Heartache on the 5th Floor

There he was, on the football field surrounded by a slew of a mix of futball and basketball players. I knew he wasn't Chinese because he had thick brown sideburned and blue eyes. He looked French or Greek or some kind of exotic that I wasn't familiar with as a Mexican-American woman.

I had been living in China in a city of 14 million people that made Los Angeles look like a villiage. The days spent at school studying law were wearing me down in a place full of taxis, subways, 80-floor skyscrapers, and mayhem. I was looking to move to a tiny mountain village to switch majors and study ecology. And there he was, the most beautiful man I had seen in Asia. I stared at him from a distance, and he never knew I was there. His face stayed in my mind a few hours later on a bus ride back to the administration office when I decided to change universities and majors after all.

A week later, I was all settled into my new life. My long congested ride in a taxi to school had transformed into a pleasant bike ride along a botanical garden to my new office and lab where I worked, studied, and translated Chinese text into English. I made friends with college students from Sweden, Mongolia, Japan, and Ukraine. My new apartment was a small apartment on the fifth floor across the street from campus, and my new roommates were two Muslim girls named Giant (pronounced Gee-on) and Cheechee. During Ramadan, I saw them abstain from eating from sunrise until sunset. The fast lasted 30 days, and on the final day, there was a feast at a local mosque. I was invited to go, so I went.

Over the prayers and passing of plates filled with rice, mutton, flatbreads, and curries, that guy that I had seen on the field on my first day at the university sat across the table from me. He told me his friends called him "BSB" because he was a big fan of the Backstreet Boys. Although a Xin Jiang dialect and Mandarin were his native languages, his English was impeccable. Over the sharing of a meal, he told me he spent a lot of time speaking and studying it over the years. His parents were Russian and Chinese, so that is why he looked the way he did. We talked about school, religion, science, and America. He was even more handsome in person, and I was surprised when we started talking and how three hours has blazed by without notice. We instantly became friends, and needless to say, my attraction for him was on the verge of erupting like Mount St. Helen.

The next day he called me, and we talked for hours. Over time, we'd meet at school for lunch, or at night we'd cozy up on some small-town road for street food, and we'd go dancing at the local bar on the weekend. Although I talked to other boys and he was with other girls, we still spent Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years' together. I left the bustling overzealous city and found peace with a foreigner in a quaint little corner of the world. One night, we ended up kissing and in bed. Our relationship had morphed into something intimate and without acknowledgment. We never spoke about what we were doing or where we were heading as a couple or as friends.

"Annie, I like you so much," BSB said with the sun shining down on his face one early morning. "I think I'm falling in love with you."

I was startled and happy at the same time. Without revealing anything, I kissed BSB on the lips and told him, "You better hurry up, or you're going to be late to your game, Mr. Captain-of-the-futball-team."

And even though we weren't officially an item, it was the sweetest time I ever had with a boy. He blew me a kiss and walked out the door to a tournament to lead his team to victory. Only an hour later, he called me to tell me he had broken his leg in a match and he wanted to come to stay with me until his bone healed.

"That's a terrible idea," my Swedish friend named Max said, taking a sip of green tea from a porcelain teacup. "He's the captain of the football team, so you know he's got other girls. I know you guys have been casual or whatever, but this is serious. He is asking you if he can move in with you. I don't know about you, but I'd say 'no.'"

BSB did have other girls, only I never saw them, and we never talked about them. Because we had been friends, it never occurred to me that I might become jealous in the future. When we were together, we were together. Nobody in the world seemed to exist but the two of us. In fact, that day, while he was in the hospital, a woman stranger chatted him up. She asked him if he would be willing to teach her daughter English. He said his girlfriend had been helping him improve -me, and that he'd have to ask me if it was okay if they could come to my house for lessons. I often saw women talking to him. He was good-looking and people were attracted to him and I had been one of those girls to approach BSB myself. So what did I expect?

"It's fine," I said, slurping up a bowl of noodles. "We're friends, so it's not a big deal. It's not like he's my boyfriend or anything."

