This Time It’s Real

The next week, I’m in math class when the interview goes up.

Ms. Sui is out today. We’ve been left without a sub and instructed to use the hour as a study hall, so everyone around me is already scrolling through their socials, a tab of our algebra questions left open in the corner just for show. Then there’s a small flurry of activity: quiet, half-muffled giggles, chairs squeaking as friends turn from their desks to watch, curious eyes swiveling from their screens to me.

And the empty seat beside me.

A now-familiar pang fills my gut. Caz has been absent from school all week. Busy shooting again.

Although, as Savannah sets her laptop on the teacher’s desk, in clear view of the whole classroom, and starts playing that dramatic reenactment Caz and I did, I’m not so sure this isn’t a good thing.

“Oh my god. Look at you two,” Nadia says, grinning over at me while the others giggle.

I don’t really want to, the same way you wouldn’t want to scratch at an open wound, but the video volume’s now playing too loud for me to ignore, my own stilted voice drifting toward me:

“I should be asking you that, you fool …”

Resisting every impulse to cringe, I look up.

Whoever edited our interview has gone through the trouble of placing my clip with Caz beside a reference clip from the original drama he starred in. And as the video plays on, the camera zooming in on Caz’s face while he makes his famous confession, I can’t help noticing a difference between the two versions. I mean, there’s obviously a difference; the original actress is far more beautiful and natural on-screen than I’ll ever be, and with the peach blossoms unfurling around them in the background and their long, blood-splattered, traditional-styled robes, their scene together looks like something from an epic tragedy.

But the look in Caz’s eyes is somehow different too.

Because when Caz tells the actress how he waited for her, how he missed her, how he refuses to lose her again, his acting is impeccable, wholly convincing. Yet it’s only that—acting. When he murmurs those same lines to me, however, the raw, piercing intensity of his gaze is undeniably real.

What was it that Daiki had teased us for on Caz’s birthday?

We can see it in your eyes …

I grip the edge of my desk, a startled breath rattling in my throat. Caz had told me, of course. Both the day we kissed, and the day in the rain, and again after the interview. But maybe, up until this very instant—with the evidence playing right before my eyes, the camera forcing me to see myself and him through its objective lens—I’d never truly trusted that he could mean it. That Caz Song could feel something real for me. That there isn’t something fundamentally broken about me, something that will inevitably drive him away.

And now the only identifiable thought in my head is:

Shit.

Shit. I’ve messed up. Miscalculated. The whole time I’ve been trying to protect myself from getting hurt … I’ve hurt him too. More than I could’ve possibly imagined. I have to talk to him, set things right. Ask for one more chance.

I start to rise to my feet, but at the front of the classroom, Savannah lurches back first. “Oh my god,” she whispers, staring at something on her laptop. Her widened eyes cut to me, and confusion rolls through my gut, merging with something sour like dread. “Um, Eliza—I think you should … I don’t …”

The interview clip has ended now, but a notification has popped up. There’s a new article about Caz waiting, posted only a few minutes ago. I peer closer, heart speeding, and the words leap out at me in fragments, sinking in like shards of glass:

Young actor Caz Song … while filming highly anticipated xianxia drama … accident on set … injuries unknown … Lijia Hospital … waiting for comment—

I go completely still.

Still as death.

What? I want to say, but the word never leaves my mouth. You’re joking, but that doesn’t make it out either. I want to throw up. My heart is self-cannibalizing, I swear, shrinking smaller, shrinking into nothing, and I can’t do anything except stand there. Suck in breath after breath after breath until I manage to unhook my voice from my throat.

Even then, it comes out as a weak rasp. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”

“It says something about a broken wire,” Savannah says, reading fast, and the temperature in the classroom seems to plummet a hundred degrees. Everyone is frozen beside me. “Or the equipment when they were shooting. Some kind of malfunction—”

And I’m officially panicking. Hyperventilating. My mind fogged with white.

I think of Caz and the pale scar running down his forearm and those cursed, worn-down wires that should’ve been replaced months ago. It already happened to him once. It could always happen again.

“I’ll call him,” I croak, because that small, hopeful, foolish part of me is still praying this is all a misunderstanding. Maybe he wasn’t even shooting today. Maybe he wrapped up his scene early and left before the accident.

Maybe.

Please.

The entire class stays silent as I scroll through my contacts, find Caz’s number on my first try. It’s so familiar I almost have it memorized by now. Then I click the call button and put it on loudspeaker and it rings—

And rings.

