“So what, are you like, breaking up with me?” asks Kevin, through a half-laugh. We’re sitting next to each other on the stair steps of our old school, at a reunion party. There’s a group, smoking by the football field: our old classmates and some kids from the year above us. Maybe I shouldn’t call them kids. They are all adults now — men, everyone in that circle. One of them waves at Kevin, come on.

Kevin waves back, an almost whole cigarette between his fingers. In the last few months, he’d committed to becoming a social smoker, only.

“You don’t have to put it that way,” I say. I exhale through a sigh, trying to be casual about it. “But yes. I guess I am. It’s been nice but, you know.”

“Oh,” says Kevin, and we both fall quiet. I resist the urge to apologize. Somehow, this “friend break-up” feels much worse than a real break-up. “Why?”

I’m unsure of how to explain. I don’t think he’d agree with my reasoning anyway. I’m not even sure I agree with it myself.

 ♡

Kevin and I are childhood friends. We grew up on the same street, with me living on one end of it, and Kevin on the other end. It was a very short street. We used to run around the neighborhood with all the kids in the area, five in total. Eventually, they all moved away, save for Kevin’s family. It was okay because he’d been my closest friend anyway: we were the same age, we were by some miracle both Vietnamese, he had all the coolest toys, and whenever his dad washed their car, he’d let us sit on the hood and help scrub the window. I no longer remember any of the toys from his room, save for a red-eyed T-Rex that could roar and a cheap plastic camera that used to have slides you could click through, but had gotten stuck on a picture of a mountain. By the time we started school, we were enrolled in the same class – a joyous day for both of us – and every morning we’d ride our bikes to school together.

Things got very weird when we became teenagers. Already at ten, we’d been bombarded with comments about how we were boyfriend and girlfriend – “Your girlfriend’s here to see you,” Kevin’s friends would taunt – but it became much worse when we got older. 

The girls in class would always tease me about my supposed “crush” on Kevin no matter how vehemently I denied it, and whenever we played truth or dare, I never chose dare because I knew they inevitably would make me kiss him or something like that. I started to distance myself. I took the bus home instead of my bike so I could avoid him and I hurried to partner up with someone else whenever we had to do group work in class. It wasn’t fair to him, but I was a stubborn, contrarian child. I despised the idea that anyone should think they knew me better than I did. Any potential for a crush on Kevin sprouting within me had been pulled and strangled out of me like a weed. 

That’s when things began turning sour. Kevin started to make fun of me in class, and soon enough all of his friends joined in – “I was just upset that you’d stopped talking to me,” he’d later share, which I honestly think was fair coming from a thirteen-year-old boy. At the time though, when we were thirteen and fourteen, nothing about it had been fair. And to me, it hadn’t even been the snarky comments or the paper balls he’d throw at me from the back of the classroom that were the most hurtful, although I did see it as a slight towards our many years of friendship. I had been the one to start it though, so I didn’t mind it as much as I would’ve, had it been unprovoked. It was the “fact” that – I had convinced myself that this had to be the case – he’d known that his teasing me in that way, would only add fuel to the fire that was our classmates’ collective conspiracy theory about the two of us being madly in love with each other. 

Slowly, Kevin grew tired of making fun of me. We had a half-hearted fight one day, where none of us managed to put our hearts into the insults. Our insults were always on the side of stale – even when we’d been “enemies”, Kevin had never once cursed at me, and I had never once cursed at him, as if that was taking it one step too far. This last fight had been extremely half-hearted. We’d been seated next to each other at the school library, doing homework, and he’d elbowed me right in the ribs. It hadn’t been hard, but it hadn’t been gentle either.

I snapped, tight as a stretched rubber band: "Stop it,” and then my voice deflated: “Just… just stop.”

He mumbled back, in this voice hovering on the edge of sadness that made my stomach twist with guilt, even though he’d been the one to elbow me: "Okay."

I would rather we'd hurl insults and curse at each other. We'd had these petty fights all the time back when we'd been friends, but we had always made up. We didn't this time. We spent the rest of the homework session working in silence. A silence that would not be broken until years later, when I met Kevin again at a party.

It reads like a story you’d recount over a beer: so there I was, right, stuck with some guy who kept blowing cigarette smoke in my face while going on and on about Japanese literature and East Asian cinema. It was driving me fucking crazy. Like hell-oh, the books he talked about weren’t even that good. Awful taste. But anyway! Guess who walked in? Guess!

“No fucking way,” said Kevin’s voice, as boyish as ever. Although it had been his voice, I didn’t recognize him at first – something had changed about him. Something fundamental, past simple aging. He grinned and it was white and perfect, his teeth ramrod straight, knitted closely together. Ah. 

