I think I knew you even from the womb, like the way Mrs.

Delia with the foggy eyes down the street talks about past lives. About how we are all born with a thousand lives trailing behind us like an invisible tail, except we dont know it, not really. But sometimes, Mrs. Delia said, her milky blue eyes twinkling, we feel it. We feel it in little bursts of cosmic recognition that snap and pop against our esophagi, in the fuzzy tips of our fingers, in the way our eyes hook onto each other and cant stop looking, looking, looking. Looking like theres something there we held onto once, closely, and then lost, but didnt know we lost, and were only now realizing that we mightve. Mightve. Such a sad thought, right? Might, as in maybe the quivering feather floating in the air of English grammar. You say it when you want to string someone along. Like that time you told me you might come to Shelley Annes pool party, and I spent the entire week with knots in my stomach, praying that you would, so you could come and see me in the new two-piece bathing suit Id begged for an entire month for Mama to buy. Even then I knew there was something special inside you. Like a glass cabinet with all of the precious wedding china inside, locked away, with my fingers aching to touch. You with your pretty boy J.Crew looks and your neatly pressed khakis every day at school, with your Anglo hair slicked back, every fine strand combed impeccably into place. You walked by and stole every girls cotton candy-tinted breath. Did you ever know? Of course not. You were too wonderful to.

You were my favorite snow globe. All perfect on the inside. But the only way to get to you was to let you shatter. Isnt it funny? I wanted to believe it was. When I laughed it sounded like scraping cardboard. The way your mother rushed up to me in the crowd of thoughtful parents with her twinkling azure eyes to thank me for volunteering to tutor you in math. And the look on your face of frozen horror before you quickly interrupted to tell her, No, Ma, History. Not math. Because your sweet baby boy with skin the color of calla lilies in Easter bouquets doesnt even know your own history. How could he? Of course I would raise my hand like a hoisted flag. Our teacher looked around first to see if anyone, anyone at all, would rather do it. She finally conceded when nobody else volunteered, and when I turned to look at you, your cheeks were the color of baby feet, beaming at me like salvation. While the teacher looked at me with soft pity. Did she know? Maybe. Even before I did. About irony. About how a little Chinese girl would know more about your history than you. About how it is written all over my body, and my parents faces. And about how I was young and desperate enough to use it to get to you. The backseat of your car has become my second home. At least it doesnt smell like old cheese and I dont find myself pressed up against junk food wrappers like in all the stories all my other friends say. In here, it is impeccable and clean, clutter-free and unsuspecting. I run my fingers over the clear, crystalline windows, writing hidden messages with one fingertip and my breath. Write me something in your language, you whisper against my shoulder. Teach me something I dont know. I watch my fingers strokes against the window. We are beautiful.

Feel my spine tingle as you clumsily and carefully repeat after me, looking into my eyes, your face half-lit by the moon. You butcher it thoroughly but we smile because that is beautiful too. At first the leather seats feel sterile and harshly alien, like a doctors office. They feel ice-cold and send a wave of goosebumps across my skin. You take one look at them in adoration as if they rise only for you. But how can I lie? So I dont. And you run your hot mouth against these tiny peaks, blessing them like you are God, melting away long, bitter winters. Slowly I begin to memorize how long it takes for car windows to become saturated in thick fog. This I do simultaneously and unconsciously, absorbing everything at once. My matted hair like cobwebs in your fingers. Your youthful laughter making it all worth it, like Old World penitence. The hiding. The sneaking around. The never-ending lying tasting metallic like fish hooks in our lips and trickling blood. The tender burns from your hot leather seat on my ass. Despite it all, you make me believe it is worth it. Even when we must wake up in our own beds alone and pretend to forget, and learn to tolerate the slow routine of daylight. On those guilt-ridden mornings I think of the first time I saw you. Walking through the halls like nothing Id ever seen, my halted breath circling my lungs, suspended at the thought of you ever looking my way. Dreaming, thinking the fantasy must be better than the real. But in that backseat, against the sweaty, hard leather, you make me see God. Dont your parents have a nice little Chinese boy for you? My friends ask me this through sassy, smirky Cherry chapstick mouths, before they giggle to themselves like heavily mascaraed wolves dressed in schoolgirl uniforms. I want to laugh with them. Laugh like the day is long, laugh until I either forget how to breathe or how

to be. Laugh so hard the atoms in my body combust and I am no longer me but part of the earth and everybody would inhale me and have me running through their bloodstream and living in their cancers without knowing so. That way I could always be in on the joke. But the jokes on them, too. Some days I want to tell them about the birthmark on your left hip shaped like a tiny cats head and revel in the confusion and dawning realization on their faces as they recognize their stupidity. I want to play in it. Sleep in it. Drink it in. Wrap it around me like silk and strings of rare pearls. Maybe, just maybe, it would smell even sweeter than your musk. Do you love her? Her tight white body all muscle and sinew, tanned golden from volleyball, her hair blonde like Aphrodite or Danish mermaids. I dont want to think of how it goes. I dont look when the two of you walk down the halls, with her baby bird hipbones swaying. I especially dont want to look when you two are crowned onstage. Even more when the two of you take the floor, looking like Barbie and her Ken, with the disco lights sparkling off her crown, and you look into her eyes like you are so in love, and I wonder how anybody in this room can stand it. And for a second, standing in the motionless crowd so unbearably invisible in the darkness, I believe you. I am ready to concede, to back away, to disappear in a veil of my own misery. Except. When the dance ends, I find you outside, waiting, leaning against the hood of your shiny car. You tell me she had to go home early, your Barbie queen, and you shake your head and say its all silly, anyway. You play it off so well that when I ask you if you love her, it feels like peeling back all my ribs, and your face looks as honest as the first day I ever saw you.

