The hallway of our apartment complex was dim. The light turned on only when I made a noise. There was only one window, looking out from the narrow gap between apartments on the end of the hallway, and the sun never shone in. I had lived there, on the second floor in a twenty-story building, since the beginning of my memory. White paint hovered over the ceiling and ended by my calf, and the lower half was just grey.
There was a girl who lived on the other end of the hallway. She was named after the beautiful queen of Sparta over whom men died fighting. Her mom added, as if she knew I couldn’t have known this, that the Trojan War started with Helen.
Beijing has the worst winters, so cold that my mom would leave vegetables on the balcony instead of the fridge. Only Helen’s home was always warm—maybe it was their lights that gave everything a warm undertone. My fingers and face burned from the freezing temperature outside when I walked into her home. I took off layers of winter clothes and still came home with blushing cheeks.
I showed her the candy that looked like white rabbits my mom bought from Japan and the place where I hid the lollipop my mom brought me from work. I told her that I kept a diary and the age I last wet my bed. On a summer night, when all the kids who lived nearby were playing together, she asked if I could get her chewing gum from her home. I didn’t want to—I knew if I left, I wouldn’t find them again—so she touched me on the shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Lei Zhihan, you are my best friend,” she said.
We always played out fairy tales or stories whenever there were enough kids. Each of us claimed a role. The only boy was the prince, and all the girls hid behind a curtain. To whomever the boy points shall be the princess, so every girl gets an equal chance. He pointed at me. He was embarrassed when he saw me. I was embarrassed too. He quickly regretted it and argued that he was pointing where Helen was standing but only changed his mind at the last second. It was not fair if I played the princess instead. The other girls agreed, so I did too. I didn’t know how to be a princess anyway. I had never been one. It was always Helen. She was the one who had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as the wood of the window frame. And I was the unwelcome princess who never showered and was frequently exiled, because I had the darkest skin tone of all the people in our friend group, because even though my mom is pale, my dad is almost brown, and I became a mixture of the two. I looked unclean, I suppose. This time, to compensate, they made me the prince’s horse.
She and some of our friends walked into my home one day and saw me wearing a down jacket. They frowned and asked, “Why do you wear a down jacket at home? Why doesn’t your mom turn on the heat?” My face burned, I suddenly couldn’t feel the cold in my home, and I just felt cheap.
The lollipop I stashed in my parents’ closet inside my mom’s sewing kit, Helen waited for the other kids to come in and said I stole it from her. My mom had to smash it into pieces and gave each of us half, but Helen wanted all of it. My mom wanted to wash the school uniform Helen left in my home before returning it, only to find the Japanese candies that I never gave her in her pocket. Our English teacher told us to tell someone a secret. I whispered into her ear that I wet my bed even at six years old. Then she turned over her head and yelled it out to the whole class. When I walked away for a minute, she took my diary from the bookshelf and told the same friends to read it, and I never wrote diaries again.
She moved away. Years later, I did too. After she moved, she wrote me a letter, nicely packaged in a small brown envelope with no clumsy scratch or stain. There was not a bad thing I could say about that letter. It somehow seemed sincere, more sincere than she had ever been. I wondered why she sent it to me. Maybe there was a moment of truth about our friendship in that letter. Or maybe she sent the same letters to everybody. I was touched and never wrote back.
My half-ish boyfriend in the fifth grade said to me, after a quarrel, that I was everything like her, but a little bit darker and a little bit worse. He had a crush on her, and then me. I went silent for a moment, then agreed. We were parts of the same hallway.
I asked my mom why she gave Helen half the lollipop when it was she who gave it to me—she knew it was mine. She didn’t remember any of it. I figured that was the magic of Helen. She made everyone forget, so it was weird that I remembered, so I never told the story, so I pretended that I also forgot, so I would and will never have my apology, or closure.
She started racing me the moment I told her that I found a cloud, a cloud that didn’t look like animals or anything particular to a child, but light was shining through the small crack in the middle of the big piece of cloud as if the sky was being torn apart. Before I knew it, she started racing me to tell the adults about it as if, inside her brain, someone had fired the starting gun. I hadn’t thought of telling the adults when she sprang out, but I ran anyway. I had always raced her when she started running, trying to hold on to what was mine.
“But the white cloud only bloomed for a moment,
When I looked up again, it was no longer there.”
— Bercht, “Remembering Marie A.”