by Nicola Yoon
Mom: Your grades still okay?
Me: Yup.
Mom: Biology?
Me: Yup.
Mom: What about math? You don’t like math.
Me: I know I don’t like math.
Mom: But grades still okay?
Me: Still a B.
Mom: Why no A yet? Aigo. It’s time you get serious now. You not little boy anymore.
Today I have a college admission interview with a Yale alum. Yale is Second-Best School, but for once, I put my foot down and refused to apply to Best School (Harvard). The idea of being Charlie’s younger brother at another school is a bridge entirely too far. Besides, who knows if Harvard would even take me now that Charlie’s been suspended.
My mom and I are in the kitchen. Because of my interview, she’s steaming frozen mandu (dumplings) for me as a treat. I’m having a pre-mandu appetizer of Cap’n Crunch (the best cereal known to mankind) and writing in my Moleskine notebook. I’m working on a poem about heartbreak that I’ve been working on forever (give or take). The problem is that I’ve never had my heart broken, so I’m having a hard time.
Writing at the kitchen table feels like a luxury. I wouldn’t be able to do it if my dad were here. He doesn’t disapprove of my poem-writing tendencies out loud, but disapprove he definitely does.
My mom interrupts my eating and writing for a variation on our usual conversation. I’m cruising through it, adding my “yup’s” through mouthfuls of cereal, when she changes up the script. Instead of the usual “You not little boy anymore,” she says:
“Don’t be like your brother.”
She says it in Korean. For emphasis. And because of God or Fate or Sheer Rotten Luck, Charlie walks into the kitchen just in time to hear her say it. I stop chewing.
Anyone looking in at us from the outside would think things are copacetic. A mother making breakfast for her two sons. One son at the table eating cereal (no milk). Another son entering the scene from stage left. He’s about to have breakfast as well.
But that’s not what’s really happening. Mom is so ashamed about Charlie hearing her that she blushes. It’s faint, but it’s there. She offers him some mandu, even though he hates Korean food and has refused to eat it since junior high.
And Charlie? He just pretends. He pretends he doesn’t understand Korean. He pretends he didn’t hear her offer of dumplings. He pretends I don’t exist.
He almost fools me until I look at his hands. They curl into fists and give away the truth. He heard and he understood. She could’ve called him an epic douche bag, an animatronic dick complete with ball sac, and it would’ve been better than telling me not to be like him. My whole life it’s been the opposite. Why can’t you be more like your brother? This Reversal of Fortune is not good for either of us.
Charlie takes a glass from the cupboard and fills it with tap water. Drinking water from the tap is just to piss Mom off. She opens her mouth to say the usual “No. Drink filter,” but she closes it again. Charlie gulps the water down in three quick swallows and puts the glass back into the cupboard unwashed. He leaves the cupboard open.
“Umma, give him a break,” I tell her after he’s gone. I’m pissed at him and I’m pissed for him. My parents have been relentless with the criticism. I can only imagine how ass it is for him working at the store all day with my dad. I bet my dad berates him in between smiling at customers and answering questions about extensions and tea tree oils and treating chemically damaged hair. (My parents own a beauty supply shop that sells black hair care products. It’s called Black Hair Care.)
She opens the steamer basket to check on the mandu. The steam fogs up her glasses. When I was a little kid that used to make me laugh, and she would ham it up by letting them get as steamy as possible and then pretending she couldn’t see me. Now she just pulls them from her face and wipes them with a dishcloth.
“What happen to your brother? Why he fail? He never fail.”
Without her glasses she looks younger, prettier. Is it weird to think your mom is pretty? Probably. I’m sure that thought never occurs to Charlie. All his girlfriends (all six of them) have been very cute, slightly chubby white girls with blond hair and blue eyes.
No, I’m lying. There was one girl, Agatha. She was his last high school girlfriend before college.
She had green eyes.
Mom puts her glasses back on and waits, like I’m going to have an answer for her. She hates not knowing what happens next. Uncertainty is her enemy. I think it’s because she grew up poor in South Korea.
“He never fail. Something happen.”
And now I’m even more pissed. Maybe nothing happened to Charles. Maybe he failed out because he simply didn’t like his classes. Maybe he doesn’t want to be a doctor. Maybe he doesn’t know what he wants. Maybe he just changed.
But we’re not allowed to change in my household. We’re on a track to be doctors, and there’s no getting off.
“You boys have it too easy here. America make you soft.” If I had a brain cell for every time I heard this, I’d be a goddamn genius.
“We were born here, Mom. We were always soft.”
She scoffs. “What about interview? You ready?” She looks me over and finds me lacking. “You cut hair before interview.” For months she’s been after me to get rid of my short ponytail. I make a noise that could be either agreement or disagreement. She puts a plate of mandu in front of me and I eat it in silence.
Because of the big interview, my parents let me have the day off from school. It’s still only eight a.m., but no way am I staying in the house and having any more of these conversations. Before I can escape, she hands me a money pouch with deposit slips to take to my dad at the store.
“Appa forgot. You bring to him.” I’m sure she meant to give it to Charlie before he left for the store but forgot because of their little incident in the kitchen.
