Noah, Not Seen, Not Invited

"I had a friend once," he said, so soft it came out as a whisper. He waited a long while, then, "We can call him Noah." He listened to the name leaving his mouth. 

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, Page 314

Hai rose and brushed himself off ... and made a beeline toward his bike. Fingers shaking, he zipped up his UPS jacket, the same jacket he had found hanging from a nail in Noah's barn the day of his funeral, having ridden his bike through mud-frosted roads to get there. Because Hai was not invited to see the coffin. Because to Noah's family he never existed. He was locked inside the head of the cold boy in the pine box.

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, page 319

The night he returned from New York ...  How could he have told her then that he had dropped out because Noah had overdosed, like nearly a dozen kids from his high school class, on a bad batch of fent-dope, and that a boy whose face she'd never seen had become the boy whose face he couldn't forget?

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, page 190

He went over to where his jacket hung and ran a finger down its arm, his attention lingering on the stitching. The jacket once belonged to his friend Noah, a boy he met working tobacco when he was fourteen, the crop blooming verdant along the river that carved East Gladness in half. His real name wasn't Noah, but that's what Hai started calling him a week after he died. Because why shouldn't the dead receive new names? Weren't they transformed, after all, into a kind of otherhood? Like many boys throughout the county, the wide green valley swallowed Noah up and spat out a tombstone the height of a shoebox at Cedar Hill, high enough to hold his name and nothing else. It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone. It'd been two years since Noah's pine box was hammered shut, and nearly every day since, the UPS jacket draped over Hai's bony shoulders, sometimes even in bed on especially cold nights, the leather torn in places and the U nearly peeled off. But skin is skin, he told himself, even when it's not yours.

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness, pages 19-20