Hours from the southern border, Vu Tran thought about the great pretense of love. His ex Nisha was—according to the e-vite—“Can you believe it? Getting hitched! She’d be getting married “to a 3D person” in a three-day ceremony, at a jazzy hotel in Hyderabad. “P.S. Not drunk in Las Vegas, worry not!”
So, Vu wouldn’t worry. Didn’t worry. The next time he’d see her, whenever that might be, if he’d see her, she’d be married. Legally. Bound to some “quirky and cute guy.” For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. From that day until God did part them.
“Or was it ‘until God did them part’?” Vu said, mostly to himself. But in a car, no conversation is private.
“I’m sure Hindu rituals don’t follow the Bible,” Randolph said as he drove them further south and west than Vu had ever been. “I’m sure they say other things. Like ‘in poorness and more poorness’. ‘In one software company or another.’”
Vu didn’t have it in him to laugh, though he tried.
The news was surprising. But what about her hadn’t become feral in the wake of her thirtieth birthday? One month, she was wallowing and self-caring after the breaking of their relationship, about to drown herself in a pool of self-pity and an actual infinity pool on top of a skyscraper in Singapore, and then, she was posting pictures on social media with a hedge fund millionaire she met at the Pearl Harbor museum in Honolulu. Right beside the Polaris missile display; it took a specific combination of insensitivity and sexual arrogance to assert oneself beside that thing. He wore a white t-shirt, the sleeves a tad too tight around his biceps. And hair-gelled up, defying gravity and, more impressively, wild island wind. In pictures, at least, he looked like the kind of guy who wanted to honeymoon in Dubai. Maybe bungy jump off the highest tower, his coif still erect and in place.
“We’d have made fun of him at a bar,” Vu said to his friend. “Now she is posting video covers of cheesy Bollywood duets.”
In a video linked to the e-vite, he wore a vest and no undershirt, the lapels just thick enough to hide the dark spots of his nipples. A chest-shaver for sure, an Aladdin-wannabe. At least a dozen other partially racist comments came to mind, and if Randolph wasn’t beside him, he’d have wanted to post the more witty ones using an anonymous account, just to see if he could get some strangers to like it. But his phone’s data signal barely loaded the video. It was as if the signal knew he couldn’t handle more than ten seconds at a time.
Vu didn’t even know this version of Nisha posing in a fancy red red-carpet dress. When they were together, she wore loose graphic t-shirts, long cardigans, and short-shorts—occasionally, transparent tights to camouflage her stubbly legs. It was her uniform. He once called her a cartoon because her style didn’t change, regardless of the occasion or location. Now, she was wearing a dress they’d have laughed at on a mannequin. Would he have liked this Nisha who went into the store to buy it? Could he have made her laugh if he met her in some Pearl Harbor museum? Jokes would’ve been difficult on the spot, but he might’ve flirted with factual information. But was she even the type to tour a Pearl Harbor museum when he knew her? He shuffled through their three years together, trying to remember if she’d ever hinted an interest in history, or shown any enthusiasm for World War II. If he had known, he might’ve shared that his grandparents were legends for fighting off the Japanese in his ancestral Vietnamese village. But she had broken up with him before he introduced the family tree beyond his branch. She said she had “changed,” but he thought that was because she had quit her job as a consultant and wanted to start work at an NGO. He labeled it a quarter-life-crisis she’d return from with a dragon tattoo or a half-shaved head, or both. Vu was fully prepared to accept her then, too. But this was unexpected. In all the scenarios he had imagined about her, he didn’t consider she’d find someone else so soon.
Randolph seized Vu’s phone.
“If you replay this one more time, I will throw it out the window.”
“Sorry.”
Randolph briefly glanced at the video. “Is this in India? She’s about to get hit by a truck, right?” Nisha was running through a crowded street, blindfolded, into the outstretched arms of her fiancé.
Vu shrugged and accepted his phone back.
Where they were in some zipcode, Arizona and where this lovey-dovey couple lip-synced in a marketplace in Hyderabad couldn’t have looked more different.
“Hey, I get it. Everyone wants someone they’d run to blindfolded on the other side of a crowded street,” Randolph said. “If I were a woman, maybe we’d stop on the shoulder and film a parody. Take it as a wedding gift.”
“No, I’m not going.” Vu paused the playing at a moment when the fiancé looked constipated, his face caught mid-lyric. “I’d rather travel through China, eating whatever I can until my innards disintegrate.”
