This Is My Brain in Love

by I. W. Gregorio

  Basically, Will is a pretty darn likable dude. I’m most impressed by how calm he is when my dad gives him the third degree. Actually, “calm” is the wrong word—the way he holds himself almost soldier straight suggests there’s some sort of tension buzzing under the surface. He’s… deliberate. But it isn’t a calculating, manipulative kind of deliberation that a pro would throw at you during a job interview. He’s thoughtful. Wanting to give an honest answer.

  Which is good, because the Wu family bullshit radar is military grade.

  Given how much of my time the restaurant eats up, I don’t have that many close friends. Priya has a ton of them and I kind of hate her for it.

  Another thing that doesn’t help is my resting bitch face, which my mom has been trying to train me out of since middle school: “Why you frown all time, Xiao Jia? You so pretty when you smile! How you find husband if you always look so moody?”

  I always thought it was ironic that she’d bring up my future mate (assumed to be male, of course), when it’s always been a given that she and my dad won’t let me date until college. I guess the point my mom was trying to make was that people don’t consider me welcoming, because I only smile when given a reason to. And what’s the matter with that? It takes a lot of effort and a significant amount of muscle control to be a walking smile emoji all the time.

  Bottom line: I don’t meet potential friends often, so I’m glad my dad didn’t scare Will away.

  I make sure to plaster a big smile on my face when Will comes in with the last of the broccoli. He’s panting a little and has rolled up the sleeves of his button-down, revealing well-toned arms that my gaze does not linger on at all, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  When I manage to tear my eyes away from the glorious lines of his forearms and shift to his face, he’s grinning at me, too, and I feel my forced smile relax into something more natural, more true.

  I’m really looking forward to those muscles getting more use.

  This Is My Brain on Work

  WILL

  No amount of research, no phone interview, could ever prepare me for how hard it is to run a restaurant. Behind the curtain, the action never ends. If you’re not prepping for a meal, you’re cooking it, or serving it, or packaging it up. Then you’re cleaning and closing out the register, and then it’s time for another service. Rinse and repeat. It’s never-ending and exhausting and humbling.

  I tell Jocelyn as much after the lunch rush is over and ask her how her parents have kept up the pace all these years. She shrugs. “It’s what they do to survive. They don’t know anything different.”

  The words she uses so casually to describe her parents’ motivations cut deep. They do it to survive. I’ve always known that I live an economically privileged life, but it’s possible that today is the first day I’ve ever understood what it is like to be a little bit desperate that you won’t be able to make ends meet. In just a few hours I can see the toll it takes on Mr. Wu, with his constant scowl and complaints about the cost of produce. It makes me sad, and determined at the same time. I took the job practically on a whim, but after just a day I want to stay because of how I might be able to help out.

  “I just wish I could have done more,” I say. “Thanks for a good first day.”

  Jocelyn shakes her head. “No. Thank you,” she says with a force that surprises me. “Half the time we’re at DEFCON 1. Having even one set of extra hands makes it basically a party.”

  And that’s why I leave A-Plus shaking my head—that anyone in their right mind would ever imply that I bring the party with me.

  This Is My Brain on Hormones

  JOCELYN

  “Pri,” I moan over the phone as soon as I get into my room after we’ve closed the restaurant. “You have to help me. I think I’m falling for the ‘Nerds Are Sexy’ trope.”

  “NO WAY.”

  “Yes way, and it’s terrible.”

  “Who is it? Is he googleable? I need pics ASAP.”

  “You know that ad I put out? I hired this guy Will. He’s gonna be a junior at St. Agnes in the fall. I can see if he’s on Insta or anything.”

  “He goes to Catholic school? Is he totally straightedge?”

  “Kinda? But in a totally sweet, adorkable way, not in an annoying judgy way. He’s black, or maybe mixed race, I think. He works for his school newspaper and is just really a solid guy, super thoughtful. My dad met him today, and he only asked one racist question that made me want to die.” I tell her about how he’s going to redo our website basically for free, and how he both passed my dad’s GPA test and aced Amah’s pot sticker challenge.

