This is not a Phone Conversation

“Brian, Brian!”

“What’s up Trung?”

“Guess what I read on Tumblr today!”

“Ugh, this better not be about ‘saggin’ spelled backwards.”

“No it’s not.”

“Ok, what’s it about?”

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Get this: There’s a ‘lie’ in ‘believe,’ ‘over’ in ‘lover,’ ‘end’ in ‘friend,’ ‘us’ in ‘trust,’ and ‘if’ in ‘life.’”

“First of all, you’re really behind on Tumblr. I read that like in April, and now it’s mid-July. Second, all of that shit is stupid.”

“What?! Don’t you think it’s crazy?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes it does. ‘Lie’ in ‘believe’? That’s like describing one of your philosophies!”

“Have you ever heard of apophenia?”

“A what?”

“Apophenia. It’s like a psychological kind of phenomenon where we people find meaning and patterns in random events that don’t really have any kind of meaning or patterns. People survive freak accidents so they think the hand of God must have come to intervene when really, they were just really lucky. Someone’s clothes all turn pink in the laundry, and he thinks it’s a message from his dead girlfriend whose favorite color was pink, but really, that shit happens in the laundry all the fucking time. And like this, ‘lie’ in ‘believe’? It’s a coincidence.”

“Oh my god Brian, why can’t you see the art in this?”

“What art? There’s no art in it. Someone just decided to compile a list of words that happened to have other words in them, and those words happened to be words that everyone could relate to. Is there any meaning in the fact that ‘tart’ is in ‘start’ or ‘pies’ is in ‘spies’?”

“Brian, for once can’t you just appreciate what’s presented right before you? You’re the type that would actually look at a painting of a pipe and say, ‘This is not a pipe; it’s a painting.’ You always have to go through this convoluted thought process where you logically deconstruct everything until it loses all its meaning, and not only does it lose its meaning, but it loses its enjoyment and entertainment value. You’re just left bored and without any kind of imagination. Nothing in your life excites you.”

“There’s stuff that excites me, but it just has to have meaning. What’s the point of appreciating something if in reality, it doesn’t mean anything? Y’know, if you take ‘lie’ and ‘believe’ and translate them to French, then you’ll realize that there’s no meaning. Because really, is there a ‘mensonge’ in ‘croire’? No, there fucking isn’t.”

“Well, ‘lie’ being in ‘believe’ might not have any inherent meaning, but you can give it meaning. I could write a piece of spoken word about it. In English.”

“Ugh, you and your spoken word. So melodramatic.”

“And of course, you can’t appreciate the art in things like spoken word. Y’know, we were like this too when we were together. You always acted on your convoluted form of logic and rationale, and I acted on feelings and morale. Each of our ways of thinking had its pros and cons—”

“Look, it’s 2 AM and I would like to go to sleep. Can we just say that I win this debate? I go with the logical way of thinking, and that’s the kind of thinking that makes the world go around.”

“Who says? Emotions and feelings make the world go around. And you know you’re not going to go asleep. You’re going to be chatting with your sex buddies.”

“I don’t have sex buddies—anymore—and yes, I am going to sleep. G’night Trung. Have fun teaching at Breakthrough tomorrow.”

“Alright, fine, g’night. Loser.”

Drive

There’s something about driving alone late at night, something so relaxing and so illuminating. It’s the only time when I can (and have to) force myself to stay awake while doing nothing for a really long time, nothing except, of course, resting my foot on the gas, keeping my left hand at the bottom of the steering wheel, and staring out into a road. No distractions.

Even though I know my destination, I feel like I’m driving nowhere because I’m not getting there in half an hour, in the next hour, or the next five hours, and the only thing I can see before me is more road heading into a black abyss. This is when I find the time to think and to reflect deeply, real deeply, far more deeply than the amount of reflection I do when I write.