Vu spent his thirty-seventh birthday loitering at a bar near his cousin’s wedding, occasionally dodging his lobster-clawed aunts for the free food.
“Don’t lie to me, man,” Randolph said. “It’s a waste of a good lie.”
“What do you want me to say?” Vu said. Sometimes he liked to play dumb, so other people around him could reveal what they wanted him to be or do.
“You want to stop her wedding.”
“You think I can stop her by showing up?”
“You think she’s making a mistake, then, yes, you could stop her.”
“What do I know about mistakes? I’m in the middle of nowhere with a greasy middle-aged guy.”
“Well, fine, I’ll admit it,” Randolph said. “I think filming you crashing her wedding might be a better bet than what we’re doing out here.”
◆
They were a week into shooting a documentary about illegal immigrants crossing the desert. Randolph kept believing they were bound to run into children he’d like to feature. That was the whole pitch to “someplace like Vice” though Vu didn’t know exactly who was funding their trip. Someone “really big and rich with a lot of reach” wanted to see herds of women and children, helpless under the beating sun, dodging patrol vans by hiding behind cacti and ducking under shrubs. They’ll be wearing trash bags to protect their arms and exposed backs. “Scraped and bruised up, thirsty for water, hungry for more, for more only found in good ol’ Umerica,” Randolph chanted it almost the entire length of the drive so far from Tucson, where they convened, to the border. Vu held his binoculars, straining to find whatever Randolph described. Or, anything close. For a while, they followed a line of empty water bottles, discarded litter, and an animal’s purple rubber chew toy, which could also double as a well-used dildo. Neither examined it too closely. Randolph stopped along the shoulder to take pictures of soiled newspapers and such, so frequently that sometimes, Vu walked along the road. Near dusk, Randolph said something about creating a photography series for an exhibition titled Mur de Papier, found images of POTUS along the deserted border.
“But shouldn’t the title be in Spanish?” Vu said.
“French is instantly artistic,” Randolph said, “and serious. Irrefutable. I’ve never argued with a French painting or about a French painter. But Picasso? Please.”
It sounded like a more plausible project than what Randolph had spent the whole afternoon pitching: Indian wedding crashers. To India, With Amour, he had titled it. But any Plan B seemed like a better idea now than what they originally pitched, considering they had only taken a few time-lapse videos of orange sunrises and sunsets on a barren and cracked landscape—filler-footage for the transitions between scenes. And if not in a film, then, only Instagram-worthy, but not much of a narrative there.
“What about us slumming it up for a while like we’re in grad school again?” Randolph said. “That could be the story. Two guys. Trying to prove the president right, but they’re proven wrong.” Randolph, like a dad, didn’t believe in quitting—even when he and Vu were sleeping and showering in random trucker motels, stinking of secondhand cigarette smoke, and poring over a crumpling map instead of fighting with a phone’s GPS. And worse, they met their daily caloric intake with Ramen cup-noodles and pop-tarts; long hours of sitting, the car vibrating under them, didn’t help the bloating and constipation, either.
“No one would watch us,” Vu said. “We’re not good-looking enough to get away with being dirty.”
Vu was the wall to all of Randolph’s bad ideas. Usually.
They next stopped at a Navajo-managed gas station, where Randolph bought a dreamcatcher for his teenage daughter and a turquoise ring for his wife of two decades. He missed them, sure, but that didn’t mean he was ready to return to his desk job at the railway museum. Not ready for DeQuincy-4-ever. But after a long day’s driving, thoughts of his wife and teenager popped out like cacti against a pastel blue horizon. The sunset was personal. It was the end of time for him. He felt it, slipping away, like spittle everyone else can see, too. Embarrassing, regretful, and uncontrollable. Vu could narrate a biopic about Randolph’s life. “The white man of 2020 lost the desert, thirsty for a politically attractive narrative arc,” Vu thought, “eyes his yellow friend with much envy.” He sounded like Sir David Attenborough explaining the motivations of an African drongo bird as it wins the trust of a meerkat family.
◆
Before being with Nisha, Vu thought “knowing someone better” had meant understanding her actions, predicting her next moves, her decisions. If that is, the person was reasonable and sane and kept to the rules that made them who they were—or, at least, stayed consistent with the way they defined themselves to others.
“In other words, you were close to her,” Randolph said. “You spent time remembering the stuff she told you about herself.”
Vu nodded. He thought of that as wasted space now. All of it. Parts of him, wasted. He couldn’t delete images any more than he could delete what she told him. If closeness were like one of those game shows when two people, best friends, mother-daughter, husband-wife, boyfriend-boyfriend, answered menial questions about the other person’s likes and dislikes, then, Vu would win a lot of levels if quizzed about Nisha.
