“We’ll never see him again,” say my parents.
Some of us cousins aren’t sure who is right.
But my little cousin Caitlin has answers. Caitlin is three and a half, and she has bangs and freckles. She’s so cute that whenever she comes to visit, I pretend she’s my little sister. “I know,” Caitlin says. “There’s a red button in his coffin, and he pushed it and it sent him to heaven.”
She’s so certain that we all pause to think about this, even the older cousins like me who should know better.
“That’s dumb,” says a cousin. “He was dead. He couldn’t have pushed a button.”
“Well then,” says Caitlin, “somebody pushed it for him.”
She leaves us standing at the grave and walks off with perfect assurance.
* * *
• • •
A few weeks after my grandfather dies, my mother has to go to the hospital and stay there for a long time.
This is because she’s pregnant with twins. Two baby girls. But one of them has died. Everything was going fine until it wasn’t. One morning, my mom woke up and knew that something was wrong.
The other twin is alive, but it’s a waiting game. They need to keep my mom pregnant long enough that the living twin has a chance to survive, but not so long that the dead twin makes the environment in the womb so toxic that it kills the living twin.
This is something I can’t think about too much, and my mom says she is the same way. She’s very patient in the hospital where we go to visit her. The walls are pink. She has a TV to watch, and magazines and books by the side of the bed to read, and lots of people who love her come and visit her. Even so, I can’t imagine a stranger place for my mom to be.
My mother likes to hike and do yoga and create art, and she is never still. Before the hospital, she couldn’t even watch a television show all the way through. Or a basketball game. Not even the Jazz, whom she likes a lot when they are in the playoffs. She’d peek in to see how things were going and then off she’d go again, to water the flowers outside or grade papers or clean a bathroom.
But right now she’s very still. She has to stay in bed, at the hospital, all day every day, except for when they let her get up to go to the bathroom. That’s it.
“I never thought I’d look forward to going to the bathroom so much,” my mom says when I visit her at the hospital, and we both laugh.
She is still great at laughing, and being beautiful.
I wish I knew that secret, to being beautiful. My mother is lovely. She has wide brown eyes and a slender frame and a smile that lights up the room. I finally traded my glasses for contacts and my hair is not as bad as it has been, but I’m still awkward. I never have quite the right clothes. All the popular girls at my school are cowgirls, and my family doesn’t even own a chicken. So I can’t wear cowboy boots and stuff like that, because then I’d be a wannabe cowgirl, which is much worse than being nothing at all.
My dad’s doing his best taking care of us kids, but he broke his wrist, which could have happened at a better time.
Things are not going great. Without my grandma, who makes us food and takes care of us during the day, we would be in trouble.
But I have a secret weapon.
A new best friend. He is the miracle of my seventh-grade year, and his name is Justin.
Justin and I understand each other even though we are not the same. Here are all the things that are different about us:
He is really, really Republican. Like, wants-to-be-the-president-someday Republican. He talks about it all the time. He knows more about politics than most adults I know, let alone any of the other seventh graders.
I am a Democrat. I think. I know it’s what my parents are. I know I care like crazy about everyone having a chance and also the environment.
Justin knows what it’s like to be popular.
I don’t.
His family belongs to the main religion in Utah.
Mine doesn’t.
Here is what we have in common:
When we met each other, we clicked. It started because we would laugh at the same things that no one else was laughing at, and we started to catch each other’s eye across the room when that happened. We’re both smart and get good grades.
We both have good families and friends but are often lonely on the inside.
We both have dark hair and very alert eyebrows.
I’m not supposed to talk on the phone with Justin. My parents have a lot of rules in general, and a lot of rules about boys and talking to them and hanging out with them.
But. My mom is in the hospital and my dad is really busy.
So I sneak and call him. I stretch the phone into the linen closet and pray that it will be his nice mom who answers when I call and not his intimidating, football-playing high school brothers.
Justin doesn’t always say the right thing. In fact, this is another thing we have in common. A lot of the time he says the wrong thing, which happens to me too. For example, everyone teases us about dating, and we’re only friends. But no one will believe it. We want people to believe it, because we both have crushes on other people, so we decide to tell everyone that we’re cousins and that’s why we spend all our time together.
That turns out to be the wrong thing to say.
Everyone ends up thinking that we’re cousins who are dating, which is disgusting and embarrassing.
But here is the thing about Justin.
He is there.
And he makes me laugh all through the months my mom is in the hospital.
I swear I have an endorphin rush every time I talk to him because he’s just. so. funny. And he feels the same way about me. I have never made anyone laugh the way I make Justin laugh.
With the help of my secret weapon, I am okay even though two people whom I love have died.
Someone so old.
Someone so new, who never even got a chance to start.
