“This feels so weird,” Chanel mutters for at least the tenth time as we creep down Mencius Hall. She keeps glancing back in my direction, as if checking to see if I’m still there. “I mean, I really can’t see you. Like, at all.”
“Well, what did you expect?” I whisper. My eyes scan the mostly empty corridor. It’s early enough in the morning that most students haven’t woken up yet—I guess they don’t share my need to be productive before 6:00 a.m.—and the ones who have are already off to breakfast. The good news is there won’t be too many witnesses around in case things go wrong.
The bad news is Chanel and Henry will look a lot more suspicious standing around here.
“To be honest, part of me thought… I don’t even know what I thought,” Chanel continues under her breath. “But things like this don’t just happen to—”
“Shh,” I hiss. A boy I’ve seen around campus a few times walks past us, but not before he shoots Chanel an odd look. He must think she’s talking to herself.
“Sorry,” Chanel tells me once he’s gone, barely moving her lips this time.
“It’s fine.” I try and fail to slow my rapidly pounding heart; my nerves have been going into overdrive ever since we left our dorm. “Let’s just get this over with.”
To my immense relief, Henry is already standing in position outside Jake’s dorm just as we agreed earlier, a full cup of coffee in one hand and a history textbook in the other. As Chanel and I slow to a stop behind one of the many large decorative pot plants lining the corridor, Henry knocks on Jake’s door, then takes a few steps backward.
A long moment passes. Nothing happens.
The knots in my stomach tighten. What if Jake’s already left his room? Or what if he sensed something was wrong, that Henry’s been acting weird and spying on him from afar? No. That couldn’t be possible. Right?
But then the door swings open, the low, rhythmic thump of a bass emptying into the corridor, and Jake shuffles out in plastic slippers. He’s wearing only a loose white tank and boxers, his spiky black hair sticking up everywhere. He stifles a yawn. Blinks around in confusion.
“Who was that just now?” he grumbles.
This is Henry’s cue.
Henry walks forward, textbook held up in front of him as if distracted, as if he hasn’t been waiting outside this whole time, and bumps straight into Jake. Almost in slow motion, the coffee cup tumbles out of Henry’s hand, and the dark liquid splashes everywhere.
“What the fuck.” Jake stumbles backward, hands flying to his soaked shirt.
“So sorry. I didn’t see you,” Henry says at once, making a good show of looking guilty. A few drops of coffee splattered onto him too, and as I watch, he slowly wipes his cheek clean with a faint grimace. “I could get you a new shirt if—”
Jake shakes his head, though he still looks pretty pissed. “Nah, whatever, man. I just need to go wash this shit off.”
With that, he disappears back into his room, snaps something that sounds like, “Peter, my man, could you please stop rapping for one goddamn second?” and reemerges with a towel draped over his shoulder and an expression that screams murder.
As he storms off to the bathroom, Chanel makes her move.
When I’d asked Chanel on our way here how, exactly, she planned to get Peter out of his room, she’d simply winked and replied in a matter-of-fact tone, “My feminine charms, of course.”
I’d thought she was joking.
But as I follow her into Jake and Peter’s room, she makes a straight beeline for him, hips swaying to the beat of the bass, and calls, her voice almost a coo, “Peter! I’ve been looking for you.”
The bass stops. Peter jerks his head up from what looks like a miniature recording studio in his corner of the room, complete with a keyboard and microphone and everything. “Uh…Chanel?” He blinks at her. Puts a self-conscious hand over his Star Wars pajamas, as if he can somehow block them from view.
“Sorry, I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Chanel asks, her eyes wide. She steps closer to Peter, until there are only a few inches of space left between them. “I just really needed to find you.”
Peter lets out a nervous laugh. “Okay… Uh, why though?”
“Oh my god. Why do you think?” Chanel says with a coy smile, like they’re sharing an inside joke. She swats his shoulder, but leaves her hand there, her fingers curling slightly over the fabric.
“You…want to borrow something?” Peter attempts, his eyes darting back and forth between Chanel’s hand and her face.
