Chapters (77)
- Cover
- Dedication
- 1
- 2
- A Series of Screw-ups: The Chisaki Joan Katsuyama Story, Part I
- 3
- The History of My Beef with Brynn Foer-Preston
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- The History of the Katsuyama Family, Part I
- 8
- 9
- A Brief History of Chisaki Joan Katsuyama’s Romantic Learning Opportunities, Part I
- 10
- 11
- 12
- A Brief History of Chisaki Joan Katsuyama’s Romantic Learning Opportunities, Part II
- 13
- The History of the Katsuyama Family, Part II
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- The Complicated History of Chisaki Joan Katsuyama’s Imaginary Relationship with Her Nonexistent Dad
- 20
- 21
- 22
- A Brief History of Chisaki Joan Katsuyama’s Romantic Learning Opportunities, Part III
- 23
- 24
- 25
- A Brief, Backward History of the McAllister Family, as Paraphrased from the San Jose Mercury News
- 26
- 27
- 28
- A Quick and Eerily Relevant History of Asians in America
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- A Brief History of Chisaki Joan Katsuyama’s Romantic Learning Opportunities, Part IV
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- A Series of Screw-ups: The Chisaki Joan Katsuyama Story, Part II (Or Maybe It’s a Prequel)
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- The History of the Katsuyama Family, Part III
- 54
- A Note from the Author
- Index of Flowers and their Meanings
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Praise for This Time Will Be Different
- Books by Misa Sugiura
- Back Ad
- About the Publisher
“Okay, fine.” She has a point, I guess. Still. I don’t like that she’s keeping secrets from me about Brynn. I know it’s silly, but it feels like she’s defecting from Team Em & CJ to Team Em & Brynn.
We crunch on the bag of Kettle chips I brought to share while I try to process the situation and get us back on familiar ground. “Is it super awkward?”
“It was at first. Because, you know. Broken heart in the trash, and all.”
I nod sympathetically. This is better.
“But it’s like I said. She’s, I dunno . . .” Emily’s voice drifts off, and she looks out across the quad for a second. “I just think it might be time to move on, that’s all. Things are different now. I think maybe she’s changed.”
“Doubtful.”
“Changing, then.”
Still doubtful. “Emily. People don’t just change from bad to good like that. They are who they are.”
“But she wasn’t a bad person. She just did a bad job breaking up with me.”
“And she never spoke to you again until this year,” I remind her.
“Fine. But I still think you’re being kind of harsh.”
I consider telling her the Valentine’s Day story, but how do you tell your best friend about her own humiliation?
I’m licking potato chip salt off my fingers and wondering what I’m going to say when I see Owen across the quad with Will Taylor, another Weekly History Minute geek, which reminds me of the most recent Weekly History Minute video (sponsored by . . . the History Club!).
It seems that George Washington, despite leading the colonies to freedom from the British and swearing that he would never buy any more slaves after he became president, was kind of a dick about the human beings he already owned. Washington had a slave named Hercules who cooked for him, and Washington loved Hercules’s cooking so much that he brought him along to the capital to be the official presidential chef or whatever. But the capital was Philadelphia at the time, and Philadelphia had this law where any enslaved person who lived there for more than six months would automatically become free. So instead of allowing Hercules to become a free man, Washington arranged for him to go to Mount Vernon after six months and then return to Philadelphia, so he could get around the law and continue to keep Hercules enslaved.
Which, I think, serves my point about people not changing. I’m sure Washington was a stand-up guy in a lot of ways, but he said he was going to change his slave-owning ways and what did he do? He turned around and royally screwed Hercules and his family and all the rest of his slaves. Turned out he valued money and convenience more than freedom for all humans the whole time.