by Shirley Marr
Josh has a good look at them and then he offers a high five to Kevin. Kevin smacks his palm back with so much enthusiasm that Josh shakes his hand afterward in pain. Kevin boasts that his drawings are much better than Josh’s and that he’s going to be a famous artist when he grows up. Ms. Jardine tells him that everyone can be good in their own way. Then he points to one of your sketches and says that it is “crap.” Ms. Jardine tells him not to use that word and to apologize, but he doesn’t.
You are exasperated by him. But then you think about what Ms. Jardine would do. She would never give up on Kevin, and you decide you won’t either. You know hardly anything about him and, like you, he could be acting this way because he’s not so happy. You think about the word Ailing used—“misfit.” Somehow the word makes you belong. You and Kevin and Josh are just three people who don’t quite fit in, but why should you have to? Your heart grows.
“At the end of the term,” says Ms. Jardine, “we are going to have a party of sorts. I’m going to bring some sweets and invite your families. You will all present your creations on a little stage I’m going to make and read them out loud.”
You wonder if Ms. Jardine is going to address the invitation to both Ma Ma and Ba Ba. You want to tell her she doesn’t have to worry about inviting Ba Ba, and you start to tremble. You reach into your pocket to hold on to the coin, and it helps with the shakes.
“I won’t be able to do it,” growls Kevin, throwing his colored pencil down. “I’m too stupid.”
You secretly feel the same way. You look down at the story you are creating and you feel shy and anxious that your voice will retreat and that this time it won’t come back.
“Don’t ever say that about yourself,” replies Ms. Jardine. “Look, if someone took me to a completely foreign country today and threw me out onto the street, how do you think I’d do trying to speak the language and understand the customs?”
“You’d be okay. You’re an adult,” Kevin points out.
“I reckon I’d starve to death! That’s if I didn’t get thrown in jail first for my unorthodox views!” Ms. Jardine laughs. “I’m confident that all of you will ace the end-of-term assignments. None of you are ‘stupid’—look at what you’ve created so far. I couldn’t be more proud.”
Ms. Jardine always makes everything better. But when you close your eyes, you see an empty chair in the audience in front of you where your mother should be.
There is a tap on your shoulder, and Josh shows you the olive tree he is drawing.
“I was too scared before to draw anything from my old home. I didn’t think anyone would be interested anyway. But now I think it’s important. Thank you.” Josh takes something out of his backpack and slides it in front of you. It is a jar of home-preserved olives.
“These are from my mom. They are delicious, although if you haven’t grown up eating them, they might taste strange at first. But they are much better than raw!”
“Thank you,” you whisper.
“This is just a small sample. We preserve them in huge bottles at home, so if you grow fond of them, I can give you one of those!”
You smile. It takes both your hands to lift up the jar. You wonder about the size of the huge bottles.
Then Kevin spoils the moment by grabbing the jar away from you and giving it a violent shake.
“Yuck,” he says loudly. “What is this foreign food?”
Ms. Jardine asks him to give it back to you and not to say what he said again. She tries asking Josh to explain about the olives, asking you what you think of them, but Kevin marches off into a corner, folds his arms, and refuses to listen. You do get the jar back, though.
Ms. Jardine talks to him quietly and convinces him to come sit back down.
Kevin is in too much of a mood to walk with you back to class, so you walk with Josh instead while Kevin skulks in the background and follows. You carry your jar of olives close to your chest, and you both stop at the undercover assembly area to look at a production an older class is working on.
There are some kids up on the raised concrete area that serves as a stage. They are practicing their parts, dressed as a princess and a knight in love, and there’s a moon whose only role is to become a crescent and turn back to a full moon again, behind all the drama at the forefront. There are two poor kids who play the front and the back ends of the same horse.
Others are busy painting and making backdrops.
Then there is one kid holding an all-too-familiar yellow flyer. He’s trying to show it to his classmates.
“Look what my big brother gave me! He says I can join his gang once I’m older. He’s going to get me a pair of combat boots just like his.”
Most of them ignore him. Others wrinkle up their faces. Some of them laugh. You grab Josh’s arm as a warning that you should leave. But it is too late, the boy on stage has already seen you both.
“See this? I think this is you.” He walks right up to you and holds the leaflet to your face so that it touches your nose. You look away and refuse to engage. This big kid is a whole head taller than you. Your heart is beating blood into your ears and you want to get away. But here you are, frozen to the spot.
“Leave her alone,” Josh manages to mumble. The kid calls Josh something you don’t understand, but it makes Josh’s face open up like a wound. The kid leaves and you both start walking away, as calmly as you can. But then he comes back with a friend. The friend grins and aims a water pistol at Josh’s face. Josh has no other option but to stand there and let the water hit his glasses.
That’s when you decide to drop the jar of olives. It lands on the first kid’s foot with a satisfying thud, and it must have hurt, as he’s jumping around and swearing. This draws everyone’s attention. Now you’re in big trouble. The cracked jar rolls off. There are olives all over the ground. You don’t think you can run; you don’t think you can scream, either. The boy moves a little closer. You prepare to learn a lesson you don’t think is fair and shut your eyes.
