What they did remember—a memory solidified by their families’ yearly, slapdash recounting at Christmas—was how they met in first grade. While the other kids dashed up the slides and swung, hooting, on the monkey bars, Kathy Liu hunched cross-legged by herself in the tanbark, too afraid to talk to anyone. A few weeks after school started, Hema Sarma sprinted up to her breathless, shouting Kathy, Kathy.
“I’m chasing them!” She pointed to the two boys running around the field. She held out her hand. “Come on.”
Kathy hated any sort of strenuous physical effort, particularly running, but there was something endearing about Hema’s chipmunk cheeks and gap-toothed smile and laughing, mischievous eyes—it was a face that was hard not to love. Kathy didn’t know how to say no, so she stood and chased the boys, with no idea of what she would do if she actually caught one.
Hema, always quick, caught a little Japanese-American boy with hair that stuck straight up, and she kissed his cheek with a loud smack. That night, his mother made an angry phone call to Prabha, telling her the boy had come home shaken and to keep her wild daughter under control. Hema and Kathy giggled over this, mocking Prabha’s rolling distress, “Vaat is this, Haaaayma? You are chasing boys now? You know, good girls don’t do this.”
For years after that, they floated everywhere together like a single organism: HemaandKathy. Their fifth grade teacher had called them peanut butter and jelly. Kathy understood herself to be the peanut butter in this analogy—solid, dependable, quiet and reserved—and Hema to be the jelly: bold, noisy, imaginative and dreamy. Their nightly rhythm: checking in by phone, sneaking down the drainpipe for a nightly jaunt because Hema’s father didn’t want her on the phone, and waving goodnight through their windows. Clockwork until Hema became a soccer star. Local newspapers dubbed her the Indian Mia Hamm.
Later, Kathy would reconstruct what had happened that Christmas, trying to piece together whether she’d missed signs that Hema had changed. It was the Sarmas’ turn to host dinner. Their house glittered with bushy silver tinsel. They’d pulled the usual white plastic tree from the garage and wreathed it in popcorn and felt reindeers.
In the kitchen, Gopal poured mulled cider for Kathy’s parents, Nancy and John. Prabha bustled into their pantry, which doubled as a prayer room, ferrying out glass bottles of cardamom and cumin, and white plastic yogurt containers brimming with other comestibles. Gopal and Prabha told Kathy’s parents, Nancy and John, that other Indian parents had told them you must show Ivy admissions officers your child was both passionate and well-rounded. It wasn’t enough to simply have good test scores.
“Can you be both?” John asked. He clutched the bowl of snap pea stir fry, covered with weeping saran wrap, his contribution to the Christmas potluck.
“But does she really need a private coach?” Nancy asked. She was a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford.
“Well it’s not like they’re in the Red Lightnings anymore,” Gopal said, holding out a tray of pakora. Nancy took one. “Soccer is very competitive these days.”
“We just want her to have the best chances,” Prabha said.
“Every time we’ve seen her play, she’s been the best on the team. Do you want her to play professionally?” John asked.
“No, no, no,” Gopal said. “Definitely not. Hema is going to be a doctor. It’s just that we found someone who coaches another of the girls on the Varsity team, and we think he’s going to be good for Hema’s chances at getting recruited.” Hema had made it onto the varsity team their freshman year—the first and only freshman ever on the team.
Hema’s older brother, Kai, who’d always wanted to be in a punk band, was home for the holidays and he had one ear cocked, eavesdropping on this conversation from the cushions of the living room couch with Hema, Kathy, and Kathy’s little sister Lucy. He turned to Hema.
“Hear that? They want to make sure you don’t turn out like me. The gay graduate of a liberal arts school nobody knows the name of. To them, success means selling out for the highest price you can get and preferably a designer degree.”
Hema shrugged. “Who cares about all that? I just want to be the best.”
Kai and Kathy looked at each other and laughed. It was like Hema to skip over any untangling of other people’s motives to focus on what she wanted.
After dinner, they drank hot chocolate swimming with peppermint marshmallows and their parents congratulated each other on how well they’d done with Hema and Kathy. Then Nancy and John went home, and Gopal went upstairs to work on his computer.