And even though he’s barely said anything of substance, Chanel breaks into giggles as if he’s just told the funniest joke in the world. “No, you idiot,” she says affectionately. “My dad’s thinking of hiring some new DJs for his nightclub, and he wants me to help him pick. But then it just hit me that like, we have a freaking expert right in our year level.”
“Oh,” Peter says. Then Chanel’s words seem to actually register; his face flushes. “Oh. I mean—I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but—”
“Come on, you don’t have to be modest with me.” Chanel leans in closer, long lashes lowered, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cringe or applaud her commitment. “You’re talented as hell, and you know it. Everyone knows it.”
Peter just turns redder.
Suddenly, Chanel pulls away. Places a hand on her hip and studies him. “So you’ll do it with me?”
“Do…what?”
She arches a delicate brow. “Come up with a list of good DJs, of course. I’ve already got a few names on my laptop, if you want to come check it out now.”
For a brief moment, Peter hesitates, like he suspects this might all be a prank. But it turns out Chanel’s feminine charms are pretty persuasive, because he rises from his chair, still trying to conceal his pajamas from view, and says, “Uh, sure. I guess. Let me just—let me get changed first.”
“Great! I’ll wait outside.”
Chanel beams at him and struts out the door, and I quickly avert my gaze as Peter starts tugging off his shirt. I listen to the squeak of the wardrobe door, the soft clatter of plastic hangers as he searches for something to wear, to his muttered curse—“Aish!”—when he bangs his leg against the corner of his bed.
Then he’s gone, and I’m left standing all alone in his room.
I’ve never really been inside a boy’s dorm room before—apart from Henry’s, of course—and the more I stare around, the more I realize Henry’s taste in interior decoration must be an exception.
There are three giant computer monitors and headphones set up over the desk, rainbow lights flashing from the gaps between the keys. Protein bar wrappers littered everywhere. Two posters of some NBA star and that popular Chinese idol so many guys seem to love—Dilraba Dilmurat—plastered over the gray walls. Socks and underwear strewn across the floor in crumpled balls.
When I inhale, I catch a strong whiff of peanut butter, and something that might be cologne.
Wrinkling my nose, I search through the mess for Jake’s phone. I spot it only minutes later, half tucked beneath his pillow. A small sigh of relief escapes my lips. For some reason, I’d thought this part would be a lot harder.
But then I enter the numbers 1234, and the phone buzzes.
The words wrong passcode flash over the screen.
I frown. Try again.
Wrong passcode.
My mouth runs dry. I’d watched Jake type in those exact numbers just this Monday, which means he must’ve changed his passcode sometime yesterday. A few more wrong attempts and I’ll be locked out of his phone for good.
But his new passcode could be anything.
I try to ignore the slow creep of despair. I can’t mess this up. I can’t. There’s no saying whether I’ll ever have the chance to access Jake’s phone again, or if it’d even matter two or three days from now, when Jake’s already sent those cursed photos out.
Besides, Henry and Chanel have already done their part. Now they’re counting on me to do mine, and more than anything else—more, even, than the idea of failure—I hate letting people down.
Okay, think, I urge myself. What numbers might be relevant to him?
I pull out my own phone, wait for what feels like an eternity for my VPN to connect, and do a quick search through Jake’s Facebook. Then I enter the date of his birthday.
Wrong passcode.
Shit. I chew on the inside of my cheek so hard I taste blood. Desperate, I Google a list of the most common iPhone passcodes, and try the second option after 1234: 0000.
Still nothing—and only one attempt left.
No, it’s fine. It’s fine. I force my breathing to steady. Don’t you dare panic. Just—just imagine you’re Jake Nguyen. You’re a straight-C student who spends his weekends clubbing and says “lol” out loud and doesn’t drink anything besides protein shakes and alcohol. You think you’re super hot because you’ve got an undercut and use a shit ton of hair wax. You’re the kind of asshole who would keep the nudes of your ex-girlfriend and threaten her with them. You… I scan the room for more information, and suppress a groan. You apparently also have an opened box of extralarge condoms sitting right on your nightstand.
Now, if you were to change your passcode, what would it be?