My heart lurches to my throat in beat with every new, unanswered sound of the dial. I feel nauseated. Faint. If I close my eyes I can imagine Caz’s voice on the phone now, smooth and low and slightly confused as to why I’m calling him in the first place, and for a brief moment when the ringing stops, I swear it’s him.

But all that comes through is his voicemail.

I stuff my phone away and look up, will myself not to see the pity swimming in Savannah’s eyes, the open concern laid out on Nadia’s face. “If a teacher asks, just tell them I had to leave.”

“Wait. Where are you going?”

It’s such an absurd question that I almost burst into hysterical laughter. Where else could I go? Where else, but to him? It doesn’t matter that he’s more or less rejected me already, that this could very well end badly. I just need to see him, to be there for him, confirm for myself that he’s okay. No matter how much it hurts.

“The hospital,” I call over my shoulder, already twisting away, punching Li Shushu’s number into my phone with trembling fingers.

Then I run—

But this time, I’m not running away.

•    •    •

The drive to Lijia Hospital takes an eternity, every passing minute dragging like a knife across my skin.

But somehow, before I can lose my mind or my heart can explode, the sign for Lijia Hospital comes into view. It looks brand-new, the blue paint gleaming.

I don’t wait for Li Shushu to park the car properly before I run out, yelling back over my shoulder for him to drive home without me, because if Caz is safe, then we can talk and figure out a way back to the compound ourselves, and if he’s not, well—

I smother the thought to death and run faster.

The air smells different the second I burst into the hospital. Like antiseptics and lemon pine to cover up something nasty and the sharp, metallic tang of stainless steel or maybe just old blood. Like desperation and sickness.

And now comes the tricky part—

I have no idea where Caz’s room is.

If I simply walk up to a receptionist and ask for Caz Song’s room number, they’ll most likely dismiss me as a fan, or maybe a stalker. They might even kick me out.

Which means I have to figure out where he is myself. It’s manageable—there are only four levels in the hospital. That’s what the signs beside the main staircase say. And since the first floor is mainly for administrative purposes and the second floor is the labor ward, I can start on the third floor, search around from there …

No sooner than the vague plan forms in my head, I’m already moving, taking the stairs two at a time.

The third floor opens up into a vast, white-walled room lined with uncomfortable-looking plastic seats. Colorless afternoon light drifts in through the windows. There are more doctors up here, and patients too: a sniffling child hooked to an IV, a too-big military coat resting around his skinny shoulders; a weary mother fumbling through her purse for receipts, medical details.

I check every face I pass, every curtained room on both ends of the hall. I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for. Maybe Caz himself, alive and well, or a cast member, or—

Someone.

Anyone.

Even just one tiny sign that he’s all right.

My heart hammers against my ribs as I move deeper in, searching and finding nothing. My skin buzzes, a new tide of panic rushing to shore.

Then I spot a familiar figure waiting outside one of the closed rooms—broad jaw and cropped hair and even broader shoulders, half his body still covered in plates of fake armor.

Mingri.

Relief crashes through my chest, but it’s cut short by the look on his face.

His lips are set in a hard, tired line, his eyes vacant and rimmed with red. As I stare, he wipes his face roughly with one hand. Is he … crying?

No.

My footsteps falter, and suddenly I want to turn right back around. Get out of here. Go back to not knowing. But he’s already seen me.

“Eliza?” Mingri rubs his eyes one last time and straightens, walks over slowly, exhaustion written all over his body. Exhaustion, or … grief. His voice is hushed. “What are you doing here?”

“I …” There’s something stuck in my throat, something painful. I try to clear it. “Where’s Caz?”

His features pinch, and I know—even before he says the words—I know. I steel myself with every cell in my body, but it’s still not enough to stomach what he says next, in Mandarin:

“Ta bu zai.”

I do a quick translation in my head—he isn’t here—and everything stops. My ears ring. Ring on and on and on like an unanswered call before the static turns to silence. I think I collapse to the ground, because next thing I know my knees are bruising against the gray tiles, the cold of the floor creeping into my skin, into my bones, sinking its sharp teeth into everything. Mingri moves forward with hands outstretched, starts to say something else, but I can’t hear him. Can’t even think.

Not here. Not anymore.

Dead.

A nail deep in my chest, twisting. That’s what it feels like, and I don’t want to feel this, but when did that ever stop anything? It’s over. All of it. And I never even got the chance to tell him how I really felt, never even got to give him a real apology. I breathe in and out and the world is still moving, it must be, but everything is frozen inside me. I had always feared Caz Song would break my heart, but this—

This is the kind of heartbreak you never recover from.