“Kevin!” Eager to escape, I latched onto him with more enthusiasm than I usually would’ve. I whispered, in hybrid Vietnamese: “Save me. I’m ninety-nine percent sure he has an Asian fetish.”

He replied, in full Vietnamese: “Jesus Christ.”

It would become one of the things I appreciated the most about being friends with Kevin again. That we could swap between one language and the other, swinging back and forth between the two like the hand of a metronome.

We went outside, where none of us needed to yell to be heard.

“I wasn’t very fair to you back then,” I said.

“I wasn’t either.”

That was long after middle school ended, and long after high school, where my family had moved to a new part of the city. 

We decided to try being friends again.

 ♡

I can’t stop looking at the circle gathered by the edge of the football field. I wonder what they’re talking about. I’d caught a snippet earlier, when I went down to fetch Kevin, having grown tired of wandering around by myself and making awkward small talk with people I’d last spoken to when I’d been fifteen. He was the only person I still knew from school. He’d been the one who convinced me to go in the first place, the last time we hung out at his apartment. It’ll be so boring without you, he’d claimed. We’d both known it had been a lie, but this was Kevin’s way of being kind. He always wished to include me. He wished to include everyone.

My fingers are getting numb and stiff, shoved between my knees. It had been a clear day; the night air is freezing cold from it.

“Why are you friends with them?”

Throughout our second friendship, I’d often referred to them as “those guys” because I could no longer remember their names. All the boys from school I’d never expected to see again. We talked about them sometimes, because the topic of our old school was inevitable when it had been such a large part of our shared history, always with the unspoken assumption that they were a far-off remnant of the past. But when Kevin turned twenty-one and had rented out the local student bar for the occasion, there they were, all chummy with him. For some reason, I’d felt really betrayed by the fact that he hadn’t told me he’d invited them. Or that he still hung out with them at all. 

They hadn’t changed. Chortled over these lame jokes that were objectively unfunny. Fruit so low-hanging they practically pressed into the earth. Really, Kevin was the one who changed around them. Maybe it was the alcohol, or perhaps this was just what it meant to be One Of The Boys, but he was more abrasive and loud. A lot of the jokes had been at his expense too. Unabashedly racist. And he played along with them. All of it took me right back to middle school.

This reunion party hadn’t been any different. These people and their circle. They made me feel small. An ant amongst trees. I knew I shouldn’t have come.

“I’m not friends with them?”

“You seemed really close just now.”

“I was being nice. Is that what this is about?”

“No. Not… it’s not just… well, yes, but… I–”

I rub the bridge of my nose. I feel crazy. I’m overreacting. I wish I’d prepared myself a bit better before going into this. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, though. I hadn’t known how much Kevin’s bond with these people had actually bothered me until I’d walked in on that conversation.

“No, I’m sorry, really,” he sighs. My frustration must be palpable. “What’s wrong? Let’s fix whatever it is.”

“You know, she isn’t here, Kevin.”

“Who?”

“Sarah. From the year above ours.”

He frowns. As if trying to recall a distant memory. I want to shake him by the collar. Come on, Kevin. Give me something. Anything.

 ♡

In our last years of middle school, there was a circle of boys I tended to avoid. All the girls avoided them. They’d been involved in an event which had occurred in the winter of our second to last year. There had been a boyfriend-girlfriend pair in the year above ours. Apparently, he had spread what our homeroom teacher referred to as “intimate photos” of her – we had all known what that had meant. He’d sent it to a group of boys in his class, behind her back. They’d had a group chat together. 

Apparently, photos of other girls had been in it too. 

They’d rated them all from one to ten. One: ugly as shit. Wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Seven: so-so. Would fuck on a good day. Ten: would fuck on any day. The subtext reading whether she wants it or not.

We didn’t talk more about it that year or the next, but all the girls knew that a few of the boys in our class were good friends with the boys in the year above us, and stayed good friends with them after the incident. Meanwhile, the girl, Sarah, had to change schools. I never saw her again.

 ♡

Maybe it’s harsh of me to fault Kevin for not remembering Sarah. There were many people I couldn’t remember. But our worlds were so vastly different. What had happened to Sarah was just some note in the margins of Kevin’s youth. Something that had happened way back then, that didn’t concern him. It had affected him so little, that he still hung around some of the boys who’d been in on it. 

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah. I made sure not to appear in any photos, out of fear that I’d end up in a group chat with a rating slapped on top of my face, reduced to a point on a scale of fuckability, although I doubted that I was even known enough to be considered a candidate. I was content with not being known. I didn’t even show up to picture day in our last year. I’d much rather fade to obscurity, remembered by no one. 

