Calvin doesn't text me all weekend.

I wake up on Monday to a text. Finally! Calvin must have been busy all weekend studying, but he eventually scraped together ten minutes before the work week started again for me — the girl who gave him her first kiss.

But it's not Calvin.

The disappointment feels like a punch in the gut.

Can it be that Calvin lost his phone? Why isn't the lone text on my phone from Calvin?

The text is from Lauren, my best friend from back home. She says that she wishes I were awake when she needed someone to talk to. Our friends were going to Fire Island this weekend, and she wishes that I could LIRR there with her. I miss her too. I am starting to wish I never left home.

Home.

It's such a funny word, isn't it?

Once my home was here in Shanghai on Huaihai Lu until my parents decided one day — when I was five or six — that they were going to move to Long Island, New York, for him to follow his literary career.

For years all I dreamed about was coming back here, to the friends and family I left behind. Yet, now that I was here, all I wanted was to go to Fire Island with my friends.

I take the subway to the hospital again that morning and wish I had someone to talk to about this Calvin situation. I wish I had anyone, really, except all my friends back home are asleep.

I should immerse myself in the culture here as Dr. Su suggested, but I can't bring myself to do it. I'm tired of trying to string sentences together while strangers look at me and wonder why I speak Shanghainese fluently but have the vocabulary of a six-year-old. I'm sick of people eventually hearing the accent under my Mandarin and whispering to each other huá qiáo.

At the hospital, I sign Fang up for his appointment under his alter-ego Ethan Wu. It's at 12:30, so I hope he doesn't throw a fit when it's not at 12:00 like he asked. It's not like I could go around telling everyone who he really is.

I did a rough google on Fang that weekend, but it's hard because I'm using my uncle's computer, and it has a Chinese web browser. Unfortunately, Google Translate of Mandarin websites only goes so far. I guess I've come away with the impression that just about every nimble young girl in this city wants to be the object of Fang's affection. He has a revolving door of girls to who he was rumored to have been linked too. He's never dated one for over a couple of months.

It's hard to say if he was really linked to them "romantically" at all. He is notoriously private, and in most cases, the female in question maintains that they were just friends. I wonder if they did that to avoid the vitriol his huge fanbase would throw in their direction if they knew their precious Yao Gege was taken.

God help the woman who ends up with him.

I think I stopped reading when I found a thread on a music message board dedicated to speculating about the smell of Fang's used socks. I don't care how famous any guy is. I would never want a whiff of the contents of his gym bag. Some of the girls rightly assessed that Fang has been missing in action since his performance on Chinese New Year. They incorrectly assessed that he's run off with his secret girlfriend and got married in the Maldives.

A girl called XiaoLiLi keeps reminding the other users to stop posting pictures of so-called "Fang" sightings in airports around the world. She insists that Fang never left china. I guess this one must have some inside information. But even if she knows something, she doesn't provide any answers as to why Fang hasn't been seen in public for months.

I'm surprised that Fang was able to keep the details of his accident private. I guess if Dr. Su was the unscrupulous sort, he could have made a pretty penny selling details of Fang's recovery to the tabloids. No, maybe Fang was right to trust his old-time family doctor. Except, now I also knew the truth about where Fang was. I'm also in this circle of trust now. Me, who isn't even bound by any vows of medical professionalism. Heck, was Dr. Su crazy in trusting me with this secret? And now Fang thinks I'm worthy of knowing his secret identity too?

The pressure is starting to bother me. It's not that I'm tempted to sell the boy out to the tabloids. No! It's not that. I'm nervous that this acupuncture thing will fail, and the crazed sock-sniffing fans will come to shoot this student-acupuncturist-in-training who mucked up the treatment of their ailing boy-god.

I jump as I go to meet Fang after my lunch hour. My phone buzzes with a new text. It's Calvin. Finally. My mouth is dry as I check the text. He better be apologizing for ghosting me all weekend.

"Hey."

"Hey, you," I immediately type in reply.

"Want to hang tonight?"

"Tonight?"

"Yeah, see you at eight?"