My dad wakes me up one morning. “Your grandma’s on her way over,” he says. “I’m going to be with your mom. She’s having the baby.”
It’s time.
Can it be time?
Is it too soon?
Too late?
My little sister is born. She weighs four pounds, seven ounces and is seven weeks early. She can breathe without help, but can’t eat on her own yet, and she’ll have to stay in the NICU until she’s five pounds.
She made it.
I can’t wait to tell Justin at school. I find him in the hallway near Mrs. Fotheringham’s class, which we have together. “My sister’s here,” I say. “My parents named her Hope.”
When we go to see her, Hope looks like she has been through the wringer. She is tiny and her legs and arms are dangly, and she has a tube in her nose. She opens her eyes, and they are weary and dark and huge.
* * *
• • •
Several years later, in high school, I have depression.
It appears to be triggered by a physical event—a bout with severe anemia. “Yours is so bad that a few years ago we would have hospitalized you for blood transfusions,” says my doctor, “but now we’ll give you shots.”
The shots are iron shots right in your hip, ones that leave enormous bruises for weeks. But I’m relieved there is a solution. I have been exhausted, my cross-country race times getting slower even though I’ve been working harder. My legs feel like lead, and I can’t move the way I want.
This is when I begin to have the running dream, the one where I can’t finish the race.
When we find out about the anemia, I’m almost happy. Now we know why I feel so bad. In a matter of a few weeks, the shots have done the trick. My hematocrit levels are back in normal range. There is oxygen moving through my bloodstream again, and my legs are lighter. At the state meet I have the race of my life. I make
the All-State team, and we win the overall championship as a team. We hold the trophy over our heads, and our coach is so proud, he cries.
So why don’t I feel better in my mind?
Why do I keep having the dream where I can’t run?
And there’s another dream now. I’m in my grandparents’ house, the place I love best on earth. It’s after school and I come inside, just like I do every day. I walk through the swinging doors in the hallway, notice myself in the pictures push-pinned into the bulletin board in the hall. No one is in the kitchen. “Hello!” I call out, sure of my place in this house, sure in knowing that here I am loved and cherished by both my grandparents. I hear a creak in the master bedroom, directly above the kitchen, which means my grandfather has heard my call. He suffers from vertigo and has to lie down during the day, but if he knows I’m in the house, he always comes downstairs to see me. Creak.
In my mind, I can see him rising from the bed where he’s been resting on top of the covers. I can picture him putting on his glasses, smoothing down the front of his white button-up shirt.
But then he doesn’t come down.
Because he is dead.
I remember this before I wake up. That’s how the dream ends, with the realization that he’s gone. It hurts every time.
It kind of feels like everything hurts inside.
“I think you need some help,” my mom tells me. She says it kindly, and without shaming. “I felt really down and sad after Hope was born. Like you feel now.”
Yeah, but you had a reason, I think. You had lost a baby. You were taking care of a newborn. You were sleep deprived and had gone through something huge. I haven’t gone through anything like that. A small health crisis, now solved. A breakup with a boyfriend I really liked.
We find a therapist and my doctor recommends medication. It takes a while for it all to work.
When I am in the worst of my depression, when I can’t even pretend I care and all I’m really doing is sitting on the porch swing in front of my house and looking out at the mountains and the lights, Justin sits next to me and cries. “I don’t know what to do to help you,” he says.
I don’t cry. I don’t really even talk to him. I don’t call him anymore, but he calls me and comes over, sometimes fresh from his job as a janitor at the hospital. He’s wearing scrubs and looks very tired.
As the summer and fall go on, I do feel better. I go on all-day hikes with my friends, including Justin. We have to wade through water with canyons rising on both sides, and pack in our lunches and scramble over rocks. We leave early in the morning and come home late at night, sunburned, with sand in our shoes. We decide to train for a marathon, and we go on long runs in the morning together, on roads where the only people we see are farmers in their pickup trucks. They lift one hand from the steering wheel to wave at us. We start early in the morning, when it’s cool in the high desert, and by the last miles the sun has always hunted us down. We’re careful when we run over the cattle guards in the road so we don’t twist our ankles. At the beginning, we usually talk, but by the end we’re too tired. It feels good, though, to be tired in this way. When we run the marathon in October, it’s not easy for either Justin or me, but we both finish. I wish I could tell my grandfather. He would have been so proud, and probably surprised. No one else in my family is a runner, and I didn’t start until a year or two after he died.
There’s no red button to eject you straight into heaven. No button to shoot you past depression and into happiness.
But.
There are these things.
A friend who will sit with you.
An adult who will have experienced their own mental illness and who will not think it is embarrassing to talk about it or to get help.
A little sister named Hope who loves you and thinks you’re the best even when you are quite sure you are not. She’ll tell you this joke she made up, over and over: “What if there were a cow . . . on your head?” and she will think it’s funny every single time.
