by Celeste Ng
Miss a few days of school, Lydia thought. Their parents would never allow it.
To her surprise, they nodded.
“That’s smart,” Marilyn said. “You’ll get a taste of campus life, for next year, when you’re there for real.” James said, “That’s an awfully long bus ride. I think we can afford a plane ticket for such a special occasion.” Nath grinned at his sister in double triumph: They’re off your back. And they said yes. Lydia, making trails in the cheese sauce with the tip of her knife, could think only one thing: He can’t wait to leave.
“You know who’s in my physics class now?” she said suddenly. “Jack Wolff, from down the street.” She nibbled a shred of iceberg and measured her family’s reaction. To her parents, the name slid past as if she hadn’t spoken. Her mother said, “Lyddie, that reminds me, I could help you go over your notes on Saturday, if you want.” Her father said, “I haven’t seen Karen in a while. Why don’t you two go to a movie sometime? I’ll drive you.” But Nath’s head, across the table, jerked up as if a rifle had gone off. Lydia smiled back down at her plate. And right then she decided that she and Jack were going to be friends.
• • •
At the beginning, it seemed impossible. Jack hadn’t come to class in nearly a week, and she hovered near his car after school for days before she caught him alone. The first day, he came out of the building with a blond junior she didn’t know, and she ducked behind a bush and watched through the branches. Jack slid his hands into the girl’s pocket, then inside her coat, and when she pretended to be offended and pushed him away, he tossed her over his shoulder, threatening to throw her into the snowbank, while she squealed and giggled and hammered his back with her fists. Then Jack set her down and opened the door of the Beetle, and the blond girl climbed in, and they drove off, steam billowing from the tailpipe, and Lydia knew they wouldn’t be back. The second day, Jack didn’t show up at all, and Lydia eventually trudged home. The snow was calf-deep; there had been record low temperatures all winter. A hundred miles north, Lake Erie had frozen; in Buffalo, snow drowned the roofs of houses, swallowing power lines. At home, Nath, who had sat alone on the bus for the first time he could remember, demanded, “What happened to you?” and Lydia stomped upstairs without replying.
On the third day, Jack came out of the building alone, and Lydia took a deep breath and ran down to the curb. As usual, Jack wore no coat, no gloves. Two bare, red fingertips pinched a cigarette.
“Mind giving me a ride home?” she said.
“Miss Lee.” Jack kicked a clump of snow off the front tire. “Aren’t you supposed to be on your school bus?”
She shrugged, tugging her scarf back up to her neck. “Missed it.”
“I’m not going straight home.”
“I don’t mind. It’s too cold to walk.”
Jack fumbled in his hip pocket for his keys. “Are you sure your brother wants you hanging out with a guy like me?” he said, one eyebrow raised.
“He’s not my keeper.” It came out louder than she meant, and Jack laughed out a puff of smoke and climbed into the driver’s seat. Lydia, cheeks scarlet, had nearly turned away when he leaned over and popped up the knob on the passenger side.
Now that she was in the car, she didn’t know what to say. Jack started the engine and eased the car into gear, and the big speedometer and gas gauge on the dashboard flicked to life. There were no other dials. Lydia thought of her parents’ cars: all the indicators and warning lights to tell you if the oil was too low, if the engine was too hot, if you were driving with the parking brake on or the door or the trunk or the hood open. They didn’t trust you. They needed to check you constantly, to remind you what to do and what not to do. She had never been alone with a boy before—her mother had forbidden her to go out with boys, not that she had ever tried—and it occurred to her that she had never had an actual conversation with Jack before. She had only a vague idea about the things that happened in the backseat. Out of the corner of her eye, she studied Jack’s profile, the faint stubble—darker than his sandy hair—that ran all the way up to his sideburns and all the way down to the soft part of his throat, like a smudge of charcoal waiting to be wiped away.
“So,” she said. Her fingers twitched, and she tucked them into her coat pocket. “Can I bum a cigarette?”
Jack laughed. “You’re so full of shit. You don’t smoke.” He offered the pack anyway, and Lydia plucked out a cigarette. She’d thought it would be solid and heavy, like a pencil, but it was light, like nothing at all. Without taking his eyes off the road, Jack tossed her his lighter.
