“Nah,” Marlon said, “they hate gossip when it’s about them.”
It was past midnight when Bond parked in front of their destination. The house sat at the foot of the Delta’s levee—one of those ritzy waterfront pads—its beaming windows the sole light on the block. The FAMOUS SINGER unbuckled her seat belt, making even that look elegant. “Without gossip,” she said, “how do you know not to respect a man with a Rolex?”
“Preach, baby!” Marlon howled, and jumped out of the car. Then, alongside the FAMOUS SINGER, he shimmied his way to the house, totally forgetting about the wide-open door of the Lexus, because, whatever, his younger brother would take care of anything that required handling, right?
In the stillness Marlon left behind, Bond inhaled and closed his eyes. He saw himself rendered in geometric brushstrokes, sitting in his dad’s overpriced SUV and framed by the driver’s window. A mixture of deep blues, fluorescent glows, and natural light from the moon. The background: the house atop a grassy mound, a beacon of bright yellow windows, and two figures ascending the lawn—one, the FAMOUS SINGER, a silhouette of long hair, a modern Apsara, and the other, a bulkier version of himself, a burst of energy drifting away.
III.
THE BRIDESMAIDS GET THE PARTY STARTED WITH SOME MARIAH CAREY
He was buzzed. Not incapacitated, not “off the wagon,” and everyone—especially his mom, and definitely his younger brother—needed to chill the hell out. Marlon stood in the center of the living room and swayed. He double-fisted swigs of cognac and the neon green of a Gatorade he found in the fridge, which no one seemed to notice because no one appreciated that he knew how to handle his goddamn shit.
“Why is there no music playing?” he yelled. “I need to dance if I’m gonna enjoy my electrolytes!”
He threw his Gatorade into the air and caught it, then thanked Buddha that he had remembered to twist the bottle shut. He’d been thanking Buddha, as a joke, for all his fortunes, since doing a monthlong stint at the dingy rehab of their hometown, which required each group therapy monologue to begin with “I thank god I am alive.”
“Do I have to do fucking everything!” screamed Monica, the LOCAL ACCOUNTANT, who did everyone’s taxes pro bono, and who was also the BRIDE’s maid of honor and first-favorite cousin, according to the number of Instagram posts of them posing at the club.
Behind the kitchen island, Monica rummaged through a never-ending procession of overfilled plastic bags from the reception. Her fellow bridesmaids kept walking in through the front door with more junk to organize, catalog, recycle, dismantle, and return for a refund because the BRIDE’s parents hated being ripped off, despite their flair for decadence, so amply manifested in the course of this three-day wedding. And now, to top it off, apparently she had to make a hot lemon water for the FAMOUS SINGER, who was, as far as Monica could tell, a forty-year-old-fake-eyelash-wearing-uppity-motherfucking-diva.
“Woah,” Marlon said, still swaying, “Guess I won’t be applying for a spot in the BRIDE TRIBE.” He pointed at Monica’s tank top, the words splayed across her chest in purple glitter. He faltered a bit, so Bond put his hand on Marlon’s shoulder, tried to anchor him firmly to the ground. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Marlon said. “It’s called dancing.”
Bond shrugged and walked over to the kitchen to help Monica.
“Come on!” Marlon called after Bond. “Don’t get sucked into her schtick! I mean, does this really need to be done right now and not, like, tomorrow? This is an afterparty! When’s the next time everyone’s gonna visit home again? Let’s have fun before the weekend’s dead, before it’s just me, stuck in this fake city, without my Cambos. Me with nothing to do but go on bad Tinder dates to Chipotle!”
Someone yanked Marlon by his shirtsleeves and he collapsed into the sectional couch. “So that’s what you think of your uncle!” Visith said. “I’m not enough for you? This why I never see you around?” Visith grabbed and constrained his nephew the way Pous did when Marlon was young, when Marlon would be minding his goddamn business as he played with hand-me-down Hot Wheels, only to get yanked into some goading argument among the grown-ups to serve as a rhetorical pawn in their dialogue about morality or honor or whether King Sihanouk was worse than Pol Pot or whether The Killing Fields was actually a bad movie or why some Cambos listened to hip-hop-good-for-nothing-trash-music and others became model students who studied nursing or dentistry or even accounting.