Sarah is never far from my mind, still. I don’t know her. I haven’t had a single conversation with her in my life. Some part of me is always thinking about her.

I look down at the circle of boy-men, and I wonder what rating they’d given all the girls in class. I wonder if they’d rated their classmates in high school if they still rate their classmates in university. 

I’ve had that thought about Kevin too a few times, like at his birthday party when one of our old classmates had made a cheap joke at his girlfriend’s expense, and Kevin was stuck somewhere between a laugh and a cough as if he didn’t know how to react. Or at this reunion party, back when he was standing in that circle, and they all glanced at me. The little moments in between that I had shrugged off at the time.

It made me feel mean. Like a bad friend. It wasn’t fair of me to assume the worst of him.

But there was this nagging fear that maybe I didn’t know Kevin entirely. That something lies nestled between the spaces of his ribs. Comes out of him when I’m not around to see it. The way he’d been at his birthday party; he’d never act that way if it was just the two of us hanging out. I may be his friend, but he’ll never see me the way he saw his other friends. I may have known him since before he could walk, but it would never change the irrefutable, simple fact that I am not a boy.

 ♡

“You don’t remember her at all?”

“What was her last name?”

“I don’t know. She was that guy’s girlfriend. Daniel or whatever. The one with the photos? In eighth grade?”

Kevin makes a sort of oohhh. Then, with an indifference I might’ve imagined, the inadvertent kiss of Judas: “What about her?”

I take a breath, grit my jaw so I won’t lose my composure: “What the hell do you mean, what about her? Daniel–”

“–Danny. Sorry.”

“– leaked her nudes to the entire fucking school. Why are you friends with him?”

“It wasn’t the entire… I-it was a long time ago,” he says, but I know him well enough to hear the guilt in his voice. He runs his tongue over his front teeth, a habit from childhood, discards his half-smoked cigarette, and snuffs it out with the toe of his sneaker. “I– Look, I really dislike Danny, okay? He fucking sucks. I know those guys say things that are… are awful sometimes, especially him, but it’s not easy for me to stand up to them. I’m all alone in that group.”

I stare down at my knees, bring up a hand to bite a cuticle sticking out from my thumb. It’s been bothering me for days. 

Kevin always wants to include everyone, even the ones who don’t want to include him. Maybe he hopes one day they’ll want to. I don’t know. I can’t read his mind. “They don’t even like you. You don’t have to be friends with them. Just walk away.”

“Are you going to? Walk away.” His voice grows smaller. “You’re serious?”

The cuticle, along with a too-long stretch of skin, rips between my front teeth and my cracked bottom lip. I spit it out and taste blood. “You’re my oldest friend, Kevin.”

“You’re mine too.”

I stand up. “I think I’m gonna head home now. See you later.”

 ♡

I resign myself to becoming the friend Kevin sees once a year. Maybe I’ll get invited to his twenty-second birthday, maybe even his twenty-third. The grief will come somewhere in between. Perhaps even now. Kevin had been kind as a boy. I remember him from when he was small: cherubic red cheeks, hair that refused to stay flat, the gap in between his front teeth he pretended didn’t bother him. He used to joke that it at least made him good at whistling. I remember his favorite T-Rex and the camera he always carried around, claiming he’d been the one to take that picture of the mountain. On many levels, he’s still kind, and I wish he wasn’t. He’s never been perfect, but perfection isn’t the point. I’m not perfect either. To be honest, I could be a bit of an asshole. Or so I’ve been told.

Perfection isn’t the point. The point is that I had approached the circle at the reunion party.

– crazy bitch. You fucked her yet at least?

Kevin had laughed nervously and gone quiet. It had to have been about me. The knowing, smug, perhaps even slightly predatory glances from the circle when I tapped Kevin on the shoulder to get his attention only confirmed it for me. He hadn’t said anything to them. He hadn’t said anything to me either. He’d just laughed it off like he always did.

The point is the letdown. It hadn’t been as much of a bone-crushing fall as a gentle downwards glide, as a heavy rock had settled in my stomach, pushed down by the weight of all the little moments that had occurred in between Kevin’s birthday and the reunion party.

I liked being his friend, someone he regarded as important. I like to think that he enjoyed being my friend too. Maybe I wished to preserve the boy that I knew, and that was why I had felt the need to call it quits with Kevin. Technically, Kevin hadn’t done anything, and maybe he never would, but was it so bad that I felt the need to protect myself from the possibility that it could happen? Maybe I was overly cautious. In an ideal world, I would have more faith. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to make these considerations at all.