“So you decided you didn’t need your brother to chaperone you home today.”
Lydia could not ignore the scorn in his voice, and she was unsure if he was laughing at her, or Nath, or both of them at once. “I’m not a child,” she said, lighting the cigarette and putting it to her lips. The smoke burned in her lungs and made her head spin and suddenly she felt sharp and aware. Like cutting your finger, she thought: the pain, and the blood, reminded you that you were alive. She breathed out, a tiny cyclone funneling between her teeth, and held out the lighter. Jack waved a hand.
“Stick it in the glove compartment.”
Lydia snapped open the catch and a small blue box fell out and landed at her feet. She froze, and Jack laughed.
“What’s the matter? Never seen Trojans before, Miss Lee?”
Lydia, her face burning, scooped up the condoms and tucked them back into the open box. “Sure I have.” She slid them back into the glove compartment, along with the lighter, and tried to change the subject. “So what did you think of the physics test today?”
Jack snorted. “I didn’t think you cared about physics.”
“Are you still failing?”
“Are you?”
Lydia hesitated. She took a long drag, imitating Jack, and tipped her head back as she exhaled. “I don’t care about physics. I could give a rat’s ass.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said. “Then how come whenever Mr. Kelly hands back an assignment, you look like you’re going to cry?”
She hadn’t realized it was so obvious, and a hot flush flared in her cheeks and trickled down her neck. Beneath her, the seat creaked and a spring prodded her thigh, like a knuckle.
“Little Miss Lee, smoking,” Jack said, clucking his tongue. “Won’t your brother be upset when he finds out?”
“Not as upset as he’d be to find out I was in your car.” Lydia grinned. Jack didn’t seem to notice. He rolled down the window and a cold rush of air burst into the car as he flicked his cigarette butt into the street.
“Hates me that much, does he?”
“Come on,” Lydia said. “Everybody knows what happens in this car.”
Abruptly, Jack pulled to the side of the road. They had just reached the lake, and his eyes were cold and still, like the iced-over water behind him. “Maybe you’d better get out, then. You don’t want someone like me corrupting you. Ruining your chances of getting into Harvard like your brother.”
He must really hate Nath, Lydia thought. As much as Nath hates him. She imagined them in class together all these years: Nath sitting close to the front, notebook out, one hand rubbing the little furrow between his eyebrows, the way he did when he was thinking hard. Utterly focused, oblivious to everything else, the answer right there, sealed inside his mouth. And Jack? Jack would be sprawled in the back corner, shirt untucked, one leg stretched into the aisle. So comfortable. So certain of himself. Not worried about what anyone thought. No wonder they couldn’t stand each other.
“I’m not like him, you know,” she said.
Jack studied her for a long moment, as if trying to decide if this were true. Beneath the backseat, the engine idled with a growl. The ash at the end of her cigarette lengthened, like a gray worm, but she said nothing, just breathed a thin cloud of fog into the frozen air and forced herself to meet Jack’s narrowing gaze.
“How did you get blue eyes?” he said at last. “When you’re Chi
nese and all?”
Lydia blinked. “My mom’s American.”
“I thought brown eyes won out.” Jack propped his hand against her headrest and leaned in to study her carefully, like a jeweler with a gemstone. Under this appraisal, the back of Lydia’s neck tingled, and she turned away and ashed her cigarette into the tray.
“Not always, I guess.”
“I’ve never seen a Chinese person with blue eyes.”
Up close, she could see a constellation of freckles on Jack’s cheek, faded now, but still there. As her brother had long ago, Lydia counted them: nine.
“You know you’re the only girl in this school who’s not white?”
“Yeah? I didn’t realize.” This was a lie. Even with blue eyes, she could not pretend she blended in.
“You and Nath, you’re practically the only Chinese people in the whole of Middlewood, I bet.”
“Probably.”
Jack settled back into his seat and rubbed at a small dent in the plastic of the steering wheel. Then, after a moment, he said, “What’s that like?”
