I pointed to the banh mi picture. “Let’s get two. If you don’t finish all of yours, I’ll have the rest.”

He smiled at me, genuinely, and I wondered for a second what he would say if I let him in. If I told him the mess of thoughts I never shared with anyone because I was too scared how they would respond.

But I didn’t have a chance, because he was already ordering for us.

We sat across from each other in a four-person booth.

“What do you like about economics?” Andrew asked as he fiddled with his straw.

I stirred my matcha latte to make sure there were no undissolved pieces at the bottom. “I didn’t give you enough information in my application? This isn’t a real date; you don’t have to bother.”

He choked on his iced matcha. “Sorry, I was just curious,” he said a little sheepishly. “Forget I asked.”

I sighed. The more he knows, the better our mission will go, I reminded myself, though I much preferred typing out my answers to telling him face-to-face.

“I like thinking about how the world works and trying to find ways to make it better. When I interned at a genetics lab in high school and realized you could answer hard questions and think about problems for a living, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Finding the right subject took a little time and a lot of reading and taking different classes, but…” I shrugged. “When I knew, I knew.” I just wish everything else in life were as easy.

He nodded, and his faint smile and hooded eyes told me he understood what I was talking about. He had a dream, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t doing this. But instead of asking—I didn’t want to push his friend side too far—I just nodded back at him. It made sense why our interaction was so one-sided, but it was beginning to feel more like an interrogation than a conversation.

“Thanks for talking up economics to them,” I said.

He looked at me like he couldn’t wrap his head around my parents having a problem with that, but luckily, he kept those thoughts to himself. Though he did say, “You feel a lot of pressure from them, huh? That must be hard. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged.

“So they named you Jing as in…” He broke off and wrote the character in the air with perfect stroke order. Quite elegantly, I might add, forming each of the three “sun” characters that comprised “Jing” like he was painting.

“Yes, that’s me. Three suns. Shiny, bright, and so successful others can’t open their eyes.”

“Yikes.”

“I know.”

He pressed his lips together, hesitating, before saying, “Is that… why you always seem to be someone else? The shiny person you think your parents want?”