The Popstar & Me

Chapter 38 - Finn's Bubbles

Chapter 38

Three Months Later

My dad's bubble tea store is taking off. He started selling bubble tea with some of the tea samples I brought home from Shanghai. For a while, he operated out of a window at Szechwan Supreme. Soon, within two weeks, there was a line out front. By the end of the month, he had his takeaway stand in front of the public library in Flushing. He even opened a third location in the Washington Square Park area.

My dad isn't going back into working at the MET, but at least he gets to tell his teenage part-time bubble tea baristas about his passion for old turn of the century American artists. Now that he has a steady job, my mom even let him back into our lives.

After that, I finally gave my dad permission to name the third location "Finn's Bubbles."

As for me, I decide not to apply Early Decision to Harvard. I'm still not sure about my future, so I choose to apply regular decision instead. I doubt I will get in, but I'm happy that Calvin gets to be the one to stand out from the crowd with his essay on his summer in Shanghai. At the last minute, though, Andrew decides he's not throwing away his future to design video games in Japan.

Instead, he's applying to Harvard too, to be with Calvin. I can tell this makes Calvin angry. He thought Andrew wasn't competition all this time, but instead, Andrew swoops in at the last minute and could possibly take the one Harvard spot at our school with the legacy card.

It makes me want to laugh because, in the end, all of Calvin's paranoia that I was his competition for Harvard turned out to be hogwash. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I joke with my parents that maybe I will work at dad's bubble tea store instead. Maybe they can promote me to general manager in four years. I would probably be better off financially than taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to get a degree that only qualifies me to get more degrees.

As I sit in my dad's new bubble tea shop and make myself a cup of freshly brewed milk tea, I feel truly at home. Not every problem in the world can be solved by a gorgeous frothy cup of fresh milk and fragrant oolong, but at least those problems can be made to seem a hundred miles away.

I still don't have a date for the fall formal. Calvin is single now. He says he's focusing on training for his next swim meet. He needs to win first place to get that swim scholarship for college. Not everyone believes him when he says he's too busy to date. No, everyone thinks playboy Calvin has a secret girlfriend.

He and I hang out a lot. He comes by to Finn's Bubbles every other day. He says the milk is great when he's in the bulking-up phase of his workout. I think he likes the company. I give Calvin a cup on the house sometimes. He did save my life back in Shanghai. Andrew says he was busy distracting the killer attack pug down in the lobby. It was especially heroic and death-defying because Andrew says he didn't even know at the time if pugs were hypoallergenic. He says his mom almost had a heart attack when she found out he touched a dog that might have triggered his allergies. And who knows if that dog even had all its shots?

Maybe that was the straw that made her put her foot down and refuse to let Andrew run away to Japan to become a Nintendo programmer. Poor Andrew, now he has to fall back on going to Harvard and becoming a surgeon like his dad.

I think about hinting to Calvin that we should go to the fall dance together, but something keeps me from saying those words. I don't know if I still feel the same way about him that I used to. I think, deep down, I still wonder what happened to Rushi and Fang, if she ever got her claws into him again. Not long after I left Shanghai, Dr. Su sent me an email back regarding my long rambling confessional three months ago.

It said — I'll take care of it.

I haven't heard anything since then. According to what internet sources I could find, Fang has disappeared from public view. XiaoLiLi is gone too. It's like everything that happened back in Shanghai was just a dream. Lana and Zhang send me emails now and then. Lana confided in me that she overheard Zhang talking to his parents about picking out an engagement ring for her. She wants to know if I'll go to her wedding since the three of us got along so well last summer.

I say yes.

I don't see any reason why not. As time passes, I'm grateful that I got to see how my childhood friends turned out and that they're together. I'm happy, even if it's a friendship where I feel like I'm the outsider.

As for my love life, my mom asks me about the hot, studious beefcake who comes to visit me at the bubble tea store. My father hired two NYU students part-time to help out at Finn's Bubbles tell my parents everything. They think it's cute that I have a boyfriend, and even cuter that I vehemently deny that Calvin is my boyfriend.

As the fall days drag on, I envy my friends who buy gowns in all the shades of the rainbow for the autumn dance. I start to give in. I text Calvin and ask him if he wants to go to the ball with me as friends.

He says he would love to, except he's too busy volunteering at the pediatric cancer ward of New York-Presbyterian the night of the dance. Maybe a rain check for next time? Maybe a holiday party, perhaps?

Sure, I reply and wonder if I'm falling behind in the college race, sitting in my dad's bubble tea store and doing something as banal as studying AP Chemistry. That Friday, Lauren and I are hanging out at my dad's bubble tea store. We told our parents we are on a study date, but we're actually catching up on the latest school gossip. It turns out that Jessica Lee is dating the school quarterback now. The two of us have such dismal love lives in comparison. Lauren says we should buy dresses and go together to the dance as a couple of BFFs.

Who needs boys?

Okay, I agree. The dance is a week away, and we're not going to sit at home watching Netflix like two losers.

I grab my coat. We decide to head to the Bloomingdale's in midtown to buy ourselves the gaudiest, most attention-seeking gowns ever. We're giggling so much that we're nearly choking on the boba in our oolong milk teas.

As we leave the store, I bump — tea first — into a man in a black blazer, spilling my milky contents all over him.

"Oh—My—God," I exclaim and try to offer him my meager little cocktail napkin (which I had already used to blow my nose on when we were giggling). "I'm so-so sorry."

"It's not a problem," the man responds, and as my eyes drift up to his face, I momentarily feel like I can't breathe. He's here, in New York, and he's not even wearing his ubiquitous sunglasses.

"Fang? What? How in the world?"

"I've finally found you."