“Yeah, don’t you know that stuff about Rose?” Vu said.
“Like the kind of cake she’d want on her birthday?” Randolph said. “That sort of thing?”
“Yeah, cake. Life’s about the small things, isn’t it?”
They were back driving again. Fast-food wrappers and brown paper bags stacked up in the backseat. At the next gas station or motel, whichever arrived first, Vu wanted to take a few minutes to clean and trash all evidence of their unhealthy week.
“Dark chocolate for Rose,” he patted his stomach, “I’ve finished her mint-chocolate, pineapple, butterscotch cakes too many times not to have the taste of what she hates seared into my tongue.”
“Exactly. I doubt this guy she’s marrying knows.”
“But is she someone who’d care?”
Vu wished she was. She deserved to be.
“What would you have bought her?” Randolph said.
“Rum cake.” Vu slammed the dashboard like it was a buzzer. “Adult desserts are spiked.”
“She said that?”
“She said that.”
“I like her.”
“She’s likable.”
Two-years into their relationship, after the awkward I-love-you’s, first fights, long-weekend vacations, sex toys, and all, after she had thoroughly worked her way into his breakfast-and-dinner routine, he had mentioned something about his mother’s preference for blonde women. As in, if he were ever to bring home a non-Vietnamese girl, his mother expected a white one. It was a dumb joke, really, but Vu didn’t think he fully recovered from that.
“Man, don’t beat yourself up about it. It wouldn’t have lasted. She wasn’t into you.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Vu said.
“She would’ve bleached her hair if she loved you.”
It was one thing to know this, and another to hear it aloud.
“You don’t even know her,” Vu said.
“I know enough,” Randolph said.
The heat was baking them in the car. The inside could only be described as an oven. Vu’s right arm in the front passenger seat was multiple shades darker than his left, the only proof, like the photographs, that they’d ever made this trip.
Vu’s phone vibrated with an Amber Alert: “Sixteen-year-old, last seen wearing a red woolen hoodie, leaving a Taco Bell off 1-19S in a white Ram Pickup. Heading south.”
He whipped back to see the one they had just passed.
“Relax,” his companion said. “Everything’s a truck out here. A truck is a modern horse. All cowboys are born in one. Almost bought one for my wife when my daughter was born.”
“Rose is too vegan for a gas guzzler.”
“Do you think it’s odd that you remember people’s dietary preferences?”
“We spend a lot of time watching women eat,” Vu said, “or buying them food as an excuse to get close. ”
“Well, I have a fetish for women driving trucks. There’s something about watching women do traditionally male-oriented jobs. Real feminism, no theory, just practice.”
Randolph took these fetishes to Hollywood. After grad school, he pursued gigs as a scriptwriter, ghostwriter, book-to-movie-adapter. Most of what he wrote ended up being turned into softcore porn, in which he was credited as Grand Rand. A real director had offered to meet him once; for six hours, Randolph waited at a café, where even drinking water cost him more than the fast-food meals he ate while crashing on Vu’s parents’ futon. “I left a part of me on the hem of that lace tablecloth,” he told Vu later. Then, he met Rose, moved to Louisiana after the state passed tax incentives to attract filmmakers. He hoped he’d find work in that way, and sometimes, he did. He even boasted about missing Sarah’s fourth birthday to work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But these brief stints didn’t manifest anything beyond part-time work. After the film ended, the crew packed up and left, Randolph returned to his job at the railway museum and placed his name in the pool of English comp adjuncts.
But when Vu moved back to Orange County from Atlanta that year, hope returned to Randolph again, and he drove to Vu’s apartment all the way from Louisiana. “Try or die,” he said to Vu, “I can’t go back.” Adjuncting wasn’t his plan B or C; it was more for a career apocalypse. Nor did any plan involve watching his classmates land gigs as assistant directors, producers, open in film festivals, while he memorized facts about the southern U.S. railway system to fulfill the requirements of a dossier. He couldn’t afford to buy his wife a truck two decades ago, and still couldn’t buy a car for his daughter.
◆
He veered to the side to let a trucker pass. “All right, that was the fifth eighteen-wheeler. It’s time for another piss-stop.”
He pulled over the car along the shoulder, turned off the ignition, and waited for Vu to act on his promise.
“What?” Vu said, rolling his eyes. “I know it’s in there. We don’t have to do this every time you leave the car.”
