He trailed off when Victor dropped the camera to the ground and crushed it under his hiking boot.
And that kind of put a damper on the whole “let’s go on a fun birthday hike” mood.
“Are you embarrassed to be seen kissing me?” I asked Victor as we made our way back to Kencho-ji Temple.
“Not at all.” He smiled at me as if I was crazy to think that someone who came from a homogenous society where the beauty standard was firmly set on waif-thin would be embarrassed by his chubby half-black girlfriend.
“Pictures are not a good idea for me,” he explained.
I understood. But a dark shiver ran down my spine.
The danger that surrounded Victor had a way of creeping up like that. One moment I was a carefree girl on a birthday hike with her boyfriend. And the next, I was reminded that his father had the kind of enemies that would cut out a child’s tongue.
Victor stopped us walking and turned me to face him. “Dawn, I am very proud to be your boyfriend. It is not safe to take pictures, but maybe you can draw me one? Something I can look at when we’re apart?”
Just like that, my entire mood lifted. I gave him a cartoony sketch of us kissing in Zuisen-ji Temple’s famous gardens, and he acted like it was the best gift he’d ever gotten.
So, no more doubts, no more suspicions. The only thing I was afraid of, after giving Victor that drawing was how much I would miss him when I went off to college.
14
DAWN
Mostly, there was only beauty between us.
Other than that birthday hike, Victor and I were a J-Drama montage filled with dreamy scenes of good times, cozy lunches at school, and walking hand in hand down Tokyo city streets.
Winter became spring, and acceptances and rejections started to roll in—mostly rejections from my reach schools. A couple of Jersey state colleges let me in, but Wellesley said no way, as did Barnard and Smith.
By mid-March, my mother was acting snippier with me than usual, wondering out loud what kind of medical school would let me in without a prestigious college listed in my application. She started side-eyeing art club again as if that was the only explanation for my lack of acceptance letters from the schools she’d picked out for me.
But luck was on my side. The Monday before my usual Tuesday with Victor, a big white envelope from Mount Holyoke arrived, letting me (but mostly my mom) know I’d gotten in with a generous scholarship.
Victor was the first one I told after my family, texting him on the secret phone my dad didn’t know I was still using.
“I got into Mount Holyoke with a pretty good financial aid package!!!”
“Congratulations!!! :)” he wrote back. “I have good news too. I will tell you tomorrow.”
The next day he congratulated me again with lots and lots of kisses during “art club.” Lying in bed while lazily smooching and signing Tuesday afternoons away had quickly become my favorite afterschool activity.
But eventually, I had to lean back to tell him, “One of my mom’s schools let me in. I still haven’t heard from RhIDS. Probably because my portfolio wasn’t good enough. I was reading online that there are kids who work on their portfolios for years. I slapped mine together over the winter break.”
He covered my hands with his so that I could no longer sign, shutting me up. Technically, he was the only one who needed to sign, but that was his way of stopping me from fretting—this wasn’t the first time I’d spiraled out about my RhIDS application.
“I know, I know. You’re right. There’s no use worrying about it until they tell me for sure,” I said, without even having to be told what he was thinking.
Then, I took my hands back to change the subject.
“What’s your good news?” I ask-signed. All in CSL, thank you. My Chinese Sign Language had improved dramatically since becoming Victor’s girlfriend.
To the point that I regretted not telling him how I felt even sooner. If I had, I probably could have put CSL on my college applications, and maybe that would have been a quirky enough skill to get me into more schools.
“I have also received a university acceptance letter,” he signed in perfect ASL.
“That’s great! Where?”
“I am not sure of the sign-word,” he answered. “But it is spelled T-U-F-T-S.”
I shot up in bed.
“T-U-F-T-S?” I nearly screeched while also spelling out the name of the prestigious university. “Like T-U-F-T-S in Boston?”
He sat up, too. “Yes, that T-U-F-T-S.” He hadn’t bothered to cut his hair since coming back from Hong Kong, and it now fell in messy waves past his ears.
It made him look like a freaking male supermodel if you asked me. But he didn’t appear smug or even confident as he signed. “I wanted to stay close to you. I hope this is O-K.”
