Part of me wants to wake Mama, lead her to her bedroom, take off her tiny slippers and tuck her in. But I know that once her eyes are open, Mama will dose herself with some exceptionally strong, highly caffeinated green tea and keep toiling until her clients' receipts reconcile their bank statements,
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not one penny misplaced. Her persistence and fiscal fluency is why clients overlook her broken English. It's how she's paying for Harvard. And summer camp.
Guilt, more substantial than any of her lectures could produce, bloats my heart. I pad softly to the living room and grab a pilled-up crocheted afghan, one with so many snags that Janie's mother would have incinerated it on sight. When I drape it carefully over Mama, her thin shoulders lift in a soft sigh.
"It's OK, Mama," I murmur and her face relaxes. Not exactly into a smile, but close enough to approximate satisfaction.
Before I dim the light, I drink in Mama's expression, the way I wish she'd look at me when we're both awake.
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6 * Nipping
Bowl number sixteen of Tonic Soup starts my very last day as a freshman with a kick. Call me vain, but since camouflaging my bad breath with peppermint is a matter of social-life-or-death, I opt to brush my teeth three more times. I can still taste Tonic Soup. So I gargle with Listermint. And I miss the bus. Which means that Mama is driving foul-mouthed me to school.
Even before my hand is on the car door, my annoyed chauffeur is hunh -ing at me. As much as I'm tempted to negotiate with Mama -- you lay off the Tonic Soup, and I won't need to gargle and brush for ten extra minutes -- I refrain. Risking Lecture Number Four (I Do Everything for You) seems hardly worth ruining the happiest day of every freshman's life. As of 3:05 this afternoon, we're sophomores.
So I sit quietly, hunched down in my seat in hopes that Mama will forget about me. Fat chance of that when we approach her new client's office, the doctor she's visiting this morning to organize his badly disarrayed bills. An especially loud hunh is aimed at me. It's raining, and my hair is going to
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get soaked, but I can't take this irradiation by irritation a moment longer. We're just a quarter mile from school. So I tell Mama, "You can just let me off here. I'll walk the rest of the way."
Mama glances at her watch and her lips tighten with annoyance. Heaven forbid, Ho Mei-Li is a second late to crunch numbers. Without putting up the least bit of resistance to my suggestion, Mama swerves into the parking lot, as she orders me, "Hurry! No late!"
Naturally, I slowpoke along on the sidewalk until I'm past glaring distance. And then I hustle to school, grumbling to myself about Torture by Tonic Soup. I'm trying to figure out a way to convince Abe that the soup builds lean muscle mass (his goal in life), when a familiar Neanderthal grunts, "Yo, Nip!"
I keep walking, head down as I'm caught in a storm of why's. Why now? Why today, the last day of school? Ku Klux Kosanko has pretty much left me alone since Abe and his baseball buddies had a "chat" with him at the beginning of the year for harassing me.
But a car slows down, way down.
"Chopsticks, I'm talking to you," taunts Steve Kosanko. His voice has an edge to it like I should be prostrating myself in front of him. Out of my periphery, I can see his huge forehead and a thick unibrow. "Maybe Half-breed Ho no speak English."
No, Idiot, I respond in my head as I walk a little faster. It's just that I don't speak Stupid.
Steve's cackle follows me. I can smell his hate the way you can always smell your yard after it's become some dog's personal outhouse.
Remind me again why I insisted on walking the rest of the way to school? I'd kick myself except then I'd probably trip,
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and I'm determined to walk like I don't hear Steve nipping at my heels with his racist pig comments. "Fung, twung, wung, low hung."
And here I thought time was supposed to mature us all. Obviously, Steve is stuck in some kind of elementary school time warp, proving that once an imbecile, always an imbecile. Another round of jeering laughter washes over me like mud. Steve's voice deepens to a leer: "Wanna check me out, Ho? Free, looky looky."
I hike my backpack higher onto my shoulders as if my books and papers could shield me. Say something, I yell at myself. Don't take his crap. But if words can't hurt you, how can they help you?