“Principle, man, you never know,” Randolph said. Each time one of them stepped out of the car, the other had to hold the handgun from the glove compartment. “We have to play safe.” He talked as if they were traveling through the Wild Wild West, and he expected cowboys to loot them of their expensive camera equipment. He called his paranoia a residual trauma from the evenings he spent cooped up with his parents watching John Wayne westerns.
“Now, remember,” Randolph said, unbuckling his seatbelt.
“Yes, yes, if a rattlesnake bites you—”
“Takes me down.”
“I’m paraphrasing you, come on, Rand.”
“No, no, no paraphrasing or improvising. I need you to tell my daughter and wife exactly what happened. That I died wrestling a desert critter.”
“No one will think little of you if you get bitten.”
“I have to at least die a hero.”
“All right,” Vu said, “I promise I’ll give you a heroic death.”
“And if a state trooper gets me first—”
“I’ll tell your daughter you saved a rabbit from getting shot.”
“Deer. Something large enough to mistake as a human.”
“Why don’t I say you threw yourself in front of a black guy?”
“As long as you make me a hero.”
Outside, Randolph surveyed the plain flat strip of land with a hand like a visor on his brows. He walked toward the sparse bushes. When he found a spot concealed enough, he twirled until he faced the right direction of the wind.
The handgun had a peculiar weight in Vu’s lap. Silver. Sleek. A few years ago, Randolph would’ve been the first to sign a petition against the Second Amendment. Now, he’d rather protect his family at the cost of his political beliefs.
Randolph’s parents were traditional Christians. He had become a missionary to please them, traveling to Jamaica at sixteen, to convert the dozens of heathens there. His first taste of sex in college diverted him away from Jesus. A religious studies partner called him Adam to her Eve. Together, they were writing their own religion, one that tolerated all the others and sex. A doctrine that they had convinced themselves would be adopted by millions of people suffering from compassion fatigue. Commandment One: Let Nature care for you. Commandment Two: Don’t Force Yourself to Forgive the Trespassers. Commandment Three: Be Kind or Be Mean, Be What You Think the Person Deserves / Trust Your Judgment of the Person. Commandment Four: Enjoy the World Through Your Senses / The Way You Perceive the World is Right, Everyone Else is Right, Too. Later, she broke his heart twice when he learned about her incurable nymphomania and that she was failing almost every subject because of it. She now ran a yoga studio in Kuching, Malaysia. That’s what happens when you come from wealth; there are no consequences to failure. The end of their relationship marked the end of faith, organized or otherwise, for Randolph.
When Vu thought about Randolph, he had files of information he didn’t even know he had stored in his long-term memory. Just hours of useless anecdotes Randolph spilled while they were drunk had taken root. What are the memories we carry around and for other people? What did it mean to know so many facts about someone’s history? And someone else’s feelings about those facts? At most, Vu could recall Randolph a little better than a stranger might.
As his friend returned to the car, Vu slipped the gun back in the case and the case back in the glove compartment. Randolph stifled a yawn, but still somehow remained awake as they listened to the classical music radio station. He was trying to find the freest background score to edit into their documentary. Why pay for a musician when so much Mozart still had not been claimed for film? Now, it was Beethoven. Too flowery with all its flutes for the barren landscape. They waited for a Russian.
◆
Another late afternoon, Randolph fell asleep at the wheel and jerked awake at the sound of tires crunching gravel along the shoulder. Thereon, he drove on the dirt road to keep himself alert.
They were between rolling hills, adjacent to the brown fence already in place. They were listening to an audio performance of Waiting for Godot, just because they thought it would be ironic. If anything came of this project, Randolph planned to intersperse his narrative with quotes from the play.
They were running out of time and money. And motivation along with those two. Whatever enthusiasm for the project that Randolph had at the beginning was leaving him. If Randolph didn’t return to his adjunct position or his desk job at the railway museum, he’d be replaced. There were a dime-a-dozen overqualified, unemployed people in his small corner of Louisiana. At least, he imagined competitors to convince himself that his jobs were rare and coveted in a stressed economy.
Vu bought a disposable Kodak and took pictures with it only so he couldn’t delete them as easily. Wrinkled cliffsides. Peaks bowing, flattening their rugged spines from the wind. Something seemingly undetectable stubbornly, persistently changing a solid, resistant formation—there was a natural lesson in this Vu wished he could capture in art, but that might’ve required thousands of years to see the air making any difference on the mountain. Why were his ideas all like that? So inane. Obvious. And yet, somehow, difficult to execute anyway. His thesis advisor had once told him to quit seeking and start accepting what was in front of him. Vu had no idea how the professor was hoping to change him.
