Lies We Tell ✔

The Third Dance

Two girls. Two guys. One list of twenty items.

After the West Tower RAs had let everyone loose on campus to set out on our hunt, my group had managed to find ten objects within the first twenty minutes. Acorn? Check. Something white and something blue? Double check. Our group of four would have made the dream team, except for the fact that Chris Ishikawa and I refused to come within a ten foot distance of one another.

This frustrated Olivia and amused Chris's roommate Nigel to no end.

"Something happened between you two, didn't it?" Nigel demanded sharply, dark brown eyes bouncing from Chris to me warily, like he was expecting one of us to launch ourselves at the other. It had only taken a few minutes in Nigel's presence for me to classify him as the motor-mouthed, clingy, and very enthusiastic roommate. I would have felt bad for Chris if I weren't in the middle of hating his guts. "My spidey senses are tingling," Nigel crooned. He wiggled his tan fingers in my direction. "Come on, spit it out, you two."

"Nothing happened. I don't even know her name." Chris glared at his friend and shoved his hands deep into the front pockets of his faded dark blue jeans. Didn't even look my way.

"It's Amelia. Amelia Xu," I growled.

"Why do you pronounce your name that way?" Olivia interjected.

I took my eyes off a squirrel that had been struggling to crack open a nut to look at my cousin. "Whaddya mean?"

"You are saying your name wrong. It's Xu." She rolled her tongue and pushed air through it, pronouncing my last name properly. The way I did around relatives, around people who spoke and understood Mandarin. Like the sound of air blowing through blades of grass, I'd always thought of it. Around Americans, I chose to pronounce my name like 'shoe'. Much simpler. Didn't raise any questions, or cause horrible mispronunciations and awkward explanations.

"Yeah, whatever. Xu, shoe, doesn't make a difference." I tried to brush away my annoyance that Chris Ishikawa didn't even know my name, yet my dumb brain recalled his full name with crystal clarity.

Ishikawa is kind of a cool name. Like, kind of a really cool name.

Shut the hell up, brain, I ordered myself.

"Hey, isn't bubble tea on our scavenger hunt list?" Nigel said as we strolled through town. His eyes were glued to a small but crowded shop. The sign above it read Bubble Island.

"Just something about napkins from a local coffeeshop," Chris reported.

"Yeah, like I said, bubble tea." Nigel wiped non-existent sweat off his brow dramatically. "Phew. All this walking's taking a toll on me. I gotta refuel the engine with sugar. Anyone up for some?"

I shook my head. "I'm good." I'd grown up inhaling bubble tea. So much that I was pretty sure that if a doctor ever had to cut me open, he'd find there was no actual blood that flowed through my veins--just milk tea and tapioca.

"Not a fan of that stuff," Chris grunted. Another strike against him. That was, what, number five hundred?

"Oh, bubble tea from America! I have to try." My cousin eagerly followed Nigel to the end of the line, which was snaking outside the door. "Go on without us. We will catch up."

Now it was just me, Chris, and the giant elephant in the room--or street, I guess. Perfect. I squinted my eyes at Chris to let him know just how much I disliked this situation. He narrowed his eyes right back. Yeah, keep narrowing those eyes, buddy. I'm just as Asian as you are. I can do this for days.