“She doesn’t know we’re married,” Kevin says slowly. “But she does know I’m in a relationship with David. I haven’t talked to her in a long time.”

  A long time? How long?

  I feel the world expanding and contracting around me, like one big beating heart, squeezing, releasing.

  “Eight years?” I ask.

  “Eight years,” Kevin confirms.

  Kevin and David have gone back into the kitchen to put the finishing touches to dinner. I look round the living room, finally taking it all in. The framed photos of Kevin and David and their friends, the modern-art prints, the shelf of books and comics. The walls are painted forest green, their shade matched by the leafy potted plants next to the TV. There’s an abstract steel sculpture in a corner of the room, about half my height, the swirling curves of it turbulent and angry somehow.

  Eight years. Eight years ago, we stopped going back to Hong Kong to see Po Po and Gung Gung. Because Kevin came out to them, tried to introduce David to them, but they couldn’t accept him. They disowned him.

  And Mum had sided with her brother, not her parents.

  “Did you really have no idea?” Joan asks.

  I shake my head. “If my mum was OK with it – if she could go as far as taking a stand against her parents, if she went to Kevin and David’s wedding ceremony and everything – why couldn’t she just tell me about it? Why did she have to keep it a secret from me?”

  “She probably thought you were too young to be exposed to all this family drama.”

  “Or to the fact that my uncle is gay.”

  “Or that.” Joan sighs. “I’m sorry.”

  I think of Po Po sitting next to me in the garden. Po Po, who disowned her son for being gay. There beside me, with her hands folded in her lap. Her jade bracelet, her liver-spotted skin. Telling her son she never wanted to see him again.

  But she does want him to visit, right? She didn’t say so explicitly but I think she does. Doesn’t she?

  Dinner is indeed a feast. Sweet chilli salmon, grilled pork chops, stir-fried choy sum with garlic, and soy-sauce chicken wings.

  As Kevin places that last dish in the centre of the table, I stare at him. Soy-sauce chicken wings are Po Po’s favourite. Does Kevin remember that? Does he associate them with her at all?

  He seems to notice me staring and says, “I hope you like the food! I’m not much of a cook. Not like your mum.”

  David puts bowls heaped with rice in front of me and Joan and sits down. “That’s nonsense,” he says, picking up and pointing his chopsticks at Kevin, and I notice the ease with which he holds them – though my parents would always tell me off when I used to gesticulate with my chopsticks at the dinner table, until I stopped doing it. They think it’s rude, but Kevin doesn’t seem to mind. “You could go on MasterChef.”

  “So what have you girls been up to today?” David asks.

  Joan’s eyes flicker to mine. “We actually stopped in Birmingham and had a wander around,” she says. “I bought some stuff at an arts market.”

  “Ooh, how lovely. Do you have time to explore Manchester tomorrow? We can show you around.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think we have a bit of time.”

  David and Kevin start to reel off attractions in Manchester, sharing their memories of the various places. “We had a really good lunch somewhere around there… Do you remember?” Kevin says of one of the museums.

  “Oh yeah, it was Spanish, wasn’t it? Tapas?”

  Eventually Joan asks David and Kevin how they met.

  “At university,” Kevin says.

  “Wait… You’ve been together that long?” I ask. “What about your ex-wife?”

  “No, no. David and I were together when we were at university, but we broke up when I went back to Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong for a while, trying a few different jobs. Then I came back to England and did a graphic-design course, which is where I met Nicole, my ex-wife. I really liked her, and I thought we could be happy – that I could make my family happy. But then I found a new job, and, when I showed up on the first day, it turned out that David was also working there.”

  “It was fate,” David says, picking up Kevin’s hand and kissing his fingers.

  “Yeah. I made an effort to avoid it for a long time. David and I tried to be friends. But I couldn’t deny it in the end. I told Nicole, and it was hard at first, but we’re still on good terms now.”

  “What do you do?” Joan asks David.

  “I’m a software developer,” David says. “Back then, we were both working for a video-game company.”