And that night, in your backseat, I think of tragedies. How honest they all started out, too. Like in English class, when we read Romeo and Juliet. I was too quiet to read for Juliet but I remember looking up at you, thinking in some other time it couldve been us, young and stupid and falling fast to our unwitting doom all the while thinking we would live forever, laughing and kissing our fingers without a single worry in the world. We hated the world. This was one of our many vows. We would never be one of them, the adults that we knew: broken and old and beyond repair. I dont hear it from you. I hear it from everyone else. Its so clich that I can hardly believe it, and when I do, Im hysterical and vomiting. My insides boil in shame. But worse. I feel angry and betrayed, and I feel like screaming through my teeth as if expelling demons. I am tempted to run to the chapel and ask for an exorcism, because I know I cannot be right, no, not inside. Not inside where you crept and slept and made yourself a shrine. I want to storm inside of myself and tear it all down. Artery to artery, memory by memory, first by the filigree, with my heel crushing glass and every meaningful thing, now rotten and decayed. And your car. Your nice, shiny car with the leather backseat with the stitches practically embedded into my body. I want to burn it. And maybe you with it. But not just you. Her too. And that fetus growing inside of her like a potbellied leech, half you and half her, sucking out all of her bodys nutrients, draining the life out of mine. I imagine the baby sitting and cooing in your backseat. How that baby would erupt in flames if it knew how you chose to baptize that backseat. With me, spread wide open like a sunrise. While she painted her nails the color of soft pink like the undersides of seashells.

The same backseat I refuse to go back into, even when you call. Once, twice, four times in one week. And in a way I take sadistic pride in the desperation of your voice, begging to explain, repeating over and over again that you love me like it is a new trendy prayer. It wraps around me warm like a fur mink before it tightens and suffocates me, crushing my bones, and I am reminded of how I am helpless and weak and how I let you in. You were so beautiful, shining like gilded golden treasures from a made-up land. Shining like how only trouble can. You only stop calling the night your baby is born. That night I spend drinking in the backseat of my own car, not leather so its all good, only vaguely reminiscent to yours. I tell God bad things, cursing your baby, your unholy spawn with this Anglo Goddess woman. And then in the morning, my eyes still swollen from bitterness, I hear. Your sweet new baby born silent, without the top of its soft velvet skull. Dead even before it could cry. It slipped out from inside her already a ghost. No, not a ghost. An empty shell. A broken cocoon. That day, I stop praying. I wont ever tell anyone. About how you drive by my house, the streams of your headlights making my heart churn restlessly in my chest. I hear you are a broken man now. Who knows when you turned into a man? Maybe it was when your baby was born without a breath. Broken and standing on my street, waiting. I dont feel sorry. I know how it feels to wait forever. How it feels to need to be chosen, to be the only one, for once. I will never tell you how I cried about your baby. How I will never forgive myself. How I am the murderer. I will never tell you sorry. Or her. Or your almost-baby. Not like

before, when I didnt have a single sorry bone in my body. None of it will ever be enough. Not even my own broken heart. So I will let you wait. Watch you as you give up as the sky lightens and as you get back into your car and drive back to her, just in time, before she wakes. Just in time for you to kiss her good morning. I dont pretend anymore. I have aged a million years since then. Mrs. Delia tells me to write about it. I have always had a gift for words, she says, like that is enough. Like that is all the reason I need. What good are words? I dont want to think of words. I am sick of everything about them. The way they crowd my mind but fail me in painful silences. Theyve betrayed me, whether theyve chosen to show up or not. I have learned that speaking words does not mean anybody will understand. Words are trouble. They tear you apart and pretend it is art. I dont need words. What I need are wings. Wings to fly away from here to dive into the eye of a tornado so that I can finally forget. Your hair is so beautiful, you once whispered to me. You ran your pink fingers through them like silken black curtains. My heart shuddered and I asked you, Really? Because I had never thought of it that way before. All of the girls on Seventeen were always blonde or brunette. My black hair and my slanted eyes and not exactly porcelain-white skin nowhere in those pages. I was so nave I thought I saw the world differently because of the color of my eyes. Black like coal, not blue like community pool water or green like sea glass. I thought you saw the world clearer and some nights I would rub my eyes before I slept, trying to smear the darkness away.

And so when you told me my hair was beautiful, I believed you. Because you saw things clearer. And all I wanted was the flutter of your butterfly breath. That even though I could not hold it forever, I would try my best to memorize the feel of it. I would burn it into a secret space. There it would lie, along with my feelings for you. May it rest in peace. I still think Mrs. Delia from down the street was right. About us, anyway. How we mustve loved in a past life and found each other in this one. Even though I am older now, I believe it more than fairytales. More than Barbie and her Ken. More than perfect nights spent in cramped backseats, whispering secrets into my collarbone. What we had was real. Okay? No more Mightves. Weve already used all of ours up. And you know whats funny? That I can laugh about now but couldnt before? Nobody ever tells you. Nobody ever tells you how pain could sound so much like poetry.