An idea comes to mind. A ridiculous, absolutely laughable idea.
I almost hope for Jake’s sake I’m wrong as I type in the numbers 6969, but the phone doesn’t buzz this time.
And just like that, I’m in.
I shake my head, a laugh and a sigh jostling in my throat. Rainie really should’ve broken up with him sooner.
I’d feared it would take too long for me to find the actual photos, that Jake might’ve created some secret file for them or hidden them using a cryptic code he alone could decipher, but when I click into his photo album, my eyes immediately find a folder named with only the peach butt emoji.
Classy.
Rainie’s nudes show up at once, along with photos of two other girls I’ve never seen before. I delete them all, then make sure to clear them out from the “Recently Deleted” folder too.
I’m about to put the phone away when I hear footsteps. Then, Jake’s voice, slightly muffled through the door—
“You’re still here?”
I realize he must be talking to Henry. That Henry’s been outside this whole time…doing what? Standing guard? Waiting for me?
Or does he not trust me to get the job done on my own?
“Of course,” Henry says steadily. “I wanted to see if you were okay.”
“If I’m okay?” Jake echoes, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice. “Dude. It was coffee, not poison or some shit.”
When Henry doesn’t reply to that, Jake huffs out a sigh. “Okay, man, I didn’t want it to come to this but… You’ve been hanging around here a lot, you know? Like, I know your room’s nearby and all, but I mean right here, specifically, and way more than normal. So…either you’re trying to steal something from my dorm or you’re like, secretly in love with me.”
I expect Henry to freeze up, maybe deny it or make some bad excuse and leave as soon as possible, but he replies with perfect calm, “Yes.”
There’s a significant pause.
“Y-yes?” Jake stammers, clearly as taken aback as I am. “Um…to what, exactly?”
“Yes to the latter, of course.”
It takes every ounce of willpower in my body not to snort out loud. I wait for Jake to call him out on his bullshit right away, but I’ve clearly underestimated Jake’s confidence in his own charms, because a second later he stammers out:
“O-oh, well… I mean, don’t get me wrong, my man, you’re great and all. Really. And the whole being gay thing, that’s—like, I’m totally cool with it. You know, love is love is love and all that…” He clears his throat. “But I just—I don’t really feel the same way about you.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah… But, like, no hard feelings, right? We good?”
“Certainly.” Henry pauses. “And I do apologize if I’ve made you uncomfortable by hanging around here so often. In fact, I’ll be leaving right this minute…”
I know this is my cue to get the hell out of here, but something makes me pause. Scroll through Jake’s photo album again. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for until I come across a video taken of Jake a few months back.
Blood pounds in my ears. Adrenaline and fear and something like excitement shoot through my veins in a dizzying rush.
Could I? Should I?
And I guess it all comes down to this: I don’t know whether it’d be morally right to take matters into my own hands, but I do know that Jake is an asshole. I also know that Rainie’s been worrying herself sick for what must be months now, and that this kind of situation isn’t uncommon at all, yet somehow it’s always the girls who get blamed for it, who are slut shamed and silenced and forced to shoulder the consequences. And I know that Rainie and I aren’t friends, that we’ve barely even spoken to each other apart from our one awkward conversation in the bathroom, but I still can’t help feeling angry on her behalf.
I still can’t resist the urge to teach Jake a lesson.
My fingers fly over the keyboard, almost as if acting on their own accord. For once, I’m grateful rather than embarrassed to have sent my teachers so many homework questions and follow-ups in the past; I’ve got every single one of their emails memorized.
By the time Jake pushes open the door, grumbling something about coffee and having too many people fall in love with him, I’ve done what I need to. I glide past him, swift and silent as a battleship in the night, finally ready to return home after winning an unlikely war.
We’re in English class when Mr. Chen opens up the email.
I made sure he would. The email subject says nothing but “Class 12C, Jake Nguyen: Urgent—please show in class.” Everyone can see it, too; Mr. Chen loves showing us video analyses of our texts on YouTube, so his laptop is always connected to the projector.
Across the room, Jake’s face goes blank with confusion at the sight of his own name on the screen.