Prabha flicked on the second half of Sense and Sensibility and began cleaning up the detritus of the Christmas feast. Unexpectedly, Kathy teared up as Hugh Grant proposed to Emma Thompson. Furious, she wiped her eyes, hoping nobody had seen.
“Well that was stupid,” Hema said as the credits ran. She blew on her fingernails, which she’d just painted with a polish labeled Pulp Fiction. “So boring Elinor gets Hugh Grant? That hardly seems likely.”
“Can you do my nails, too?” Lucy asked Hema, extending her bare feet.
“Hey. I like Elinor,” Kathy said.
“Nobody likes Elinor. She’s boring and proper,” Kai interjected. He was cooling the chicory coffee made by his mother by pouring it back and forth from a stainless steel tumbler to a smaller dish he called a dabarah.
Hema crinkled her nose as she dabbed nail polish on Lucy’s toenails. “Okay, but wouldn’t you rather just fall madly in love, so in love you actually wanted to be with the person?”
“No way. Elinor has common sense, and that’s more important.”
Kai laughed, and sipped his coffee. “When you’re my age, Kathy, I’m pretty sure you’ll answer differently.”
Hema immediately wanted to please him. Theo was black-haired, handsome in a vulpine way, stocky and muscular, yet agile, and a little older than Kai. He was French, and played professionally in London for ten years before coming to the United States. He’d played for France’s soccer team in 1998 when they won the World Cup. He wanted the girls he coached—girls like Hema—to be tough and fierce, to be consummate sportswomen.
Where all the other people in her life wanted her to restrain herself, to be less, he asked her to be more. He wanted her to be as aggressive as she actually was. He taught her how to commit a foul that a ref wouldn’t call; he schooled her in the psychology of the game.
“Get in there,” he’d yell from the sidelines at her practices—not in the crazy, anxious way her parents had when they came to her elementary school games, but with the confidence of someone who knew she had it in her to win. A commanding and encouraging tone in his voice made her want to do better, to scrap until the very end.
“You’ve got to pass more,” Theo said to her one day after her game, handing her a bottle of juice as they walked through the parking lot. “Rely on your midfielders.”
“I don’t know if I can rely on them,” Hema said, still high from the scrimmage, her cleats clipping pavement. “You saw them out there. They just don’t care as much as I do.”
“Were we watching the same game? I thought they were giving it their all. To function as a team, you have to trust.”
He held open the door of his beater, a silver Toyota Camry, and she climbed in. “You want to see a video that illustrates this point I’m making about teamwork?”
They drove to his tiny studio apartment on El Camino Real. It was three floors up. From the hallway, they entered a nondescript door with peeling black paint. Inside the single room was a kitchen alcove with the tiniest stove that Hema had ever seen, and a couch the pale beige of porridge. Rows of pinkish light sliced through crooked Venetian blinds. Sheets swirled in a white rose at one end of the unmade bed, burgundy pillows lay askew at the other, all heady with the wintery fragrance of pine trees.
They watched his tape, the first World Cup game he’d played in. He brewed a pot of Genmai Cha tea. He sat beside her, close enough that she could hear him breathing, and smell his musky cologne and the popped rice smell of the green tea, his warm shoulder against hers, and they watched the match like that for hours, as the large yellow street lights of Palo Alto flickered on and night fell around them.
Practice wound down at twilight. The team and its coach were scattered by the bleachers. From a distance, against the streaks of gold and pink at the horizon, Kathy saw the dark silhouette of a man and a girl with their heads huddled together. They stood apart from the team, in a world of their own, and for a moment, she didn’t recognize her best friend.
Theo patted Hema on the back. It was a familiar gesture. He shouted something at the whole team like “Go Team, go!” in his French accent and pumped his fist. Kathy would have left without saying anything, but Hema spotted her in the dusk and called her over.
“It’s so wonderful to meet Hema’s best friend. Hema speaks about you all the time,” Theo said.