My eyes race up and down driveways, hunting for a good escape route. The huge "Lincoln High, Home of the Patriots" sign is up ahead. But I don't want to give Steve the satisfaction of seeing me bolt. Just ignore him, Mama would tell me. As if that ever works. Ignoring Steve just makes him madder that he can't screw with my head.
Against my better judgment, I look over at Steve, hanging out the driver's side window like the dog he is: a pit bull, ugly and mean. I may have x'ed Steve Kosanko out of every yearbook picture he's ever spoiled, but I'll never forget how mean his eyes can look. He's shorter than I am, but outweighs me by a good fifty pounds. All muscular upper arms and skinny legs that don't look like they can sprint. Trust me, he can. He got enough practice on me in grade school.
When I first complained about Steve, my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Enoch, just patted me on the head and said, "He's got a crush on you." Right, more like he wanted to crush me. My fifth-grade teacher gave me a look like Come on, what can
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this puny kid do to you? Well, nothing except turn school into a three-season hunting ground for Patty Ho.
But then Abe morphed into Lincoln's all-star pitcher with a team of he-men friends. Friends who enjoyed pounding on bullies. Friends who let Steve know I was off-limits. Friends who are graduating.
Before I know what Steve's planning, before I can dodge out of the firing line, he rears back and spits. A giant glob lands on my cheek and slides down, sluggy tears. All the voices inside me -- the strident one telling me to get my ass in gear and stand up for myself, the mousy one whispering to haul my ass out of here -- are speechless.
My feet are rooted into the sidewalk. I can't move. Then my heart hardens into a pellet of disbelief as I stare at the guy sitting in the passenger's seat. Mark Scranton, lust object since sixth grade when he moved into my neighborhood and my heart. The guy whose voice I can pick out in the most raucous soccer game. The guy whose campaign speech I wrote.
Et tu, Mark?
Mr. Class President won't meet my eyes. And I won't stop staring. Finally, Steve's car peels down the street, leaving fart fumes. And only then do I wipe my cheek on my sleeve.
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7 * Changing
Shielding my spit-stained face behind my long hair, I speed walk to my locker. All I can think about is changing. Changing schools so I don't have to deal with Steve Kosanko next year. Changing lives so I never have to face Mark again.
This morning, I settle for changing clothes. Thankfully I don't run into anyone because I don't think I can manage a "hello" or "sorry" without breaking apart, and I don't want that to get back to Steve Kosanko.
I reach my locker. For one long, Alzheimer's moment, I can't remember my combination. When I finally do, I paw through a year's worth of high school detritus: notes from Janie and Laura, empty potato chip bags, a couple of lint-covered gummy bears, crumpled quizzes. I almost lose it when I find a picture of me and Mark that slipped to the back of my locker, snapped at his house after we practiced his campaign speech, the one that I wrote for him, the one that he passed off as his own. I would tear the picture up into a million pieces, but I'm on a mission now.
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I shove aside my biology book, and at last dredge up the oversized, orange T-shirt, left over from a couple of weeks ago when I wasted my time painting a "Make Our Mark! Vote Scranton!" campaign banner. Who would have known that it would be my cheek that would carry his friends wet mark?
The bell rings, lockers clang shut, and kids race to class. I'm usually part of the student herd, but today I head to the girls' bathroom. Luckily, it's empty.
The damp spot on my sleeve, left from wiping Steve's spit off my face
, is drying, but I'd rather break out worse than Dylan Nguyen than keep this spitrag on for another minute. I don't even bother with a stall. Instead, I yank off my brand-new shirt and drop it onto the sticky bathroom floor. On the wall is a flyer for last week's junior prom. The day after Janie's boyfriend asked her to go with him, she went shopping for The Perfect Prom Dress with her mom. I prescribed The Perfect Prom Therapy for myself and blew the last of my Chinese New Year lucky money on this red shirt.
Can you say, "Buyer's remorse"?