♡

“What did you expect? He’s a man,” says my roommate the next day, when I tell her about everything that happened at the reunion party, and I glare at her over my shoulder, more irritated than the situation warrants. 

“He’s my friend,” I say defensively, tucking my hair behind my ear in a harsh motion. I’m not sure who I’m defending: myself or Kevin. Both of us. Kevin was clearly dealing with his own shit. I guess I just expected better from someone I regarded as a close friend and someone who regarded me as one. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, expecting better. And I certainly don’t think it’s my fault. “Or was. I don’t know. And I don’t think you get to say that anyway. You literally have a boyfriend.”

♡

I asked Kevin about his friendship with those guys, you know. Once. We sat across from each other at a fast food restaurant eating mediocre cheeseburgers and soggy fries. It wasn’t about the Sarah incident – we never spoke about that – or even anything remotely related. When Kevin and I hung out, we talked about all sorts of things. Rarely were they ever serious. That time, it toed the line, although I tried to be lighthearted about it to mask my actual concern:

“I’m not accusing you of being a race traitor or anything, but. You’re on thin ice, is all I’m saying.”

Kevin shot me a mock-wounded look. “That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.” One of his hands snuck out to steal one of my fries. I let him. He’d wolfed down his burger in five bites, which had been less because of the size of Kevin’s mouth and appetite, and more because of the size of the burger.

“Do they still think we’re cousins?”

“Some of them do? But that’s like. Hilarious.”

I snorted. “It is.” It wasn’t as funny when one of them asked us if we knew anyone who had been “gang raped by American GIs during the Vietnam War”.

I finished the rest of my burger. Kevin couldn’t stop bouncing his leg and the entire table shook from it. I kicked him, gently, to make him stop.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, sheepishly.

“Look, I know it isn’t that big of a deal. But if it was me, I would’ve been fed up with it. And I can tell it makes you uncomfortable.”

“I only see them once a year.”

“Don’t you play League with them or something?”

“Not all of them. And that’s different. It’s not in person.”

“Because famously people who play League are actually super nice.”

“Oh, shut up.”

We left the restaurant and left it all at that.

Outside, Kevin handed me his almost empty soda by the entrance to light a cigarette. I drank the rest of it because he’d eaten some of my fries. The sound of the hollow straw echoed in the parking lot.

“My mom found out about my smoking habit,” he said, glancing at me as he tucked the lighter and the crumbled pack of Marlboro back into his pocket.

“Well, you’re not exactly subtle about it,” I argued around the straw. I’d chewed it entirely flat. There was plastic in my mouth.

“I am around her.”

“You’re alive, at least. I’d be grateful.”

“Barely.” In a high-pitched, angry Southern Vietnamese dialect: “Are you a fucking idiot? Do you want to die of lung cancer, huh?”

I could picture it: Kevin’s mother descending upon his cowering man-boy form with the wrath of a thousand gods.

He snapped back to normal-Kevin. “So anyway. I think I’m gonna quit.”

 ♡

There’s a memory of Kevin I sometimes return to. It’s not particularly extraordinary. It’s special though. We were in his room. I can’t remember what led up to it, or what we did before that. I can’t remember how old we were. But it was back when we’d still been friends, and the world had been wide and green in that way the world is when you’re very small. Back when the greatest pain we’d ever felt was the crash of tumbling down from a tree or the temporary betrayal of our friends playing with someone else for one day. Back when the greatest love we’d ever felt was the one for our parents and our best friend and our favorite toy, and all of them were equally important.

“Look,” said a young Kevin, holding the camera up to my face. I covered one eye with my hand – at the time, I didn’t know how to wink yet. There was a picture of a mountain in the viewfinder. “I took that picture,” he boasted, lying through his teeth.

“What? No, you didn’t.”

Kevin glared, his arms falling to his side. “Yes, I did.”

“Okay, where was it then? And when?”

“It was… it was…” said Kevin, faltering. It was from Sapa, in North Vietnam. None of us knew that at the time. He looked close to tears, his bottom lip quivering. He’d always been a shitty liar. He really wanted me to believe him. I decided to indulge him, this one time. Girls mature faster than boys do, my teacher had once said. Bullshit, in hindsight. I indulged him more so because it wasn’t fun or nice to make Kevin sad.

“Never mind. I believe you.”

“Really?” he said, squinting. Then, his grin cracked his face in half. In the middle was the whistle gap. Exactly how he looked at his happiest. “It’s cool right?”

“Yeah. Really cool. Give me the camera. I wanna see the mountain again.”

He held the camera up to my eye.

♡

February 21, 2025