A half hour later, Matteo is sent packing. He’s gone before the kitchen staff clears the breakfast buffet.
Sophie almost cries as she hugs Mei-Hwa, and so do I.
In the afternoon, Sophie, uncharacteristically sober, bruised eye hidden by makeup and the shadow of a straw hat, joins my dance team in the rain-soaked back courtyard. Last night’s storm stripped the cypress trees bare of their foliage and like the trees, none of my dancers look happy with her arrival.
“Are you kidding?” Debra scowls under her blue hair and puts her mouth to my ear. “We’ve worked too hard to let her in to stab us in the back. Especially after what she did. Ever, think about it.”
I squeeze her hand, grateful for her concern, even if it’s misplaced. “It’ll be fine,” I whisper, then raise my voice. “Everybody! Let’s do a run-through.”
My dancers are gorgeous in their spandex, T-shirts, shorts, and leggings, fifteen strong and totally different body types all moving to the rhythm. Sophie sits on a bench and watches critically. For what, I’m not sure. She doesn’t seem inclined to dance with us. I don’t know how to include her, though I want to find a way, and then I’m distracted by the dance itself. As it progresses, that gap—the thing I’m missing—becomes more apparent to me. Like a hole in a parachute keeping the performance from taking its proper shape.
“You’re not smiling, Ever,” Laura says when we finish. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry. That missing tent pole . . .”
“I see it, too.” Lena adjusts her red headband. “Why don’t you do a solo? Something that moves. Covers the stage. We’ll form up around you.”
“I’m not allowed—”
“The Dragon doesn’t have to know,” Debra says. “Not until you walk onstage and by then, it’ll be too late. You’re our best dancer. If we’re going to nail this performance, you need to be in it. You know it, too.”
The Dragon did send Matteo packing, but her help today doesn’t make me immune to her fire. I imagine the Dragon rushing the stage, seizing me by my collar: Stop the music! I imagine the Dragon not rushing the stage, me dancing before those guys who’ve ogled my naked photo. My skin crawls backward.
But Debra’s right.
“We can’t let her find out,” I say. The girls swear on it.
“We have to be extra careful about practice.”
“We will.”
I start by improvising around them, weaving in and out of the three groups. I tug on Debra’s ribbons, cut through the spaces, try out some of my new kung fu–inspired steps. The pleasure of doing this thing I love, surrounded by their energy, finally eclipses my worries.
“It’s an improvement,” I concede, reaching for my water bottle. “It ties the parts together. But it’s still missing something—energy, gravitas.”
“You need a drummer.” Sophie speaks up for the first time. “I’ll ask Spencer. He’s in the dragon drums elective. Also, what are you doing for costumes?”
“I figured we’d find dresses in the night market.”
“I’d recommend blue, green, and orange for the three groups so the audience can follow along better. Red or white for Ever to stand out. My aunt has a great tailor in Taipei who’s really reasonable—I’ll take charge. And one more thing. Your talent’s wasted just doing the Chien Tan show. Our auditorium’s all folding chairs and old curtains. I’ll talk to Uncle Ted. The National Theater sometimes needs opening numbers.”
I choke on water. “The National Theater?”
“So we’d do two performances?” Some of Debra’s animosity fades.
“One for Chien Tan. One for Taipei.” Sophie smiles shyly—thrilled and awed, as if she’s walked into a stadium and caught a flyball.
I return her smile. Then I back up to see the group better. “All right, let’s do another run—”
I bump into a firm body behind me. A warm arm. All eyes shift over my shoulder and widen.
I know who he is before I turn around.
I’d forgotten how beautiful he is in the flesh, even with his travel-rumpled jet-black hair and wrinkled olive shirt. He’s slung his backpack on his shoulder, holding it there with a muscled arm. His earbuds are twisted together and draped in a loop over his neck.
His amber eyes meet mine, a sadness in them mixed with a newer light.
“Rick,” I croak. “You’re back.”
29
I have to hold back from flinging myself at him. “I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”
“I just got in.” His eyes travel over my team. “What are you doing?”
