by Remy Lai
Yanghao picks Ginger up. “I’ll take her home.”
I sigh. “That rule doesn’t matter now. There’s no cake making to hide.”
Yanghao thinks for a moment, then continues toward the door. “I don’t mind taking Ginger home.” Off he goes. I hear Anna’s door creak open again, then the muffled sounds of Yanghao and Anna talking, then the door bangs shut.
* * *
I want to march over and ask Yanghao what he’s doing. Mama never gave him permission to hang out at Anna’s house. I want him to annoy me. I want to not be alone with my thoughts.
There’s no cake making to push out the hundreds of s l o w s swirling in my mind. I picture a chocolate raspberry torte dropping from above the s l o w s. But instead of dispersing the words, the cake smashes into bits. Then the s l o w s swarm around the bits like vultures.
I need to find a way to make that torte.
* * *
Yanghao leaves me alone for two hours.
47
Friday morning, there’s a slice of cake in a plastic container on Joe’s desk. It has three layers of puffy puffed pastry, like an apple mille-feuille has, except instead of little cubes of caramelized apples for filling, this one has cream and a thick slab of something brown.
Whatever it is, I hope it’s overbaked and dry.
Ben says hi to me, but I pretend not to hear him, and then Miss Scrappell comes in for English class.
At recess, Ben places a plastic container on my desk. “For you.”
I only nod, and Ben leaves.
What did Ben and Joe put in this cake? Laxatives? Did they spit in it? Is all of Ben’s niceness a lie? Which kind of lie would it be? White, red, or colorless? If it’s red, it’d all be a ploy: Pretend to be friends with the s l o w boy and then pull a prank on him. Pretend to be interested in the s l o w boy’s love of cakes, then use it to humiliate him. Ben and Joe would get away with it because the s l o w boy wouldn’t figure out the cake made him sick. Even if I did, I couldn’t tell anyone.
I march to the front of the class where the garbage can is, open the container, and flip it upside down. The puff pastry crackles as the layers break apart. I still have no idea what that thick slab of brown is. It looks like very hard jelly. Maybe Ben and Joe want me to break my teeth.
I turn around.
My first thought is to say sorry, even though Ben is the bad guy. But a very strange look is on his face. He continues to his desk and fishes out his wallet from his backpack. Then he leaves.
I march down the rows of tables back to my desk. There’s something on Joe’s desk: the container of cake.
I have so much I want to say to Ben.
But I don’t have the English words.
* * *
During math class, Miss Scrappell has all of us sit in our groups and work on the project. Even though I’m still mad Ben called me s l o w, he’s the closest thing I have to a friend, and I’m very relieved when he pulls his chair to my desk. But for that whole hour, he doesn’t speak. He just writes numbers on pieces of colored paper.
At the end of school, he doesn’t say bye to me, and I don’t dare to be the first to say it to him. Surely he won’t say it back.
* * *
During my after-school English tutoring, Miss Scrappell places an old-fashioned flip phone on my desk. No, wait. It’s an electronic dictionary.
Booger. I got that. Which surprises me.
48
The first thing I do when I wake up on Saturday morning is tell Mama I have a craving for chocolate raspberry torte. I also want to ask if we could make one together, but I don’t want her to suspect I’m still secretly making cakes, so I say something that sounds perfectly innocent.
Yanghao spends most of the day shuttling between our sofa and Anna’s house, with his nose buried in The Little Prince. Mama spends the whole day cooking a week’s worth of lunch and dinner for Yanghao and me. She makes woks and woks of noodles with dumplings.
We are stuck.
In all different ways.
* * *
With nothing else to do, and nobody else to do anything with anyway, I have no more excuses not to do my homework. Since the little table in the kitchen is covered with onions, garlic, and Mama’s other cooking stuff, I drop my schoolbooks on the coffee table and sit cross-legged on the floor.
When Yanghao comes back, he plops onto the sofa and buries his nose in The Little Prince. I’m about to comment he’s taking forever to finish that book and if he returns that book late, he’ll get a fine from the library, but then I think about the computers there.
I smack my own forehead. I can Google recipes! I need a library card for that, and mine hasn’t arrived yet. Besides, I’m not speaking to a librarian to book a computer. Luckily, I have another idea.
“Yanghao,” I whisper. “We can copy recipes from the cookbooks at the library. We can’t ask Mama to take us now because copying cake recipes will look suspicious, and she’ll interrogate us, then I’ll have to lie. Really lie. We’ll have to wait till Monday.”
I’m about to call him a booger when he points to a white envelope on the table.
“What?” I ask. “Did Ah-po and Ah-gong reply already?”
No, the letter can’t be from Ah-po and Ah-gong because there are kangaroos on the stamp and my name and address are all typed up. I rip the envelope open. The letter is written in Martian, but I recognize the first words: Dear Jingwen. Stuck to the bottom of the letter is a colorful card, like one of those cards Mama uses to withdraw money from the bank machine but won’t let me use—a library card!
“I got mine, too. Mama checked the mail this morning,” Yanghao whispers. “But how can we use the library’s cookbooks? They’re in English. Can you—”
“I can use a dictionary.”
