come eat some ham
chapter 11
previous (lightning strike)
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In high school, our duopoly of friendship expanded to a small group of others who occupied the same social strata as us, what might be described as ‘bookish’ or ‘academic,’ the small subset of kids at Veddersburgh High School who might stand a chance to someday leave the community and never look back. We were the kids who it was assumed would someday be in New York or L.A. or Seattle or Boston or one of the trendier places to move, like Colorado or South Carolina, the ones who would be asked, “Where are you from?” and we’d have to be embarrassed and explain we were from a place the asker had likely never heard of.
We were a group diverse as a college brochure, and among us were:
Danveer Kumar, Veddersburgh High School’s only Indian boy. He lived in the same neighborhood as Tommy, and his father was an industrial engineer at the baby food plant the town over. We had hung out with him in middle school sometimes.
Cynthia Cheng, a Chinese girl whose parents were the proprietors of Veddersburgh’s only take-out Chinese food place, Number One Chinese Food. She lived above their restaurant on Main Street.
And there was Emma.
Emma Lightfoote!
For the longest time, I couldn’t think her name without thinking it thrice: Emma! Emma! Emma!
Emma’s personage was like holding up a feminine mirror to Tommy and seeing the reflection as a John Singer Sargent portrait. Her femininity refined her, smoothing over Tommy’s foibles while doubtless also adding its own blind spots, though I was in turn blinded to those by her considerable beauty. She was all legs and golden wavy hair, brilliant blue eyes. She even had a cleft chin, and the only other person I knew to have a cleft chin was Tommy. They looked sort of alike in the way couples sometimes do, almost like they were brother and sister.
As such, it seemed like she and Tommy should be pistil and stamen of the same species, attracted at the earliest possible age and glued together like cutouts from a magazine, ultimate totems of the powers that be and have been. Her parents were friends with Tommy’s, also being a couple of the most fortunate in Veddersburgh. They were both lawyers, and her father had recently been appointed county judge.
Even both their names were fortunate portmanteaus meant for the fleet-footed!
Of course, I had latent desires for Emma, but in high school, those desires remained remote, despite my excited and unreasonable teenage brain, because it was so obvious that she and Tommy should be together, and Tommy was my best friend, and as little as I knew about masculine platonic relationships, I did know that, for the sake of such relationships, it was unwise to interrupt such forces of attraction.
More than that, I was certain not to appear in the eye of Emma as a potential suitor anyway.
My physical deficiencies and awkwardness, normal amongst middle schoolers, unfortunately persisted into high school. Mrs. Goodspeed described me as a “late bloomer,” and that was generous of her. My frame maintained a boyish, slight nature, and I was not very tall. My hair was a dark, bushy mystery to me, and my fashion sense consisted of band t-shirts and husky jeans, which were rapidly falling out of style in favor of the tighter variety.
Perhaps I was not as bad as I make it out to be, but in the throes of my enlarged teenage amygdala, I felt I could not hope to compare to Tommy. He was the kind of youth who was prematurely a man. He put on muscle without trying, had rapidly grown to above six feet, and was broad-shouldered and strong-jawed. His blond hair had grown into the sort of curly-headed snowboarder look that was popular then, and he was immaculately clothed (still, I presumed, by his mother) in brands you would get from the mall, back when that was still a thing.
Whenever our group gathered in Tommy’s basement on listless, bored teenage Saturday nights, it would be too simplistic to describe the tension between Tommy and Emma as ‘magnetic’ or ‘palpable.’ It was more like watching a delicate waltz of will-they-won’t-they that was willfully more ‘they will.’
Tommy’s basement was our hangout spot—a projector screen for movies, ample seating, a popcorn machine, a pool table, and a fridge stocked with sodas (we were the sort of kids too cowardly to attempt to drink alcohol). Above all, he had parents who were content with us coming and going as we pleased and didn’t feel like they needed to check on us every five seconds.
Nerds as we were, watching a movie and then critiquing its themes as though we were in film class was one of our favorite pastimes.
Looking back, we had it good.
One chill-session freshman year saw Danveer (we called him ‘Dan’ in a shameless act of assimilation) bring his Blu-Ray copy of Napoleon Dynamite to the basement, insisting we must watch.
“How have you all never seen this?” he asked as he put it into Tommy’s brand-new PS3.
We all watched from the L-shaped couch, Emma and Tommy from the smaller end, Danveer and I sandwiching Cynthia on the longer.
If Emma was for Tommy, Cynthia was for me. I found her very pretty, with straight black hair and a round, kind face with a short, shapely body. She was smart and mostly quiet like I was, interjecting our conversations among friends with quips and comments that belied a nuanced cultural understanding and fresh perspective. Among the many quirks that endeared me to her were a love of professional wrestling (John Cena, in particular) and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels.