“Oh, yeah, you too.” Kathy shook his hand, and she could feel herself blushing with the awkwardness, his ingratiating formality. She found his accent comical and his manner overweening. He continued to talk, but she had already stopped listening, and eventually she tugged at Hema’s arm.
“Isn’t he amazing?” Hema asked as they walked away. “He’s so wise. I could listen to him talk for hours.”
Kathy didn’t answer. Hema’s rapturous tone reminded her of when they were small and leafing through Hema’s stacks of Tiger Beat, many of which she’d smuggled out of the library because her father didn’t want her reading what he considered trash. They’d compare notes on each issue of the candy-colored magazine, remarking on who was cute, and who wasn’t, who seemed like he might be cool in real life, and who they believed were poseurs. Always, their tastes were different.
Prabha shared Kathy’s concerns, and this provided Kathy with a small measure of relief. While Kathy was studying in the Sarma living room one Saturday, she overheard Hema talking to Prabha in the kitchen. “Enough!” Prabha said. “You have to think about the future. You have to get a college education; you can’t be a soccer star your whole life.”
“I could coach,” Hema said. “Like Theo.”
“Coaching is okay for somebody like Theo.” “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s not the kind of job we get. You always wanted to be a doctor.”
“You always wanted me to be a doctor.”
“Sports medicine,” Prabha said. “We’ll pay for college if you focus on sports medicine.”
“Why do you get to paint pictures of flowers nobody wants to buy, but I have to get a job
I would hate?”
Hema returned to the living room a few minutes later with a protein bar. Her eyebrows were knit and her cheeks were flushed. “You okay?” Kathy whispered. Hema nodded, but her eyes were closed, a little flame going out inside her.
Kathy said nothing, but blamed Theo. Why had he gotten her hopes up? Hema was smart, like next-level smart, and he had somehow wormed his own paltry and unambitious expectations into her brain, persuaded her it was enough for her to be a soccer coach.
“Do you need an ice pack?” Theo asked.
Hema was horribly sunburned, but in heaven. The sweetness of the pain and the tang of the orange juice mixed as they always did in the unbeatable high after she’d scored back-to-back goals.
Hema shook her head, which was propped against the armrest of the porridge-colored couch. He rubbed pink calamine on her legs. Firm but gentle ministrations. He was so close she could smell him, the scent of him an intoxicating mixture of freshly cut grass and sunscreen, the smell of endless summer. “I was on auto-pilot for that last shot,” she said. “I kicked on reflex when she passed to me. It was all those drills we did.”
“You were amazing.”
At that moment, Hema sat up and looked into Theo’s hazel eyes. She kissed him. His lips were warm.
Summer before their senior year. The air was almost humid and sultry. Hema waggled up from below her windowsill, wearing an elaborate red dragon mask and khaki army fatigues. Kathy laughed. After an all-nighter preparing her project for an honors science summer camp, she was ready to take her contact lenses out and sleep. But then Hema took off the mask, pulled up the window, and pointed at the ground, a sign that she wanted to take one of their nocturnal walks by the creek. They shimmied down their respective drainpipes and headed wordlessly into Los Altos Hills.
Bay Quarter Horses grazed in the shadowy dusk. The sounds took on a greater intensity in the dark with so little to look at—cows lowing, the distant buzz of Foothill Expressway.
“What’s going on?” Kathy asked, as they neared the creek, their feet making a crackly shur-shur in the grass.
“Do you ever think that our lives here are just unbearably small?” Hema asked. “I can’t wait until graduation, until I can just get out of here.”
“What’s wrong with here?”
“The definition of success is so narrow. There’s no space. I mean, why even live a life if it’s not exciting?”
Kathy had no answer to this. The creek swished and kerplunked over stones. As they hiked deeper into the hills, the crickets chirruped.
“Hey, do you remember how you saved Lucy in that sinkhole by this creek?” Kathy asked.
Hema laughed. “Oh, please, you would have saved her if I hadn’t.” She bent suddenly and picked up a tiny frog, and held him up to the stars, dark and pulsing. “Oh, look at this adorable guy.”
“I really wouldn’t have had the presence of mind that you did,” Kathy said, stroking the frog’s slimy back with her index finger.