He liked his privacy too much, unfortunately, to make anything of his masters’ in journalism. Successful reporters had to have personalities, opinions, spunk; twitter followers and provocative backstories; they had to be intrusive, angry and passionate about the injustices happening in the world—but maybe Vu had a high tolerance for bullshit. He couldn’t react to the things which didn’t surprise him: black men being killed, guns in schools, state rallies to keep the confederate flag. It’s not that he was heartless or unempathetic. It was that he expected conditions to be worse.
For a while, Vu worked as a producer at CNN-Atlanta. He worked at the headquarters beside Georgia Tech’s campus, where he met and dated Nisha. If he hadn’t been with her, he wouldn’t have stayed the last three years in the job.
Soon after their break-up, he quit the south, and a cousin in California introduced him to the SAT/ACT tutoring biz. The area was teeming with rich Asian parents willing to pay double-digits per hour to improve their kids’ reading comprehension and verbal reasoning scores.
“I woke up one morning and realized I could’ve been doing this out of high school. Why did I need multiple college degrees for this?” Vu said.
“You hate your reality but don’t want to risk anything to change it,” Randolph said. “You have to take chances.”
Reality awaited Vu’s response: in the form of emails he needed to send, confirming the SAT-tutoring schedule for the upcoming week when he’d return from trying to fulfill Randolph’s dream to trying to fulfill the desires of zealous teens. He thought of the picture Nisha sent him—standing like Wonder Woman, akimbo, on a foggy mountaintop with Kashmiri girls in headscarves surrounding her like a skirt. She had worn a red cardigan then over her traditional clothes. Her bangs hid her forehead, and a forced smile usurped the bottom-half of her face. Had that email been his cue? Or, was this invitation a hand reaching out for him? Asking him to whisk her away from a stranger she ought not to marry? She liked that sort of romantic Bollywood story.
He couldn’t believe he was thinking about Nisha again. He was thoroughly over her. Therapy and Tinderellas alike had pushed her into a friend-zone. Why did Randolph insist otherwise? Why did the Universe pull him back to that space and time? To the night with her when she had briefly entertained the possibility of him as a husband only to break up with him the next day by claiming she wasn’t ready for marriage, even though she liked the ring he picked out for her. What a fake excuse that was. And it had taken all his energy to forgive her for giving him that hope, for saying yes, and then, snatching it away. That was not even a year ago.
Meanwhile, rows of turbines dotted the places no one could grow crops. As they inched toward the city from the rural underbellies of the state, silence overwhelmed the car.
◆
Randolph tucked wagging feathers of the dreamcatcher into the coils of yarn. It still swayed off the rearview mirror, but with less power to distract.
“I think we should head back,” Vu said.
“Where is your spunk? Spunk gives you patience for art.”
Vu had added his name last minute to Randolph’s documentary pitch. That depleted all his stores of spunk.
“Are we really the kind of people to make money off these children?” Vu said.
“Why not?” Randolph said as he passed an eighteen-wheeler carrying automobiles.
“I mean, shouldn’t we have any conscience?”
“We should.”
“We should?”
“Should I say, ‘hey, let’s screw over the kids?’” Randolph’s hair had lumped together in greasy streaks down his forehead as if it were wet. “Just think about what they’re escaping.” Dictatorships, rampant crime, drugs, drug cartels, human trafficking, gangs, gang rapes, gun violence, poverty, lack of jobs, lack of food; for an hour, he listed all the reasons Latin Americans attempted the border as if he were on a quiz show and each item added a thousand dollars to his winnings.
“They’re escaping economic persecution. Death. The same thing my ancestors were fighting in England. My ancestors risked the open ocean. That’s what it is. The difference between ocean and desert. Compared to all of that, all they have to fight to come through, we’re just a couple nice guys in their way.”
Vu stayed silent because he found it awkward to talk about ancestry with Randolph.
“We should make a video game, Vu,” Randolph said. “That’s what we need. Like Oregon Trail. Now that we have some idea of the landscape.”
The game would follow the known paths of an illegal migrant family. They’d have to dodge the border patrol, climb over the fence, brave the desert heat, and the longest rattlesnakes, all just to cross over. Minimal provisions—first-aid kits, water cartons, nutrition bars—would be scattered by a young liberal generation. And there could be a legal counterpart to that version—one where players opted for the legal immigration route, filled out many forms, and waited many years in their own violent home countries—whether that be Afghanistan or Guatemala; the objective of the game would be to survive until their legitimate papers arrived.