This dude definitely gifted squat, Marlon thought, wishing Bond had a telepathic connection straight to his brain. “If you’re our uncle,” he said, “it’s, like, barely.”
“Yeah, shut the fuck up Visith!” Monica yelled. “Marlon’s right, for once. Punch me in the face the day I start calling you Pou.” She handed over to Bond a bag of fake-Buddhist wedding favors, tiny silver goblets all filled with chocolates.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” Bond asked.
“Get ’em out of my face,” Monica answered.
Just then, the rest of the bridesmaids and groomsmen and miscellaneous cousins—second cousins, third cousins, other Cambos unrelated to the BRIDE but whose families had escaped the regime with the BRIDE’s family through a forest of minefields—charged into the living room and kitchen in an overwhelming surge of rowdy drunken shouting. The bag of favors vanished from Bond’s grasp, and he felt the sensation he often experienced when visiting home, that his parents had conceived him to work on a conveyor belt of nonsensical family issues. How else could he explain the tasks that continued to jam up the flow of his free time? Like attending debrief sessions with Marlon’s rehab counselor because their mom could barely deal and their dad ignored any and all problems involving these sons of his who would never understand the horrors, the nightmares, the endless grief, that came with the AUTOGENOCIDE.
Bond observed the open room. The FAMOUS SINGER had reemerged from her bedroom, looking better than she did at the wedding. A bridesmaid was holding the decorated money box from the reception, but she promptly disappeared into the hallway. Maybe they didn’t need to bother with Visith, Bond thought, considering all those signed and sealed envelopes. Then he saw Visith acting chummy with a fuming Marlon. Bond hoped his brother wouldn’t say something stupid, that he would refrain from accusing a sober Visith, outright, if he had snubbed the BRIDE, because then Visith would get offended and stories would spread about Marlon’s offense and then their parents’ reputations would run the gauntlet of the Cambo rumor cycle. Which was the last thing anyone needed. He scanned the room again. Among the crowd of cousins, the bag of wedding favors was nowhere to be found.
A shot glass appeared in Bond’s hands, as two bridesmaids bounced across the room handing servings of Hennessy to everyone except Monica, who was given a whole bottle to alleviate her suffering as the maid of honor. The bridesmaids found a speaker and plugged its aux cable into a phone. “Can you really be a drunk Cambo without blasting Mariah Carey?” one of them shouted.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” blared from the speaker, and Visith said, “It’s July, dumbasses.”
“So what? It’s the best Mariah song!” Marlon said, inciting Fuck yeahs from the two bridesmaids. He broke free from Visith and started dancing in the middle of the living room, elbows bent close to his torso, shoulders bopping up and down. He waved at his younger brother and yelled, “Drink!”
Bond sighed, twisted his face, and downed his shot of cognac.
The afterparty had officially started, and Marlon felt relieved. The entire night he had yearned to ache into that warm nothingness. Hollow pangs of muscle memory throbbed in his thighs, his shoulders, the places where he had felt the most heat. Cravings pulsed through his whole body. But he would survive this night. If everyone had fun—if his younger brother managed to chill out—he could do it. He wanted to forget the damage he had done to his life, to dance and drink and pretend, at least for one night, that everything would be okay, that he could fill the emptiness inside with these Cambos he loved. Grooving to Mar
iah Carey, Marlon looked straight into the kitchen’s fluorescent lights. A stream of white seared his vision, flushed out his brain. He gulped down another swig.
IV.
THE DRUNKEN MONOLOGUES
CAMBOS DELIVER AT 1:15 A.M.
“Someone take a picture of me in this ‘Bride Tribe’ tank so I can post it on Instagram, tag the BRIDE to make her happy, and change into my normal clothes,” Monica said. “Or, I don’t know, kill myself—whatever’s easier with this giant-ass hair!”
Four drinks deep, Monica had grown simultaneously angrier and more dutiful toward the BRIDE. By now the afterparty had spilled out into the garage and the hallway, where Bond was helping Monica, for no reason he could readily discern, stuff bags into a closet.
“How did you get your dress off and the tank on in the first place?” Bond asked, genuinely curious. Monica’s tightly wound locks fed a mess of frozen curls sitting on her head like an alien leech controlling her mind.