I left my home in NorCal for UCI on the evening of July 4th, of all days. I figured, y’know, traffic would be a bitch the day before when everyone traveled to visit their families, and a bitch the day after when everyone drove back home—with hangovers. But it wouldn’t take much for anyone to figure that this was some lame excuse, some kind of ulterior motive because really, why the hell would I leave friends and family on an iconic American holiday?

While driving through the deserts of Central Valley, I glanced into my rearview mirror every now and then to soak up the last few moments of the sun as it set over the horizon behind me. I mused about the symbolism of my situation: I was driving farther and farther away from the light as I headed down an endless shadowy road. The dark sky through my front window stood in stark contrast to the image in my mirrors.

I tried to keep myself somewhat active by sipping on two pearl milk tea drinks, one of which was Trung’s. Just before I left, Trung and I got drinks from Tapioca Express. We actually did this the day before, too, and in fact, I had originally planned on leaving the day before, July 3rd. We went to Tapioca Express, and as we wandered around the plaza with our drinks, Trung urged me to stay an extra night and hang out with Peter and black John. I was supposed to hang out with them on Friday for an early July 4th barbeque, but after I got home from Breakthrough, I passed out on my bed for five hours. Trung convinced me, so the two of us chilled at Peter’s house with him and John. We played Super Smash Bros Brawl and I learned how to play beer pong, but knowing how destructive a single beer was to me, we used water so that I wouldn’t wake up the next day feeling too shitty for my solo drive back down to Irvine.

10 PM. The sun had been long gone now. Black skies through my front window, black skies in my mirrors, black skies everywhere. Trying to hold onto any glimmer of light, I found myself staring into a circuit of city lights far away in the east. Maybe it was Fresno, or Visalia. I doubled back between watching the road and watching the cities, but eventually, something completely stole my attention: a burst of red, white, and blue sparkles over the island of yellow lights. I had an entire firework show in the left corner of my eye.

I turned to the passenger seat with my mouth already halfway open and words ready to come out, foolishly thinking that for a second, I had someone to tell, “Oh my god, did you see that?” But no, there was no one, no one but my stuff animal whale, Op, and his mate, Mop. So, I resolved to enjoying the fireworks with only these two and the quiet company that they kept.

The fireworks, they made me think about a lot of things. Like the time my family and I took a vacation to Hawaii and watched fireworks from the shores of Honolulu, and my old brother and I skipped rocks over the warm ocean water—that was 1998. I thought about the time my high school friends and I watched fireworks from the hillside of a rich country club neighborhood, and I tried to flirt with a friend’s friend from her taekwondo class—that was nearly ten years later, in 2007. And the following year, Doug, a fellow Breakthrough teacher, Trung, and I drove around Cupertino tracking down a decent place to park and watch fireworks. We gave up and tried to catch glimpses of fireworks from a school parking lot, but we could only see so much shrouded by the dark silhouettes of redwood trees. We had better luck in 2009, fortunately. Doug directed us atop a mountain in a small town where street lights were a scarce luxury. We stood in the outskirts of the entire Silicon Valley where we spectated the firework shows of several cities across the south bay. I held Trung close in my arms, and occasionally we both reached and grasped the air, pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.

After seeing a third city’s firework show, I realized the reason I left on July 4th: I didn’t have anyone to enjoy it with. I stopped talking to almost all of my high school friends right after graduation, I broke up with Trung, I broke up with Ranier, I didn’t come back to Breakthrough, I left my family for college three hundred miles away from home, and I just sorta popped back into Peter and Black John’s lives after inexcusably missing out on scheduled hangouts over the last ten months.

But maybe there was more to my reason; the more I reflected on the people I abandoned, the more I realized that maybe I left because, well, I didn’t think that I deserved to enjoy it with anyone. This lonely six-hour trip on the night of July 4th was my punishment.

I got my last firework show around 11 PM, and, trying to keep the last images of light ingrained in my brain, I drove my trip’s last two hours in darkness back to Irvine.