Until someone comes flying toward the bully, and suddenly there is a fight going on. It’s Kevin. You had forgotten about Kevin. He’s younger than the other kid, but since he’s also a whole head taller than you, he’s giving it a really good go. Everyone else is yelling or watching stunned, but someone has the good sense to call for a teacher.
* * *
After the last school bell has rung for the day, you see Kevin back at the strangely cheerful punishment wall, this time with an impressive bruise on his face. You press yourself against the wall next to him.
“You didn’t have to do that,” you say to him.
“Are you trying to say that you’re a girl who doesn’t need a boy to protect her?” Kevin yells at you. “Well, I was only trying to help a friend. That is all!”
“Thank you. You are my friend too,” you say.
Kevin has opened his mouth, ready to shout something else, before he realizes what you have said.
“You called me a friend first,” you point out.
“Yeah,” he says, and his jaw relaxes so much that the rest of the sentence becomes a set of mumbles. You think he is suggesting that you both take off and leave the school behind. It is exactly how you feel, but instead you say to him:
“You cannot run away from your problems.” You look at him clearly in the eye. “You must stay and learn and win.”
He seems to comprehend what you are trying to say, and the anger in his eyes flickers a little less angrily.
The door to the principal’s office opens, and the kid Kevin fought comes out. He sees the two of you and makes a symbol with his hand and walks off. It is Kevin’s turn to go inside. You don’t know if the principal is a good or a bad guy; on your side or not on your side. These days your whole world has been clearly split into two.
CHAPTER NINETEEN Medicine
You and Josh wait for Kevin at the utility pole. You tell Josh that you are sorry about the jar of olives. He jokingly tells you not to worry because his mother has five hundr
ed more jars at home. You feel that in saying so, he is suggesting that it is friendship that is not so easily replaceable. Josh is nervous and ill at ease with himself as he picks at the little bits of yellow paper on the pole with his thumbnail. You both shiver against the cold that has never felt so bitter.
You see him first, that figure hunched against the world with his hands in his pockets. You want to know what the principal said to him, eager to know if everything is all right, but he is reluctant to talk. You tell him that there is a place he needs to be right now. You say “please.”
“What place?”
You tell him “the glasshouse.”
“Are you kidding?” He explodes into pieces. You’ve never heard so many swear words. But you let them bounce off you as though they don’t hurt a bit.
“She’s not kidding,” Josh tells him.
The three of you cross the road in a line, not greeting the Lollipop Man today. All of you have your hands in your pockets and are individually pulled in toward yourselves, fighting your own individual battles.
“I need to go home and show my dad this bruise so he can give me another to match it on the other cheek,” Kevin says, and then he laughs as loud as he can. Neither of you laughs with him.
“Before you do, maybe you can say hello to Meixing’s cat,” says Josh.
The black-and-white cat is standing in the middle of the footpath on her hind legs. She is wearing a tuxedo that matches exactly the black-and-white patches on her body and is looking around casually.
“Why have you dressed your cat like this?” Kevin says in a puzzled voice. It at least has had the effect of taking the anger out of him.
“I don’t know,” you reply. “I think it’s her choice.”
The cat leads all three of you through the creaky red gate with the heart-shaped eyes, down the trodden path, and to the door of the glasshouse, as if it were naturally supposed to be. She reaches up and turns the door handle with both paws. When you all still stand there, she shrugs her shoulders in annoyance and makes an arrow with her tail. You get the point.
“No, not this again,” grumbles Kevin. “Don’t expect me to be impressed or to have changed my mind.”
Oh, it’ll be different this time, you think to yourself, but you also understand that sometimes you have to let someone see for themselves.
You have been thinking about the incident with your cousins and Kevin and that you finally understand. None of you needed the glasshouse on that day. Biaomei and Biaojie might never need the glasshouse, and while you had them here, neither did you. Also as you remember it, Kevin was his usual sarcastic self, but armored and okay.
Right now nothing is okay. You all carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. You feel the blows, visible and on the inside, that have been dealt by the same hand. But you know that if you call on the glasshouse in your hour of need, the glasshouse—suspended somewhere between reality and imagination—will never let you down.
You lead your friends inside. The first thing that strikes you is how warm it is in here compared to the sharpness of winter outside.
You turn your head to look at Kevin, and you know, before you see his face, that it will be a mixture of confusion about why the glasshouse is so big on the inside and what is it with all the orange trees (there are now more than last time; Uncle must have been busy). But Kevin’s face will also say that he always has low or no expectations about anything in this world and he never believed that the shelter you promised would actually be offered to him.
You are eager to see your flowers and your blue ornamental wisteria and Josh is eager to see his olive tree, so you run on ahead and let Kevin follow. The sun is slowly inching her way to the west, and the moon, having become new, is a transparent ghostly circle in the sky.
Since you were last here, your forget-me-nots have spread everywhere, even inside abandoned flowerpots under Uncle’s planting station, the ones with only a bit of leftover soil at the bottom. Your wisteria is so heavy with bloom, it is touching the ground and has formed the perfect hideaway for reading and drawing inside. Everything is so blue.