  “That’s cool,” Joan says, and asks them about the games they worked on.

  I busy myself with a chicken wing, biting into the juicy skin and meat and tearing it from the bone. The flavour of it, darkly sweet and intensely savoury, clings to my tongue.

  After we finish the food – or as much of it as we can – Kevin brings out pudding, which, incongruous with the rest of the meal, turns out to be banoffee pie. He explains that he doesn’t really know how to make any Chinese desserts.

  “Well, Mum’s never made any, either,” I say. I have no complaints about the banoffee pie. It’s one of my favourites.

  “And actually David normally does the baking around here, so…”

  David’s hand, which was on the back of Kevin’s chair, comes up to ruffle Kevin’s hair. “You’re a good baker too.”

  They touch each other so often and so naturally, just two people in love. Watching them as I eat the banoffee pie, the crunchy biscuit base of it crumbling in my mouth, the cream as light as sunshine, my resentment that I’d been kept in the dark fades away. At least I know about them now.

  At least they’re happy.

  Kevin refuses to let me and Joan help with the washing-up. “We have a dishwasher,” David says.

  “Against my wishes,” says Kevin, piling up the plates.

  I laugh. We don’t have a dishwasher at home. Mum thinks it’s a waste of water and electricity. As I understand it, they aren’t a very common appliance in Hong Kong.

  Joan asks about having a shower, and David shows her the bathroom. I hear the noise of the dishwasher starting up, and Kevin comes out of the kitchen.

  “You’re not going to come and see Po Po then,” I say softly.

  “Your mum’s been trying to persuade me. She says Po Po feels differently now. But I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.” He sits down on the sofa, slumping against the cushions.

  I turn round in my chair to face him. His neon-yellow glasses are new to me; his last pair had brown frames. Behind those slightly smudged lenses, his eyes are pensive and sad. His goatee is the same as ever. His grey Henley shirt has a stain on it, probably soy sauce, despite the apron he was wearing earlier. He looks younger than my dad, even though he’s several years older.

  He’s my uncle, and he’s married to a man.

  One time, when he came to our house last year, I spent all of dinner rambling on at him about Eden Recoiling, and then I showed him the bookshelf in my room, and he read the first few issues right then and there. I asked him who his favourite character was so far.

  “Nefarious Warthorn is very impressive,” he said.

  I frowned at him. At that point, I was going through a bit of an anti-Neff phase. I was just so sick of how everyone in fandom fawned over him and didn’t pay any attention to Zaria and Mayumi.

  “Zaria’s my favourite,” I said, incredibly conscious of the fact that, in the issue he’d just read, Zaria had kissed a woman.

  “She is pretty cool,” he agreed.

  That page where Zaria was first shown to be queer flashes across my mind.

  “Uncle…” I say, thinking about how strong Zaria is, how fearless, “I’m bi.”

  Kevin sits up straight, his eyes wide. “Oh, Elsie! That’s…” He reaches out with his hands. “Come here.”

  I stand up, hesitantly, and Kevin stands up too. He hugs me.

  Hugs don’t happen often in my family. But Kevin is hugging me, and I think of his parents disowning him, the price he paid to be with David, to live with this man who would kiss his fingers and ruffle his hair every day, and I hug him back, as tightly as I can.

  “I’m proud of you,” he says.

  There’s a spare bedroom, which Kevin uses as his office since he works from home. Besides a desk with two outrageously large monitors, an office chair, a printer and stacks of folders, it also contains a double bed that looks pristine. “Are you both OK to sleep in here?” Kevin asks. “Or one of you could have the sofa in the living room. It’s very comfy.”

  Joan and I glance at each other. Her hair, wet from the shower, drips into her eyes, and she blinks. “I can sleep on the sofa,” she offers.

  “I’m sure we could both take the bed,” I say.

  “Wait.” Kevin narrows his eyes at me. “I’m thinking your mum wouldn’t be too pleased with me if I let you sleep in the same bed as a boy, and, since it turns out that you’re not only attracted to boys, maybe I should rethink this.”