You Are My Best Friend

I bit my lips as I felt my face soften, and, copying the students, my lips curled to a smile, a humble one. I nodded slowly as I spoke in a lower voice. “Bonjour classe,” I breathed. “Bonjour.” I took Trung’s place at the whiteboard in front of his ten students and asked, “Ça va?”

“Oui, ça va,” they all answered in unison.

I scanned the faces of his students. Many of them were familiar, but there was on particular one that I had to stop at. I locked eyes with Matty, and we gave each other a subtle wassup nod.

“Alors,” I clasped my hands together, “Allons-y!”



After the students left for the lightrail station at 3 PM, I retreated back to the staffroom to rest a little before what would probably be a really long staff meeting. With Breakthrough ‘09 commencing in less than a week, we teachers would be finalizing every huge and every minute detail of our celebration night’s in-school practices, transportation, songs, displays, and the event itself. I looked over the student song, which my co-crew leader and I would have to review with our crew of 10 students the next day. In honor of Michael Jackson’s death five weeks ago, the students had voted to sing a Breakthrough-fied version of “Beat It.”

“Hey,” Nicky, my co-crew leader, said as she sat down next to me. “Guess what came up at lunch at our crew table while you were away working with your dance students?”

“Oh my god, what large animal did Matty liken Gabrielle to this time?”

Nicky laughed. “No, ‘pig’ was just that one and only time. But anyway, we were all sitting close together playing Egyptian War when Gloria sat down and was all like, with this shady look and shady tone, ‘Yo guys, I heard Brian is gay.’ And she said it like she was all disgusted too.”

“Oooh, yeah, Gloria doesn’t like me too much because I make her do her work in my writing class. For example, today I told her to pick up her pencil. So what’d you say to her?”

“Nothing. Matty jumped right in, and he pretty much jumped down her throat. He was all, ‘If he’s gay, why does it even matter? Brian’s still Brian. He’s a great crew leader, a great teacher, and a great friend!’ All the other students agreed. He put Gloria in her place.”

“Wow” was all I could manage. I leaned back and rocked in my chair. “Wow.” Matty was only 12 years old.



All the students giggled as their heads followed me around the room. I pranced from corner to corner like a giant leaping leprechaun, waving my hands in the air and awkwardly doing dance moves. I kicked over one of my speakers trying to jerk.

“Alors!” I yelled. “Tout le monde, une fois ! Jeeeeeeeeeeee—”

They all joined in as we sang the last line of the song together. “Jeeeeeeeee suizzz uune piiiizza, tombée en ruine!”

I applauded the students. “Bravo, vous êtes toutes les pizzas! You are all pizzas.”

After class ended, I walked out with Matty to Breakthrough’s brunch time. He was excited to see me, as I was to see him. But we only got to catch up really briefly because once the picnic area came into view, I heard another familiar voice that made my heart leap.

“IS THAT BRI—”

“OH MY GOSH IT’S BRIAN!”

I was suddenly ambushed by three or four girls, particularly ones that liked to be touchy with me when I was a teacher last year. I shook them off of me and tried to individually give side hugs to each one, and then I noticed some guys lining up, including Timmy.

“Where you’ve been man?” “Brian’s back!” “Are you swimming for pool day?” “Are you teaching today?” “Stay the whole day Brian!” “Brian’s not wearing glasses any more!” “You still have your funny walk!”

I side-hugged a few more students and then decided that this would take forever if I let it continue, and I actually had to go to the copy room to copy some worksheets for Trung. They were getting wrinkled in my hand. I shrugged and ducked my way out of the crowd of students and turned around to wave at them as I ran off. “I’ll be back in a bit!” I shouted to them.

You should’ve come back, Trung had told me. It was something that he told me every night over the phone when he’d tell me about his day at Breakthrough. The kids miss you. My second French class got distracted for ten minutes talking about you. You should’ve come back. I didn’t know whether to believe I really should’ve, but the moment when all those kids ambushed me outside the picnic area—that was when I realized it was true.

