If You Still Recognise Me Read online

  It feels like summer at last.

  The Speech Balloon is only a few minutes away in Gloucester Green, sandwiched between a bubble-tea place and a dusty antiques shop. Inside, I’m greeted by cheerful blue walls and packed white shelves.

  There doesn’t seem to be anyone here, until a person stands up from behind the till, their back to me. All I see is a blond head of hair.

  My heart stops.

  I only started coming here after the break-up, looking for something to occupy myself with now that I had all these frightening empty swathes of time. I was armed with a list of recommendations I’d found on Tumblr – comics featuring prominent queer characters of colour. Eden Recoiling was one of the first things I picked up, and I got into it so quickly, I barely even remember what else was on that list.

  Leo never mentioned he liked comics but maybe he does, and I just don’t know about it. I never knew him well enough: he was worse than a stranger to me, someone I thought I knew, but didn’t really—

  But they turn round, this blond person at the till, and it’s not Leo, after all. This person’s hair is different, lighter in shade and in volume, a sunlit cloud floating away from their head. They’re skinnier too.

  They smile at me.

  I realise that I’m staring, and I look away without smiling back. I end up feeling horribly rude, and I don’t know how to fix that, so I make a beeline for the shelf that I know Eden Recoiling is on. The newest issue from May is there. On the cover is Neff, short for Nefarious. Nefarious Warthorn, a male character that everyone in the fandom is obsessed with. He’s white, of course, and lean with a cruelly handsome face, and he wears a lot of patterned velvet suits. Nobody can tell whether he’s actually evil or not, despite his ridiculous name, and he has a dark and blurry past. Nearly everybody ships him with Hax, the oblivious daydreamer and inventor, a minor character and also a white guy, who perpetually looks like he’s just been deposited by a hurricane, with a dazed expression and straggly hair and grease-stained dungarees, one strap unbuckled.

  Eden Recoiling is set several decades after an apocalypse, when plagues of locusts destroyed much of the vegetation, and then monsters emerged from underground and killed most of humanity too. The heroes of the comics continue to fend off these monsters, while some of the few plants that remain have gained sentience and mobility.

  I roll my eyes at the cover, where Neff is apparently talking to a vine demon. Admittedly, I had a soft spot for him when I first started reading the comics, but then I stumbled into the fandom and realised that he’s all everyone wants to talk about, even if there are plenty of characters who deserve just as much attention, if not more.

  I take the April issue off the shelf just to look at it because it has Zaria Zero on the cover. I already have a copy of this; it’s on my desk at home, and I would just sigh at it whenever revision overwhelmed me. Zaria in an emerald jumpsuit, her beautiful dreadlocks streaked with purple, looking up at a night sky with a pink-hued full moon. I can’t help but stroke the cover. Zaria got me through so much. Could I have finished my A levels without her?

  I put it back on the shelf eventually and go to pay for the May issue.

  “Eden Recoiling! Oh my God, I love this series. I don’t know anybody who reads it!”

  I am not prepared for this interaction. Usually, when I’ve come here after school, I’ve been served by an older guy with a scruffy beard, who never really speaks to me. Occasionally, there was a different guy, beardless but with long dirt-brown hair, also older, also uninterested in conversation with me. The boy in front of me now is probably about my age, and he genuinely seems to want to talk.

  “Uh yeah! It’s great. I don’t know anybody who reads it, either.”

  Is that true? I don’t know anybody in real life who reads it, but there’s a small fandom online and, of course, Ada.

  The boy drums his fingers on Neff’s face on the cover. “Ah, Neff. He’s fit, isn’t he?” He says this not with the detached tone of somebody who’s only saying what he supposes my opinion would be, like I would expect a straight boy to say, “He’s fit” – not that I would ever really expect a straight boy to say that – but with personal conviction in the statement, an audible swoon in his voice.

  I blink at him, and he ducks his head, embarrassed, scanning the comic. “Yeah,” I say, “but I think Zaria’s the hottest.”