“Or if I know, I can just tell you.”
I can’t help but raise my voice. “Booger.”
“Booger?” Mama peeks her head into the living room. “I suppose I should be glad you’re using English, Jingwen, even if it’s not a very nice word.”
Her eyes are red and teary from chopping onions, and I’m a little glad. It’s better that she can’t see me clearly.
49
Turns out, I don’t have to wait forever. On Sunday, Mama surprises me. She takes Yanghao and me to Barker Bakes. She got permission from her boss for the three of us to use the fancy kitchen to make a cake together.
I say, “It’s much, much bigger than it looks from outside.”
Yanghao nods and wipes the drool off his face.
Mama chuckles. “The café part at the front is tiny in comparison because Barker Bakes is mainly a catering business. We supply cakes for events like birthdays and weddings, and also other cafés. Come on, let’s bake a cake.”
“A chocolate raspberry torte!” I say before Yanghao can make any suggestions.
She opens the cookbook she stole from my schoolbag. “Chocolate raspberry torte it is.”
* * *
Mama measures the ingredients and handles everything to do with the hot oven or stove. She doesn’t know I’m now a professional at doing those things, so she only tasks me with mixing the batter. Mama knows Yanghao can’t even be trusted to remember to put on underwear in the morning, let alone help with baking, so he’s only in charge of being a general nuisance, which includes sticking his fingers into the batter and picking at cake skin. All the rules broken.
We’re about to assemble the four layers of chocolate sponge between raspberry cream when Mama’s boss arrives.
“Hello,” she says. “You two must be Jingwen and Yanghao.”
“Hello!” Yanghao replies enthusiastically.
I force a smile and concentrate on stirring the bowl of chocolate ganache. Hopefully she won’t ask me anything that forces me to reply in long sentences. Yes or no questions are all right, if I can understand the questions in the first place.
But I don’t need to be nervous, because Yanghao hogs all the attention. “I love
your kitchen,” he says.
What did she ask Yanghao and me to do? Does she want us to make a coffee cake? But Yanghao hops off the stool and follows Mama’s boss out of the kitchen, with Mama close behind, so I guess not.
“Come on, Jingwen,” Mama says. “We’ll finish the cake later, together.”
I sigh and do as I’m told. Mama’s boss beckons us to sit at a table in the café before walking off.
“Are Yanghao and I going to drink coffee, Mama?” I ask.
“No,” Yanghao answers. “You and I are going to have chocolate milk shakes. Mama and Heather are going to have coffee.”
Heather? Like weather? Is that Mama’s boss’s name? When did she mention her name? When did she say chocolate milk shakes? What is “milk shake” in English? Milk something. I huff. Yanghao probably heard wrong.
But Heather does return with chocolate milk something and coffee. Yanghao almost-yells, “Thank you, Heather!” like she’s given us a chest of gold coins.
“So, Jingwen and Yanghao.” Heather sits down next to me. “How do you like it here so far?”
“I love chocolate milk shake.” Yanghao slurps on his drink extra loudly.
Heather chuckles, then turns to me.
“Yes,” I say, and slurp on my drink. Milk shake, I repeat in my head. Shake the milk to make a milk shake.
She fires off another question. “How’s school?”
This isn’t a yes or no question. I could lie and say good, but before I open my mouth, Yanghao saves me.
I can’t tell if he’s lying.
Mama beams like Yanghao has invented a vaccine for cooties, while I gnaw on my straw. But wait, Yanghao’s not done turning her into a lightbulb.
So Yanghao has more than just one friend?
Yanghao is still the tiny bean sprout whose chin barely clears the table, but suddenly I don’t recognize him. His voice sounds the same, but everything he says is unrecognizable. He’s just across the table from me, so close I could kick him if I wanted to, but somehow the space between us feels as wide as the distance between Australia and our old home. Vast, vast oceans.
Mama and Heather make the oceans even wider when they speak to Yanghao in Martian.
My head hurts from all the translating, and I’ve been pretending to suck at my empty glass for way too long. I whisper to Mama that I’m going to pee, then I sneak off. She’s so caught up in Yanghao’s one-man show, she doesn’t even tell me where the bathroom is.
I slip into the kitchen, then turn back and look through the little round glass window in the door. Once again, I’m stuck on the other side of the glass while Mama and Yanghao sail far, far away.
I stack the chocolate sponge layers, with raspberry cream in between. My tenth birthday cake had four layers with cream in between, too.
I pour the chocolate ganache over the stack. My tenth birthday cake had a layer of blue fondant, with little pink starfish all over.
On the top of the torte, I place a circle of raspberries. My tenth birthday cake had figurines of SpongeBob and his friends.
The cake that Mama, Yanghao, and I are supposed to make together, I build it up myself.
50
Starting at nine o’clock on Monday, I’m a ghost.
Not an awesome ghost with spooky powers.
But a ghost no one can hear or see.
At three in the afternoon, I become visible, but still a ghost who’s neither dead nor alive. Miss Scrappell has all her attention on me as she teaches me all about conjunctions.
for
and
nor
or
but
yet
so
La-ti-do.
