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It happened in a car, obviously.
It was just a peck on the lips, dry and friendly, almost accidental because she had been aiming for his cheek. She just meant to say thanks. But anyway, they were almost brother and sister, and family kiss on the lips sometimes.
She didn’t think that much of it. Shaun’s only visible reaction was a small, confused smile. Katy turned her head away and floored the gas. The pizza van whirred through the streets of Berkeley.
That was their first kiss, if you want to get technical about it. It was one of those really still summer nights where nothing seems to move, and they’d just finished with exams, so Katy said, let’s go for a drive in my pizza van, and Shaun said, it’s not your pizza van, you have to deliver pizza with it, and Katy said to stop being a narc and he finally gave in, and she pecked him on the lips.
They were nineteen.
She wrote his name in her secret diary when she was fifteen.
Today I made my first real victim, sorry, friend.
Katy’d had ‘friends’ before, but they rarely stuck around because her free time was spent helping out her mom at the store; by the time she was done pickling the horseradish with Nana Chen she was not in the mood for human interaction.
Sometimes, her classmates called her “desperate” and “too much”, sometimes they forgot she existed.
She’d never had a male friend, either. Her mother wouldn’t hear of it.
It was exciting, at first, because she thought she could keep him a secret, but her brother saw the two of them walking together from school and he asked her who the new kid was, and she blurted out that he was an orphan, because it wasn’t a lie, that’s what Shaun had led her to believe, and somehow, this worked. Katy was not allowed to hang out with boys, but a young Chinese orphan? She couldn’t keep him all to herself.
A few months later, she wrote in her secret diary, both annoyed and resigned:
Mom likes Shaun better than she likes me, because he’s such a “well-mannered young man” and he’s always top of the class and she wants me to be just like him. It’s like he can do no wrong. Ugh, wish he’d been a really shady bad boy.
Which was so silly to imagine that she added several XDs at the end of the sentence, because Shaun was the nicest, gentlest boy she’d ever met. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.
But gentle in a really reassuring way.
Katy never felt afraid when she walked alone with him at night. And even when he got bullied, Shaun didn’t cower or fold in. He just stood there, sort of assessing the situation mildly, while Katy made a scene.
To be fair, he loved telling people about “the scene”, AKA the first time they met.
Katy singing Hotel California at the top of her lungs really gave that song its terrifying due. And he still wasn’t sure how she’d managed to filch the keys to that idiot’s Ford Mustang (was Spencer his name? it was something white and obnoxious). Katy told him it was a trade secret. Shaun said he’d like to learn that trade. So they got in the car, picked up Soo at the street corner, and they were off to the races.
Right away, she trusted the new kid. True, she’d always been on the side of outcasts, but something about Shaun, even when that bigger guy was screaming in his face and about to wrestle him to the ground, gave her a sense of certainty. Like, yeah, I know this kid. And he knows me.
“Why did your father leave?”
Shaun asked direct questions like that, but he did it in this careful, sweet way, and it made it seem like he was being far more careful than he really was.
“Why does any dad leave?” she replied sardonically. “Wanna listen to the new Tegan and Sara?”
She saw by the slightly disappointed look on his face that he’d expected a bigger overture from her.
“Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad…” she mumbled, because you can’t be dismissive about family in front of orphans, can you?
“He wasn’t a good dad,” she added quickly. “We are better off without him. Sometimes, it’s really not worth keeping toxic people in your life, you know?”
Shaun nodded, looking away. “Okay. Let’s listen to the new Tegan and Sara.”
Katy popped her head in the narrow hallway. “Mooom, can I shut the door to my room? Shaun and I are gonna listen to some music!”
“I know you have headphones! I bought them! So you keep the door open!” her mother’s prompt, staccato reply floated from downstairs.
Katy heaved a sigh.
“Families are overrated, if you ask me.”
“Look how far it folds back.”
“Ooooh, that is sick.”
Katy lay down next to him, snuggling in the leather seat.
The roof of a car was always comforting: a little claustrophobic but domestic. Known.
“I dare you to drink the milkshake without spilling it on your face,” she said, because they were just lying there in the math teacher’s Jeep and what else were they supposed to do?
“How can he afford this car on his salary?” Shaun wondered, resting the soggy paper cup on his chest.
“You think he cooks meth on the side?” she said, trying to bring the milkshake to her mouth without dumping it all over her T-shirt.
She watched Shaun raise the cup at a particular angle, open his mouth wide, and then pour the foamy liquid straight into his mouth, somehow. It was both graceful and disgusting.
“How do you do that all the time?”