Josh looks up at his olive tree, which, in the funny time that exists here, has grown almost as old as the ones he remembers from a different home. You show Kevin the seed box, thinking that a tough boy like him surely wouldn’t be interested in anything like gardening, which he probably thinks is for little kids or old people. But he surprises you by taking a long time looking over the seeds. Surely he will select the biggest one, the cocoa seed, which is the size of his head. Instead, he chooses a seed so small that at first you think his hand is empty.
He goes about planting and nurturing that seed in a way that makes you think he cares. You feel both happy and yet strangely sad at the same time. You think how vulnerable he looks. You don’t think he ever lets anyone see this side of him.
The green shoot comes out of the ground and, from it, a bright red flower. In a single breath the flowers spread like wildfire all the way to the glass horizon. It is a slash of scarlet that clashes and sits uneasily next to your field of blue.
“What are they?” you ask Josh.
“Poppies,” he replies.
“I feel sleepy.”
“Me too.”
“Kevin,” you say, and you look around for him, but all you can see is red.
It is through a half-asleep haze that you watch the poppies tell the story. You see Kevin as a young boy with his parents, huddled together eating as much food as they can in one sitting. You understand when you see the long wooden boat that no one will get to eat again until they reach the other side of that great ocean.
You feel you can’t stand anymore, so you get down on your knees in the soft dirt. Josh is already asleep, curled up on the dirt like a seed himself, thinking about sending roots into the soil below. You curl up next to him. You force yourself to keep your eyes open, and you see Mrs. Huynh give Kevin a large spoonful of cough medicine and tell him to close his eyes.
You want to close your eyes too and you feel yourself nodding off, but you jerk yourself from sleep to see Kevin wake up inside that long narrow boat and start to cry. Mrs. Huynh gives him another large spoon of cough medicine. The crying dies away and he is quiet.
“Kevin?” you say again. “Kevin, wake up!”
This time Kevin does not wake up and cry. He looks very pale and cold, rocking gently along with the boat. You get a very bad feeling, and you are back on your feet and running and screaming his name.
“Kevin! You gave me such a big scare!” He is at the edge of the poppies, sitting on his heels. When he looks up at you, you don’t see that angry boy. You see through his armor, like a hole unraveled in a sweater, and you see a scared boy instead.
“I understand,” you tell him, and you hold out your hand.
He doesn’t let you help him up. Instead, he jumps up, and like that, you see that chink in his armor close up.
“You understand nothing about me!” Kevin turns and runs away from you and the glasshouse. The magic shatters.
Josh comes over and you both stare at the field of poppies together.
“When will he stop being so angry?” Josh asks, turning to you for an answer.
You don’t have one, but you say, “The important thing is not to give up on him.”
“Even if he’s angry forever…,” says Josh, thinking as he says the words. Then he nods.
You wonder how, in the process of you all leaving your homes and coming here, Josh has turned out so wise and Kevin has turned out so broken. You look up at the sky with the sun shining next to the almost invisible moon, and all you know is that humans are so complicated, and this is heartbreaking and heart-mending all at once.
CHAPTER TWENTY Letter
The black-and-white gatekeeper insists on walking Josh home. You don’t know what to do with Kevin. You look through the hole in the wooden fence, but his backyard is empty. There is a light on inside his house, making it glow warm and cozy, so you feel r
elieved. The feeling is quickly extinguished when you realize it was Mr. and Mrs. Huynh who decided to bring Kevin here on that dangerous journey that almost killed him.
You don’t know why you feel you have to tiptoe when you go inside. You should have the right to stomp up and down the stairs banging on a pot if you want to, because it’s your home too. But Ma Ma likes you quiet so you don’t give her a headache.
She also doesn’t like being touched, rarely gives and receives hugs, and doesn’t want to be kissed like you see other kids kiss their parents at school drop-off. What type of rules are these? She says it is tradition. Which of your cold, uncaring ancestors is responsible? You want to scream!
Reluctantly, you check on her because she is still your mom.
Ma Ma is in her bedroom. Instead of lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, she is now sitting on the edge, looking down at an envelope in her hand. You wouldn’t be surprised if that is as far as she has moved all day. Her ankles look so swollen—the “heatiness” that First Aunty talked about must have returned, as Ma Ma’s face is red. You suddenly feel sorry for her.
“Ma Ma, would you like the comfort drink you make for me when I get sick?”
“I’d like that very much,” Ma Ma replies, looking down at the envelope. You don’t think Ma Ma is sick. You don’t think she is well, either. Since she has arrived at Big Scary, she has only left to go to the chicken place and the funeral parlor. This makes you think about Ba Ba again, so you hurry to the kitchen to make the drink. You have to keep yourself busy; cling to the hope that lies inside a pink cocoon in the corner of your bedroom window. A bell chimes once. You feel the eye in the Room on the Roof flutter open, then close.
The special drink is cocoa powder mixed with a splash of boiling water and topped with microwaved milk. You are reminded of what Ma Ma used to tell you: if a half crescent appears on the top of the foam, then it is a smile that means you will have a good day.