Laura said that of course it was okay, but for some reason Sunny didn’t write. Probably, she decided, he was just as shy as he’d been in middle school, always standing awkwardly off on the periphery of things, never willing to put himself forward. So after a couple weeks she wrote him instead, asking how he was, how his classes were going, whether there was a girl in his life yet. By evening he’d responded-good, fine and no. But he was very happy to hear from her. Yes, Kelsey had given him her address, though he hadn’t been sure she’d remember him after so many years. Still, since she’d been so kind, would she mind if he wrote her occasionally and promised not to do it too often? He knew how busy she must be, and of course she wouldn’t be under any obligation to reply.
“Excellent!” Kelsey said when Laura told her about all this. “Now he’s yours, which is only fair. I dated him. This is the least you can do.”
And so the two began a correspondence. Every couple weeks Laura would receive a newsy e-mail and wait a few days before writing back, not wanting to give him the wrong impression, though in fact she did enjoy hearing about his family, his classes, his part-time jobs. Gradually she learned to read between the lines, factoring in Sunny’s modesty (he wasn’t doing “okay” in his classes, but brilliantly), his optimism (his father’s condition wasn’t likely to “improve soon,” but rather would continue its decline), his stoicism (he was friendly with several of his professors, meaning he had no other friends). His classes had many attractive and intelligent girls, he admitted, but most were spoken for and, besides, his mother was determined that when the time came he should marry a Korean girl and bring her to this country. For this precise purpose she’d kept in touch with friends from the old country who had daughters roughly Sunny’s age. He wasn’t in favor of this plan, he confessed, but until such time as he should fall in love with a girl who loved him back, he saw no reason to bring his mother un-happiness by refusing to consider the possibility of a Korean wife.
Laura’s e-mails to Sunny were far less circumspect. She was enjoying college and doing well, but she confided to him that she and Kelsey were going through a rough patch in their friendship. Kelsey had originally suggested they room together, and her feelings were hurt when Laura, who was still ambivalent about her being there, said they should probably be meeting new people. To her surprise, though, Kelsey proved more adept at making friends than she was, and by the end of September she had a new boyfriend and had pledged a sorority. Laura began to sense that the shoe of neediness was now inexplicably on the other foot. At the beginning of the spring semester, when Kelsey asked if she wanted to pledge her sorority, Laura said she didn’t think so, but the way Kelsey just shrugged and said “Fine” made her wonder if she wasn’t relieved.
Laura also confessed to Sunny that she was still in love with Jonathan, who’d gone off to a midwestern university. Worse, his father had published a well-reviewed book that won him a job at an Ivy League school, and the family had moved, which meant she wouldn’t be seeing him even on vacations. Most of the boys she’d met at Skidmore were wealthy city brats majoring in alcoholism who saw no reason to waste time on a girl who wasn’t going to put out, not when the next girl would. Kelsey is lucky to have you for a friend, Sunny wrote back. And you are right not to give in to social pressure. You’re too special. That made her feel guilty, detailing her own brokenheartedness to a boy who she suspected was himself brokenhearted over her.
Much as Sunny liked to write long e-mails, he had little use for instant messaging. Most of her college friends-Kelsey in particular-were on IM every night with a dozen friends all over the country. Laura, wary of the habit, tried to stay off-line except on weekends. Sunny agreed that it wasted time, but he had another reservation, too. I like to think about what I say, he explained. When I speak impulsively, I sometimes say foolish things. She’d noted, of course, that his communications were formal to the point of stylistic stiffness, that he never contracted words or used slang or made grammatical errors, but she’d attributed this to the combination of his brilliance and cultural upbringing. Eventually she began to suspect that he not only wrote carefully but also revised again and again. The reason he didn’t write more often (as he’d done with Kelsey) was that every letter had to be perfect. It was the instant in instant messaging that frightened him, and himself he distrusted. You need to loosen up, Laura wrote him. So what if you say something dumb? It’s just me. We’re friends. I say dumb things all the time.
No, he wrote back in his next long letter. You never say dumb things.
One Sunday night Laura awoke before dawn, as she often did on days when she had a big exam or presentation. She’d forgotten to turn her computer off the night before, and now noticed that Sunny was online. She’d put him on her IM buddy list, but until that moment he’d never actually used it.
Sunny, is that you? In California it was 2:00 a.m., not so very late for a college student, but still.
Then, after a long beat: Laura?
How are you?
An even longer beat, then: A terrible thing has happened. My brother has been arrested.
Laura watched the blinking cursor and had just about concluded that he wasn’t going to say anything more when words started flying onto the screen in a torrent. His brother and a friend had broken into a house in Beverly Hills. A girl they’d met at a club lived there and told them no one would be home. She was angry with her parents, who’d left for Europe without her, fobbing her off on an aunt in Brentwood for a whole month. She’d given Sunny’s brother the security code and told him to take everything. Except it turned out she didn’t really live there, that the people who did weren’t her parents and weren’t in Europe, that the code she’d given them didn’t even have the right number of digits. Sunny’s parents had had to borrow money against their house to get his brother out of jail. The story had been in the newspaper, the family disgraced. Sunny was afraid his father, his health precarious as always, might now take his life for the shame of it. His mother was talking about moving back to Korea. She wanted Sunny to leave Stanford immediately and come home.
Your brother has disgraced himself, not you, not your family, Laura wrote. If you leave Stanford I’ll never forgive you.
Again, she watched the blinking cursor for a long time. Finally, he came back. You are right, of course. May I tell my mother you said this?
I hope you will.
Please don’t tell Kelsey
Of course I won’t, she promised. Hey, you know what? I’m proud of you. You wrote a spontaneous message. It contained actual mistakes, a misspelling, even. You can rest easy, though. You didn’t say anything foolish.
He wrote back, The thing I wanted to write but did not… that was the foolish thing.
Laura didn’t have to ask what that thing was.
“I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to judge me too harshly,” Sunny told Joy when she asked what he was doing in D.C. The day had turned hot, and Griffin took off his sport coat and loosened his tie. Guests were now gathered on the lawn, waiting for the wedding party to emerge from the hotel. Sunny had walked with them to the last row of folding chairs when Joy waved him over, giving her a graceful kiss on the cheek and shaking Griffin ’s hand with firm forthrightness, though neither gesture should have been particularly surprising. The kid had graduated from Stanford, after all, then gone to law school at Georgetown, so there was no reason for him to be shy or awkward anymore. “I’ve become two terrible things,” he said with a wry grin. “A lawyer and a lobbyist.”