Chapter 1
Jennie
I met Lisa Manoban during my freshman year of college. 6 foot 3 inches, 155 pounds of sun-burned and sharp jawline Thai. She had wire rimmed glasses that had gone out of season a decade ago and long, shaggy dark hair, with a lingering remnant of the Justin Bieber era.
It was a Halloween party a few months into the year. She was there alone and I'd been dragged along with my roommate, Heather. She was just the sort to use any excuse to expose her midriff, not that she needed one, so Halloween was her favourite holiday.
I was dressed like a cat, having had to find myself a costume at the very last minute. Luckily, every girl owns a pair of black skinny jeans and a passably tight black long sleeve shirt. Even more luckily, the only convenience store on campus had one last pair of kitty ears. Though it cost half of my meal plan to buy them.
Lisa was dressed as a robot, with cheesy aluminium foil taped sparingly to the cardboard boxes on her forearms and the one she wore like a hat.
We bonded over our lame costumes and our lack of any desire to be there. She told me that she had a girlfriend, someone back home in Thailand where she'd grown up. Her girlfriend had promised her that long distance would work. And it was long indeed, seeing as she was attending UCLA. I told her about my sister who had just gotten into medical school and my parents' lack of appreciation for my art. She thought it was cool that I wanted to be a screenwriter. I thought it was cool that she programmed. We were a friendship match made in nerd heaven.
For the next few months, we did everything together, even planning our class schedules around one another's for the following semester. I tutored her in English every afternoon and she taught me Thai every evening. I drove her to the airport when she flew home for both major holidays and was always there to pick her up when she returned.
As the winter turned to spring, we were together through it all. She was there when I got my first internship at a local studio. I was there when her
hometown girlfriend broke her heart. She was there when my father got remarried to a woman my age and I was there when her debate club won regionals. We were each other's profoundest supporters, biggest cheerleaders, and best confidantes.
Nothing changed for sophomore year. Friday nights were for staying in, watching a terrible old horror movie and laughing so hard that we snorted, trying to throw candy into one another's mouths from across the room. Saturdays were spent out, exchanging amused glances every time someone from our broader friend group got too wasted and did something foolish. Sundays were for catching up on homework that we had neglected for the rest of the weekend, sprawled out on the floor of my dorm listening to music and asking each other questions about what part of the world we wanted to see the most or who we wanted to become.
Junior year brought me my first serious boyfriend and Lisa welcomed him with open arms. Until he broke my heart by cheating on me with Nancy Choi and Lisa broke his nose with a mean right hook in the parking lot of Target. Lisa held me close while I sobbed against her chest in her 1997 Pontiac Sunfire.
I swore off men and made new friends during senior year. Girls from my women's studies class. They were wild and fierce and Lisa had a major crush on one of them - Kaia Gerber. I spent the whole first semester trying to get them together and the whole second one gagging whenever I came across them making out in Lisa's room.
But their passion was as short lived as it was bright. Kaia joined the peace corps and left UCLA before she even finished her classes. Lisa said there was no future for them and it was my turn to hold her in the dingy lobby of my shitty off-campus apartment building.
I loved Lisa. I loved her more than anyone I'd ever known outside of my family. So when she came to me one day, a week before graduation, with her eyes ringed red from a sleepless night of crying and screaming into the void, claiming that she'd received a letter from Homeland Security that she was going to be deported the day after graduation as that was when her student visa expired, I didn't hesitate.
I asked her to marry me.
Chapter 2
Jennie
There had never been anything even remotely romantic between Lisa and I. Not even a hint of flirtation. But I loved her in a way that meant just as much and I knew how badly she wanted to stay in this country, how much she needed to, in order to make her dreams come true. And she would. There was no one on this Earth with the determination and sheer willpower of Lisa Manoban. So if I had to sign a little certificate to make it happen, hey, that's what friends do for each other.
That very same week, I heard back from NBC about the internship which I'd applied for. I'd been accepted. Lisa lifted me into the air in the parking lot of that same Target and we spent the whole afternoon drinking celebratory cherry-flavoured Slushees until we made ourselves sick.
On Thursday, we went to the courthouse, signed the papers, went through with some silly ceremony the presiding judge said was a requirement, and left making jokes about our sham marriage, calling each other spouses for the rest of the day. On Friday, we graduated. My parents caused a scene when my mother, unable to help herself, called my dad's new wife a whore under her breath and got a high heel to the back of her calf in return. Lisa helped separate them. We thought that it's best not to enlighten them about our arrangement. On Saturday, I got on a plane to New York City. Lisa took me to the airport, hugged me, wished me luck, and made me promise to keep in touch.
I did. For a while.
But after a year, it was clear that life was taking us in two different paths, both of which, it seemed, were paved with long working hours in far apart time zones and a lack of attention to even basic nutrition, much less finding the time to make a phone call. Besides, nobody kept in touch with their college friends. Right?
In truth, I'd forgotten about Lisa, about how I'd never felt more myself than I did with her, about how college with her was the most free and
