Ben reaches out and tugs on a strand of my chin-length blond bob. “For what it’s worth, I like your hair. And your blue eyes.” He rests his hand, the color of wet sand, next to mine. “Culture, heritage—you’re right, it’s about more than blood. It’s more than a DNA test. So is family. Nate’s my family, even though we don’t share a drop of blood. Know what I mean?”

I nod.

“You’ll figure it out,” he says. “You don’t have to label yourself. I don’t go around being all, I’m Japanese American. I’ve never been to Japan. I’m from Brooklyn. I’m just me. You’re you. Fuck labels and the people who insist on them. If a label society wants to give you is helpful to you, makes you feel connected to the world—gender, race, religion, nationality, whatever—cool. Use it. There can be awesome community there. But if it’s not, if the label makes you smaller inside: Fuck it. My lab partner refuses to share their gender with anyone. They told me that they’ve decided what they are, but it’s no one else’s business. They’re like, Fuck all your assumptions about what or who you think I am if I say I’m male, I’m female, or even nongendered. I’m just me, and that’s all you need to know. Hello, nice to meet you. You feel me?”

I cannot wipe the smile off my face. No one, no one has ever made so much sense to me in my whole life, not even Dad explaining his dark matter quintessence theory.

“Wow, Ben. WOW.”

He laughs. “If there’s one thing meditation has taught me, it’s that there’s a place beyond all that. It’s big and wide, and has no borders or labels or systems. It just is. That’s where I live.”

“I want to live there, too. But not everyone can. Even if they’d like to,” I say. “I mean, you said so yourself: People get weird around you when you say you meditate. About the Asian thing. You still have to deal with that.”

“But not on their terms. That’s my point.” Ben takes my mug and refills it, sets it down in front of me. “Homo sapiens, man.” He sighs. “We complicate the hell out of everything, huh?”

I laugh. “Yeah. But we figured out how to walk on the moon, so we’re not so bad.”

“Facts.”

I wrap my hands around the mug. Mom loved this kind—diner mugs. Thick. Indestructible. It was all we had at home.

“My dad was a meditator.”

I can picture him so clearly, sitting on his cushion in the corner of his office, eyes closed, that slight smile on his face. The sound of the bell when he was finished, pulsing through the whole house.