"You made your mother and me real proud," he’d told me. “I just wish I could be there to see you walk across that stage.”
Un-huh. With a cynicism I didn't have four years ago, I had wondered where he really was right now. Which criminals was he tricking this time?
But that had been how I felt on the inside. On the outside, I had just thanked him for calling and murmured something about maybe visiting him and mom in Texas soon.
I kept up the act. Because that was what our family did. We pretended, especially with each other. That still hadn't changed.
But other than that, my life was totally different.
I’d traded the cosmopolitan city of Tokyo for the bucolic college town of South Hadley, Massachusetts. All the free time I used to dedicate to drawing had been re-delegated to round-the-clock studying to keep up with all my science and math classes.
I'd also made a best friend.
Her name was Lena. She was Indian and black instead of Korean and black. Her mother was dead, not deaf like mine. And her eyes were much rounder than mine. But that was pretty much where our differences ended.
She was also on the total parental guilt track to becoming a doctor, which was why she was standing right behind me in line to receive our Bachelor in Biological Science degrees. She’d grown up with a tiger parent. And like me, she belonged to what our insanely body-positive dorm president called the "cute and chubby club."
We’d both had to work our asses off to get good grades at Mount Holyoke. And I doubt I would've gotten into medical school if Lena hadn’t always been willing to spend Friday nights with me, doing sexy things like studying crazy hard and running endless flashcards and assuring each other that this would somehow all be worth it in the end.
Maybe it was. Our family members waved back at us from the bleachers. And both our tiger parents looked prouder than proud.
Mom was right, I told myself as the dean handing out diplomas started saying all the “H” names, and we got closer to the stage steps. Going to Mount Holyoke and then eventually on to medical school was a much more practical life path than putting all of my eggs in a teenage Chinese gangster's basket.
My father had made sure to keep my name out of the reports after the Red Diamond-Nakamura-gumi sting was finished. To his colleagues, he'd made me look like a dutiful daughter who went above and beyond to help him bring a bunch of criminals to justice. Meanwhile, Raymond Zhang had been put behind bars where he couldn’t hurt anyone else. And Red Diamond had crumbled without their leader. Good. That meant everything that happened in Japan was in the past.
And as for my future, that looked brighter than ever. I'd be starting med school at Manhattan University next fall. And I'd even lined up a fantastic internship for the summer with the Women’s Disability Clinic, one of their most distinguished non-profits.
Everything had worked out in the end. I should be happy.
“Why don't you look happy?” Lena asked me as we moved even closer to the stage.
I didn't dare answer, her or myself.
Instead, I ran through all my reminders yet again…
Victor's father was a criminal. Extortion, money laundering, trafficking—the drugs, weapons, and human kind. He deserved nothing less than to rot away in prison for the rest of his life. He wasn't a good guy.
And neither was Victor if he followed in his father's footsteps. Which according to my father, was exactly what Victor planned to do, “no matter what lies that boy told you to get in your pants.”
What we had…the promises we made each other…it wasn’t real.
I had matured and could see first love for what it really was now. College was a dumpster fire when it came to carrying over high school relationships. So many of my friends at Mount Holyoke had dumped and been dumped over the phone—sometimes over emails and texts. It wasn’t a good idea to expect your first love to last through your first year of college, much less marry him beforehand.
Everything Victor and I had planned could have only ended in disaster.
There was no reason I should still be thinking about him.
But that was exactly what I’d been doing for the last four years. I had even looked up when Tuft’s graduation would be at the beginning of May. And I’d sighed when I saw it was scheduled for a week before mine. It wasn't like he was there. I had no idea where he was in the world right now, but it wasn't there.
He was somewhere far away.
And that future I'd imagined for us had been nothing more than a silly girl’s fantasy. I hated, absolutely hated, that I couldn’t stop daydreaming about the parallel timeline where we pulled it off.