I take the pouch, grab my notebook, and drag myself upstairs to get dressed. My bedroom is at the end of a long hallway. I pass by Charlie’s room (door closed as always) and my parents’ room. My mom’s got a couple of unopened blank canvases leaning against their doorframe. Today’s her day off from the store, and I bet she’s looking forward to spending the day alone painting. Lately she’s been working on roaches, flies, and beetles. I’ve been teasing her, saying that she’s in her Gross Insect Period, but I like it even more than her Abstract Orchid Period from a few months ago.
I take a quick detour into the empty bedroom that she uses as her studio to see if she’s painted anything new. Sure enough, there’s one of an enormous beetle. The canvas is not especially large, but the beetle takes up the entire space. My mom’s paintings have always been brightly colored and beautiful, but something about applying all that color to her intricate, almost anatomical drawings of insects makes them something more than beautiful. This one’s painted in darkly pearlescent greens, blues, and blacks. Its carapace shimmers like spilled oil on water.
Three years ago for her birthday, my dad surprised her by hiring part-time help for the store so she wouldn’t have to go in every day. He also bought a starter set of oil paints and some canvases. I’d never seen her cry over a present before. She’s been painting ever since.
Back in my room I wonder for the ten thousandth time (give or take) what her life would be like if she never left Korea. What if she never met my dad? What if she never had Charlie and me? Would she be an artist now?
I get dressed in my new custom-tailored gray suit and red tie. “Too bright,” my mom said about the tie when we were shopping. Evidently, only paintings are allowed to be colorful. I convinced her by saying that red would make me look confident. Checking myself in the mirror now, I have to say that the suit does make me look confident and debonair (yes, debonair). Too bad I’m only wearing it for this interview and not for something that actually matters to me. I check the weather on my phone and decide I don’t need a coat. The high will be sixty-seven degrees—a perfect fall day.
Despite my irri
tation with the way she treated Charlie, I kiss my mom and promise to get my hair cut, and then I get out of the house. Later this afternoon my life will hop on a train headed for Doctor Daniel Jae Ho Bae station, but until then the day is mine. I’m going to do whatever the world tells me to. I’m going to act like I’m in a goddamn Bob Dylan song and blow in the direction of the wind. I’m going to pretend my future’s wide open, and that anything can happen.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON. This is a thing people say. My mom says it a lot. “Things happen for a reason, Tasha.” Usually people say it when something goes wrong, but not too wrong. A nonfatal car accident. A sprained ankle instead of a broken one.
Tellingly, my mom has not said it in reference to our deportation. What reason could there be for this awful thing happening? My dad, whose fault this whole thing is, says, “You can’t always see God’s plan.” I want to tell him that maybe he shouldn’t leave everything up to God and that hoping against hope is not a life strategy, but that would mean I would have to talk to him, and I don’t want to talk to him.
People say these things to make sense of the world. Secretly, in their heart of hearts, almost everyone believes that there’s some meaning, some willfulness to life. Fairness. Basic decency. Good things happen to good people. Bad things only happen to bad people.
No one wants to believe that life is random. My dad says he doesn’t know where my cynicism comes from, but I’m not a cynic. I am a realist. It’s better to see life as it is, not as you wish it to be. Things don’t happen for a reason. They just happen.
But here are some Observable Facts: If I hadn’t been late to my appointment, I wouldn’t have met Lester Barnes. And if he hadn’t said the word irie, I wouldn’t have had my meltdown. And if I hadn’t had my meltdown, I wouldn’t now have the name of a lawyer known as “the fixer” clutched in my hand.
I head out of the building past security. I have an irrational and totally unlike-me urge to thank that security guard—Irene—but she’s a few feet away and busy fondling someone else’s stuff.
I check my phone for messages. Even though it’s only 5:30 a.m. in California where she is, Bev’s texted a string of question marks. I contemplate telling her about this latest development but then decide it’s not really a development.
Nothing yet, I text back. Selfishly I wish again that she were here with me. Actually, what I wish is that I were there with her, touring colleges and having a normal senior-year experience.
I look down at the note again. Jeremy Fitzgerald. Mr. Barnes wouldn’t let me call for an appointment from his phone.
“It’s a very long shot,” he said, before basically shoving me out the door.
Observable Fact: You should never take long shots. Better to study the odds and take the probable shot. However, if the long shot is your only shot, then you have to take it.
ON HER LUNCH BREAK, Irene downloads the Nirvana album for herself. She listens to it three times in a row. In Kurt Cobain’s voice she hears the same thing Natasha hears—a perfect and beautiful misery, a voice stretched so thin with loneliness and wanting that it should break. Irene thinks it would be better if it did break, better than living with wanting and not having, better than living itself.
She follows Kurt Cobain’s voice down down down to a place where it is black all the time. After looking him up online, she finds that Cobain’s story does not have a happy ending.
Irene makes a plan. Today will be the last day of her life.
The truth is, she’s been thinking about killing herself on and off for years. In Cobain’s lyrics she finally finds the words. She writes a suicide note addressed to no one: “Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.”
I’M ONLY TWO STEPS OUT of the building before I dial the number. “I’d like to make an appointment for today as soon as possible, please.”
