by Kelly Yang
“Where are you?” Claire asks.
I tell her the name and address of the store.
“I’ll be right there,” she says.
Claire arrives at the store ten minutes later. She strolls into the back office in her block heels and looks at me—I want to crawl into the fetal position.
“How much?” she asks the security guards, pulling out her wallet.
She doesn’t ask what happened. Doesn’t ask why.
“Your friend here owes $134.80,” Red tells her.
Without a word, Claire pulls a hundred-dollar bill and a fifty from her wallet and hands them to the security guards. She doesn’t wait for change, she just grabs me and pulls me out of there.
When we’re out of the store, I turn to her and say, “It’s not what you think. I’m not a shoplifter.”
“Of course not. I never thought that.”
“I was going to pay for it—I swear! But then I saw someone in the store and I—”
“Listen,” Claire says, holding up a hand, stopping me. “You don’t have to explain it to me.” She taps on her phone for an Uber, then looks up at me. “I’ve listened to enough of your speeches to know that.” She smiles.
My eyes open wide. “You have?”
Claire nods. “Oh yeah, all the time. It’s the best part of living at your house.”
Her words surprise the hell out of me. “I thought you didn’t like living with us,” I say quietly. “You know, from your WeChat posts,” I add.
She flushes. “I was just writing that for my friends back home. It was stupid; I’m sorry.” Her phone dings. It’s her Uber driver. She asks me if I need a ride. I shake my head no.
“Thanks again for coming. And I’ll pay you back!” I say to her. I put my hands together. “Please don’t say anything to my mom about this.”
She shakes her head, like she would never.
“Or to Zach,” I add.
As her Uber driver pulls up, Claire opens the door and turns to me, shielding her face from the sun with her hand. “Zach, is he like your boyfriend or something?” she asks.
I shake my head. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, wondering whether I should tell her I like him. But when I look up, she’s already inside the Uber.
I wave as she drives off. She texts me from inside the Uber, Next time you want to go crazy in a grocery store, call me and we’ll go crazy together. Especially in the chocolate aisle!
I smile. I was wrong about Claire.
Fifty-One
Claire
I was happy to be able to help Dani. She’s done so much for me, not the least of which was help me get an amazing English teacher. Jess is waiting for me in my room after I get back from the grocery store, not to go shopping, but to study. Dani’s mom, who came home to get her phone, let her in. I’m helping Jess prep for the English placement test. More parachutes have been testing out, not just in English but in math, science, and history too. It’s wonderful to see so many parachutes taking charge.
Now when the bell rings, instead of the usual stampede of jet-black hair heading one way and blonds the other, there is jet-black dotted throughout the blond and brunette, which makes me smile. I’ve been trying to encourage Jay to test out too, but when it comes to school, he’s not too bothered. He tells me he’s going to take over his dad’s company when he gets out of college, a plan that I’m sure will impress my mom at dinner. And for that role, his old man says it’s more about instinct than book smarts.
“You’re late,” Jess says, pointing to her Cartier tank.
“Sorry,” I say, putting my purse down. “I lost track of time.”
“Where were you?” she asks. I shrug, not about to tell her Dani’s secret. Instead, I delete my WeChat moments on my phone and point to the English books on my desk.
“Did you get started?” I ask.
Jess smiles mischievously and walks over to Emma’s box of condoms. “No, but I did discover these!” She opens the box. “Thank God you finally popped your cherry,” she says. “But seriously, Claire, these are so cheap. I’ll get you some better ones from Japan. The Kimono MicroThins? They won the Oscars of condoms.”
There’s an Oscars of condoms? I chuckle. “Thanks, but they’re not mine,” I say, putting away the box.
Jess looks confused. “What do you mean? You and Jay still haven’t had sex?”
I don’t say anything.
Jess’s jaw drops. “What’s wrong? He can’t get it up?” she presses.
“No! It’s not that!”
“Then what is it?”
