Virginia Peng

It was the first time I’d seen my friends since August. I had been the first to move away for college, fracturing the transitory summer after senior year, and I’d been away from home for the longest. We had hugged in the middle of Classon Avenue, cars honking and wheels screeching around us, before my friends asked if I’d grown taller since Los Angeles.

I didn’t go home for October break. California was too far for such a short gap of time. I could’ve splurged on a plane ticket and made my mother happy, but I told her it wasn’t worth it: I could spend that money on boots or that winter coat she’d been hounding me to get. The truth was that I didn’t want to go back. My homesickness had just begun to heal, still sticky and raw and scabby beneath the bandages of time. To go back home, to kneel in the sand and feel the sun on my face, only to be torn away would be too painful. My scabs weren’t ready to be picked off. New York City was the closest I’d let myself get to home.

Three of my friends from back home lived on the ninth floor of a Brooklyn building, a floor they had filled with their art-school projects. Figure drawings and color studies dappled the sleek, white walls and fluttered against the broad windows looking out over Downtown Brooklyn. I could see the life my friends had built there, the home they’d carved out of the city, and I could see how different things were.

We’d all changed since summer. I had last seen my friend when she was the homecoming queen. I had remembered her as the high school dream, sparkly and glittery in her baby pink dress, her hair long and dark against her plastic-diamond tiara. Now, I could barely recognize her. She had left behind her homecoming crown, moved across the country, cut her hair short, and developed a taste for Oreos dipped in oat-milk. She’d adapted to the New York City subway, learned to hurdle over the turnstiles with ease, and made a bevy of friends whose names I repeated under my breath: Cristian, Kiana, Greta, Riley, Mila and Mia.

She’d plastered postcards and prayer cards and a picture from “Ponyo” above her bunk bed. Back home, she would keep letters stacked in shoe boxes. We used to sit by her bed, two blocks from my house, and rifle through those memories. We’d always stop by KFC beforehand to buy dry biscuits and spew golden crumbs over the letters she’d bound together with twine. That night in Brooklyn, we didn’t have any biscuits, but the memories flooded back the same.

Sitting on her bottom-bunk felt like family dinner. I saw the faces of my old friends, sandwiched between the faces of their grinning new friends — all of us glimmering in the soft, warm lamplight. My cheeks hurt from smiling and my stomach ached from doubling over with laughter, just like they had back home. I tried my friend’s Oreo and oat-milk combo, grinning with bits of black cookie in my teeth. I felt the same way I always used to: brimming with joy and milk and cookies, surrounded by the people I love most. Maybe I wasn’t ready to see my family yet, not ready to peel the scab off my open wound, but that night in Brooklyn was good. Maybe by Thanksgiving the scab will come off.