“I don’t even know,” she said. “The dress was so tight on me, I went into a blind rage tearing it off.”
Maybe that’s where the ang pavs went, Bond thought, peering into the closet. If so, he could see if there was a red envelope signed by Visith. “Is the money box safe?” he said, feeling clumsy for asking.
“Why, you gonna steal it or some shit?”
“What?—no—Jesus.” His phone buzzed, and to seem less flustered, Bond pulled it out to check his messages. A photo of Visith shotgunning a beer popped up, accompanied by a text from Marlon saying, Too late! The garage party be bumpin and I’m the GAME MASTER. A response to Bond’s earlier text saying, Hold off on the plan, I think I found a better way.
“You should steal it,” Monica said, her face engulfed in a red glow. “Steal her money and then redistribute it to everyone as, like, reparations. She got, what, fifty grand for getting married? Why are we rewarding her? Anybody can get married. I can get married tomorrow. Old white guys fill out online forms and brides are Fedex-ed to them!” She brought the bottle to her mouth, whiffed the alcohol, and mimed a hurling face. “I can’t drink anymore or I’ll die.”
Monica threw the bottle into Bond’s hands. He thought of another painting, a gaudy portrait of Monica—hideous hair, grotesque makeup, with the BRIDE TRIBE tank rendered in a dramatic chiaroscuro—then shook off the notion. “I don’t know,” he said, collecting his more decent thoughts. “These weddings are kinda nice. I mean, when’s the next time someone’s gonna pay the FAMOUS SINGER to perform for us?”
“Don’t get me started on her!” Monica yelled. “All weekend she’d ordered me to make hot lemons. Once I had to do it three fucking times before it was ‘right.’ How can you be picky about that?” Monica took out the bag she had, only a second ago, stuffed into the closet, and started digging through it.
“Look, what needs to be done?” Bond said, and then remembered pairing with Monica as lab partners in AP chemistry, how she would micromanage their experiments to death, doubling the work necessary to receive a good grade. He snatched the bag from her. “I’ll do it.”
“You wouldn’t do it right,” she said, grabbing it back, and Bond felt like pulling out his hair, or maybe hers.
“It’s the money,” she continued. “Being rich has fucked with people’s heads. Forty years ago our parents survived Pol Pot, and now, what the holy fuck are we even doing? Obsessing over wedding favors? Wasting hundreds of dollars on getting our hair done? Do you know what the TRADITIONAL CLOTHING LADY said to me? She said, It’s good we hired her to do the wedding outfits because most Cambodians here used to be low country people, and no one but her carries the expensive styles from Phnom Penh. Can you believe that? Apparently once you have money, you develop fake problems! You should hear the shit people tell me when I do their taxes.” Monica stopped going through the bag and considered Bond, her eyes lighting up. “Marlon’s a perfect example!” she said. “He was making hella money, and then he got anxiety and depressed or whatever, and then he got addicted to drugs. It’s the money, I swear. Like, do you think our parents had ‘anxieties’ when they lived through the genocide? No, they worried about fucking surviving.”
Bond took a drink and clenched his jaw. Sure, Marlon drove him crazy—you had to be a selfish dumbass to get roaring-ass drunk in front of your mother when she was forever paranoid about your history with substance abuse—but when had Monica become an expert on his family? And where was Monica when his family had no money? Where was anyone?
“You really have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bond said.
“What? Are you offended?” Monica taunted. “You don’t need to be defensive. I’m not your mom.”
“Marlon’s really messed up. He’s always been.”
“We’re all messed up!” Monica shouted. “Do you think any of us aren’t? But when you have money, you start focusing on every little way you’ve been fucked over. And meanwhile, the rest of us deal! I can’t imagine what I’d do with the money this wedding cost. With the money the BRIDE’s parents have, or, fuck, your parents!” She whacked her head repeatedly, to satisfy an elusive itch buried somewhere beneath her frozen hair. “Like, oh my god, you know the BRIDE made us store her money box so she could keep it as a memory. She kept texting to remind me not to throw it away! And don’t get me started on how she, like, needed us to put the ang pavs in her car before she left the reception. Like she couldn’t trust her cousins? It’s not like she doesn’t know where we all live! I bet she was texting me while counting all her stupid fucking money.”