  He smiles at me now, and, unlike when I first entered the shop, I can actually return his smile, even if I’m still nervous.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “All the characters in this comic are extremely fit. It’s a real problem.”

  “Yeah, how dare they? Like the world is rebuilding itself after an apocalypse – there’s no way they can possibly look that good! It’s just so implausible. I can’t look half as put-together as them, and the world hasn’t even ended in our universe yet.”

  He laughs. “You’re right. Don’t they have higher priorities than fashion and personal grooming? Where are all these amazing outfits coming from?”

  I set my backpack on the counter, fishing for the right coins from my purse to give to him. As I’m sliding the comic into my backpack, he reaches out to touch the acrylic charms dangling from the zip. They clatter together in his hand. “Wow. Is this Zaria? And Mayumi?”

  I nod. I bought them from this fanartist that I really admire. The Neff charm sold out within a few days, but I looked last week and there were still Zaria and Mayumi charms left. Ugh. It upsets me that they don’t get nearly as much love as Neff does.

  I wish I could draw but I can’t. I can’t write fanfic, either. I’ve tried before but I’ve never managed to finish anything worth posting. The only thing I can do is leave enthusiastic comments on other people’s fanworks, and sometimes I make graphics: mood boards, aesthetics and gifs, what people call ‘edits’ on Tumblr.

  As Eden Recoiling doesn’t have a movie or TV adaptation, I can’t make gifs of it exactly, but I take snippets from other things with actors that could play characters like Zaria and Mayumi, and overlay them with quotes from the comic and pretty effects. Even if Zaria and Mayumi aren’t the most popular characters, I still tend to get over a hundred likes on my posts, which means they must be all right. Ada always gushes about my edits too, so I’m encouraged enough to keep making them.

  She has the same Zaria and Mayumi charms. I bought them for her, as a Christmas present.

  “I love these – they’re so cute! You must really be a huge fan. I’m Felix, by the way.”

  His expression is just as sunlit as his wispy white-gold hair. I look past him and see the piece of paper stuck to the wall: Staff Wanted.

  I make up my mind and reach into my bag for my CV.

  “I’m Elsie,” I say.

  As I leave the shop, I text Ada again, my stomach bubbling and my hands shaking. I’ve never given my CV to anyone before or met another ER fan in real life.

  A link appears. I open it up, and it’s a Tumblr post by a woman called Sara whose username I instantly recognise. She belongs to the contingent of Neff/Hax shippers; one of her novel-length fanfics is regularly hailed as a classic in the fandom. I’ve never seen an Eden Recoiling fanfic recommendation list that doesn’t mention at least one of her works. According to her bio, she’s in her late twenties and lives in California.

  In this post, she’s cosplaying Neff Warthorn in one of his customary velvet suits, hair neatly coiffed, and somebody else is cosplaying Hax, sporting a bedraggled look and sooty dungarees. Against a lush floral backdrop, Neff is down on one knee, proposing to Hax. And what a picture they make – Neff’s flawless composure in delicious juxtaposition to Hax’s unkempt delight. The caption reads: I proposed to Macy and she said yes! So of course we celebrated with a Neffax enGAYgement cosplay shoot!

  A ring emoji caps off the post.

  Sara and Macy are the dream. Two years ago, when Ada and I just started chatting, Sara was in the middle of writing the fanfic that propelled her to fame. Macy commented on every chapter.
She lives in Washington DC but she happened to be visiting California for a work trip, and she posted about it on her Tumblr. Sara, curious about this person whose comments were basically fuelling all her writing at this point, was looking at Macy’s Tumblr and spotted that post. They met up in LA and found that they got along better than they could ever have expected.

  Two years later, they’re still doing the long-distance thing, but Macy is planning to move to LA eventually, and now they’re engaged.

  Sara and Macy have a mini-fandom of their own, and Ada and I, even with our slight grudge against Neffax shippers, still count ourselves as part of it. They’re just adorable. They do Neffax cosplay shoots together when they can, and you can see their chemistry in every photo. Fans would often sigh, I want someone who looks at me the way Sara looks at Macy.