My face aches from smiling. My heart thumps with a million questions. “A dance. For the talent show.”
“Ever choreographed it,” Laura says.
“No kidding?”
“It was your idea,” I say.
“I’m going to drop off my stuff.” He hitches his backpack higher. Runs a hand through his hair, uncharacteristically nervous. “Will you—come by when you’re done?”
The girls exchange glances and I pick up a fan off the ground, wanting to hide my face before I give away how nervous he’s made me.
I fight to keep my voice casual. “We’re still rehearsing. I’ll be by in fifteen minutes.”
Seven minutes later, I knock on Rick’s door. The door opens with a waft of steam. Rick in blue plaid boxers peers out, a white towel over his bare shoulder, hair damp and slick from his shower. My eyes slide down his tanned chest to his muscled midriff—oh my—and shoot back to his amber eyes.
“Sorry,” I blurt, flustered. “I couldn’t focus. Came earlier.”
He’s as embarrassed as I am. “No problem. Let me change.”
I catch his freshly showered scent as his door closes behind me. I turn my back and face the wood of his door, braid my fingers together. He’s back. Of course he’s back. He said he’d be. He said he’d talk to me then.
“Why did you go to Hong Kong?” I blurt at his wall. “Why were you gone so long? Was something wrong?”
“Yes and no. All set.” His striped T-shirt eases my ability to look at him.
“Was Jenna with you?”
He blinks, surprised. “You heard about that?”
“Xavier told me.”
Rick frowns. “He must have heard me on the phone with her. Here.” He slips a stack of photos into my hand, modestly facedown. “I cleared out the guys’ lounge but then everything happened and I didn’t get a chance to get these to you. I’m sorry. I should have called to let you know.”
“Oh—” My face flames. The edges cut into my palm as I thumb through them—four—then shove them out of sight into my pocket. I’m not sure which is worse—that he’s seen all of me, shoulders to toes, or that he’s seen all of me and is as indifferent as if I were the Statue of Liberty. My eyes fasten to his knees. “I never meant for them to get out.”
“I figured. You okay? Marc told you, right?”
“Oh, Marc.” A laugh bursts from my lips. “He told me just enough to make me paranoid.” I clamp my mouth shut—I hadn’t meant to admit that. I still can’t look at him.
Until he puts his hand under my chin, and lifts my head. In his face, I don’t see judgment. Just concern. And a question.
Then he releases me. He picks up his cap and puts it on his head. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk. There’s a favorite place of mine across the river.”
My chin still burns from his touch. “I’m not allowed off campus.”
Rick glances out his window into the courtyard below. “I’ll get you out.”
Fan-Fan, the guard in the booth at the top of the driveway, merely winks at Rick as we pass. How easy it must be to walk through life when you’re Rick Woo. But I’m no longer irritated. Reputation matters. It can make your life easier or harder. Rick’s earned his the good old-fashioned way.
The sun burns overhead as we cross several streets rushing with honking cars and mopeds, and an overpass over the Keelung River. I fill Rick in on losing Odette, the new da
nce with my girls, my parents’ threat to bring me home, and he goes from pissed at Sophie to sober when I tell him about Matteo.
“If he were still here, he’d have to answer to me.” Rick yanks me out of the path of an oncoming scooter. “My family has the worst track record. Half my aunts and uncles have had their marriages blow up because someone cheated or beat on someone. Including my parents. Soph’s, too. Sometimes I wonder if this is how Sophie and I ended up where we did.”
“Where you did? What do you mean?”
He glances away. “I’ll tell you when we get to where we’re going.” The traffic thins as he leads me down a sidewalk toward a walled complex, fronted by a Taiwanese-style gate of dark wood beams hung with red paper globes. The four corners of its roof flare upward in the traditional swallowtail style, muted and elegant in dark brown and cream. “Thanks for taking care of Sophie. I’m glad you”—he hesitates—“and Xavier . . . were there.”
Xavier. My stomach cinches. Rick seems to be waiting for a response, but I move past him and step over the threshold into the complex.