Throughout the rest of my visit at Breakthrough, I caught up with several students. Timmy wants to go to a military college. Lilly and Belinda don’t like their dance teacher at their school and wish I were theirs instead (lol). Patty is going through that teenage girl phase where she feels like she’s the only sane person left on the planet. Lorenzo is crushing on Lan, one of six returning ninth graders and one who I taught in my seventh grade writing class in 2008, my first year, and in my eighth grade writing class in 2009. I remember thinking in 2008 that I would teach all the way until the end of 2010 so that I could see how much the seventh graders I started out with would grow through middle school.

The one thing that every student who I talked to told me was, of course, “You should’ve come back.” I had to watch over Trung’s English class while he went to the bathroom to poop, and they all wanted to know, “Why didn’t you come back?” I wish I could tell them. To myself, the reason was understandable: I ran my class to be extra “fun” at the expense of discipline, and some students suffered, socially and academically, and I didn’t want to subject more students to the same suffering. But I felt like all the students would just think I was too much of a coward to come back to try to improve myself. Well, I didn’t know if that was what they would’ve thought, but it was what I started to believe.

The school day ended at 4 PM. The students lined up in front of the buses, and I waved them off. Before leaving, Matty asked me if I was going to come back the next week. Or the week after the next. I was sad to tell him that I’d be back down in Irvine, but I assured him that I’d come back up in four weeks for Breakthrough 2010’s celebration night.

“You definitely should,” he said. He smiled, and I was glad to see that my assurance was enough to make him happy. There was no way I’d miss celebration night.



Matty and I sat down next to each other on the lightrail. I had chaperon duty during the last week of Breakthrough, so I was riding it back with the students to make sure that they got home safely. Matty and I chatted, and he revealed to me that the directors were helping the student make a special surprise for the teachers on the last day of teaching. Matty could not keep any kind of secret, but fortunately I already knew because this was my second summer teaching at Breakthrough, and the students had done something similar during my first in 2008.

“Sorry, I just had to tell you,” Matty said, “because I wrote you something really good and I couldn’t keep it inside.” He exaggerated a shiver.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a rap.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny white note. “Can I read it to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, here’s the rap,” Matty took a long, deep breath. “Brian’s so Asian, he likes to eat rice with beef on the side. You love salmon, which can get a little smelly, but at least it fills your belly. You are my best friend of all of breakthrough; our friendship will always be true...ya!”

I was speechless. Matty could probably tell by the look on my face that I approved, sincerely. He handed me the note, and I reread the rap carefully. Then I flipped to the backside, where there was one last message: I will never forget you, my best friend.

The French Teacher

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

“Aujourd’hui, vous allez présenter vos présentations. Vous avez cinq minutes pour lire et étudier vos phrases, d’accord? Alors, allez-y.”

The middle school students understood hardly half of the French, but they still nodded at their teacher. They poured over their notes on how to introduce themselves and how to talk about their birthdays and the things they liked to do, and their lips quivered as they silently repeated to themselves their French sentences over and over again.

“Hey,” one girl whispered to a boy next to her. “I hear he’s going to be here today.”

His face lit up. “Really?”

“Qui parle?! Est-ce que tu voudrais présenter premièrement?”

The students ducked their head down.

“Well, the five minutes I gave you guys to study your sentences are up anyway. Are you guys ready to present?”

Everyone looked away, trying to avoid locking eye contact with their teacher. They knew that whenever their teacher used English, something serious was going to go down.

“Well, before I call on someone, I’d actually like to introduce another person first. A special guest, and some of you may already know him. He’ll be here to listen to your introductions because he wants to get to know you, and after you guys introduce yourselves, he’s going to teach the class.”

The students shot nervous glances to each other. Guests usually meant older adults in business suits, the kinds of people that made them nervous.

“Alright, can our special guest please come out?”