  I could be this for you, I think. You don’t have to do anything except ask me. Instead I write:

  I send it before I can even think about what I’m saying, and, with my heart in my throat, I add:

  I hate that I’m standing outside the Speech Balloon because I need to lie down right this second. I already can’t believe I even said the thing about us cosplaying Zaria/Mayumi together. But Ada’s message has murdered me.

  What can I possibly say to that?

  Not as cute as you dressed up as Zaria, I’m sure.

  We’d steal the spotlight from Saracy.

  Do you think we’d have people shipping us?

  What would our ship name be? Adelsie?

  Which of Mayumi’s outfits would you most want to see me in?

  I groan. I think about Ada wearing Zaria’s emerald jumpsuit. I groan some more.

  My heart goes somewhere that isn’t this earthly realm.

  I can’t take it any more. I decide that this is it. This summer – The Summer – is when I’ll tell her how I feel about her. I have to. I don’t know how – the thought of confessing my feelings, saying, “Hey, Ada, I have a crush on you,” out loud over a video call or even typing it in a text feels like it would kill me instantly, turn me into dust on the wind. But there must be a way. There has to be. After this summer, we’ll both be at university, and there’ll be so much work to do and so many new people. Ada will probably find someone within walking distance to fall in love with, someone who’s not an ocean away, and that’ll be the end of us. If I don’t do it this summer, I never will.

  Other people have done it before. Sara and Macy did it. I can do this.

  I rub my hands over my face and try to summon enough composure to at least reply.

  Mum and Po Po are sitting together at the dinner table.

  It’s startling how much skinnier my mum is after only two months. Two months – that’s the longest she’s ever been away from me. Seeing her now, it hits me how much I’ve missed her. Sure, there’s been a handful of nights while she’s been away in Hong Kong where I’ve cried myself to sleep, but I told myself that was only because I was stressed about my exams.

  Really it was the emptiness of the house, especially when Dad went over to Hong Kong too for a week to attend the funeral and left me all alone. It was me sitting at my desk with my revision notes, and, whenever I pressed pause on my studying playlist and took off my headphones, I could only hear quiet. No TV downstairs, or my parents having a conversation way too loudly with no concept of indoor voices.

  It was me waking up on the day of the funeral and thinking about putting on black for something I wasn’t going to, and then remembering that it wasn’t black but white that was the colour of mourning in Hong Kong. So I wore a white dress to my exam, and then when I got home I found it impossible to concentrate the rest of the day, until I ransacked my room and found, in a crumpled tote bag at the back of my wardrobe, the zippered red coin purse I used on trips to Hong Kong when I was little. It had an Octopus card in it and a handful of coins. Hong Kong dollars. I rolled the pretty, scalloped edge of a two-dollar coin between my fingers.

  The final thing in the purse was a key ring, with no keys attached. It was a flat, rectangular piece of white acrylic, in the style of the hand-painted signs that red minibuses in Hong Kong use to show their destination. There were Chinese characters written in red and above them an English translation in blue: Made in Hong Kong.

  Before he retired, Gung Gung was a minibus driver. He bought the key ring for me, a little piece of his history.

  I took it out into the garden and buried it. I felt silly afterwards, kneeling on the grass, still in my white dress, which I’d pulled up over my knees so as not to stain it. It had been so many years since I had seen Gung Gung, and what did I know about him, really? Nothing except the faintest memories. I wasn’t sad, not exactly, but I was filled with a kind of longing for all the knowledge that would allow me to be sad. What would life be like for me if, like the key ring, I had been made in Hong Kong? If I had grown up there? If Gung Gung had been a real part of my life, and not just the hazy outline of a man, seen from a distance?

  “Yan Yan,” my mum says, as I walk into the dining room. It’s a nickname for my full name – Yut Yan – that I hardly ever hear. “Where have you been?” All in Cantonese, since Po Po doesn’t speak English.