  “Uncle!” I hiss. “There’s nothing going on between me and Joan.”

  “All right.” Kevin holds his hands up. “I’ll take your word for it as long as your mum doesn’t find out. Goodnight!”

  As he strolls down the corridor to the room that he and David share, I give Joan an embarrassed smile, but she’s not looking at me.

  “Maybe I should take the sofa,” she says, her eyes on the wall. She thumbs a small chip in the paint.

  “Why? The bed is big enough.”

  Joan says nothing. Something buzzes beneath my skin. It’s like hearing the whine of a mosquito by your ear and feeling a bite – whether real or imagined – begin to itch, but not being able to see the culprit and close your fist round it. It flies past, eluding me. My body tingles, alert and watchful. I can see the muscles of Joan’s throat move as she swallows. Her eyes remain fixed on the wall.

  “I think—” she finally says, just as I also open my mouth to speak, the question that I’ve held back all day finally too loud to be contained.

  “Do you like me?” I ask, trying to hide my terror behind a smile that I hope is teasing. It slips away as soon as she reacts.

  “What?” she splutters.

  The calm breaks on her face, as though I’ve dropped a pebble into a still pond. The effect is startling. Getting to know her again this summer, I keep feeling that she’s older than me even though we’re the same age. Like she’s done so much more growing when all I’ve managed is to stagger round my teenage years in confusion, uncovering more wounds every time I think I’ve healed, becoming smaller instead of bigger. It’s not like she doesn’t carry around her own baggage, all that stuff with her dad, but even when she’s talking about that to me she seems like an adult, living an adult life. On the grown-up side of eighteen rather than the child side.

  But now she looks … young, like me. Wide-eyed and fumbling, as though she’s lost the script for her life and, like everybody else, is forced to make it up as she goes along.

  The panic in her eyes shrinks her down to my size. I start to understand that it’s possible that I can become as grown-up as she always seems, that there isn’t such an unbridgeable chasm between me and this confidence I covet in her, because it isn’t something innate, but something practised.

  “Do you like me?” I repeat. “Do you… Do you have feelings for me?”

  “No.” She shakes her head, as if saying the word isn’t enough. “I don’t. You’re my best friend. I don’t –” her voice rips through her like a letter opener tearing an envelope, the letter within bearing the worst possible news – “I don’t think of you in that way.”

  Whatever knife cut through her cuts through me too. We stare at each other. Her hair is still dripping, one clear drop of water beading at the tip of a clump of hair, gathering volume in the silence. Suddenly that drop of water is all I can focus on. I feel like I’m inside it as it swells, knowing that the fall is inevitable but clinging, anyway.

  It falls, and my gaze darts down with it. It joins the crowd of its kin, little dots of water on the wood-tiled floor around Joan’s bare feet.

  “I’m taking the sofa,” she says, and I don’t protest.

  I send this text to Ritika before realising that it sounds a bit too alarming without context. I send another one.

  I stand in Kevin’s office with the door closed and type furiously, explaining to Ritika what just happened.

  I don’t have to scroll up. I remember it well.

  I knock my head back against the door.

  I lie on the double bed with my arm draped over my face. I can’t remember the last time I slept in a double bed, if ever. It seems horribly enormous, like an open field. I can’t sleep like this. I wish for a tent, a sleeping bag, something to help me feel more enclosed and less exposed. A cocoon, to take away my tremendous awareness of the space around me.

  It’s raining again. I can hear it pelting against the window, an army of ghosts trying to get in.

  Joan could have been in this bed with me. If I hadn’t asked her such a stupid question. But then maybe the whole reason why she didn’t want to sleep in the same bed as me is because she’s worried about my feelings for her. Because she deduced them, somehow, before I even really figured them out myself.

  But I’ve been figuring them out today.

  I’ve spent all day with Joan. Every second I haven’t been talking to her, I have been thinking about her. About the possibility of us.