The woman who answers sounds like she’s in a construction zone. In the background I hear the sound of a drill and loud banging. I have to repeat my name twice.
“And what’s the issue?” she asks.
I hesitate. The thing about being an undocumented immigrant is you get really good at keeping secrets. Before this whole deportation adventure began, the only person I told was Bev, even though she’s not usually that great with secrets.
“They just slip out,” she says, as if she has absolutely no control of the things coming out of her mouth.
Still, even Bev knew how important it was to keep this one.
“Hello, ma’am? Can you tell me your issue?” the woman on the phone prompts again.
I press the phone closer to my ear and stand still in the middle of the steps. Around me, the world speeds up like a movie on fast-forward. People walk up and down the stairs at three times speed with jerky movements. Clouds zoom by overhead. The sun changes position in the sky.
“I’m undocumented,” I say. My heart races like I’ve been running a very long way for a very long time.
“I need to know more than that,” she says.
So I tell her. I’m Jamaican. My parents entered the country illegally when I was eight. We’ve been here ever since. My dad got a DUI. We’re being deported. Lester Barnes thought Attorney Fitzgerald could help.
She sets an appointment for eleven a.m.
“Anything else I can help you with?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “That will be enough.”
The lawyer’s office is uptown from where I am, close to Times Square. I check my phone: 8:35 a.m. A small breeze kicks up, lifting the hem of my skirt and playing through my hair. The weather is surprisingly mild for mid-November. Maybe I didn’t need my leather jacket after all. I make a quick wish for a not-too-freezing winter before remembering that I probably won’t be around to see it. If snow falls in a city and no one is around to feel it, is it still cold?
Yes. The answer to that question is yes.
I pull my jacket closer. It’s still hard for me to believe that my future is going to be different from the one I’d planned.
Two and a half hours to go. My school’s only a fifteen-minute walk from here. I briefly consider heading over so I can have one last look at the building. It’s a very competitive science magnet high school, and I worked very hard to get into it. I can’t believe that after today I may never see it again. In the end I decide against going; too many people to run into, and too many questions like “Why aren’t you in school today?” that I don’t want to answer.
Instead, I decide to kill time by walking the three miles to the lawyer’s office. My favorite vinyl record store is on the way. I put my headphones on and queue up the Temple of the Dog album. It’s a 1990s grunge rock kind of a day, all angst and loud guitar. Chris Cornell’s voice rises and I let it carry some of my cares away.
NATASHA’S FATHER, SAMUEL, MOVED TO America a full two years before the rest of his family did. The plan was that Samuel would go first and establish himself as a Broadway actor. It would be easier to do that without having to worry about a wife and small child. Without them, he would be free to go on auditions on a moment’s notice. He’d be free to make connections with the acting community in New York City. Originally it was only supposed to be for one year, but one became two. It would’ve become three, but Natasha’s mom could not and would not wait any longer.
She was only six at the time, but Natasha remembers the phone calls to America. She could always tell because her mom had to dial all those extra numbers. The calls were fine at first. Her father sounded like her dad. He sounded happy.
After about a year, his voice changed. He had a funny new accent that was more lilt and twang than patois. He sounded less happy. She remembers listening to their conversations. She couldn’t hear his side, but she didn’t need to.
“How much longer you expect us to wait for you?”
“But, Samuel? We not no family no more with you over there and we over here.”
“Talk to you daughter, man.”
And then one day, they were leaving Jamaica for good.
Natasha said goodbye to her friends and to the rest of her family, fully expecting that she would see them again, maybe at Christmastime. She didn’t know then what it meant to be an undocumented immigrant. How it meant that you could never go home again. How your home wouldn’t even feel like home anymore, just another foreign place to read about. On the day they left, she remembers being on the plane and worrying about just how they would fly through the clouds, before realizing that clouds were not like cotton balls at all. She wondered if her dad would recognize her, and if he would still love her. It had been such a long time.
But he did recognize her and he still loved her. At the airport, he held them so close.
“Lawd, but me did miss you two, you know,” he said, and he held them even closer. He looked the same. In that moment, he even sounded the same, his patois the same as it always was. He smelled different, though, like American soap and American clothes and American food. Natasha didn’t mind. She was so happy to see him. She could get used to anything.
For the two years that Samuel was alone in America, he lived with an old family friend of his mother’s. He didn’t need a job, and he used his savings to cover what little expenses he had.
After everyone moved to America, that had to change. He got a job as a security guard working at one of the buildings on Wall Street. He found them a one-bedroom apartment for rent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
“Me can make this work,” he said to Patricia. He chose the graveyard shift so he would have time to audition during the day.
But he was tired during the day.
And there were no parts for him, and the accent would just not go away no matter how he tried. It didn’t help that Patricia and Natasha spoke to him with full Jamaican accents, even though he tried to teach them the “proper” American pronunciation.
And rejection was not an easy thing. To be an actor you’re supposed to have thick skin, but Samuel’s skin was never thick enough. Rejection was like sandpaper. His skin sloughed away under its constant onslaught. After a while, Samuel wasn’t sure which would last longer: himself or his dreams.