He couldn’t actually reply; his mouth was too full of chocolate.
And okay yeah, she felt something weird about their proximity and the taste of sugar.
She stared up at the car’s roof and mapped it with her fingers.
“He probably helps kids cheat off their SATs,” she suggested, continuing their previous conversation.
“We could do that,” he said, wiping his mouth.
“You could do that.”
“Come on, Katy, you’re just as smart –”
“I don’t need your patronizing. I know I’m just as smart. You’re just better at math.”
She could see Shaun smiling from the corner of her eye. “Better at carrying a tune too.”
“I heard that.”
“You sure? Cuz sometimes you sound like you don’t actually hear the music –”
She dumped her milkshake on him. It got all over their math teacher’s front seats and between the seats too.
The thing about them was, they could never really stay mad at each other.
They both started laughing at the same time.
The school dance was still going strong when they slipped out of the car, covered in milkshake.
They ran down the hill, holding hands, laughing hysterically.
She hadn’t been invited by any boy to the school dance, which was just as well.
Shaun had been invited by a couple of girls, actually.
But he’d decided to spend the school dance with her, in their math teacher’s car.
Katy wrote in her secret diary that night,
I won’t ruin our friendship with gross, dumb feelings.
Gradually, as they grew up, Shaun’s reassuring knowability started to crack.
There was prom. They went together to prom as friends and they had a blast. They didn’t have to rent a limo. They simply “borrowed” the one the rich kids hired.
They returned it at the end of the night, but one of the rich kids (another Spencer, probably) called her a “retard”, which you’d think would be a term frowned upon in 2012, but he thought it was completely warranted because she acted so feral and unpleasant and weird all the time, always “trying to be funny”, always trying to look like she wasn’t a sad, lonely kid.
Katy wanted to claw his eyes out, but Shaun pulled her away from him and convinced her to go inside and dance.
Weird thing is, that kid who called her a retard didn’t come back to school the next week, and he wasn’t seen at graduation either.
Katy forgot about him. She only remembered when she saw him in a wheelchair in a Cal-Mart a week before her and Shaun had to leave for college. Katy was trying to persuade her mom not to pack two suitcases of food for Berkeley when she saw a guy in a wheelchair trying desperately to get away from her. His face was ashen. He looked terrified.
Katy was troubled by it for a few days. She thought about bringing it up with Shaun, but she ultimately decided against it. What would be the point? Shaun wouldn’t know anything about it. Shaun was her dorky best friend. They did silly dances, played Grand Theft Auto, and committed petty larceny because they wanted to live inside Grand Theft Auto. They were harmless idiots. She knew Shaun. She did.
Then that one time in college, Nana Chen needed emergency eye surgery, but there was no money. All the savings had gone to Katy’s college expenses. Katy felt awful. She wanted someone to take her eyes out and give them to her grandmother.
And then Shaun just showed up with the money the next day.
When she asked him how he’d got it, he said he’d saved some cash writing papers for his classmates.
“Shaun, it’s way too much.”
“It’s not enough,” he said, taking her hands in his. She looked down at his knuckles. She expected to see bruises, she didn’t know why. But his hands were smooth and clean.
It was easy to forget some things, because there was still that indelible feeling of being comfortable with each other, of knowing each other beyond knowing.
Shaun could compartmentalize so much of his identity, and so could she.
They both compartmentalized that one night in her dorm room, after she’d turned twenty-one, when she asked him if he was still a virgin, and he said, “you’d know if I slept with anyone by now, we’re practically joined at the hip.”
“So, you are?”
“Yeah, no big deal.”
“Me too. But I’m sure you knew that already.”
“Yeah. But there’s no rush, is there?” And he gave her that same small smile again, like when they were nineteen, kissing but not kissing in the pizza van.
She knew that something could have happened then, the laying out of some sort of friendly pact. Let’s lose our virginity together since we do most things together.
He confirmed it by leaning in slightly, as if to propose this arrangement to her, or simply kiss her and decide on it wordlessly. Then she leaned in too, and it almost looked like it would happen.
But then they both burst into wild laughter.
Because, no duh, that would have been a terrible idea.
She was pretty sure she’d started laughing first, and he’d followed her example. She wondered what would have happened if she’d kept a straight face.
Or maybe he’d started laughing first.
But that made her sad – the thought of him thinking this was such a funny joke.
She hated feeling this way about her best friend.
He probably didn’t like it either. They both pretended that night never happened.
Could she even be mad at him that he’d hidden so much from her when they’d both done such a good job of knowing only what they wanted to know?