“We can call it Welcome to America,” Randolph said. “What do you think? A hit, right? A bit racist, controversial. Those are all the rage these days. We’ll start a conversation.”
He had a dozen ideas every second and a dozen Randys ready to pursue each one to its ultimate dead end.
They rented a luxury suite at a Holiday Inn for their last night. They dove into the PBRs and plastic packets of chips from the mini-fridge. The beers promised a light enough buzz while they walked to the Walgreens for more. Vu wanted to develop the Kodak-film in black-and-white by the morning. A Redbox faced the parking lot. Randolph paid a dollar to rent Legally Blonde because he was missing Rose and Sarah. His wife and daughter looked like older and younger versions of the actress, respectively.
Back in the room, Randolph promptly took a photo of his laptop playing the title credits. He snapchatted it to his daughter. She sent back an emoji with hearts for the eyes. More than missing them, Randolph wanted them to believe he’d rather be at home watching Reese Witherspoon attend Harvard Law School with a chihuahua under her armpit than being on the road chasing some intangible thing.
They carried two white towels to the swimming pool. It was just hot enough outside to expect warm water.
“Just say you want to make more money,” Vu said. “Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
“No, no,” Randolph said. “Not even close. I can still buy Sarah a used car. I am not desperate yet.”
“Yeah, maybe she’ll accept an old model,” Vu said, “as vintage.”
There was a padlock on the iron gate, but they climbed over the fence and sat far away from the board that read Pool Hours. Pleading ignorance if caught worked the best when Vu pretended to speak gibberish with an Asian accent. He hadn’t yet tried it in this state.
Aloe vera bloomed along the edge of the pool. As they sat, dipping their feet in the water, Randolph searched for a Latin song on YouTube. The Spanish arches, pastel desert hues, mostly shades of yellow and beige, just the sheer amount of adobe brick, flat roofs, red-tiled roofs, inspired a craving for something different than what was distinctly American.
“You mean you miss trees,” Vu said.
“I miss trains,” Randolph said. He finally settled on Justin Beiber’s “Despacito.” “Sarah listens to this nonstop while she does her homework.”
“Must be nice,” Vu said.
“What?” Randolph scratched at a reddening bug bite on his elbow. He placed the phone on a towel between them and lowered the volume as if the noise attracted mosquitoes.
“To have a daughter you can blame for your bad taste in music.”
“Among other things,” Randolph mumbled.
Vu scrolled through new posts on Nisha’s Instagram account. She looked pale, blue, or maybe, his eyes were tricking him. With their cheeks pressed together, Nisha and her fiancé looked more like brother and sister. He wrote a message to reply: cordial, polite, but distant. He read it aloud to Randolph.
“Do you wish her the best, really?” Randolph said. “Do you mean it?”
“No one ever means that.”
“You sound so constipated, though, like you’re holding back tears and a gut-wrenching monologue between your teeth.”
“I don’t think so.” Vu laughed at the thought.
Randolph gestured for the phone. “Let me help you with it.”
Vu lowered his body into the water. The cold surface broke around him. He didn’t realize he was at the deep end until his feet grazed the bottom, and the water licked his collarbone. While Randolph typed on the phone, cuddling a beer in his elbow, Vu swam to the pool’s bottom, counted to six, Mississippi’s in between, and then returned to the surface.
Randolph read: “Dear Nisha. I love you. I won’t wait forever, but if you love me too, call now or forever hold your peace.” He taunted Vu with a finger on the send button.
“Don’t, Randolph. She’ll think I’m crazy,” Vu tried to grab the phone, but Randolph stood up.
“She’s marrying someone else. Who cares if she thinks you’re crazy?”
“I do,” Vu shouted, “if you respect me, give me the phone.”
“I don’t respect you,” Randolph said. “I care about you.” With that, he sent the text.
Vu rushed to the phone, which Randolph now tossed carelessly on a lounge chair. Double blue ticks marked the message as delivered and read. Then, she was typing a message back. He let her type. He prayed for her to think this was all a joke. Or, to say sorry for hurting him again. But she didn’t. Instead, she stopped typing. She didn’t click send. She changed her mind.
Then, his phone sent vibrations through his hand and up his arm.
Nisha was requesting video.
“You’re welcome,” Randolph hollered as he climbed over the fence and disappeared.