The freebie T-shirt I got for running the Sound to Narrows 12K race with my cross-country team hangs loose and falls past my thighs. Not a good look, I'm sure. A glimpse of myself in the mirror confirms that, but as I look at my reflection, I wonder what it is that makes Steve hate me so much. Sure, my hair is more black than brown, and my eyes have a slight almond tilt to them. But my teeth are as white as snow, and half of me is just the same as him, Mark and 99.98 percent of my high school. So why does being part-Taiwanese make me all-disgusting in Steve's eyes?
My right cheek hurts from all my scrubbing, but I can't stop squirting more soap into my hand and lathering again.
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The cold water makes my teeth clench, but I splash until my whole face feels numb.
Here's the thing: no matter how much I scrub, no matter if my skin is rubbed raw, no matter how much cover-up and concealer I wear, I can't erase who I am. I feel like I'm stuck on some infinite teeter-totter: too-white, too-Asian; too-white, too-Asian. As much as I try to balance in the middle, I keep getting slammed, from one side to the other.
Against my pale, cold skin, my eyes look darker than ever. I finally ask myself the question that hurts the most: How could Mark have joined Steve's hate-spewing squad? Save getting a lobotomy how am I ever going to forget the sight of him, driving away like he had no idea what Steve had just done to me?
I turn away from the mirror. Running my red shirt in the washing machine a hundred times in a row, fading it to pink, would never salvage it. It's stained forever, marinating in the memory of Steve Kosanko and his scummy new sidekick, Mark Scranton. I pull the photo of me and Mark out of my back pocket, feeling like I'm going to throw up as I look at his face, no longer gorgeous, but gross. I crumple Mark in my hand and flush him down the toilet.
Mama would have had a conniption about the colossal waste of forty bucks if she saw me tossing my ruined shirt into the garbage. That would surely have brought on Lecture Number Five: You So Wasteful.
But I don't look back.
The halls in between classes are usually a no-geeks-land as the exceptionally brainy and fashion-challenged hurry to avoid being picked on.
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I wish I could stay out here in the quiet where I can see forever down the hall. But this is a no-girls-land, no matter who she is, because Mr. Allen, the vice-principal, is waddling out of a classroom, heading straight toward me. He looks like a beluga whale, in the same puffy, white, harmless way.
"Patty, anything wrong?" he asks, concerned.
This is one of the times when being part-Asian works to my advantage. Mr. Allen takes one look at me and sees only what he expects to see from a girl whose last name is Ho: a studious Asian kid. He assumes that I have a perfectly acceptable reason for being late. Part of me wants to pretend that I was up to no good: Nope, just looking for a safe place to get high, thank you very much.
When it comes down to it, what can this beluga whale do when just yesterday he was the one who clapped the great white Steve Kosanko shark on the back and handed him the student citizenship award for the second year in a row? He was the one who announced to the whole school that Mark won the election.
"All righty then. Better head to class," Mr. Allen says, lumbering away and expecting the silent Asian girl standing alone in the hall to follow his directions. I hear and obey.
I drift into Honors English late. Mrs. Meyers is leaning against the blackboard, legs crossed like she's at a bar, just chatting with some friends. She scans my ice-numb face and her gaze drops down to my T-shirt. A question instantly formulates in her eyes. I may not be the most fashion aware, but I know better than to wear a too-big, orange T-shirt listing corporate sponsors unless I'm outside, sweating from running
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or biking. I have become my mother, whose fashion sense is: the cheaper the better, but free is best.
Worse, I can feel Mark scrutinizing me, but when I glare at him, dare him to look at me straight in my face, his eyes fall to his hands, twisted on his desk. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is our future leader of America.
"Everything OK, Patty?" asks Mrs. Meyers.
I nod and plaster an A-OK smile on my face even though I don't think I'll B-OK for a while. As I slide into my seat, Janie whispers, "What happened to you?"
I take one look at Janie with her pink miniskirt and funky cowboy boots and chubby thighs. She can complain all day long about being fat, but her extra fifteen pounds don't stop her from getting dates, don't stop her from fitting in, don't stop her from being normal. By virtue of blotchy red skin that is still white when it counts, she doesn't get spit upon. Jealousy scrambles sure-footed into my heart.