Carved-wood doors slide open to sunlit grounds like none I’ve ever seen: a jagged rock labyrinth, arched bridges of redbrick layered on gray stones, a maze of curvy white walls, inset with glassless windows shaped like flowers, pomegranates, clouds, even butterflies. A long, low brick mansion lies across the courtyard, with several smaller buildings to the right. A few families stroll the grassy knoll.
“I didn’t even know this place was here,” I say, awed.
“It’s Lin An Tai. It’s the former residence of an old family named Lin, from the 1700s. I came here when I was a kid.” Rick moves toward an asymmetric archway curved like the leg of a harpsichord. “It felt like falling into a Chinese Narnia.”
“Oh, it totally is!” It’s so beautiful, it makes me want to dance.
“I’ve been coming here to think. It’s kind of my secret place.”
I follow him over brick walkways and through circular archways, emerging onto a pond floating with white flowers and lily pads, orange carp swimming beneath. Two pavilions, crowned by rusty-brown pagoda roofs, sit on adjacent shorelines. We move into one and I brace against the wooden railing, my feet moving gently to the music of insects, the gurgle of a distant waterfall. Rick stands beside me. Our elbows connect and neither of us pulls away.
“Why were you fighting with Xavier?” I ask finally.
He drops a pebble into the pond, making ripples that run into the lily pads. A second pebble follows the first. Followed by a third. I wonder how many pebbles it would take to fill this pond, with the things he’s deciding not to say.
“First day of Chien Tan, David was running his mouth about girls in the yearbook, and Xavier made it known he was targeting you. In a total asshole way.” I feel a stab of anxiousness—I don’t want to know what Xavier the Player said that made Rick warn me off him, even if that’s no longer how I see Xavier.
“I’d told him to stay away from you. After Aunty Claire freaked out about you and him, I went looking for him, but he’d left already, and then I came back to campus and found your pictures everywhere, and when I ran into him—I—I assumed. Then I guess I lost it.”
My feet have stilled, rooting themselves to the floorboards.
“But Xavier and I—talked. At the nurse’s. I saw one of his drawings of you. By accident. And I realized he was your artist. Maybe he was just putting on a show for the guys before. And I guess you probably knew he honestly liked you and you could take care of yourself. And that—” He pauses. “Makes me think better of him.”
I can’t help cringing as I imagine the conversation: Rick holding an ice pack to Xavier’s nose. Checking out Xavier for me, like the big brother he promised to be.
“You shouldn’t have told Aunty Claire we were pretending,” I blurt. “You ruined everything.”
“I wasn’t about to let the family think things about you that weren’t true.” He crosses his arms, his brows kneading into a stubborn line. “You were doing me a favor. I was the one too chicken to stand up to them in the first place.”
There’s truth in that. And I’m relieved Aunty Claire knows I wasn’t cheating on Rick.
“But she must think I cheated on Sophie.”
“Sophie ignored Xavier all weekend.” He frowns. “Anyways, you won over Fannie. She was disappointed you didn’t take her pet frog with you.”
“Her pet?” The ribbiting terror in my shower was a gift.
“But you made it better, too,” he continues. “It took standing up for you for me to realize what I wasn’t doing for Jenna. What I wasn’t willing to do for Jenna. How wrong that was.” A fourth pebble follows the others to its watery grave.
“Rick, what happened in Hong Kong?”
His forehead creases into lines. Then he starts from the pavilion, floorboards creaking under his weight. A dragonfly shoots over the grass after him, quick darting movements from flower to flower. I follow him to the Qing-style mansion and through sliding paneled doors into an inner courtyard, where sunlight spills over scalloped eaves onto a square of dirt floor. More carved, paneled doors on three sides slide open to bedrooms displaying historical Chinese furniture. The scents of parched grass and oiled wood float on the wind, but despite the peaceful setting, my mind whirs like the leaves sweeping ahead of us.
Rick tugs me down onto a bench. “All these years, I’ve stomped all over Jenna. We’ve done everything I wanted, never anything she wanted.”
Honestly, it’s what I’d have expected from Boy Wonder, before I met him.
