“Wait.Wait!” he calls, scrambling after her.
She’s already gone.
I breathe out, letting my scowl loosen, but my fists won’t unfurl. The anger is still there, the acid searing my stomach, burning me from the inside out. I don’t know if it’ll ever go away. I used to think it would at some point, maybe after the divorce was finalized and everything went back to normal, but these days I’m starting to worry that thereisno going back to normal after what my father did. This is just how I am now.
As I walk back over to Haili, I can sense someone staring. Instinctively, I glance back and spot him right away. Ares. It’s clear from the way his dark brows are furrowed, his mouth pressed into a thin line, that he overheard everything. But there’s no trace of sympathy anywhere on his face.
My fingers tingle with a strange, unfamiliar, out-of-control feeling, my insides clenching. I’ve always prided myself on being able to detect exactly what someone’s thinking about me, but between him ignoring me earlier, and how he’s looking at me now, I have no idea what he’s thinking.
Part of me is tempted to march right over and find out for myself. Does he have a problem with me? Did I accidentally smudge my makeup on his favorite shirt or something? Or, the most mortifying possibility of all: Does he justnot like me?
But then I notice Haili, who’s been hiding behind one of the pillars, her cheeks streaked with tears, and I push my questions away. I can deal with Ares Yin later. Right now, my friend needs me.
“Are you okay?” I ask Haili.
“No, but... I watched the whole thing,” she says, and manages a weak smile. “Thanks for doing that. I wouldn’t have had the guts to even confront him.”
“I held back, honestly. If youreallywant to make him miserable, I have plenty of other ideas,” I say. I reach into my purse, rifling through several tubes of lip gloss and a tin of strawberry mints and a new bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, before I find the packet of tissues I’m searching for. I hold it out to her.
“I don’t think he could ever be as miserable as I am right now,” she mumbles, scrunching the tissue up into a ball and dabbing at the mascara flecks under her eyes. “He doesn’t care the way I do.”
“Remind me again,” I say gently, “why you like him.”
“I don’t know....” She pauses and thinks for so long that I start wondering if she’s planning on skipping over my question entirely. “He’s... I guess he’s nice to me?”
“He’s nice to you,” I repeat, less gently, unable to keep the skepticism out of my tone.
“He gives me all these little compliments—like, he’ll say that I’m cute or that he thinks my necklace is pretty or he can’t stop thinking about my body,” she elaborates in a hurry. “He carries my bags, and he holds the door open for me, and sometimes he helps me stab the straw into my bubble tea, and... and there was this one time where I spilled water on my shirt and he got me a napkin....”
I take a deep breath and silently lament the fact that the bar is so low these days you’d have to dig through hell’s basement to find it.
“Also,” Haili goes on, to her own detriment, “once I was running seven minutes late to go meet him, and he didn’t even get mad.”
“Okay, no. I’m sorry, but literally any human with basic decency would do those things. An old woman held the door open for us on our way into the hotel just now. And I’ve seen actualpigswho are trained to carry bags,” I add, which makes her snort a little, even as more tears slip down her cheeks. “It’s truly not that difficult, and more importantly, it’s not that rare. Like, give me half an hour, and I could find you another boy with his exact same haircut and nose ring and love of clubbing and Jack Daniel’s off a random street in Beijing.”
“I just wanted it to be him,” she whispers. “I so badly wanted it to be him.”
“I know,” I say, my voice softening again, and consider how I should phrase my next words to get the point across without rubbing the salt deeper into her wounds. “But you said that he’s had plenty of girlfriends before, right? What was it, six? Seven?”
She nods slowly. “Yeah. Seven. And a half, if you count that summer fling.”
“Okay, so, the way that he was behaving around you—that’s like, muscle memory for him. He knowswhat he’s doing. He’s got all his tricks tried and tested. It only seemed special because it was your first time experiencing it with him—andyouare special. You’re gorgeous and way too good for him. And you can cry about it, or get angry, and you can call me whenever you need to vent, but on days when you miss him, and you’re fighting the urge to text him, you have to remindyourself that what you miss is the experience. Thefeeling. Not him, the person.”
She nods again, faster, though I’m not sure how much of it is sinking in. “God, I’m so done.” She sniffs, leaning back against the gray stone. “I’m going to become a nun. No more feelings for me; I’m never liking anyone ever again.”
But I know she will, and soon. Haili is one of those people who’s simply in love with the idea of love. She’ll lock eyes with a stranger in the grocery store or see someone helping an old lady across an ice-slicked road, and that’s it for her. She’s already gone, heart on her sleeve, twenty thousand feet in free fall, with no thought for self-preservation at all.
I genuinely can’t fathom how she does it—how anyone does it. How she can bear to put herself through the pain of wanting someone, only to lose them again and again. It sounds like signing yourself up for torture.
“Do you want my driver to give you a ride home?” I offer. “I can also hang out here with you.”
“It’s okay, it’s getting late. I think... I just need some time alone right now,” she says with a wobbly smile, and I wish I could magically make everything better, spare her from the last two stages of heartbreak: the rage, followed by the grief. But this is where love always leads. “Thank you, though, for coming with me tonight. I seriously have no idea what I would’ve done if you weren’t there.... Just so you know, I’m definitely voting for you.”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about the election for prom queen. “You don’t have to thank me—I’m alwayshere for you,” I tell her. It’s the diplomatic thing to say, but I really mean it. “Just text me when you get home safe, yeah?”
“You too.”
I glance back at her a couple times on my way to the lift. She remains standing in the same spot, arms wrapped around herself, her hurt palpable, everything about the wounded, betrayed look in her eyes so reminiscent of my mom’s that I consider running back to hug her—or running after Yaozu to punch him.