“I remember how the tadpoles we caught would turn into frogs and go hopping out of my garage, and my parents would never be the wiser.”
Kathy looked away, her throat catching on all the things she wanted to say. Since Hema had started training with Theo, their conversations turned increasingly to the past. Their friendship had dwindled into a series of remembrances. They didn’t see each other enough to make new memories, and next year, they would go to separate colleges, and they probably wouldn’t do these nighttime hikes again. Already, they were too far apart.
They continued trekking through the fronds of sweet fragrant fennel. Hema told Kathy that Theo was critical of the way they’d been raised in Palo Alto, how whitewashed and affluent it was—he called it Shallow Alto.
“And yet, he’s willing to take your parents’ money to coach you.”
“Well, I mean, he has to live, doesn’t he? It’s not surprising so many of the girls he coaches have crushes on him.”
“Yuck. He’s so old.” Kathy waited for Hema to agree, but Hema bent down and released the frog back into the creek.
“Run away, little frog,” Hema whispered into the darkness.
Senior year blurred: college applications and elaborately decorated dances and self-important student government meetings. Kathy was startled by the arrival of Valentine’s Day. It was as uneventful as every other day, except that a skinny kid in her AP Calculus class had handed her a handwritten love letter. She’d glanced through it, mocked a few lines, and tossed it in the trash.
The high school campus was open, which meant most kids would drive off-campus at lunchtime. Kathy usually met Hema for lunch at Hobee’s on Friday when they both had a free period just afterward. They ordered their usual hash browns and blueberry coffee cake and smoothies from brightly illustrated menus typed in a quirky, curlicue-laden font.
Hema shrugged when Kathy told her about the love letter. “He’s not really that bad.”
“But would you date him?”
“No, but we have different types. Did I tell you I’m trying out for the under-20 women’s team this March? Theo says they’re interested.”
“He’s going behind your parents’ backs? What about college?” Kathy asked. She picked at her hash browns drowning in a cool red pool of salsa and sour cream.
“I can always go to college later. I won’t always be on a winning streak.”
“Did Theo ever go back to college?”
“No, but he wasn’t raised like us. He’s hot, don’t you think?”
“Gross. He’s got a weak chin and I think he’s losing his hair. He’s, what, twenty years older than us?”
“No. Only eleven years. He’s twenty-eight years old. When I’m twenty-eight, he’ll only be thirty-nine, and that’s not too wide an age gap.”
Kathy made a face. “He’s even older than your brother.” She pulled the straw out of her smoothie and flecked a purple swirl of smoothie onto Hema’s arm. She noticed then that Hema’s arm, usually hairy, was smooth, waxed. Hema raised an eyebrow. She scowled and wiped off the smear with a napkin.
“So? Lots of girls date someone a little older than them. Men mature more slowly than women.”
“He had a really short soccer career.”
“He got injured.”
“Unless something’s wrong with him, he probably has a girlfriend.”
“Well, yes. He was married for a few years,” Hema acknowledged. “But it didn’t work out. She didn’t like how passionate he was about soccer. Can you imagine trying to be married to someone who didn’t get the most basic fact about you?”
“I don’t get why he’s telling you this intimate stuff.” Kathy put her fork down.
“He thinks I’m a good listener. What’s gotten into you?”
Kathy explained. Hema’s patent crush on a man that was so much older was revolting. There was no way any good could come of it. But the more Kathy talked, the more adamant Hema was that Kathy just didn’t understand him.
“We’re dating. I was just trying to figure out how to tell you.”
“How long?”
“A year.” Hema didn’t seem to have any idea how strange it was that she hadn’t told Kathy for a full year. She had kept this secret to herself, like a tadpole she’d swallowed, like she didn’t trust Kathy at all.
“Oh my god. You’re under age, Hema.”
“We’re seventeen!”
“We’re just kids.”
“I’m going to be eighteen in two months.”
“He’s a predator.”
“Stop it. You don’t know him.”
“I know that he’s in a position of power over you and he preyed on you.”
“Let me get this straight. Basically you want me to be more like you?” Hema asked. She drew herself up.