  “Did your mom meet him?”

  “No, it was already too lunch-busy when she came back from her errands. I think it’ll be weird to do a formal introduction. Better to just let him grow on her.”

  The truth is, Will isn’t the first person that my family has been biased against, and he won’t be the last. Case in point: The day after I got my period, my mother sat me down to do her version of the birds and the bees talk, which included a rundown of who it was acceptable to marry in my hypothetical future.

  “American boys only want one thing. You should marry an Asian guy.” Except she then proceeded to contradict herself by eliminating every other Asian subgroup based on their worst ethnic stereotype, concluding, “As long as you find someone who is Taiwanese, that okay.”

  Priya got her own special brand of South Asian mom xenophobia, so she gets that white people haven’t cornered the market on bias. In fact, she was the one who explained to me, after her family trip to India, how colonial powers encouraged intraracial prejudice—the better to keep everyone down.

  “Sliding the guy in under the radar is a good strategy. It’ll give you time to get some mom-bait details, play the long game. Maybe you can pretend he wants to be premed and make him come up with nutritional information for your menu. Oh! Or have Amah fake a heart attack and have him do CPR on her.”

  I roll my eyes. “You’ve been watching too many telenovelas. Will’s got plenty of mom bait up his sleeve; we don’t have to make anything up.” I realize what I’ve just said and make a face. “OMG, why are we talking about whether my mom will approve of my marrying Will? It’s not like he’s going to want to date me or anything.”

  “Can’t hurt to try. This guy sounds incredible! You sound like you’re glowing.”

  “Give me a break, you can’t hear light.” I sigh, still smiling.

  “You know what I mean. You haven’t sounded this excited about a guy since… your birthday.” She catches herself, but I can hear the name that she didn’t want to say out loud anyway. And it’s this bruise of a memory that dampens the expanse of my feelings and makes me remember where I am. Who I am. What I need to do, without distractions.

  I can feel the smile melt off my face. “Who am I kidding,” I mutter. “I’m sure I’m not his type.”

  “Jos, don’t do this.”

  “Do what?” I ask, daring her to say it.

  I hear Priya’s deep intake of breath and brace myself. “You know, the thing you sometimes do where you admit defeat before you even start the game.”

  “It’s not like that,” I insist. “No games, Pri. I promise. I just got excited. It’s only a crush that will run its course. I’m psyched that I found someone who can help the business, that’s all.”

  “Jos.”

  “Gotta go, it’s bedtime. See you tomorrow night to do some storyboarding?” We’re working on a short film to submit to the All American High School Film Festival. I’m writing the screenplay and Priya is going to direct.

  After we hang up I stare at my ceiling, and despite myself, I can’t stop thinking about my last big crush. Rob Bradley comes into A-Plus at least twice a month to pick up takeout for his family, and sometime after Christmas he started making small talk about little things, like our English homework and who we thought was writing our school’s anonymous advice column. When Priya told me she’d convinced him
to come to my birthday dinner at Carmella’s, I wanted to hug her and puke at the same time.

  Turns out, Rob only came to my party because he wanted to mack on Peggy Cheng, the other Chinese girl in our grade, aka the one I always get mistaken for.

  Months after my party, I still feel like a deflated balloon thinking about it. Rob only gave me a cursory “Hey, happy birthday” before beelining to grab a seat next to Peggy. When I remember how he leaned his head down to laugh with her, there’s an echo of pain in my chest.

  The most embarrassing thing, though, what I’m maddest at myself for, is that I had thoroughly convinced myself that Rob was interested in me. I still don’t know how I was so delusional. What, did I think that my attraction to him would magically make him attracted to me? Animal magnetism doesn’t quite work that way.

  I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

  Sluggishly, I plug my phone in, but my arms give up on anything more complicated than that. I’m so bone tired that I can’t even get the energy to slide off my bed and get ready for sleep.

  I figure, why bother brushing your teeth, if you just have to brush them in the morning?