"I still think it's going to blow up in your face," Max said, setting down his teacup on a glass table. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

Against Max's advice, I let BSB move in with me. Because his leg was broken, he spent all of his time in my bed. I cooked for him, helped him shower, and somehow we still managed to have sex. Our days became routine, I'd go to school, and he'd chat with me during the day online. He'd help me cut up vegetables sitting at the kitchen table, I'd cook, we'd eat, we'd study together, and we'd sleep together.

Little by little, everyone at the school found out the captain of the futball team was staying at my house, so eventually, his friends started to visit him. He had many friends, so I knew people were coming over while I was working in my office or laboratory. And since he chatted with me most of the day, I never had any reason to not trust him.

Until one day, my mom had sent me an email telling me that she had wired me three hundred dollars for my birthday. I needed to go home and pick up my passport to withdraw the funds from the local bank, so in the middle of the day, I went home.

When I walked into my lobby, I noticed the elevator was on the 5th floor. Someone must be visiting BSB, I thought, as most people on the floor had already gone to school and work, and he was more than likely the only person at home during that time. The elevator slowly came down, and the door opened. I stepped in and rode it up. The walls were unpainted plywood, and there was a small television monitor set into the wall that played commercials for English lessons all day long. The announcer sounded like an auctioneer and had the perfect advertisement voice as he spoke rapid-fire Mandarin."一八八八九六九六九六," he said giving out the phone number.

The door opened, and I walked to my apartment door. I unlocked the door, walked in, shut the door, announced I was home, and walked into my bedroom where BSB and I slept and spent most of our time. Only when I opened the door, he wasn't alone. BSB was putting on his underwear with a used condom next to him on the bed, while that married woman from the hospital, with the daughter that wanted to speak English, stood by the window and zipped up her skirt. My heart sank five floors to the ground.

"Anni," BSB tried to explain god knows what.

I didn't stop, nor did I say anything. I just went to my dresser, grabbed my passport, and walked out.

Before I shut my bedroom door, I turned to him and told him, "Of all the people, you had to be the one who played me like a fiddle." My voice turned to ice, "You can't stay here anymore."

I took the elevator downstairs and saw the married woman in the lobby. I told her in fluent Mandarin, "Seems like English isn't the only thing you're teaching your daughter, whore."

BSB blew up my phone until I answered. He cried in person when I came back home later on that night, but it didn't matter. He was no longer my friend or casual sex buddy. I could have handled sex between people, but I couldn't tolerate the deceit. The buttering me with affection and poetic words only to have him roll around naked with someone else against my knowing. How many girls had he slept with while I was out of my house? Was he only chatting me up during the day to make sure I was at school, and I wouldn't catch him? All the good things I felt about him dried up and died in an instant.

Eventually, he moved out, and I started dating a Ukrainian boy. BSB tried to fight my new beau one day at school, and then a race riot broke out between the Muslim and Ukrainian boys because of it. It was like a great war of brothers cast in middle Asia with cellphones. Shakespeare couldn't make this stuff up.

"So," Max said, picking up egg fried rice down with a pair of chopsticks. "The captain of the futball team sleeps with you, breaks a bone, moves in with you, you cooked for him, washed his clothes, made him more fluent in English, and he still manages to sleep with a married woman, in your bed, with a broken leg no."

I nearly spit up my spicy eggplant laughing, "When you say it out loud, it's one of the most humiliating things I have ever heard in my life."

"I warned you," Max said, taking a bite of his oily food. "It is too bad that it might make a good story someday."

"Are you kidding me?" I said. "You think I'll ever admit this to anyone? I'm not telling a soul, much less an audience."

"I've read your writing, Anni," Max said, wiping his mouth with a red cloth napkin. "What we said tonight, over this fried fish and rice, has been far more interesting than anything you have ever written."

It took me a long time to let the sting of the embarrassment go away and have the guts to write about it. Even after all this time, I still cringe whenever I hear a Backstreet Boy song on the radio.