“What’s it like?” Lydia hesitated. Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. You saw it in the sign at the Peking Express—a cartoon man with a coolie hat, slant eyes, buckteeth, and chopsticks. You saw it in the little boys on the playground, stretching their eyes to slits with their fingers—Chinese—Japanese—look at these—and in the older boys who muttered ching chong ching chong ching as they passed you on the street, just loud enough for you to hear. You saw it when waitresses and policemen and bus drivers spoke slowly to you, in simple words, as if you might not understand. You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair in the scene, as if you’d been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what’s she doing there? And then you remembered that she was you. You kept your head down and thought about school, or space, or the future, and tried to forget about it. And you did, until it happened again.
“I dunno,” she said. “People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.” She eyed him, suddenly fierce. “Kind of like you did with me. They think they know all about you. Except you’re never who they think you are.”
Jack stayed silent for a long time, staring down at the castle in the center of the steering wheel. They would never be friends now. He hated Nath, and after what she’d just said, he would hate her, too. He would kick her out of the car and drive away. Then, to Lydia’s surprise, Jack pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out. A peace offering.
Lydia did not wonder where they would go. She did not think, then, about what excuse she’d offer her mother, the excuse that—with an inspired smirk—would be her cover for all her afternoons with Jack: that she’d stayed after school to do physics extra credit. She did not even think about Nath’s shocked and anxious face when he learned where she had been. Looking out over the lake, she could not know that in three months she would be at its bottom. At that moment she simply took the proffered cigarette and, as Jack flicked the lighter, touched its tip to the flame.
eight
James is all too familiar with this kind of forgetting. From Lloyd Academy to Harvard to Middlewood, he has felt it every day—that short-lived lull, then the sharp nudge to the ribs that reminded you that you didn’t belong. It seemed a false comfort to him, like a zoo animal crouched in its cage, ignoring the gawking eyes, pretending it is still running wild. Now, a month after Lydia’s funeral, he treasures those moments of forgetting.
Others might have found refuge in a pint of whiskey, or a bottle of vodka, or a six-pack of beer. James, though, has never liked the taste of alcohol, and he finds it does not dull his mind; it only turns him a dark beet-red, as if he has endured some terrible battering, while his mind races all the faster. He takes long drives, crisscrossing Middlewood, following the highway almost to Cleveland before turning back. He takes sleeping pills from the drugstore, and even in his dreams, Lydia is dead. Again and again, he finds only one place where he can stop thinking: Louisa’s bed.
He tells Marilyn that he’s going in to class, or to meet with students; on weekends, he says he has papers to grade. These are lies. The dean had canceled his summer class the week after Lydia’s death. “Take some time for yourself, James,” he had said, touching James gently on the shoulder. He did this with everyone he needed to soothe: students enraged over low grades, faculty slighted by the grants they did not receive. His job was to make losses feel smaller. But the students never turned their C-minuses into Bs; new funding never materialized. You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it. And the last thing James wants is time for himself—being at home is unbearable. At every moment, he expects Lydia to appear in the doorway, or to hear the squeak of her floorboards overhead. One morning, he heard footsteps in her room, and before he could stop himself, he ran upstairs, breathless, only to find Marilyn pacing before Lydia’s desk, opening and closing her desk drawers. Get out, he wanted to shout, as if this were a sacred space. Now, every morning, he picks up his briefcase, as if he is going to teach, and drives in to the college. Even in his office, he finds himself mesmerized by the family photo on his desk, where Lydia—barely fifteen, then—peers out, ready to leap through the frame’s glass and leave everyone behind. By afternoon, he finds himself at Louisa’s apartment, plunging into her arms, then between her legs, where, blessedly, his mind shuts off.
But after leaving Louisa’s, he remembers again, and he is always angrier than before. On the way back to his car one evening, he seizes a stray bottle from the street and hurls it into the side of Louisa’s building. Other nights, he fights the temptation to steer into a tree. Nath and Hannah try to stay out of his way, and he and Marilyn have barely exchanged a word in weeks. As the Fourth of July approaches, James passes the lake and finds that someone has festooned the dock with bunting and red and white balloons. He swerves to the side of the road and rips it all down, bursting each balloon under his heel. When everything has sunk beneath the surface of the water, and the dock lies solemn and barren, he heads home, still shaking.