  This Is My Brain on Confusion

  WILL

  When I get dressed for my second day of work, I make a point to wear jeans and a dark polo shirt and remember to put on sneakers so my feet won’t be killing me again by the end of the day. My mother frowns at me as she gets ready to leave. “Looking rather casual, aren’t you, Will? I thought you were a management intern.” Today’s an operating room day for her, so she’ll change into scrubs when she gets to the hospital, but she’s still wearing a dress and pearls.

  “My boss told me to wear clothes that I didn’t mind getting dirty,” I say, trying not to sound defensive.

  “Well, as long as you remember you mustn’t look like a hooligan if you expect to get any respect from your coworkers.” She punctuates her comment with a kiss on my cheek, and I have to remind myself that her crisp British English makes everything sound harsher than it should.

  “So how’d the first day go?” Grace asks after my mom leaves. Her voice is sympathetic. I can’t help feeling sad when I think about her going to Yale in the fall.

  “It went okay,” I say. “The people are nice, and it’s cool seeing how a restaurant works. I’m thinking about maybe writing a piece on restaurant turnover and how it can affect the microeconomy of strip malls. Kind of like that feature Julia Brown wrote on the new construction downtown? The one that got published in the O-D?”

  “Really?” Grace asks. “Are you going to write a Chinese food version of Kitchen Confidential? Adventures in the lo mein underbelly?” She fakes a movie trailer voice-over: “What’s really in that pork fried rice, and what day of the week should you avoid the moo shu?”

  “Ha ha,” I say, not impressed. “Hey, have you ever had real pot stickers here in Utica before? You know, the kind of dumplings that are crispy on the bottom but steamed on top?”

  “I don’t think so. Mom and I had some that time we went to New York Chinatown. On my college trip. Why, do they make them at A-Plus?”

  “Not yet,” I say. “Quick question: Last year when you ran in the Boilermaker, there was a food court, right? I’m wondering if maybe A-Plus could be a vendor. There’s a ton of foot traffic.”

  “It’s kind of late to be planning this. The race is in, like, two weeks.”

  “Isn’t Maria Bertozzi’s dad one of the big organizers behind it all, though?” I ask.

  “Sure, I guess I can try to get his number for you.”

  There’s a meaningful pause during which my sister looks right at me, her eyebrows raised as if daring me to say something else.

  I know what Grace expects to hear. She’s waiting for me to ask if she can call for me. She probably even knows all the arguments I’d make: The Bertozzis know her well, so won’t it mean more coming from her? She is the one who ran the race, wouldn’t she know more about what kind of opportunities there might be?

  She knows that I know she would never make the call.

  You would think I would prefer talking on the phone to conversations in real life. It’s safer, right? The person on the other end doesn’t see you and can’t make a snarky judgment of you based on your appearance. You never have to make an effort to look the person in the eye or stress out about their microexpressions and what they mean.

  With my anxiety, I should be the type of person who would thrive as a telemarketer, but no. Phone calls are my Achilles’ heel. I particularly hate the silent moments, when there’s no body language or facial expression to tell me whether someone’s bored to death or just thinking about their response. On phone calls, I can second-guess myself to the point of hysteria. This is not an ideal match for journalism, I admit. But luckily, these days most sources are more readily available by e-mail or a text. I’ve also been known to bike two miles across town to speak with someone in person and have cultivated a lot of friends who are willing to be middlemen and middlewomen when I need to make requests of others.

  Grace is not one of those middlewomen. In fact, she is the anti-middlewoman. She is an endwoman. She’s my mother’s daughter, too, so she’s done her homework and decided that the way to fix me is exposure therapy—forcing me to do the things that make me the most anxious to help make them less anxiety-inducing. In the hierarchy of fears that Dr. Rifkin made me chart out, phone calls ranked even higher than public speaking and my anxiety about the mobile roller coasters at the Booneville-Oneida County Fair.

  As I dish out some Greek yogurt, blueberries, and granola, Grace sends a series of texts. She’s rewarded with a response within a minute, because of course she is.