Hema’s skin was fawn-colored, glowing and moisturized. Her lips were penciled in with some sort of scarlet pigment. Kathy noticed in that moment that she’d started wearing mascara and a wide line of jet-black kohl around her eyes. Just a few years earlier they had made fun of Prabha for always wearing kohl so thick around her eyelids, joking that it made her look foreign and slightly ridiculous, like she thought of herself as some sort of Scheherazade. And now Hema was aping her.
“No, I just want you to come back. I want you to be the same person I’ve known my whole life,” Kathy said.
“Maybe I’m not that person anymore. All that model-minority crap is you, not me.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Leaving a wad of cash on the table, Kathy hurried to her car, so Hema wouldn’t see her cry. She drove back to school, leaving Hema to find her own way back.
That night was the first they didn’t wave goodnight through their windows. The following week, Kathy ate alone on a bench at the edge of the quad at lunchtime, and Hema was nowhere to be seen. It was spring, and all the other seniors were planning the class gift, elaborate ways to ask their sweethearts to the prom, and outings for Senior Cut Day. They were taking it easy, but to keep her growing anxiety at bay, Kathy continued to work as hard as she had before.
She checked her phone every five minutes. No sign of reconciliation—no texts or emails. Hema had other friends, mostly her teammates, and of course she had Theo. Kathy’s sister Lucy was at high school by then, but she had her own interests—as far as Kathy could tell, they were horror movies, gymnastics, a giggling group of friends, and boys. Kathy only ever had Hema.
She thought of Kai then, and wondered what he would say. He had been home for the holidays. He never brought any of his partners home; there was a chill, a subtle testiness between him and his parents that went unremarked. But he was the same old Kai and kind to Kathy.
She searched for him online and called him at work, and after his initial surprise to hear from her, he asked why she’d called.
“Is this a joke? Did Hema put you up to this? My sister can be very persuasive.”
“No, this is true.”
“I’ve met that guy once or twice. He seemed nice enough.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
Kai still sounded uncertain. “It seemed to me like he cares about Hema and wants the best for her.”
“I don’t know about that. I think they’ve had sex, Kai. And he’s going to take her to try out for the under-20 women’s team secretly.”
There was a pause and then Kai’s voice was harsh. “I’ll take care of it.” He hung up before Kathy could say anything else.
The next day, Kathy didn’t see Hema as she left the house. It was drizzling, one of those light-fantastical California rains, where the sun continues to beam as a fine mist coats everything. The hills were faintly green. Gopal’s car, usually gone by seven a.m., was still parked in the driveway. A fragrance blew up from the black asphalt and blacker loam.
Kathy stood in the mist and watched through the window for a moment: Hema, Gopal and Prabha. She could just barely make out Gopal—apoplectic—shouting and pounding his fist on the table. Prabha was crying. Hema stood stock-still, arms crossed, watching her parents.
When Kathy returned home from school that afternoon with Lucy, Gopal’s car was still parked in the driveway, but the living room blinds were drawn.
“Is everything okay with you and Hema?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Lucy paused, and then she asked, “Are you ever jealous of her?”
“Why would you say that?”
“I’m jealous of her sometimes.”
“Why?”
“She has beauty, brains, money, talent. Sometimes, when I’m standing next to her, I feel totally lame and ordinary. I thought it must be worse for you since she’s your best friend.”
She didn’t come back to school. Kathy learned later from one of the girls on Hema’s soccer team that she had gone to live with Theo. Gopal and Prabha called the police, but by then the two of them had disappeared.
His apartment on El Camino Real was vacated. Kathy talked the super into letting her into the studio unit, and saw that Theo had left behind a couch and a bed. They were stripped of their covers and sheets and pillows. There were a few pots and pans abandoned in the cupboards. Kathy imagined Hema in the tiny kitchen, cooking dinner with Theo, pretending to be an adult, sitting on the counter and swinging her feet the way she did at Kathy’s house. There were no pieces of paper in the apartment, no notes, nothing to explain where they’d gone or whether they’d ever be back.