  The first time I had a crush on a girl, it was Chloe Godby in my class. She was white, with soft brown hair and a mouth that made me think of the first syllable of her last name. She played football, and so did one of my friends from the book club at the time, so I used to watch them play, but really I was watching Chloe.

  In the months before that, I’d become obsessed with a certain actress and devoured every single movie – as well as every interview on YouTube – she’d ever been in. After replaying a particular sex scene over and over, hypnotised by her bra strap sliding off her shoulder, the camera lovingly swooping down the length of her naked back, I admitted to myself that perhaps I wasn’t straight.

  This actress was also white.

  When I started to dream of having a girlfriend, the girlfriend of my imagination was always white. In nearly every movie, TV show and book I consumed, the romantic heroine was always white. White women are beautiful and worthy of love. Mainstream media taught me that. White women are attractive, and women who aren’t white are as good as invisible.

  I was fourteen, and I wasn’t fully aware of any of this. But the message was burrowing deep into my brain.

  What I was aware of was my own sense that I was undesirable. Around me, girls were talking about boys they’d kissed, but when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see somebody any boy would want to kiss. My face was flat and round, my eyes small and my eyelashes non-existent. It was as if everything remotely interesting or appealing had been pressed out of my face. I wasn’t attractive, and I knew it.

  And then Leo happened.

  The moment he showed interest in me, I felt like I’d won the lottery. A boy liked me. A white boy liked me.

  After Leo, when I first found Ada’s fanfic and started looking at her blog, I didn’t know she was Black, that her mum was from Nigeria. I assumed she was white, like the majority of people I came across in fandom. She didn’t use to post selfies then because she struggled with body-image issues and low self-esteem. She talked about how great it was to see a queer Black female character like Zaria, but it didn’t make me think, Oh, Ada’s Black.

  I didn’t know what she looked like but already thoughts of her had become part of my daily routine. Wake up, think about Ada. Brush teeth, think about Ada. Walk to school, think about Ada.

  Then we Skyped for the first time, and it hit me how messed up it was that, when I fantasised about flying to New York and meeting her, I’d imagined her as a white girl.

  She’s gorgeous just the way she is and always has been. At that point, she had an Afro, and the first time we Skyped she was wearing a yellow shirt with a navy bow tie – her first-ever bow tie, the beginning of her collection. She’d bought it just for the Skype call, wanting to try something new and feeling that it was safe for her to do so with me, and I kept telling her how cute she was, but she kept shrugging off my compliments and making self-deprecating comments.

  After we ended the call, I spent the whole night thinking about how we both believed in our undesirability.

  And, as we talked more in the days and weeks that followed, I started to become conscious of how I’d been infected with the idea that whiteness was more desirable and attractive than any other option.

  I thought I was working on eradicating this notion from my mind. But I haven’t got rid of it. It still subtly colours my way of thinking.

  I knew I liked Joan a lot. I knew that I liked being with her, just sitting watching TV or eating dinner or having the most mundane conversations. I knew that I liked how she was wholeheartedly herself, someone honest and brave and unashamed. I knew that I liked her sense of style, that I found the way she dressed attractive. But I didn’t realise that it wasn’t just her clothes or her hair: it’s her I’m attracted to. Joan in her entirety. I didn’t know that because some part of me still doesn’t think that Chinese people can be attractive.

  Deep down, I’m still convinced of my own ugliness and the ugliness of anyone who looks like me.

  Worse – Joan isn’t feminine, and all my life I’ve been taught that the only way to be desirable is to strive for femininity. The further you fall from it, the uglier you are.

  It’s even in that offhand remark my mother made about Joan: She used to be such a pretty child.

  But I realised, in that corridor outside this room – just as Joan told me she didn’t think of me in that way and gutted me – that I think of her in that way.

  I see it at last. Joan is beautiful, handsome, hot in a way that makes everything inside me glow like the moon. Looking at her makes me forget that the world tried to teach me what its definition of ugliness is. I want Joan. Her eyes and her mouth and her collarbones, her fingers and her wrists and the hairs on her arms.

 

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