He’d asked her once, “so, what’s the deal with you and cars?”
And she’d said, “they help me get away real fast.”
And maybe there was a question there, a pointed “what are you running away from?”
But neither of them wanted to answer that.
So, her best friend is/ was a killer. He’s lethal and repressed. And still sweet and caring and dorky. He can paralyze someone with three fingers, and he’s also her favorite person to karaoke with. And her favorite person, full stop.
She sits next to him on the plane on the journey back to San Fran, and she feels scared. Not of him or of his father’s legacy, or the humbling powers he has inherited, or the ancestry behind them. She’s scared that she might lose him. Not to death, but to the world, the rest of it. He will be loved by others, befriended by many, he won’t be just hers, and he never was.
Yes, in her mind, he’s still her person, but does the great warrior Shang-Chi have room for her measly friendship?
They’re eating ice cream on the hood of his new car, staring at the sunset.
“You wanna tell me what’s making you sad?”
Katy laughs a throaty laugh. “Um, we did just come back from a life-changing trip that nearly killed us.”
“Yeah, but, you’re sad about something else… which makes me wonder what it could be.”
Again, that sweet, soft-spoken way of his, hiding the brutal and accurate assessment.
She swallows. “You’re the one who’s grieving. I don’t want to pile on.”
“I’d prefer it if you did.”
She stifles a sigh. “I’ve just been thinking.”
“Yes?”
The words come out at random. “You know…the first time we met and I came between you and that bully, I wasn’t really worried for you. At the time, I thought I was. I thought I was jumping in to defend a fellow outcast, but afterwards I sort of felt the opposite. I noticed how calm you were, how you were sort of waiting for that idiot to go just a little too far so you could knock him out. So, maybe I jumped in to stop you from doing that. Maybe I always knew and just buried my head in the sand. I don’t know.”
Her friend leans close, brushing elbows with her.
“See. You do know me. Simple as that. You always have, Katy.”
And it’s completely false and completely true, at the same time.
Simple as that.
Katy feels a blush coming on, like she’s fifteen again.
“Yeah, but I’m still a dumbass. I should’ve known that was you who put that guy in the wheelchair. We should’ve talked about it.”
Shaun chuckles. “Don’t worry. I made sure he could walk afterwards. He’s still walking today, being an asshole somewhere, probably.”
Katy laughs, horrified and delighted. “You sound way too pleased with yourself.”
“I’d do it again.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Come on. You’re not your dad.”
There’s no shadow on Shang’s face as he looks at her. “I don’t have to be. But I’d still do it again.”
And okay, he is pretty terrifying in that one moment. So terrifying, in fact, that she doesn’t notice he’s leaning in, and when his lips crash softly against hers, she almost jumps, but his hand on her cheek reels her back in.
Katy hears a voice screaming inside her head. She’s kissing her best friend, her oldest crush, her weirdest secret. No wait, he’s kissing her, he did it all on his own, and she’s kissing him back. Is she going too strong? Is she using too much tongue? Maybe they should take a breath, but ohmygod she’s kissing her favorite person! And he tastes really good and his fingers in her hair are very nice and the heat from his body is making her dizzy.
When they finally part, Katy keeps her eyes closed. If she opens them, this will turn out to be a big, weird mistake.
But Shang runs his thumb over her lips and says, quietly, “sorry if I came on too strong. I’ve been sort of meaning to do that for a long time.”
His laughter has always made her feel right at home, but also a little sad because she can’t always make him laugh.
“What are you writing?” he asks, lifting his head from the pillow.
“Just documenting our transition from besties to sexties in my secret diary,” Katy replies, chewing on the top of her pencil. “I just coined that, by the way, though I’m pretty sure Urban Dictionary already has an entry on it.”
Shang picks up his phone. “Actually, their definition of sextie is different from yours. So maybe you can claim some kind of copyright, after all.”
Katy grins, turning her face to him. “See, we don’t even need those ten rings. We are fucking geniuses.”
Shang circles her waist and pulls her back into his arms. “Yeah, literally.”
Katy chokes on a laugh. “Oh my god, I just got that–”
Her bestie is impatient. He shuts her up with a kiss.
He slips five rings over her wrist. She feels a terrible sting, but there’s music to it too. She feels like she’s running on fire, like she’s turned into every part of an engine. She exudes energy.
But here, there’s nothing to run away from.
He is standing before her, watching her calmly.
Katy wants to make a bad joke about him putting a ring on it, but she stares at her best friend, lit ethereally by the power of his rings and hers, and she thinks, yeah, I know this kid, and he knows me.