Page 14 of Just Try, Again and Again

“I don’t want to be the girl that’s using some rich white dude for his money.” I fidget in my position uncomfortably.

Bryce flashes a smile, and I don’t miss the ground staff not being able to take her eyes off of him the moment he does. “It’s honestly nothing. I do things like this all the time.” And there it is. We might be similar—both lonely and aching for a mother we can’t have—but that’s where the similarities end.

This boy and I are worlds apart. He’s loaded and I’m broke. He gets invited to bonfire parties and I don’t have any friends—I’m the odd one out. He is charming and I’m weird. People respect Bryce Simmons. No matter how much his story and mine are alike, I bet people didn’t whisper nasty things about him when his mom was sick. I know for sure nobody talked about his ethnicity behind his back.

Why is her mom bald? What color do you think her hair was before she got sick?

“Hey,” he says in a tone much softer than the playful one he used before. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” He touches my cheeks and I finally feel the wetness on them.

I quickly wipe the tears away and grab our tickets from the counter. “Come, we’re going to miss our flight, otherwise. It’s too late to cancel now.”

11

Bryce - 18 years old

Fuck.I kind of wish we were sitting at the back in economy right now. At least then I could properly talk to her and ask her what’s wrong. There’s too much space between us. I would kill to trade the extra leg space if it means we wouldn’t have a partition between us.

The seatbelt sign turns gray and I immediately stand up, causing Haruki to look up at me. She loops her headphones around her neck and gives me a small smile. “Thanks for this, Bryce. It was really nice of you. Sorry I overreacted before.”

My body begins to relax. “Do you want to talk about why you were crying? I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. If you want, you can pay me back in pictures. Once you’re a famous photographer, one of your sunrise pictures will be worth the plane ticket.”

“Oh, stop it. And it’s not that. What you said before…It reminded me of my childhood, and my childhood always reminds me of my mom. Sorry for the breakdown.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Until now, Haruki has only been giving me snippets of her past. I know her father is a lot like mine, working long hours to the point of exhaustion. She also told me her father favors her brother more than her because he’s more obedient. He recently passed the Takken exam, the qualification needed to become a realtor in Japan. Haruki was supposed to follow in her brother’s footsteps, until she did what she did.

“It’s a really long story, I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Haruki,” I say with a small smile on my face. “The flight is really fucking long. We have all the time in the world. Why don’t you start from the day you were born? Otherwise, how are we going to kill time?”

Her facial expression changes to a more relaxed one. “Okay, well, remember how I told you I come from Osaka?” I nod. “We actually didn’t always live there. My parents met while my mom went on vacation in Japan. When they got married and my mom relocated to Japan, she made my dad promise that she could pick where they would live. Since she already had to uproot her whole life, it was only fair that she was allowed to pick the city.”

“So, which one did she pick?”

Her deep, brown eyes are now shimmering, something that has never happened before when she’s talked about her family. My own eyes are starting to burn, knowing exactly how she feels right now. This is the same look I had when I used to open our old photo albums when I was a kid.

“In the beginning, they stayed in Osaka, but my mom wasn’t happy, so they traveled around Japan, and when my mom visited Takayama, she fell in love with the area.”

“That’s the one with the nice old town, right?” I ask, hoping to God I’m not wrong on this one. My plan to impress her would backfire so hard I would rather just jump off this plane.

To my relief, she looks at me pleasantly surprised, with her head tilted to the side. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve been to Japan, you know. I told you this,” I say as I press my body to the partition, itching to be closer to her. “I’m not some uncultured, spoiled kid. Now continue the story. But your mom picked a good spot.”

The truth is, I didn’t like Takayama. Not one fucking bit. My dad took me on one of his trips to Japan once, and on the day he promised to take me to Disneyland Tokyo as a birthday present, his business partner called last minute and asked whether he wanted to take a day trip and visit a city famous for its old town and woodwork instead. Of course, Arthur Simmons didn’t say no.It wouldn’t be right to decline the offer, son.

“My mom was a painter, and a pretty well-known one, at that. She said the town and the surroundings inspired her. So, they moved there, despite protests from my dad’s family, and my mom would paint while my dad took care of the business side of things. I still remember those days; we were always happy at home. And since both of them worked from home, even though they worked crazy hours, we always saw and played with them.”

“Why am I sensing there is a but?”

“My mom is of Italian descent, so I didn’t really stand out that much. I mean, look at me; I could pass for a complete Asian. But the area isn’t exactly Tokyo, and we did our best to integrate. Mom mostly spoke to us in Japanese and I never really felt like I didn’t belong. Children don’t feel these things when they’re younger, you know?” Haruki continues, the expression on her face is changing into something else; something I don’t wish to see on her. “But then she got sick and we moved to Osaka so that my dad’s parents could help with the childcare, and there, everything finally hit me at once. Suddenly not only was I the mixed kid, I was also the new kid, and the kid with the bald mother all-in-one.”

“And that bothered you, didn’t it? That all the attention was on you.”

Haruki nods. “So I directed the attention on other parts of my life I didn’t really care about.” She lifts a portion of her hair to make a point. “I didn’t want to be the new girl who’s only half-Asian with a sick mother, so I ran away from that identity, and I guess I’ve been running ever since. Still trying on different lives to see which one suits me best.”

I swallow the lump in my throat, but it doesn’t work because I’m still covered in goosebumps. Whatever God is out there probably planned for us to meet so that we would make each other feel better.

“Well, anyway,” she continues. “That’s my life story. Now you know everything about me.”

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