, you mean,” I say.
“What?” He frowns, like I’m the one who’s mixed the dates up, then seems to remember something. “Right, Saturday. Two days ago.”
Which is how long you’ve left me on read,I think bitterly inside my head. Nobody leaves me on read this long. No one. Even Erik Park, who I met only once at a Bulgari gala dinner and has been touring the world with his K-pop group, never takes any longer than three hours to reply to my messages.
The sheernerveof this boy—
As if he can sense the direction of my thoughts, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out my bracelet. “I found this,” he tells me. “It was in my bag.”
I don’t take it right away. Instead, I glance around, making sure enough people are passing by to witness this moment, before saying loudly, “Oh,thank god—I wasn’t sure if it’d falleninto your bag or on the floor when I was trying on the prom dresses.” Ares might not be following the script the way I want him to, but this is a show, whether he likes it or not. A performance for the girls crowding around the lockers, who nudge each other and exchange raised-brow glances and giggles.Good.If the rumors about me and Ares going to prom together hadn’t been spreading fast enough after my Instagram story, this should do the trick. When I’d planted the bracelet in his bag, it wasn’t just so I’d have an excuse to message him on WeChat later—it was also to serve as physical proof that I was with him outside of school.
“Don’t lose it,” Ares tells me, pressing the bracelet into my open palm. I try not to react when his fingers brush mine. It’s a light touch, barely anything, yet it’s as if all my nerves are made of electricity, dialed up to the highest voltage. His skin is smoother than I imagined, softer, despite his calluses. And there’s a new ring on his thumb—silver, engraved with a dragon symbol, the metal a few degrees cooler than his hand.
He turns to go, and it’s only then that I notice how stiffly he’s moving. How he’s carrying his books at an awkward angle with just one arm, as if afraid to put any strain on his other side. How he’s almost limping, his gait slow and uneven.
“Wait,” I call. “Are you okay? Are you... injured?” My voice rings out with genuine worry.
He glances back over his shoulder at me, like he’s as surprised by my concern as I am. “I’m fine,” he says.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” He pauses, then adds, “Remember that peer mentoring starts tomorrow. Make sure you prepare.”
I’m aware that Ares had meant math preparation, and not mental preparation.
But I can’t shake my nerves the entire afternoon, as if I’m getting ready for a first date with a celebrity—except I’ve done that before, and even then, I hadn’t been anywhere near as restless as I am now. I plan out my hairstyle, my outfit, practice microexpressions and lines designed to charm. Revert back to my classic makeup style, because I need the confidence, and I feel more like myself with heavy eyeliner than without it. I pick out a café for us to study at, somewhere with a more casual atmosphere.
Nothing can calm me down.
As a last resort, I turn to my main form of therapy, which any qualified therapist would likely advise is very unhealthy: I search for my name online.
The first page loads right away, over a hundred different results, information pieced together from interviews about my early life, my mother and my father and my zodiac sign. Slowly I scroll through the photos, assessing each of them with utmost concentration, like a quality control analyst. The ones in the top row are all nicely photoshopped, my hair glossy and my makeup perfect, taken from magazine spreads or my own social media, but that’s only because I made sure of it.
Last year, someone had uploaded a screenshot of me with my eyes half open, mid-speech at some gala; I’d immediatelyreported the image for “inaccurate information,”which technically it was, because it was a super inaccurate visual representation of me. They took it down within two days, but even that had felt too long. The idea of anyone searching me up in that time and seeing those hideous photos made me want to claw my skin off.
When I’ve triple-checked that no more embarrassing shots have slipped through the cracks of the internet, I click on my most recent post. The photos were taken just yesterday in the old hutong districts, shots of me smiling in the sunlight, a tiara perched on my head, posing with a penguin mascot in the last one. The caption, drafted and edited multiple times in my notes app:Honored to have been nominated for prom queen!!! voting is open now forairingtonstudents—link in my bio! love u all xxx
It’s me, but it’s not. Chanel Cao, the brand. The girl you want to be—the girl even I want to be. And the comments float over the screen... she’ssopretty, marry me, kiss me, Chanel, we love you so much, please don’t ever die, you’re perfect, you’re an icon.
I try to view the whole thing with distance, as if I’m someone else, the way I do when I’m evaluating a selfie before posting it; sometimes I’ll even close my eyes, wait for five seconds, then open them, as if I can trick my brain into thinking that my face is a stranger’s face, and I can then determine, objectively, if it’s up to standard.
And I’m satisfied, but the satisfaction is surface level, fleeting. Like those sugary drinks my mother hates that keep you full for maybe half an hour, then leave you even hungrier than you were before.
“Chanel. Are you paying attention?”
I look up at Ares’s face, then back down at my notes on the café table. Slowly the black squiggles sharpen back into incomplete equations. “Sorry,” I say, brushing my hair out of the way. “Please. Do go back to what you were saying about...” I pause, searching through my memory of the last ten minutes for something smart and math related, but end up only with my usual doom cocktail about Ares, prom, the vision. Even when he’s right next to me, he’s haunting me.
Ares raises his eyebrows. “Can you at least pretend to care about the topic for a second?”
“Sure,” I tell him, sitting up straighter on the stool. “I believe it was... multiplication?”