I suppress a smile, feeling almost giddy with anticipation. Finally, I want to sing. Only an hour has passed since I fled from Jake’s dorm room and finished packing for school, but it seems like an entire lifetime ago, with every moment in between spent waiting for the scheduled email to come through.
“Now what’s this?” Mr. Chen muses out loud, his eyebrows raised.
Jake blinks. “I didn’t…”
But the rest of his sentence is drowned out when Mr. Chen clicks onto the attached video. Immediately, a BLACKPINK song blasts through the speakers at full volume, so loud that half the class jump in their seats.
Then the Jake in the video comes into view on the screen. His gelled hair is shorter than it is now, his skin still burnt a dark gold from the summer break, and he’s clearly intoxicated, his cheeks so red they practically glow. His eyes are half-shut as he sings along to the song, flailing his arms about and stamping his feet in an uneven rhythm as if trying to do the choreography as well. Judging from the family portraits and giant porcelain vases in the background, it looks like he’s at someone’s house, but the place has been redecorated to resemble a nightclub. Flashing colored lights dot Jake’s low V-neck top and sweat-coated forehead, and more teenagers hoot and clap and cackle like wild witches in the background.
Someone in the video screams over the music, their words slurring together so they’re just barely comprehensible, “Who d’you reckon’s the hottest girl in the year level?”
Jake yells back some name I can’t quite catch, and shoves his flushed face into the camera. Then, raising his voice, he adds, “She’s so—she’s so-oo fucking hot.” His lips stretch into a sloppy smile. “Like, dude. Have you seen her ass? She could sit on my face and I’d—”
Mr. Chen quickly shuts his laptop, but the damage is already done.
“Jake,” Mr. Chen says after a long pause. He stands up, the screech of his chair cutting through the silence—and even then, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the class this quiet before. “A word outside, please?”
Jake’s face looks almost as red as it did in the video. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, his head bowed at an angle, he shuffles after the teacher into the corridor.
The door has barely closed behind them when the class erupts into chaos. Loud whispers and notes of laughter swirl around the room, friends leaning far over their desks and jumping out of their seats with wide eyes to discuss what they just saw:
“Oh my god.”
“I can’t believe…”
“What the hell was he thinking? Did someone hack his phone?”
“The secondhand embarrassment is real. Like, I’m literally cringing so hard right now—”
“Did you see Mr. Chen’s face? He looked like he was ready to resign—”
“I always knew Jake Nguyen was a fuckboy. You can just tell by the hair—”
“No wonder Rainie dumped his sorry ass. Seriously.”
“Ugh, I can’t believe I used to have a crush on him in Year Seven. Someone kill me now…”
As my classmates continue talking over each other, Henry peers at me silently from the seat next to mine, and I read the question in his dark eyes: Was this your doing?
I say nothing, just shrug and pretend to focus on my Macbeth notes, underlining the words revenge and desire and guilt.
But I know, somehow, that he can read the answer in my eyes too.
“I heard Jake Nguyen has detention every day for the rest of the month,” Henry tells me on our way to class the next day, “for deliberately distributing inappropriate content and”—he makes air quotations with his fingers—“behaving in a way that doesn’t represent Airington’s school values.”
“Good,” I say, unable to help feeling a sharp surge of triumph. Hopefully the punishment will teach Jake to be a little more careful about his actions—and if not, then at least the other girls at our school might think twice before dating him.
As we round a corner in the crowded hall, I turn to Henry. “Oh yeah. Speaking of Jake—I probably should’ve said this earlier but…” I pause, the words I’ve prepared since yesterday burning in my throat. Why is it so hard to be nice to him? What is it about the words thank you that makes me feel so disgustingly vulnerable?
“But?”
Just say it, I command myself. Looking away and resisting the overwhelming urge to cringe, I tell him, “I just wanted to thank you for that little performance you pulled the other day. Guess you’re a pretty decent actor or whatever.”
Great. Even when I’m trying to be nice, it sounds like I’m mocking him.