At least the electronic dictionary is much easier to use and doesn’t cause paper cuts.
As soon as tutoring is over, I come to life again. I wish I were dead, though, because on our way to the library, Yanghao burps so loud that everyone nearby spins around to stare at us. He says his burp smells like the chocolate milk shake he had yesterday afternoon and would I like to smell it.
Once at the library, he says if I want to use the computer, he can talk to the librarian to make a booking. No, thanks. I don’t need my little brother doing things for me. Also, I don’t want to confirm that Xirong hasn’t emailed me.
Yanghao returns fifteen of the sixteen books he’s borrowed on his and my library accounts—he isn’t done with The Little Prince—so we can borrow fifteen cookbooks.
The books I pick are those whose titles I understand, including Short and Sweet, Sugar Rush, The Perfect Cake. I also choose Cakes and More Cakes and flip through it until I reach a picture of a Neapolitan mousse cake.
Yanghao points to it. “That’s the cake we’re making today.”
“I can see the picture, booger,” I say.
Today Yanghao and I are free to break rule number fourteen, the one about packing the cake-making ingredients into our schoolbags, since Mama won’t be home.
Carrying the shopping bag filled with flour and tubs of cream, I open the door of our apartment.
Heart. Uh. Tack.
I step back and shut the door, but I’ve only closed it halfway when Mama sees me. “You boys are home.”
Behind me, Yanghao yips. I twist my arm and hold the bag of cake-making ingredients toward him. “Ma-Mama, doesn’t your work start at four thirty?” The clock above the TV says it’s a little after five. Yanghao takes the bag from me, and I hear his padded footsteps as he backs away from the door. Phew!
“No,” Mama says. “I now work from eleven P.M. to nine A.M. Heather heard me calling you two during my break and asked if I wanted to change my shift. I won’t be here to help you get ready for school, but overall, I’ll have more time with you. And I’ve prepared a bath for you both. When you’re done, you can have some of these prawn crackers.” The crackers in the oil spit and crackle. “Come in, boys. What are you doing standing there?”
“Prawn crackers!” Yanghao jostles past me. He doesn’t have the plastic bags. I step inside and close the door slowly, scanning the stairway. Where did he hide them?
“After-school tutoring went overtime, Jingwen?”
I nod. I’m telling the worst kind of lie. I can’t think of how or who this lie would harm, but still I feel just like when I stuck my hand under the fridge to retrieve Yanghao’s button and ended up bleeding.
* * *
Mama makes Yanghao and me take a bath. She sits on the rim of the tub and lathers his hair while he makes a plastic dinosaur waddle across the sea of foam. I scratch my palm. It’s itchy even though the scab is long gone.
“How’s school, Jingwen?” she asks. “When I spoke to Miss Scrappell, she said you’re making progress. Although she says—and I agree—that you have to read and speak English more if you want to grasp it.”
I ladle foam onto my head. “I can speak English. Yanghao is a booger.”
He looks up at Mama. “Jingwen is a big booger.”
“You boys—” she begins, but the phone rings, and she leaves.
“Yanghao,” I whisper, “where did you hide the grocery bags?”
“On the stairs. Up on the fifth floor.”
“I hope no one steals them. I’ll get them once Mama’s gone to work, but how are we going to make cakes now that she’s home?”
He dunks the dinosaur into the foam. “Tomorrow?”
“Didn’t you hear what Mama said? She’ll be home every weekday until eleven o’clock.”
The dinosaur peeks its head out of the foam. “We can ask Mama to make cakes for us on the weekend, then.”
As he makes the dinosaur skip across the foam, he doesn’t notice my shooting daggers at him, so I lean back and slide forward until the foam is up to my nose.
“Yanghao?” Mama peeks into the bathroom. “Sarah called. She asked if you wanted to meet her at the playground. I hope you don’t mind, but I asked her if she wanted to come over and play instead. Her mama will bring her over here soon.”
“Yes!” Yanghao jumps up, sending waves of sea and foam lapping against my face.
I think I’m drowning.
51
Yanghao and Sarah play their board games too loudly. Their squeals and shouts in Martian zoom all the way from the living room and pierce through the door of my room, where I sit on my bed trying to read Cakes and More Cakes. All that racket makes it hard to concentrate, especially when I have to use my dinosaur-age dictionary to look up many, many words in the many, many steps of making a Neapolitan mousse cake.
When Papa and I made this cake, I asked him why Pie in the Sky wasn’t going to have the same cakes as our family’s cake shop.
I asked if it was because the people in Australia wouldn’t like our plain cakes.
I asked if it was because the cakes with lots of cream and chocolate would be much more expensive, which meant we’d get rich a lot quicker.
It was as if he hadn’t thought about it at all. I asked if he’d chosen the cakes by eeny-meeny-miny-moe.
I was a little confused, but I had more important questions. I asked if we could get a new computer and a new car after we sold the expensive cakes of Pie in the Sky.
I never imagined Papa had thought so far ahead for me. I hadn’t even turned ten.
I asked if he didn’t have a good life.