  “I’m forwarding you Mr. Bertozzi’s number. Maria says he should be in his office.”

  “Grace, at least let me finish breakfast first.”

  I eat my breakfast super slowly just to mess with my sister, but the joke’s on me. As I get up to wash my dishes by hand, instead of putting them into the dishwasher like I usually do, she finally loses patience. “Okay, Captain Avoidance, time’s up. I’ve gotta get to work.” She grabs my phone, dials a number, and puts it on speakerphone.

  I swear and frantically de-suds my hands while the phone rings once, twice. And of course I don’t catch a break as Mr. Bertozzi’s secretary picks up on the third ring.

  “Lisowski and Bertozzi, how may I help you?”

  These words should not strike fear in my soul, I know they shouldn’t. But I don’t need to look at my smart watch app to know that my heart rate has probably doubled. I grab the phone and turn off the speaker. My voice only shakes a little as I answer.

  “Um, hello. My name is William Domenici. I was hoping to speak with Mr. Bertozzi?”

  The minute I’m put on hold, I hiss at my sister, “I’m going to tell Mom and Dad. You know Dr. Rifkin said exposures are supposed to happen in a safe environment, right?”

  Grace rolls her eyes. “Please. You’re in our kitchen. Doesn’t get much safer than that. Good luck, bro.” She grabs her blazer and is out the door before Mr. Bertozzi picks up the phone.

  “Will! How can I help you? My daughter just texted something about the Boilermaker?”

  “Yes, sir.” At least I’m so pissed off at my sister that I can’t concentrate enough to be too anxious. “I know the deadline has passed for vendor applications, but I wanted to know if it’s possible to make an exception for a small food cart?”

  When it turns out that there are a few more openings left, it’s maybe a little bit irritating to have to admit that Grace’s strongarm tactics worked. It’s worth it, though, to be able to show up at A-Plus with the opportunity in hand. Jocelyn is already staging the bags for that afternoon’s lunch orders when I get to the restaurant. She looks up from her work using a box cutter to make rectangles of cardboard and nods at me.

  There’s something off about her. It’s not just that she’s frowning with concentration (she is)—it’s that her movements are
slower than usual. When she showed me the setup routine yesterday, her movements were impressively quick and efficient: open the paper bag with a flick of the wrist, slide it instantly into a plastic bag, line it with cardboard with one hand while grabbing two fortune cookies to throw in with another.

  “I should’ve brought coffee again, huh?” I ask, joking, but when she doesn’t smile, I hover awkwardly for a minute.

  How could everything that felt so natural yesterday feel so wrong today?

  This Is My Brain on Frugality

  JOCELYN

  My brain feels like a giant ball of lint.

  Will, in contrast, comes into work all eager, like a Saint Bernard with a tennis ball in his mouth. I nod at him in greeting, because words seem too hard at the moment.

  “I should’ve brought coffee again, huh?” he jokes, and for a moment it irritates me. Is he basically saying that I look tired? Or worse, cranky? I swallow a snarky response and wave to the kitchen.

  “Amah has some green tea already steeped if you need some caffeine.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m good,” he says a little too quickly, like he’s trying to manage my mood, for God’s sake. I shake my head to clear out the cloud of negativity in my head.

  Snap out of it, Wu.

  “So,” I say. “What’s in the folder?”

  “Oh!” Will lays down his folio and starts pulling out computer printouts. “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I made some mock-ups of a new website.”

  “Wow,” I say after some stunned blinking. “These look awesome!” I mean, anything that uses a font more sophisticated than Arial Black would win an A-Plus design competition, but what Will has come up with is both functional and super slick.

  He flips through some different views of the drop-down menus and spouts some technobabble that I mostly ignore, before he asks anxiously, “You like it?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s ridiculous. You did this in one night? My dad will freak out.” At least he’ll be happy when he finds out it was free. He’s always ignored our website except for the annual grumbling when he has to renew our hosting service.