• Adam and I

    Prologue
    If you take a quick glance at any of my high school photos, you’ll almost always find two people in them. One is Adam. One is I.

    Adam, hopefully as you’ve guessed, is the guy in the green Letterman jacket and the square wire frame glasses, with that sly smile on his face, one corner of his mouth drawn just a bit higher than the other. His looks are average. Rates 6, maybe a 7, on the high school scale of good-looking-ness. Squarish head, thick cheekbones, tan skin. Five foot eight, soft brown hair. Average build. Not too athletic. I tell him he looks like an ugly raccoon. He grins and retorts that I look like a fat penguin.

    I’m the one next to him. I have sleek black hair and long bangs swept to the side of my face and tucked in behind my ear. I’m Korean. High cheekbones, thin face, tall and bony. Brown eyes, Five foot seven. If you look closely, you can see that I have freckles. Adam does not.

    In posed pictures we’re always smiling. Whenever Adam’s mom would point the barrel of her Nikon camera at us and tell us to grin and bear it, Adam would drop his arm around my shoulders and flash her that mischievous smile of his, as if he had the perfect plan to sabotage his mom’s camera lens. I’m smiling, teeth showing just a bit between my parted lips. My eyes are always nervous. They ask questions. Do I look dorky? Are my teeth straight? I don’t have anything on my shirt, do I? Am I too stiff? Did I close my eyes? Will this picture be posted on the internet? And how can Adam smile when this could just as well be the worst moment of his life? That’s why Adam is so different from me. He has lost the ability to worry. Contrary to me, the one who can’t do anything without thinking up absurd ideas of how Adam’s new scheme could get us killed. I’m not sure how we survived through the course of nine years. But we did. And we still do.