“I thought you came here to study,” I say.
Jess plops herself down on my bed. “Claire, you’re dating the hottest guy in school. And he’s crazy for you.” She looks at me and asks gently, “Is it the other girls on his phone?”
That certainly doesn’t help. I walk over and look out the window.
“I know it’s hard, but you’re going to have to trust him. Those girls are in the past.”
Jess’s phone dings, as does mine. We both look down at the urgent message from Nancy.
HELP! My parents saw my Insta!
Jess speeds over to Nancy’s host’s house on the other side of town. Florence meets us at Nancy’s. We find her sitting on her bed next to a fortress of handbags, which she appears to be categorizing with her laptop. She puts down her laptop when she sees us.
“Hey,” we say to her, taking a seat next to her on her bed. Nancy looks up and clutches an LV bag as she cries. “My parents got a VPN to go on Instagram. When they saw my posts, they flipped out. ‘This is what we’re paying forty thousand US dollars plus room and board for?’ they said,” she wails. “They called me an ungrateful piece of American trash!”
Jess tries to calm her down. “Did you explain to your parents it’s all just a way to get followers and when we get enough, we’ll delete all our posts and start fresh? But we’ll still have the followers? We need at least 20k to be influencers!”
Nancy rubs her eyes. “My parents don’t know what that means. They’re not like your guys’ parents.” A tear falls onto her LV bag, and she quickly dries it with her hand. “I don’t come from a lot of money. My parents left me with my grandparents when I was four years old to go to Beijing to work. They took out a billion loans just to send me here.”
Jess, Florence, and I look at each other. “But what about all your clothes? All your bags?”
Nancy picks up the LV bag she’s holding and shows us. “All knockoffs from Shenzhen or rented from online.” She pulls out the rental card from the inside pocket of the leather bag.
Jess gasps. “You rented this?” she asks, taking the bag in her hand. “Why?”
The answer, too embarrassing to say, was for us. I toss the bags aside and pull Nancy in for a hug.
“You don’t have to rent that stuff,” I say.
“That’s easy for you guys to say. You already have it!” Nancy says. Her eyes slide over to her desk, where her wallet lies open. Both her Visa and Mastercard are cut up into a thousand pieces, next to a pair of scissors. I think back to all the times she said she forgot to move her credit card from one bag to another. “I don’t know how it got so out of control . . .”
“You should have just told us,” Jess says, shaking her head at Nancy. “I would have totally lent you some of my—”
“No,” I say, cutting Jess off. That’s not the thing to say. I look into Nancy’s eyes and tell her, “It doesn’t matter what you carry.”
Nancy peers over at Jess, whose eyes flit around the room at all the fake bags that litter the floor. I can tell she’s trying hard to be supportive while also trying to stay true to herself, someone who would never be caught dead buying knockoffs.
Florence’s small voice chimes in. “I have something to tell you guys too.”
I turn to her, fully expecting her to come out, but instead, she says, “My parents aren’t who I said they are. . . .”
“Your dad’s not a hedge
fund manager?” Jess asks.
“I mean he is, but . . .” Her chest rises and falls. “I’m . . . I’m his illegitimate daughter.”
Jess’s eyes go wide. She stares at Florence, the flesh-and-bones incarnation of her most painful scar. I can feel the heat of Jess from the other side of the bed.
“That’s why he sent me here. To hide me . . .” Florence looks down, her eyelashes flooding with tears. “I know it’s a lot. If you guys don’t want to be friends with me anymore, I’ll understand.”
The room falls silent. As I reach out a hand to Florence, Jess gets up, grabs her car keys and her bag, and starts walking out.
“Jess, what are you doing?” I ask.
She holds up a hand. “I’m sorry, I need to process this,” she says.
That night, as I get ready for dinner with my mom and Jay, I think about Nancy and Florence and how I had them pegged but I was totally wrong. I think about Nancy, quietly renting and returning bags, running up a huge credit card bill her parents can’t afford, just so she can feel like she’s one of us.