Her forehead-wrinkling half-smile of support makes me ashamed of my Janie-envy. This is my best friend, after all.
"He spit on me," I mutter to Janie, as I pass up my English composition book. I don't have to tell her who the "he" is. "And Mark was with him."
Janie's solidarity is immediate, never mind that she's had a not-so-secret crush on Mark for the past two years, too, not that I've ever admitted my own stupid infatuation. She screws up her face in disgust. Without any hesitation, she swivels in her seat, facing Mark, and mouths: "Asshole loser."
We can glare all we want at him, but there's nothing anyone can do about the real loser. Not when Steve's mother is on the school board. Not when the last time I lodged a complaint, my junior high school principal, Mrs. Stark, just
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hemmed and hawed and said she'd look into it. What she meant was she was looking into her future as a principal.
"Some of my favorite reads, perfect for keeping your brain sharp this summer," says Mrs. Meyers, back to business. Normally, I'm all ears in Honors English, totally absorbed because Mrs. Meyers talks to us like peers, not kids. Her hand floats across the chalkboard, but her writing could have been Sanskrit for all its wriggles in front of my unseeing eyes.
"I loved The Corrections" cries Anne, ever the dedicated Asian student even on this last day of school when all the grades have been calculated. I want to shake her: You are the reason why everyone hates us. Why everyone calls the two of us the Asian Mafia even though only one of us dominates every class discussion. Guess which one? God, Anne, why do you have to raise the curve? Why can't you stay quiet like me?
Mrs. Meyers hefts a huge cardboard box onto her desk. Her hands are on either side of the box, like she's protecting its contents. "Now the day you've been waiting for. I can honestly say that I enjoyed reading every one of your Truth Statements." She picks a couple off the top of the stack. Thick binders. Laminated covers. Professional bindings.
I feel like my lungs have collapsed. On the Monday they were due, Mrs. Meyers gave us an extension until three in the afternoon to turn in our Truth Statements, a special dispensation because of the Spring Fling. I hadn't seen anyone else's work. Until now. Hadn't we all moaned about how behind we were on writing our Truth Statements?
Talk about truth is cheap. The whole truth was that everyone -- except me -- went full-throttle for the A+.
Mrs. Meyers beams, proud mama who gave birth to all these overachievers. "Most of you are ready to write spectacular,
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honest college applications. Just remember, dig deep inside yourself to find the real answers. The real truth." Then Mrs. Meyers starts calling up people to collect their Truth Tomes from her. "Anne."
The front of Anne's three-inch binder is decorated with a collage, rice paper decoupaged with pho
tographs of a traditional Chinese garden moongate. Geez, even if she listed all her spelling bee trophies and math championships and geography ribbons, they couldn't have filled an entire binder, could they?
"Mark," calls Mrs. Meyers.
The Class Coward shuffles up to claim his binder-clipped ream of paper, at least fifty pages thick. Too bad he keeps his eyes averted from the blasts of disgust coming from my desk. I'd bet every one of my favorite books and Janie's entire wardrobe that there isn't so much as a single sentence in Mark's Truth Statement that says he's friends with a racist pig. Or that he's too much of a wimp to stop Steve Kosanko from spewing on me.
A shimmer of pink diverts my attention from The Traitor. Janie, who triple-spaced and wide-margined last year's world history report, holds a dossier with a pink cover sheet tied together with a sparkly silver ribbon. I stare at her work, betrayed again. Hadn't she been stressing about this assignment as much as I had?
Come on, people, I want to shout. We've been alive for about fifteen years. How much truth could any of us accumulate?
My paltry three pages are such a weak excuse of a Truth Statement that I'm the only one without mine back at the end of the class. Anne doesn't miss this fact, projecting in her loud voice as if we're at dim sum and need to talk over the chattering Chinese and rolling carts: "Where's Patty's?"
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"The only truth we need to know is that her shirt is butt ugly." Cole laughs, nothing but good-natured humor. His grubby concert T-shirts never look any better than what I have on, and everyone knows it.
Nothing but the truth: (and a few white lies) Page 4