The sight of Nath rummaging in the refrigerator sets him ablaze again. “You’re wasting power,” James says. Nath shuts the door, and his quiet obedience only makes James angrier. “Do you always have to be in the way?”
“Sorry,” Nath says. He cups a hard-boiled egg in one hand, a paper napkin in the other. “I didn’t expect you.” Out of the car, with its lingering air of exhaust and engine grease, James realizes he can smell Louisa’s perfume on his skin, musky and spicy-sweet. He wonders if Nath can, too.
“What do you mean, you didn’t expect me?” he says. “Don’t I have a right to come into my own kitchen after a hard day of work?” He sets his bag down. “Where’s your mother?”
“In Lydia’s room.” Nath pauses. “She’s been in there all day.”
Under his son’s eye, James feels a sharp prickle between his shoulder blades, as if Nath is blaming him.
“For your information,” he says, “my summer course comes with a great deal of responsibility. And I have conferences. Meetings.” His face flushes at the memory of that afternoon—Louisa kneeling before his chair, then slowly unzipping his fly—and this makes him angry. Nath stares, lips slightly pursed, as if he wants to frame a question but can’t get past the W—, and suddenly, James is furious. For as long as he has been a father, James has believed that Lydia looked like her mother—beautiful, blue-eyed, poised—and that Nath looked like
him: dark, hesitating in midspeech, preparing to stumble over his own words. He forgets, most of the time, that Lydia and Nath resemble each other, too. Now, in Nath’s face, James suddenly sees a flash of his daughter, wide-eyed and silent, and the pain of this makes him cruel. “You’re just home all day. Do you have any friends at all?”
His father has said things like this for years, but at this moment Nath feels something snap, like an overstretched wire. “None. I’m not like you. No conferences. No—meetings.” He wrinkles his nose. “You smell like perfume. From your meetings, I guess?”
James grabs him by the shoulder, so hard his knuckles crack. “Don’t you talk to me that way,” he says. “Don’t you question me. You don’t know anything about my life.” Then, before he even realizes the words are forming, they shoot from his mouth like spit. “Just like you didn’t know anything about your sister’s.”
Nath’s expression doesn’t change, but his whole face stiffens, like a mask. James wants to snatch the words back out of the air, like moths, but they’ve already crawled into his son’s ears: he can see it in Nath’s eyes, which have gone shiny and hard as glass. He wants to reach out and touch his son—his hand, his shoulder, anywhere—and tell him he didn’t mean it. That none of this is his fault. Then Nath punches the countertop so hard it leaves a crack in the old, worn laminate. He runs out of the room, footsteps thundering up the stairs, and James lets his bag fall to the floor and slumps back against the counter. His hand touches something cold and wet: the crushed remains of the hard-boiled egg, shards of shell driven deep into the tender white.
All night he thinks about this, his son’s frozen face, and the next morning he rises early. Retrieving the newspaper from the front porch, he sees the date black and stark in the corner: July 3. Two months to the day since Lydia disappeared. It doesn’t seem possible that just two months ago he had sat in his office grading papers, that he had been embarrassed to pluck a ladybug from Louisa’s hair. Until two months ago, July 3 had been a happy date, secretly treasured for ten years—the day of Marilyn’s miraculous return. How everything has changed. In the kitchen, James slides the rubber band from the newspaper and unrolls it. There, below the fold, he sees a small headline: Teachers and Classmates Remember Departed Girl. The articles about Lydia have grown shorter and sparser. Soon they would stop entirely, and everyone would forget about her. James cups the paper toward him. The day is cloudy, but he leaves the light off, as if the dimness will soften what he’s about to read. From Karen Adler: She seemed lonely. She didn’t really hang out with anyone. From Pam Saunders: She didn’t have a lot of friends, or even a boyfriend. I don’t think the boys even noticed her. At the bottom: Lee’s physics teacher, Donald Kelly, remembered her as the lone sophomore in a class of juniors, noting, “She worked hard, but of course she stood out.” Beside the article, a sidebar: Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place.