A crash, and then a sudden slam startled the students in their seats. All heads shot to the back corner of the room to investigate the intrusion.

“BONJOUR CLASSE!”

The students stared in awe.

I closed the doors to the closet behind me and marched forward. I stood there, my face beaming, my hands placed on my hips, and the morning sun shining through the blinds against my face. I glanced at Trung, who stood at the front grinning, and then I looked at the students. Their lips slowly curled to a meek, but happy smile.

I bit my lips as I felt my face soften, and, copying the students, my lips curled to a smile, a humble one. I nodded slowly as I spoke in a lower voice. “Bonjour classe,” I breathed. “Bonjour.”



One Week Earlier

2 in the afternoon. Trung stood at the white board readjusting the class agenda while his students slowly trickled through the door and sat at their desks. When he finished, he turned around to see Lilly raising her hand.

“Que voudrais-tu, Lilly?”

“Wasn’t Brian a French major?”

The eighth graders looked up from their notes at the sound of the name. A few seventh graders new to Breakthrough this summer glanced around confused.

“Who’s Brian?”

“He taught at Breakthrough last year!” Lilly answered. “And he taught the year before last one’s too. He was my dance teacher and my crew leader.”

“Yeah, he was my dance teacher too,” another student added. “He was pretty much one of my favorite teachers.”

Trung saw the excited looks on his students’ faces, and he tried to cut them off before this conversation went any farther. “Alright, classe, sortez vos—”

“Remember when he sang Boom Boom Pow at celebration night last year? He said the ‘s’ word!”

Murmurs erupted into excited chatter as students recounted their favorite memories of one of the “coolest” and the least teacher-like teacher from the past two summers. Trung sighed as he dropped his shoulders and leaned up against the whiteboard. He smiled. Damn it Brian, you still somehow manage to cause disruptions even when you don’t teach at Breakthrough anymore.

“Trung, why isn’t Brian back?”

“Yeah, what’s he doing right now?”

“Well...” Trung paused to think up of an excuse. “Brian really wishes that he could’ve been back. Trust me, I talk to him every day, and he’s sad that he couldn’t be here for his third summer. He’s just...he’s really, really busy this summer with...important stuff.”



2:10 in the afternoon. I dragged my shirtless self out of my bed and into my desk chair. I felt like browsing porn on Xtube, so I did. Guy jacks off in the library? ...ew, he’s fat and hairy. Next. Asian man gets it in both holes? ...is that a bald spot on the back of his head? Next. Then I did my thing, wiped up my mess, and crawled back into bed. I needed twenty more minutes.



After all the students departed on school buses at 4 PM, Trung retreated to the staff room to wait for the staff meeting to start. One of this summer’s new teachers approached him to ask a question.

“Hey Trung, who’s Brian?”

“Brian?”

“Yeah, my student Timmy says I remind him of one of last year’s teachers, Brian. Is that a good or bad thing?”

Trung chuckled. “It could be good, it could be bad, it could be both.”

“Speaking of Brian,” Doug, a veteran Breakthrough teacher of three previous years joined in, “Why isn’t he back this year, Trung? I really thought he was going to come back. He should’ve. What’s his sad excuse?”

“Well...” Trung didn’t want to divulge all the reasons in front of a new teacher, so he tried to think of a temporary one to use until he could discuss the actual reasons with Doug later in private.

“He’s just really busy with his studies.”



4:15 PM. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of stale Honey Nut Cheerios and my laptop when I couldn’t believe what I found online: two hundred pages of philosophy. The best philosophy ever, the kind that I could spend all night reading and commit to memory. I read the title of the book to myself out loud, “The Philosophy of...The X-Files. Fuck yes.” I began to read in my head. I would like to say—and, dare I say, want to believe—that the divergent approaches embodied in the characters of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are a bit analogous to those of two giants from the history of philosophy: Plato and Aristotle... This was fucking amazing.