And Florence, how she still didn’t tell everyone her other secret. Though now I understand a little more why she’s so afraid. Her situation is complicated. After Jess left, she told us her dad won’t even let her call him Dad in public. They put her here in America so no one would find out about her.
Dani knocks on my door as I’m putting on my boots.
“Come in!”
“I just wanted to say thank you again,” she says. “You look nice! Going out with your dad again?”
I shake my head.
“He seemed really nice, by the way,” she adds.
Ha, if she only knew. “I’m going out to dinner with my mom and my boyfriend.”
“Is that the guy who always drives up in his Ferrari?”
“Lamborghini,” I correct, then feel immediately bad for being one of those people who knows the difference and actually corrects people.
Dani reaches into her jean pocket and pulls out five twenty-dollar bills.
“This is for the other day. I’ll pay you the rest later,” she says.
I shake my head. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do,” Dani insists.
She pushes the money into my hands. I can tell it means a lot to her that I accept it, just as it’s important to me that she think my parents are perfect and my dad would never walk out on me at dinner. I thank her for the money and put it in my purse as the doorbell rings. My mom’s here.
“It’s okay, honey,” my mom says from across the table. We’re sitting in Mori, one of the top sushi restaurants in Orange County, and Jay’s late. “You have to understand, guys get busy sometimes.”
I nod, pushing the wasabi around in my soy sauce. He’s really late. We’re almost done. My mom has to leave for the airport soon or she won’t make it for her connecting flight to New York. I try him again on his cell. Where is he?
It goes straight to voice mail.
“I don’t understand,” I say apologetically. “I told him five times we were going to dinner tonight.”
I try texting him. My mom reaches across the table for my phone.
“Honey, you need to stop,” she says, switching off my phone. “He’s going to think you’re needy.”
My mom tosses my phone into her purse.
“When I first met your dad, I didn’t call him back for days,” she says, blowing on her green tea. “You have to be a little more coy with guys or they’ll lose interest.”
See, this is exactly why I needed Jay here tonight, so I wouldn’t have to deal with my mom’s psychobabble all by myself. “Jay and I don’t need to play games. We’re in a happy, healthy relationship,” I inform my mother.
My mom sets down her tea. “Then why isn’t he here?” she asks.
Ouch. As I reach for a sushi roll with my chopsticks, my mother remarks to take off the rice, I don’t need the carbs.
“Your arms are looking big,” she says, studying me. “Have you been swimming?”
I ignore her, popping the whole piece in my mouth and chewing loudly just to spite her. We talk briefly about Tressy and how Snowy, my dog, is doing, eventually getting to the sensitive subject of Dad. She reaches a hand across the table.
“He didn’t mean it,” she apologizes for him.
I roll my eyes. I feel the tears gather in the back of my eyes at the memory of that night. I waited for forty-five minutes outside the restaurant after he left, crying in the wind, before my Uber finally showed up. “Mom, it was horrible.”
“I know, honey,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” She says she gave him an earful when he got home, and he felt really bad.
I ask her how things are going with her and Dad.
“Good,” she insists. “I told him if I ever catch him cheating again, I’m out of here.”
I nod. Good for her, although it’s probably not the first time she’s said that.
She reaches for an edamame. “Sometimes I think if I hadn’t met your dad at such a young age, maybe I could have had a life of my own.”
“It’s not too late, Mom. You’re only thirty-seven.”
My mom laughs as she peels the edamame. She hands me the peas and asks me about school. I tell her about the mini revolution I started, fighting to get my English teacher suspended for writing that obnoxious email.
“You’ve always been feisty. I think you get it from your father,” she says with a wink.
As I smile back at my mom, it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve spent two and a half months away from my parents.
“I’m so proud of you, Claire,” she says as she waves to the waiter for the check and gives me back my phone.