Bond clenched his jaw harder. He had spent an hour following Monica around, listening to her rant about the wedding. He watched in complicity as she tried proving just how much smarter, how much more responsible, she was than the BRIDE—than Marlon, than him, than everyone—because what? Because when she got drunk she completed random unnecessary tasks? And now he’d found out the money box was empty!
Fucking shit, Bond thought. And fuck Monica. He swore the sneer across her face communicated everyone’s exact thoughts on him and his brother. Those poor parents, he imagined all of them thinking. Look at their disgraceful kids, tarnishing their parents’ reputations with drug addictions and frivolous artistic delusions. Why had those parents worked so hard for a future like this?
If only the cousin understood how much he toiled away for his family. The countless times, while growing up, he had cleaned the entire apartment, walked a mile to buy groceries, and cooked the family meals because his dad was working night shifts or cramming for engineering school, because Marlon was out with his friends being angry in the world, because his mom cycled through depressive episodes, leaving her so crippled that her sons—twelve and sixteen during the worst of it—had to beg her just to get out of bed, to eat, to live. For god’s sake, here he was, scheming to find proof of his uncle gifting nothing at his cousin’s wedding. All for his mom.
Suddenly, he found everything unbearable—the sight of Monica, the thumping vocal runs of Mariah Carey, the whoops and damns coming from what sounded like a dance battle in the garage. He pushed past Monica to enter a bedroom, knocking the bag from her grasp. Dozens of used, damp candles from the reception spilled onto the ground. “I was counting those!” Bond heard Monica yell from behind the door.
V.
THE GAME MASTER HATCHES A NEW PLAN TO EXPOSE VISITH
The rules of the drinking game eluded the drunken cousins, but that stopped no one from trash-talking their opponents like they got paid six-figure salaries to administer verbal beatdowns to their own flesh and blood. Marlon—the self-appointed GAME MASTER—had concocted for the garage crowd an amalgamation of beer pong, dice but without actual dice, an aerobics workout, truth or dare, and darts, with crumpled paper instead of actual darts. And people were engrossed, even the FAMOUS SINGER. Recovering drug addict or not, Marlon was the FUN COUSIN.
The final round had started, and Visith, competing against a bridesmaid for the championship title, was getting booed out of the dance
circle for refusing to pop and lock. “This is dumb!” Visith said. “Let’s go back to throwing balls in cups.”
“You are too scared to dance in front of us?” the FAMOUS SINGER asked, her proper tone more belittling than regular trash talk.
“Wait—we can pivot,” Marlon said, proud to have used the word pivot in a context not involving his online coding classes, which he was taking for the tech boot camp his parents were paying for because he’d ruined his career in finance by sinking into an Adderall-induced psychosis, right in front of his old boss. A brilliant idea had sparked in his head, and Marlon wanted to capitalize on it before his eventual comedown, before he felt the sensation, like he often did after midnight, that the whole world was stomping on his chest. He quickly looked around, then started gathering supplies from the cabinets. This new plan would expose Visith once and for all, Marlon thought, fighting his drunken spins by throwing himself into meaningful action.
On the table in the center of the garage, Marlon unloaded an armful of supplies and proceeded to tear paper into a pile of scraps. He secretly marked a piece, and then passed them out to everyone, along with several pens. “Write down the amount you gifted the newlyweds,” Marlon said, earning looks of skepticism. He handed Visith and the bridesmaid a scrap of paper each, making sure to give his uncle the one he’d marked. “Don’t worry, it’s anonymous.”
When everyone was done, Marlon collected the scraps in a tin can. “Listen up!” he said, standing in between the final two competitors. “This, here, is the last game: Whoever draws the higher number is declared best cousin!”
“That’s lame!” yelled one of the Mariah Carey–loving bridesmaids. “I wanna see some dancing!”
“Guys, don’t be fooled by how basic this game seems!” Marlon said, punctuating his words with his free hand, his heartbeat sprinting into a belligerent thumping. “The winner we deserve shouldn’t be decided by dancing or skill. Trust me. Choosing one of these numbers is a test of fate, of what the universe thinks we deserve, who it deems our winner. This is about Buddha! About karma! Are we destined for greatness? Or failure? Some people are born winners, am I right? And others, unfortunately, are born losers. This is what we’re testing!”
Afterparties Page 13