Our proximity brought forth the kind of hair-raising energy between hormonal teens that makes even the simplest brush of legs a cataclysm of the senses. At one point, she shifted positions and accidentally laid her smooth, cool knee on my thigh. I felt her tense, but she allowed it to stay there for the rest of the movie, which I managed to still pay attention to.
Overall, I did not ‘get’ Napoleon Dynamite when I watched it in Tommy’s basement. As far as I could tell, it had minimal plot, the funny parts were more cringe than funny, and I did not take away a message from it nor begin quoting it in every other breath as kids of that time sometimes did. You would not find me wearing a Vote For Pedro shirt. I took myself too seriously. I thought it was below me to enjoy a movie that was obviously only trying to be goofy and lighthearted.
“I didn’t get it,” I announced when the movie ended, thinking myself the true intellectual.
“Oh, I loved it,” Emma said. I immediately doubted myself.
“Me too,” Tommy said. “Really, in the end, it’s about friendship and about having the courage to be yourself. It’s about seeking connection, kind of. Like remember in the beginning, he puts the action figure out of the bus window and it just drags along the road? And the interpretive hand dance thing? It’s failure to launch—until he finds Pedro, anyway. Then they can be weird together. It’s about how weirdness is actually okay when you find other weirdos.”
I was embarrassed by how much what he said seemingly applied to Tommy and me in real life, but no one else seemed to pick up on that.
“I think it’s about capitalism kind of, too. The Rex Kwan Do guy is selling this American dream of self-confidence and self-belief, but in the end Pedro and Napoleon find it in each other. And the girl, Napoleon’s girlfriend, whatever her name was, she was selling door to door and totally failing because she wasn’t confident,” Emma said.
That was how Emma was, very politically and righteously oriented, eyes like a hawk for injustice and oppression, for the political subtext of everything from our school cafeteria menu to the school administration’s policy on dress code. Her personal crusade was to change our school’s team name from the abomination it was (the Indians) to literally anything else.
I admired her.
“Right, right!” Tommy followed up excitedly. I sensed a hint of annoyance from Emma as he had interrupted her, but it quickly melted into doe-eyed fawning over his words. “And Uncle Rico, he’s trying to sell stuff, the containers, the breast enhancements. It’s playing on people’s insecurities. And in the end what he wants is a time machine, which is something no money can ever buy, which is true of friendship as well, but at least friendship is, like, obtainable.”
“Exactly-y-y,” Emma said, elongating the last vowel of the word approvingly.
“I just thought it was frickin’ hilarious,” Cynthia said of the movie. “Uncle Rico made me sad though. He reminded me of Coach Richards.”
“TINA, YOU FAT LARD, COME EAT SOME HAM!” Danveer shouted, chowing on some Doritos, now simply glad he could say this reference and have us understand.
After the others left, I slept over in the basement. My head lay on the side of the couch where Emma and Cynthia had been, and the lingering smell of their perfumes, lotions, and shampoos intoxicated me.
The next morning, Tommy and I ate our sugary cereals, then he walked me home the long way through the Whispering Pines woods, as we made a habit of doing in those days. It was late fall and the trees were brilliantly orange and red, a neat perk of living where we did when so much else about it seemed so unattractive. Waldo dashed along with us, smelling the musk of squirrels buried amongst the leaves.
“When are you finally gonna make a move?” I asked Tommy. It was assumed I meant the situation with Emma. It felt strange to say those words. I had no idea at all about what it meant to ‘make moves’ when it came to a woman you liked, but it felt like the right thing to say. We were rock-hopping in the creek.
“I don’t know, I feel like Emma and I are too pre-destined. Like it seems so right that it’s…too right. Like if I got with her, that’d be it, I’d be done, I would never have to date anyone else in my life.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know. It’d be nice to explore a little bit.”
“What like…with Cynthia? Or someone like that?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “Not my type.”
I was relieved.
“What’s your type then?” I ventured. It wasn’t the sort of conversation he and I normally had, but I was ready to have it.
“I’m not sure. I just think Emma is...too much like me, maybe?”
It was all he had to say on the matter, and I had to concede it was true; if difference was what he desired, then maybe Emma wasn’t for him.
If Tommy’s specifications for a teenaged partner were simply based on being different from him and Emma, then Veddersburgh High School should have been able to accommodate him nicely. Tommy Goodspeed and Emma Lightfoote were so compatible because not only were they similar, but they were also exclusively similar; there was no one else in town with their combined likeness of academic excellence, familial wealth, and physical attractiveness.
But Tommy apparently knew no one else worth pursuing, because while he failed to join up with Emma, he also failed to join up with anyone else.
By the end of our freshman year, Tommy and Emma were still apart, and the other males of Veddersburgh High School were circling. Emma was a girl of such a caliber that she was invited to the junior prom when she was only a freshman, invitations that she declined, but the warning shots had been fired all the same.
It was a matter between Emma and me, though, that I am convinced was what finally forced Tommy’s hand when it came to the union of Lightfoote and Goodspeed.
next (the former stripper)
previous (lightning strike)