But Henry’s lips tug up at the corners as if I’ve just paid him the biggest compliment in the world, and says, “Well, of course I’m a great actor. It’s one of my many strengths.”
“Is humility one of them, too?” I say dryly.
“Naturally.”
I roll my eyes so far back in my head I almost see stars. But as we exit the building and walk past a group of tiny Year Sevens who stare after us as if we’ve just stepped out of a magazine cover—one of them saying in an awed, breathless kind of voice, “Damn, I didn’t know Henry Li and Alice Sun were friends”—my faint annoyance is pushed aside by pleasure. It’s nice being noticed. Really nice.
“You know,” I muse out loud, “if it weren’t for the fact that we hated each other’s guts, we’d probably make an impressive power duo.”
I expect Henry to raise his eyebrows at me as usual or make a cutting remark, but his footsteps suddenly slow beside me.
“Wait. We hate each other?”
He says this as if it’s actually news to him. As if we haven’t spent the past four years exchanging little snide remarks and glares across opposite ends of every room. As if I didn’t drag myself to last semester’s optional chemistry revision sessions with a thirty-nine-degree fever just so he wouldn’t beat me on the final exam.
I whirl around to face him, squinting into the sunlight, and for the briefest moment I catch something almost like hurt flicker across his features—
No. I must be imagining it. There are few things in this world that have the power to hurt Henry Li—things like a sudden drop in SYS’s stocks, or his name coming last on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Certainly not me.
“What did you think this was?” I demand, motioning to the space between us.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure.” He stares at me a beat. Slides his hands into his back pockets. “A fun competition?”
“Fun,” I repeat in disbelief.
But then again, of course he sees our four-year rivalry as a fun competition. For someone like Henry, who will always have his father’s business, his family’s wealth as a safety net, everything is just a game. There are no true consequences. No real threats. He could fail a thousand times in life and still sleep easy, knowing there will be food waiting for him at home, medical insurance for his parents, more than enough money in the bank.
Henry and I might share similar goals and grades, but at the end of the day, we will never be the same.
“Do you seriously hate me?” Henry says, a strange, unreadable expression on his face. And maybe it’s just the angle from where I’m standing, but his eyes look suddenly lighter in the sun, more gold than their usual coffee black. Softer, somehow. “Well?”
I cross my arms over my chest, weighing out my response.
Yes, is the obvious answer. I do hate you. I hate everything about you. I hate you so much that whenever I’m around you, I can barely think straight. I can barely even breathe.
But when I open my mouth, none of that comes out. What I say instead is, “Don’t you… Don’t you hate me too?”
Immediately, I regret it. What a ridiculous question to ask. He’s obviously going to laugh at me and say yes, the way that I should have just now, and whatever sense of comradery we’ve built over these past couple of weeks will collapse, which will then affect our efficiency in completing Beijing Ghost tasks. But it’s not just that. For some reason, the thought of him telling me he hates me—right here, out loud, in plain English—feels like a punch to the chest. Which is even more ridiculous, because—
“No.”
I blink. “Huh?”
“No, Alice.” The faintest movement in his throat. I still have no idea what his expression means, why his voice sounds so strained. “I don’t hate you.”
“Oh.” My mind goes blank. “Well, that is… That’s something. For sure.”
That was not a legitimate sentence, Alice, I scold myself.
“A very good thing to know,” I try again. “Glad we spoke of it.”
Neither was that.
Thankfully, I’m saved from what’s shaping up to be one of the most awkward exchanges of my life by a new phone notification. I turn around and open up my Beijing Ghost messages. To my surprise, it’s from Rainie again:
i don’t know how u did it but…thank u.
you’re my hero.
I stare and stare at the message, read it three times over, and feel my heart lighten. Because this—this gives me a spark of hope. To know that I can live in a world where Rainie Lam would voluntarily call me a hero, even if she doesn’t know Beijing Ghost is me. To think that even the richest and most influential of Airington’s elite would thank me, need me, however briefly, and that my powers—my strange, inexplicable, unreliable powers—have actually been able to help somebody…
I hold the phone to my chest and inhale deeply. Never before has the summer air tasted so sweet.