“Did you ask her what she wanted?”
“I tried. She never wanted anything. And me—I guess I want the world.”
“And you go for it. And I—” I swallow my pride. “I admire that about you.”
“I told you Jenna needs certainty. Stability. I was always off doing crazy things, in her eyes—traveling for games, competitions, championships. Coming here all summer. I made her so nervous and I felt so guilty. All the time.”
I’d worried he’d break Jenna. Is he saying he did?
“A year ago, I tried to end things. I told her that in the long run, we’d be better, stronger people apart than together. We were in her kitchen. Cutting a loaf of bread we’d picked up. And she—” He rubs his thumb over those white scars inside his fingers. “She started crying and saying she couldn’t anymore, couldn’t take her parents, school, life, without me. She grabbed the knife and—”
Oh, no. No.
“I grabbed hold.” He opens his palm to sunlight. Under its harsh yellow rays, the four inch-long scars line up in their row.
“Oh, Rick.” I press my fingertips to them. Stiff, dense tissue. Cut to bone. I remember how easily he’d pulled the cupcake guy off me at the club. Now I imagine him, terrified, hanging on to the blade with all his strength.
“So you stayed with her.”
“I couldn’t take the chance she’d eventually go through with it.”
“But what if she was just—”
“Manipulating me?”
I hate that word. “What if she was just saying it?”
“This probably sounds like I have Stockholm syndrome, but she’s not a manipulative person. Not intentionally. She was horrified when I got these.” He curls his fingers over the scars. “She’s never forgiven herself—just sewed on another big stone to her suit of failures. Part of me thinks maybe she did it because I was there and she knew I’d stop her. Either way, I couldn’t risk leaving her.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone? Not even her parents?”
He hangs his head. “She made me swear. I told everyone it was an accident. We were chopping vegetables. The knife fell and I stupidly grabbed it.”
What they’ve gone through—I can’t seem to grasp it. How did she feel in that moment that the line was crossed? How did Rick? Guilt swells in my throat. Rick’s whole family—Sophie, even me—have been hating on Jenna, who needs help more than anything. I put a hand on his
arm. “Were you angry?”
“More terrified. I stayed, and things got better and she even started volunteering at that horse camp. After a while, in my mind, we were a done deal. We grew up together. We’d been together forever and weirdly enough, the only thing we didn’t do was sleep together. Maybe it’s the one thing I did right. Even though I thought—I know this sounds insane—but I thought I was going to marry her.”
I pull free. “Oh my God, what is with your family? Rick, you’re eighteen.”
“And I’ve been taking care of my mom and sister since I was fourteen. I opened a bank account before I could drive. I’m the eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son. You know the last thing my dad said when he left us? He said, ‘You’ll have to be the man of the house now.’ I hated him for it. For abandoning my mom when her RA flared out of control and the going got tough. But I took what he said to heart.
“And I couldn’t be like him. Not with Jenna—I couldn’t do that to her.”
I can’t believe how trapped he’s been—is—not only by Jenna, but by his own principles, his impossibly high standards for himself, and his integrity. That night on the balcony under the crescent moon—he’d been worried about her.
“This is why you’re transferring to Williams.”
Rick plucks a long blade of grass. Twists it around his finger. The greeny scent of the crushed stem wafts on an uptick of wind.
“Every time I’ve come here on this trip, I wanted to show this place to you. Because you reminded me of my little sister, I told myself. You getting into one crazy situation after another with me. And out again.” His entire finger is a grass tube. He releases the blade, which springs free in a soft coil. “That night on the balcony, when we climbed down the pipe, I—I almost kissed you. I’m sorry I was so rude then—I was mad at myself. I told myself it was because you were so pretty, and I was just a typical asshole.
“But at my aunt’s, I finally admitted there was more to it than that. I called Jenna and told her we needed to break up.” His eyes go strangely blank, as if he’s buried away all other feelings trying to bury this one. He pulls out his phone and shows me a black-and-white photo of a robin flat on the earth. “She texted me this overnight.”
Loveboat, Taipei Page 23