* * *
? ? ?
I gave the brush to Won when we met up for dinner at the same Vietnamese spot in Chinatown. There was a wait, and we stood outside in the plaza after putting our name down on the list. The sunset made our shadows long on the ground.
“This feels weird,” he said, holding the brush. “It’s new, right? You haven’t—”
“Shut up,” I said. “I’m trying to say thank you, okay?”
He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “You’re welcome,” and after that, he never brought up life coaching me again.
“I’m not going to use this,” he added. “I don’t want to accidentally think about you when I’m in the shower.”
“It’s a gift,” I said. “You can do whatever you want.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll wash Pepper with it.”
“I just thought you could exfoliate your dry, crusty ass.”
“My ass is perfect,” he said. “Thank you very much!”
“Please stop coming on to me,” I said. “It makes me uncomfortable.”
Won laughed. “You stole my line—”
“I value our friendship, Won. Perfect ass and everything, it’s not worth it to me.”
“You’re just going to break my heart,” he said. “Leave me for another white girl.”
“I won’t—”
“That’s what they all say.” He shook his head and feigned a sigh. “At least I’ll have . . . this shower brush . . .”
“I won’t do that again,” I said quietly.
“Do what?”
“I won’t drop out on you,” I said. “I swear.”
“This is about me and Jesse? Jane. I’m fine. I told you, I’m healthy.” I asked if he’d talked to Jesse since. “I had to go cold turkey on that situation,” he said. He shook his head and looked away.
“Did you love him?” The question Carly always asked me.
“No. I thought I did. But that wasn’t love,” he said. “That was something else.”
I touched his shoulder. “You deserved better than that, Won.”
He blinked a few times. “I did, right?” He turned to me. “I’m a good person. I have a job. I give my mom money every month.”
I studied his face, the pain etched in his eyes. In the fading light of dusk, Won seemed to glow. He looked beautiful, the way he always appeared to me.
“No one wants Asian guys,” he said.
“I do,” I said. Won scoffed. “Especially Koreans,” I said. “Especially you—”
“Shut up,” he said, smiling. “Rice queen.”
“You’re just my type,” I said. “Hot. Unavailable.”
“You got issues,” he said.
“Can a Taiwanese girl be a rice queen?” I asked.
“I found a doctor I like,” Won said. He traced a finger along his jawline. I told him, not for the first time, that he was already perfect. “Then let’s call it ‘enhancing perfection,’？” he said.
They called my name at the restaurant door and I answered, “Here.”
The surgeon was based in Seoul, someone who worked on actors and runway models, Won said, excitement in his voice. I promised to give him a ride to LAX and to pick him up when he returned, polished and new, after recovery. I already missed him.
Kenji’s Notebook
Tuesday evening, Fiona rode the 6 train downtown after seeing Kenji home from the hospital. She’d tucked him into bed and made sure the packet of OxyContin lay within his reach on the nightstand, next to his notebook. He looks terrible, Fiona had thought. Like a wilting jack-o’-lantern left out long after Halloween, a face falling into itself. She didn’t want to admit that she felt afraid. Kenji was thirty-two, six years older than she was. He had cancer of the mouth and throat. On alternating Tuesdays, she and Jasper, her boyfriend—her ex-boyfriend, that is—took turns sitting with Kenji while the chemo drained into his arm. He was on his second round of six weeks, and skeletal from it. Kenji was Jasper’s best friend, but Fiona had grown to love him, too. Four months ago, Kenji got the prognosis: surgery to clear out as much of the cancer as they could manage, then radiation and chemotherapy. A month and a half later, Fiona learned that Jasper had been sleeping with a woman in his writing program at Hunter. She’d read about it in Kenji’s notebook, snooping around one night while he slept.