Empathy

Six hours remained until the CADC roster would appear on the website. He still hadn’t received a call, and it was driving him crazy. All he wanted to do was to sit down and wait for it, but now here he was in his Social Dance class, a class that he shared with his Kevin, me, Jojo, a girl who was already in CADC, and Hillary, one of CADC’s team captains.

As he stood next to Hillary waiting for instructions from the teacher, he tried so hard to get into Hillary’s mind and probe it with questions. Is the cabinet still deciding on who to choose? Do you already know the roster? Am I on the roster?

Standing next to her, he instead thought that he might’ve accidentally overheard her telling Jojo how she felt “bad for them.”

His heart sank, and he felt his head run hot as it filled with more questions. Did I hear her right? Who’s she referring to? Kevin, Brian, and me?

The teacher introduced a few news spins, and so, trying to concentrate, he shoved the questions as far back into his mind as he could.

Some time during that class though, he came to accept that the possibility of not getting into CADC was very, very real. As he, Kevin, and I ate in the dining commons after class around 7:30, he explained what he thought he overheard and yelled out, “Fuck! What did we do wrong? The next time I see Hillary, I just want to ask her what we did wrong.”

He waited on us for an answer. There was silence, and then a meek proposition. “CADC likes to screw around with the people they accept,” I said. “Maybe Hillary wanted you to hear to mess with your mind. Or maybe you heard her wrong.”

No, he knew he heard her right.

“Plus, you know David Lee? The really really good short Asian guy with the mohawk who’s definitely going to get in? I’ve been regularly checking his Facebook—stalkerish, I know, but whatever—he still hasn’t gotten a call yet either. So CADC is still in the process of making their calls. Don’t lose hope.”

He looked at me like it was one of the very few things I had ever said that made sense. How strange it was, he thought, to hear “don’t lose hope” from me when that was what he was telling me two weeks ago. So maybe there was still a reason to believe.

After dinner, he and I left Kevin and met up with Asian John to attend a free dance workshop from MCIA, another one of UCI’s dance teams. The main goal was to distract himself, to pass another hour feeling as little pain as possible.

But he couldn’t get into the choreo. It required too much energy and swagger, something that he didn’t have this night. He looked over at me, and we caught each other’s stares. Seeing my empty face and lack of energy, he could tell that I wasn’t in the mood either. He went to the corner and sat down by the staircase, and Asian John and I followed. My friend Sang came over to joined us.

He looked up at Sang and wasn’t too sure what to feel about him. Sang already got a call from CADC while he didn’t. Should he be envious of Sang? Jealous? Angry? Happy? At the very least, he shook Sang’s hand and told him, “Congratulations, man.”

When the workshop finished around 9:30, he, Asian John, Sang, and I stood around outside in the cold discussing what to do. There was a scheduled blackout from 9 to 6 AM at VDC and VDC Norte, the apartments. He had planned on going to Panyia’s place, where there was power and where he was going to meet back up with Kevin and several other friends waiting for their calls from CADC. I, however, seemed intent on going back to Sang’s dorm, so he extended his hand out to me, ready to bid farewell. As I reached out and shook his hand, he nodded at me, and I nodded back.

“Good luck, Alfonso,” I told him.

He and Asian John turned away from Sang and me, and we walked our separate ways.

Shortly after getting to Panyia’s place, he got a text from me saying that David Lee just got an acceptance phone call from CADC. This gave him and Kevin yet more reason to hope, to get excited, and to get nervous. Any one of them could be getting a phone call too in the next few minutes. He prayed for it.

When more minutes passed without hearing his phone ring, he further tried to rationalize why he hadn’t gotten a phone call yet. It could be one of CADC’s pranks: to make two or three more calls five minutes right before putting up the roster. But as the hour hand crawled closer toward 12, the prayers and the rationalizations grew weaker, making more room now for heartacheand self-criticism.

Around 11:45, he had already nearly finished the process of mourning and reached acceptance when his phone rang. With one last shred of hope remaining, he leaped up and reached for his phone, his heart racing. However, it wasn’t the phone call he was hoping for, and it wasn’t the phone call that he would want to hear. As he picked up his phone, he was disappointed to see that the phone call wasn’t coming from anyone on CADC.

“Hey Brian, what’s up?”

“Did you check your email?” I asked him.

“No, why?”

“I got the email,” I sighed. “The rejection email.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“And, well, you know how when the sender sends out a mass email and you can see a list of all the emails he sent it to?”

Fuck, fuck no. He wish he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he saw where this was going. “Yeah,” he answered.

“Your email is on that list. And so is Kevin’s.”

I said it like I was saying something as typical as, “I bought some milk from Albertsons.” I delivered the information so nonchalantly that he didn’t know how to react with anything more than just, “Oh, alright. Thanks for telling me.”

“Sorry man, so I’ll see ya tomorrow or at the next dance workshop?”

“Yeah, sure,” he answered. I hung up, and Alfonso knew that was it. No CADC this year.



At the beginning of the last school year, Alfonso heard that KASA, the Korean American Student Association, was in search of freshmen to join their club and compete in a freshmen dance-off of several Korean clubs from different schools around SoCal. KASA had to put together a dance team comprised only of first-years, and they had to perform a six-minute set. This was just like any other dance competition, except anyone could dance in the team as long as they auditioned for their part and got casted. Alfonso was just getting into breakdancing, but he thought he might give choreo a try. And he was glad he did.

Through KASA, Alfonso got a sense of what being on an actual dance team was like. He met new friends, he learned and cleaned pieces, and he auditioned and got casted for them. As the competition came closer, the directors scheduled “hell week” practices, and that was when he really bonded with his KASA teammates. They practically lived in a parking garage as they practiced through the night until the sun came up. They barely got any sleep, and together they shared their pains and miseries and questioned why the hell they were putting themselves through all this. But in the end, it was worth it when their team won second place.

That sense of family. Seeing all your effort go somewhere. That feeling of performing on stage. The sense of victory (and slight disappointment) when hearing his team name called out. That only came in small doses with KASA, as the KASA dance team existed solely for this once-a-year dance-off competition. Alfonso knew he wanted more. And he was going to do whatever it took to get it.



“I always thought that those who succeeded were the ones who worked hard...I guess it’s still not my turn to shine.”

“The beginning of a whole new year to improve...now where do I start?”