Later, Kathy would hear from her mother that Prabha flew around the country that spring, going to tryouts in different cities, hoping to find Hema at one of them, hoping to bring her home, even though she was eighteen. But she didn’t find her.
Midsummer, Kathy bumped into Kai at the Harvard Square T station. His fingers were entwined with a man’s. He looked so different—so happy—and they hugged.
“Have you seen her?” Kathy asked, both afraid and hopeful that Hema had kept in touch with her brother, even though she’d cut Kathy off.
“Yes. She’s fine. I’m sure she’ll contact you eventually.” His partner tugged his hand and they had to leave, but Hema never did call.
Many winters later, after Harvard then graduate school in molecular biology, she returned to her parents’ house for the holidays. She stepped out of the taxi and into the sunshine, pulling her carry-on after her. An unfamiliar car sat in the Sarmas’ driveway, an old red Nissan Sentra. Hema emerged from the Sarma house. She was pregnant, her hair cropped short.
She raised a hand in greeting. “How’ve you been?” she asked, as if she were returning from a vacation instead of reappearing after years. She had some sort of accent that she hadn’t possessed as a child. It was like her, when Kathy thought about it later, not to acknowledge what had happened. She had moved on to adventures Kathy couldn’t imagine, while Kathy had stayed on track.
“All right, I guess. Congratulations.” Kathy gestured at Hema’s belly.
“Oh! Thank you! We’re going to raise her in Paris—that’s where we’ve been these past years—but my mother begged me to have her here.”
“We?”
“Theo and I.”
“You’re still together?” Kathy couldn’t hide her incredulity.
Hema laughed and held out her hand. There was an enormous ugly diamond on her ring finger, its facets glinting in the sunlight. “Twelve years, baby.” Kathy could hear in her voice a faint I-told-you-so—or was she imagining this?
“Don’t look so shocked, Kathy,” she said gently. “We were meant to be.”
This was what their epic friendship had come to, this dumb, silent moment on a sidewalk. Kathy wondered what Gopal and Prabha thought—Hema had been their great hope, and in spite of their every effort, she’d followed a completely different path than the one they’d laid out for her. Perhaps Hema was saving face by pretending everything had worked out; after all this time, after losing everyone, after throwing everyone away, would she admit that she’d made a mistake? There was nothing apologetic in Hema’s face, no worry lines, no signs of secret distress. Rather, she stood with her hips thrust forward, as if in defiance of what Kathy might be thinking.
Then she cracked a huge smile. “Do you want to feel the baby kick?”
Kathy didn’t, but she put her palm on Hema’s hard belly. For a few moments, she didn’t feel anything and was about to withdraw her hand, when something rolled against her skin, against her palm. A sharp kick, and then another. A new life. A force even less predictable than Hema.
They bid each other farewell and Kathy pulled her carry-on luggage into her parent’s house and up the steps where she’d glimpsed Hema for the first time, running with a large bubble wand—bubbles streaming in a long gossamer tunnel behind her before separating into large fragile baubles that burst momentarily, leaving dark wet splats all over the concrete path that led to Kathy’s stoop. She couldn’t breathe for a moment. She wanted to retrace all her steps, to tell Hema how much she’d meant, to tell Hema that she made life exciting and new, always, and that she was sorry she’d betrayed her and that she was genuinely happy she was happy, and that somehow, against all odds, Kathy had obviously been wrong about her passion for Theo.
Hema turned the key in the ignition in her car. Kathy held up a hand and saluted her as the car hurtled away from the hills, a red blur. The car barely rolled to a stop at the stop sign where their little hilly road hit a busy thoroughfare, and then it disappeared around the corner, and Kathy caught her breath, thinking of the girl she’d once known. It was a face that was hard not to love.
Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica: A Novel and the award-winning short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent. Most recently, Anita’s short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alta Journal, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light and The Normal School. She has been a regular contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Review of Books, and her nonfiction has also appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times (Modern Love), among other places. Anita is on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle where she serves as Fiction Chair for 2022-2023. She is editor of Alta Journal‘s California Book Club. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her spouse and three children.
Photo by Ron Lach