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I met Jun before meeting Dylan or Bridgette—Jun was actually how I met Bridgette—at a clam bake during the summer with my parents when I was twelve years old. Adele was there too, but she was too preoccupied with flirting with the group of teenage boys who lingered around the buffet tables, all on the rowing team at their respective schools.
My parents spent most of the evening speaking with other guests, complementing the view of the lake or the food, discussing their children's academic accomplishments like they were their own badges of honor. I sat on a stone beach in between hibiscus flowers, occasionally swatting bees away from my food, wishing my parents hadn't decided that I needed to wait until I was thirteen to get my first phone because every other bored kid at this clam bake was on theirs.
Including Jun Chen.
She was sitting at one of the tables, a finished plate left in front of her, and her chin tilted down close to her chest, almost scratching the lilac lace of the dress she was wearing. Her jet-black hair was pin straight and tucked behind her ears, revealing delicate diamond earrings that glinted in the setting sunlight, and she had a round shaped face, thin eyebrows that made me jealous more than once because mine were always so bushy. She was pale, like I was, but her skin tone was so much more even than mine, with red pimples like rough terrain around my hairline in comparison to her porcelain smooth.
She was there with her family too, and like mine, they were too busy socializing to care about how bored their preteens were, and after observing her for a moment, I decided to get up to return my plate, purposefully walking past her table. We were some of the youngest kids there that night, since politicians liked to keep things neat and calm, which children weren't, and the others were boys who kept running back and forth across the courtyard with food in their mouths. If she weren't too busy trying to subtly touch a junior's forearm at that moment, I would've whispered to Adele how Mom would've killed us if we did that.
I was depositing my plate in a black tub near the buffet table, still occasionally glancing over my shoulder to look at the girl sitting alone at her table, when her face suddenly fell and she began frantically whispering to herself, "No, no, no, no!"
She was still holding her phone in her hands, tapping at the screen, and pressing her thumbnail into the on button on the side, eyebrows narrowed together and close to her widened eyes before she abruptly dropped her phone on the table and reached over the empty chair beside her. She extended her leg out behind her as she leaned over the wicker seat, fingers scrambling to grasp the strap of a black weather purse dangling over the back of one of the chairs.
"Ugh, come on!" Her fingernail snagged on the strap but instead of grabbing it, she knocked it onto the floor with a series of muffled clanks coming from inside.
I stepped away from the buffet table, sidestepping around one of the guys from the rowing team as he ran his hand through his wiry hair, nearly elbowing me in the chin before I picked up the purse from where it sat, upright, on the ground. The girl was straightening herself on her own chair when she glanced up, hair in front of her eyes, and realized I was holding the purse out to her, her irritation melting into an expression not too unlike the agape one she had a moment earlier.