You may not have all of these things.
You may have different ones.
But.
Also.
You might have this.
As you grow older, and even if you still have the dreams (I do), you’ll know that hope can be born even when things have gone and you can’t have them back.
Someone will say something, ask for help, and your heart will know a part of what they’re experiencing. Not exactly what they are going through—no one can ever know that—but enough.
You’ll know to stay on the swing.
And listen.
DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY
MARIE LU
Surviving
I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD in 1989, the year I left for America and the year the Chinese government cracked down on college-age protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
I was a kid. So, my memories of that time are simple and fragmented. The protests had been happening all throughout the spring of that year, culminating in a hundred thousand people filling the square, each calling for democracy. At the time, I lived near the square with my family—and for us, the sight of the weekly crowds was something of a tourist attraction. “Let’s go see what the students are up to,” my aunt would say, and she would wheel out her bicycle, help my cousin and me on, and then ride us out to the fringes of the square.
What I remember is keeping an eager eye out for the Popsicle vendors who set up shop around the square. I remember thinking that the sea of bicycles looked like a moving river. I remember the way my skin would stick to itself from the warm air.
And on the day the government finally cracked down, I remember the tanks out in the streets, waiting at the square’s entrances for orders to come from above. I remember the massive, massive crowds, and my aunt leaning down to me, telling me that we should head home early. I remember that kindergarten was canceled the next day.
This kind of unrest was new and unusual to me, of course—I grew up in late-1980s China, a time of rapid economic growth and rising wealth. But my parents were all too familiar with events far worse; they had survived the Cultural Revolution, one of the darkest periods in China’s history. To this day, my mother will not tell me all the things she witnessed during those dark days of her youth, but the stories she has shared sound like something out of a dystopian novel.
The way you survived during the revolution was to stay off the radar. My grandfather, an accomplished poet, burned every single one of his books. My mother’s family flushed any family jewelry or valuables down the drain. They memorized Mao’s “Little Red Book” in school while secretly studying on their own at home.
Whatever you did, your goal was to keep the Red Army’s eyes from falling on you. Being other was dangerous.
I would listen to them tell these stories and think that some of them must be far too outlandish to be true. But then I would remember Tiananmen Square, and nod along.
It was that past world to which my parents said their goodbyes. It was that world my parents left behind, setting their sights instead on the light across the sea. And it was that world that cemented the fundamental lesson I thought we took with us to our new home:
Assimilation was the key to survival. You lived by keeping your head down. Do not rock the boat. Do not speak out. What was a better example of this than the Tiananmen Square Massacre? It’s hard to say how many protesters died that day, but it was obvious to me that speaking up and standing out had killed them.
My father had already left for America—specifically, for Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge—a year earlier on a student visa that had taken ten y
ears to acquire. Several months later, the travel visas for my mother and me were approved too, and we left to join him. He picked us up late at night in a beat-up yellow Cadillac that must have been on its last legs, and I rode back sandwiched in between my parents in the front seat, the ride so bumpy and the smell of old leather so pungent that I upchucked right onto my exhausted mother’s shoes.
None of us spoke English yet, outside of the limited conversations my father could piece together. One of our first American experiences was Mardi Gras (of all things), and I can still remember us standing there on the street, feeling distinctly like an other, not understanding a word being said. What was this bizarre place where people dressed in costume and partied until morning? What was with all the shirtless people? Where were we? Why were we here?
We were incredibly poor. My parents rationed their food strictly—one orange a day, meat only on the weekends. Anything considered a treat was reserved for me, and eating out at fast-food restaurants was a luxury we almost never indulged in. On weekends, we searched for yard sale signs and church donation tents. Of course my parents couldn’t afford child care, so my mother was forced to take me with her to her shifts at a local Chinese restaurant, where she learned to balance eight plates at once on her slim arms as I watched TV in the restaurant’s broom closet from morning until evening, the only place anyone could keep a restless five-year-old.
I was as happy as a clam. Children adapt to almost anything when they’re young, and my existence was the norm as far as I was concerned, because, well, what else could I compare it to? I was fed, clothed, sheltered, and loved. I took these privileges for granted and had absolutely no concept of poverty. In my protected little world, my hand-me-down stuffed toys were made of magic, and my summers in that broom closet were spent singing songs and making up my earliest stories to myself. We couldn’t afford new clothes, but what did I care? My mother would spend weekends transforming reams of cheap cloth and unusable old shirts into the most beautiful dresses for me, full of lace and pockets and flower patterns. Our first Christmas, my father splurged on a tiny, two-foot-tall pine plant, and we excitedly decorated it with a single garland of lights and a dozen ornaments.
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