  Mum looks like she’s holding herself too tightly, back straight and arms rigid. I almost wish I could give her a hug, but people in my family don’t really do that. Her taut posture matches her mother’s. Sitting across the table from each other, they’re nearly mirror images.

  “Celebrating the end of A levels,” I reply in Cantonese, except the word A levels is in English.

  “How was the exam?”

  The actual exam seems like something that happened to somebody else a long time ago, or like one of the many dreams I’ve had about exams. “I think it was OK.”

  “It’s nearly four.” Mum actually taps her watch when she says this. “You agreed to be home by two, and you didn’t reply to any of my messages. Now greet your grandmother properly.”

  I nod at my grandmother. “Po Po.”

  “Yan Yan! So tall now, ah! Taller than your mum, aren’t you? And what a lovely dress!”

  I can’t help but preen a little. I wore one of my favourite dresses today to face my last exam. Not my favourite because that’s folded up and pushed to the back of one of the drawers under my bed. I haven’t put it on since Leo broke up with me because I can still picture the way he looked at me whenever I wore it. The one I’m wearing today I bought earlier this year with my Lunar New Year red envelope money. It’s a blue wrap dress with a daisy print.

  “Um, thanks! I like your blouse too, Po Po.”

  “You sound like a white person trying to speak Cantonese, ai yah. And what has your mother been feeding you? Too many potatoes.” She shakes her head and then immediately offers me an egg roll from a big square tin made of shiny red metal.

  An egg roll. Just one of the many snacks my gung gung used to press into my small hands, insisting that I eat more. I peer down through the golden cylinder and spy the pork floss stuffed in its centre. Pork floss! It’s been forever.

  I’m still full from lunch, but the egg roll is so tasty, crumbling sweet and buttery in my mouth, with the savoury touch of pork. It’s almost enough for me to forget that I apparently sound like a white person trying to speak Cantonese.

  “You like it?” Po Po says. “I remember it was your favourite.”

  “It’s delicious. Thanks, Po Po. How are you?”

  “The flight was so long,” she complains. “My body aches! Even more than usual. This house is very nice, though.”

  How strange that she’s never been here before, to the house where I’ve lived all my life.

  Now that I’m closer, I can see that Mum’s mug is actually empty, but she carries on gripping it with both hands. She starts on a long spiel about all the work that’s gone into the house over the years, the big bathroom renovated a couple years ago and what she’s thinking about doing with the kitchen next year.

  Po Po’s eyelids are drooping.


  “Po Po, why don’t you go for a nap?” I suggest. “You must be so tired after the flight.”

  “Oh, gwaai syun.” Good grandchild. A verbal pat on the head.

  Warmth flushes through me, a sunflower turning towards the sun. I’d forgotten the way those simple words could make me feel. If I’m just a white person speaking Cantonese, how can that phrase make me glow like that?

  “We were waiting for you to come home,” Mum says a tad sharply. She’s always been stricter than my dad, but she seems more intense than usual.

  She leads Po Po up to the guest bedroom.

  I wash up the mugs they left behind and go upstairs, to the sanctuary of my room.

  Being around my mum was like sitting next to someone who’s smoking a cigarette. Like I was inhaling all this second-hand smoke, but the smoke was her grief, thick and clouding the air.

  It was what I’d anticipated. Why I’d put off coming home for as long as possible. I just didn’t want to be in the same room as all that sadness. I wanted to be able to pretend that this was going to be the best summer of my life.

  I lie down on my bed and check my phone, clearing away the WhatsApp notifications from my mum asking me why I wasn’t home yet.

  I sling my arm over my eyes. Po Po is like a stranger to me, but she makes me feel like I’m a stranger in this house too, with her comment about my bad Cantonese.

  A memory floats up. One summer, when Joan and I were both in Hong Kong at the same time, we went to the Peak. The skyscrapers of Hong Kong glittered below us. “Isn’t it weird,” she said, “that when we’re here everyone looks like us, but I feel even more different than I do when we’re in England?”

  “It’s not weird. I know what you mean.”

  “We’re just like tourists here.”