Not Here to Be Liked: Chapter 26–One Month Later

You don’t need to like the first boy who likes you. You can be discerning, even a little uppity.

Somewhere in this, I think, is a pep talk, although as far as I’m concerned, it seems gratuitous.

I’m also galled by the way that, in Mom’s universe, Len and I have become characters in a sordid morality drama: dangerous boy, virtuous girl.

Before Mom resorted to her epistolary courtship with Dad, she and my grandpa had tried to get to America by way of Hong Kong, which served as a port of first refuge during and after the Vietnam War.

“Aiyah,” Mom reproaches. “What you need is a referral. It’s always easier if you have someone on the inside.”

Len: I can see why you like her. She writes so precisely, it almost hurts. Like it’s just you and these facts that you can’t look away from.
Me: Yeah exactly! She’s austere, but in a good way.

What no one knows, though, is that we’re texting all the time. Last night, we kept it up long after we’d finished the calc problem set, long after both of us should have gone to sleep, and I can see it in his face: a little more wan than usual, with faint dark circles forming under his eyes.

Len is sitting on a counter at the side of the room, his feet propped up on a chair. He tilts it forward, then backward, each time bringing it down onto the carpet with a cavalier thud.

“Yeah!” Ryan is ebullient. “Genius, right? It’s, like, zero effort!”

“Are you telling me this utterly asinine suggestion wasn’t even an original idea?”

Len leans in, and for a few brief seconds, our shoulders touch—long enough for me to lose track of whether it’s Ryan’s inanity that’s got me feeling worked up, or something else.

Unlike me, Serena has been fairly sanguine about this whole situation. She reaches over and steals Len’s hat, placing it on my head, her expression sly. “Let’s see,” she says, adjusting the brim. “Eliza, give us your best bro face!”

She sighs, a long and jaded exhale.

Serena leaves him hanging with a coquettish dip of her shoulders, but then Ryan supplies the answer.

Kim and I both start to gather our things and try to creep into our room unnoticed, but we get caught in the maelstrom.

“The other night, you were chatting with someone until way late. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
Apparently she hasn’t noticed the current text hiatus. “I went to bed at eleven last night.”

She simpers fondly at me before turning to go. “I’m just glad you finally get that it’s okay to care about how you look.”

The front shades are drawn, but the back window is illuminated, and through the semi-sheer curtains, you can see people crowded around a table, erupting every so often in a histrionic roar.

“Eliza Quan!” he says, stepping aside to let us in. “The feminist!” He is being facetious, but in that way that is past ridicule.

“Ugh, why have we never hung out before this?” Serena is almost maudlin now.

It was Len who violated a place I thought was safe, setting off a whole heap of humiliation and vitriol that I had to fight off without any help from him.

There isn’t a trace of his normal glib humor, no layer of sardonic bubble wrap around his words.

All those hours I spent parsing its dense descriptions and meandering anecdotes—I thought all of it would somehow illuminate something profound about Len.

All those hours I spent parsing its dense descriptions and meandering anecdotes—I thought all of it would somehow illuminate something profound about Len. Or, at the very least, about life. Instead, over 350 pages in, I’m as confused and frustrated as ever.

At this point, I’d really like to simply fade into the background and never have anyone notice anything I ever do again. Would it be so bad to be insignificant? Would it be so egregious to stand for nothing?

Unfortunately, today is when our Macbeth group is supposed to perform our scenes, and thanks to our train wreck of a cast, the class seems much more interested than usual. When Ms. Boskovic calls us up to the front of the room, everyone sits up a bit straighter, straining to avoid missing the debacle.

Winona reaches over and scratches Smokey’s back, which precipitates some serious tail wagging.

Her gaze becomes stern, and I shut my eyes, preparing for more censure.

If Perec had properly followed his own knight’s-tour-through-the-apartment-building conceit, there should have been one hundred chapters—one for each room.

I’m about to turn back to reading about the Cold War détente when I hear an unexpected voice coming from the TV.

Now my curiosity is really piqued.

“I agree that we haven’t had enough female students in leadership positions at Willoughby, especially in the roles of school president and Bugle editor in chief. The numbers are a travesty, and I regret that I had nothing to do with improving them. Because feminism, contrary to popular belief, isn’t about hating on guys like me. It’s about all of us working toward equality, together.”

“I’m stepping down because I’m the one who posted Eliza Quan’s manifesto on the Bugle home page. That was conduct unbecoming of a Bugle editor in chief, and a violation of basic journalistic integrity. Not to mention messed up.”

“There’s only about forty minutes left at this point,” I say. “I think he’s earned at least that much of a reprieve.”

To me, he says, “We may never entirely see eye to eye, Eliza, but your tenacity is, and always has been, a force.”

Len’s happiness is obvious, though keyed up with a furtive, skittish energy. His fingers fly through his hair before he pulls his baseball cap down over his eyes.

“Maybe you’ll even develop an abiding love for the Willoughby team.”

After all, the symbolism of the gesture—my portrait being hung in its rightful place by the boy who nearly deposed me—was simply too great to pass up.

It’s lunchtime, only a few days before the year is over for good, and my editor’s portrait has just arrived in the mail from Eton Kuo ’88, the illustrious artist himself.

The portrait, if I may say so myself, is a pretty good likeness. Sure, my forehead’s a little wide, and I’m not sure I scrunch my face up that much (“You do,” said James), but I hear that one shouldn’t have such stringent expectations in life.