“Thanks, Mom,” I say.
“And I’m sorry not to meet Jay. He is an amazing catch.” She holds up a glass of sake to me.
As we toast to my amazing new boyfriend, I try not to think about the fact that at this exact moment I literally have no idea where he is.
Fifty-Two
Dani
After Claire and her mom leave for dinner, my mom turns to me, sheepishly, and asks if I too want to go out. But I don’t want to schlep to KFC or McDonald’s, I want a real dinner. I used to dream about the day I would get my acceptance to Yale, how my mom would saunter into Budget Maids and announce to Rosa that her daughter’s going to an Ivy League school, and we’d go out to a nice, white-tablecloth dinner afterward. The look of pride on my mom’s face, it’d fill me up on nights when I went to bed half-hungry.
I shake my head and turn back to my laptop. I’m at the kitchen table researching LA private schools. Maybe there’s one I can transfer to midyear, one that’ll offer me a scholarship. My mom pulls green beans, onions, bell peppers, and coconut milk out of the fridge and starts making ginataan, my favorite. The warm coconut smell fills the kitchen. My mom pulls out a brochure from her purse, glancing at it as she stirs.
“What’s that?” I ask.
She holds the brochure up, and it reads, “ADULT SCHOOL.”
I close my laptop and sit up. “You’re thinking of going back to school?” I ask.
My mom shakes her head. She tastes the coconut and adds salt. “No time,” she says. “Too busy cleaning and trying to make enough money.”
“I can pull some more shifts. Mom, I think you should do it,” I encourage her. “It’ll be great.”
She leaves the stew to simmer, walks over, and massages my shoulders. “I don’t want you pulling more shifts, my anak,” she says. “You already pull enough.” She works a tight knot in my neck. “How’s school?”
My shoulders tense, and I squirm out of her hands. I don’t want her to know I didn’t get headmistress commendation this year.
“It’s fine,” I say, gathering up my papers and computer in my arms.
My mom looks at me. “Are you okay?”
I nod, averting her probing eyes.
She walks back to her stew and stirs. “I know you think of yourself as my greatest hope, a
nd you are,” she says. “But I don’t want you to put so much pressure on yourself.”
Too late for that. That night, I tiptoe into my mom’s room and put the money I made from cleaning houses that week on her desk. I was going to give it to Claire, to finish what I owe, but she can wait another week. I hope my mom will enroll in adult school. I still think she’s right, that I’m our greatest hope. But in case I’m not, I hope she invests in herself.
At school the next day, Ming walks me to my locker after band. She consoles me on not making headmistress commendation.
“You’ll get it next year,” she says. I tell her about my debate team changing the time on me.
“That’s so messed up,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t imagine if I showed up for practice and the rest of the band wasn’t there.”
“It was pretty bad,” I say, opening my locker.
“You still gonna go though, right? To practice?” she asks.
Before I can answer, something falls out of my locker. A bloody rubber hand.
Ming and I scream.
I pick up the rubbery Halloween prop. There’s a note attached to the gross hand, severed at the wrist in fake blood. It reads:
OMG a hand touched me!
Followed by a motion:
This house believes Dani De La Cruz will do or say anything to get ahead.
Fifty-Three
Claire
Where were you??? I text Jay.
Three ??? to convey the urgency. I press Send and continue typing. How could you stand me up with my mom!? WTF?! Then I stare at the words. I can hear my mother’s voice: Don’t seem needy . . . you need to be coy with guys. I delete the words and put down my phone.
I try to focus on my psychology essay, but it’s impossible. Where was he? And why hasn’t he texted me back?
At school the next day, Jay’s not there. Jess, Nancy, and Florence tell me to relax.
“He’s probably sick or something,” Nancy says. She takes out a piece of gum from her simple Coach backpack. She’s returned all her rented bags from online. Honestly, the Coach bag looks just as nice. I’m thinking of getting one too.