The Sun Is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

  There was a time when my father thought the world of me, and I really missed it right then. More than that, though? I missed the days when I thought the world of him, and thought he could do no wrong. I used to believe that all it took to make him happy was us, his family. There are pictures of me from when I was three wearing a MY DAD IS THE COOLEST T-shirt. On it there was a father penguin and a daughter penguin holding hands, surrounded by icy blue hearts.

  I wish I still felt that way. Growing up and seeing your parents’ flaws is like losing your religion. I don’t believe in God anymore. I don’t believe in my father either.

  My mother kissed her teeth when he gave her the ticket. She might as well have slapped him. “You and you foolishness,” she said, and stood up. “You can keep you ticket. I not going anywhere.”

  She walked out of the kitchen. We listened as she walked the twenty steps to the bathroom and slammed the door with all her might.

  None of us knew what to say. Peter slumped in his chair and hung his head so you couldn’t find his face under his dreadlocks. I just looked at the space where she’d been. My father’s eyes disappeared behind his dreaming veil. In his typical denial-of-reality way, he said:

  “Don’t worry ’bout you mother. She don’t mean it, man.”

  But she did mean it. She didn’t go with us. Even Peter couldn’t convince her. She said the ticket price was a waste of her hard-earned money.

  On the night of the show, Peter and I took the subway alone to the theater. My father had gone ahead to get ready. We sat in the first row and didn’t mention the empty seat next to us.

  I want to be able to say now that he was not good. That his talents were only mediocre. Mediocre would explain all the years of rejection. It would explain why he gave up and retreated from real life and into his head. And I don’t know if I can see my father clearly. Maybe I’m still seeing with my old, hero-worship eyes, but what I saw was this:

  He was excellent.

  He was transcendent.

  He belonged on that stage more than he’s ever belonged with us.

  Area Teen Pretty Sure Day Can’t Get Worse, Is Wrong About That

  My dad’s with a customer when I walk in. His eyes tell me that he will have many things to say to me later.

  I might as well give us some more to talk about.

  It’s just after the lunch rush, so the store’s pretty empty. There’s only one other customer—a woman looking at blow dryers.

  I don’t see Charlie cleaning or restocking any of the shelves, so I figure he must be slacking off in the stockroom in the back.

  I’m not even nervous. I don’t give a shit if he beats my face in, so long as I say what I have to say first. I drop my jacket outside the stockroom door and turn the handle, but it’s locked. There’s no reason for it to be locked with him in it. He’s probably jacking off in there.

  He pulls the door open before I can pound on it. Instead of his usual sneer, his face is a combination of tired and defensive. He must’ve thought it was my dad trying to get in.

  As soon as he sees it’s just me, his face goes into full superior asshole smirk. He makes a show of looking over my shoulder and around me.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” He says girlfriend like it’s a joke, the way you would say a word like booger.

  I stand there looking at him, trying to figure out not how we’re related, but why. He pushes past me, deliberately bumping into my shoulder.

  “She dump you already?” he asks, after taking a quick look down a couple of aisles to verify that she’s really not here. His shit-eating grin is firmly in place.

  He’s baiting me, I know. I know it, and still—I’m letting the hook pierce me like some dumb fish that’s been hooked a billion times before and still hasn’t figured it out yet that hooks are the enemy.

  “Fuck you, Charlie,” I say.

  That catches him off guard. He stops smiling and takes a good look at me. My tie and jacket are missing. My shirt’s untucked. I don’t look like someone who has the Most Important Interview of His Life in a couple of hours. I look like someone who wants to get into a fight.

  He puffs himself up like a blowfish. He’s always been so proud of the two years and two inches that he has on me. It’s just him and me back here, and that makes him bold.

  “Why. Are. You. Here. Little. Brother?” he asks. He steps closer, so that we’re toe to toe, and pushes his face closer to mine.

  He expects me to back down.

  I don’t back down.

  “I came to ask you a question.”

  He pulls his face back just a little. “Sure, I’d fuck her,” he says. “Is that what happened? She want me instead of you?”

  The thing about being a fish on a hook is the more you try to get off, the more trapped you are. The hook just buries itself deeper and you bleed a little more. You can’t get off the hook. You can only go through it. Said another way: the hook has to go through you, and it’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker.

  “Why are you like this?” I ask him.

  If I’ve surprised him, he doesn’t show it. He just goes on with his usual shittiness. “Like what? Bigger, stronger, smarter, better?”

  “No. Why are you an asshole to me? What’d I do to you?”

  This time he can’t hide his surprise. He pulls out of my space, even takes a step back.

  “Whatever. That what you came here for? To whine about me being mean to you?” He looks me up and down again. “You look like shit. Don’t you have to try to get into Second-Best School today?”

  “I don’t care about that. I don’t even want to go.” I say it quietly, but it still feels good to say it at all.

  “Speak. Up. Little. Brother. I didn’t hear you.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I say louder, before realizing that my dad left his position at the register and is now close enough to hear me. He starts to say something, but then the doorbell chimes. He pivots away.

  I turn back to Charlie. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for years. Maybe I did something to you when we were younger and I don’t remember.”

  He snorts. “What could you do to me? You’re too pathetic.”

  “So you’re just an asshole?” I ask. “Just the way you’re made?”

  “I’m stronger. And smarter. And better than you.”

  “If you’re so smart, what are you doing back here, Charlie? Is it big fish, small pond syndrome? Were you just a tiny douche bag fish at Harvard?”

  He clenches his fists. “Watch your mouth.”

  My guess is good. More than good, even.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? You’re not the best there. Turns out you’re not the best here either. How does it feel to be Second-Best Son?”

  I’m the one with the hook now. His face is red and he’s puffing himself back up. He gets right in my face. If he clenches his jaw any more it will break.

  “You want to know why I don’t like you? Because you’re just like them.” He points his chin in the direction of our dad. “You and your Korean food and your Korean friends and studying Korean in school. It’s pathetic. Don’t you get it, Little Brother? You’re just like everybody else.”

  Wait. What?

  “You hate me because I have Korean friends?”

  “Korean is all you are,” he spits out. “We’re not even from the goddamn country.”

  And I get it. I really do. Some days it’s hard to be in America. Some days I feel like I’m halfway to the moon, trapped between the Earth and it.

  The fight leaves me. I’m just sorry for him now, and that’s exactly the worst thing I can do to him. He sees the pity on my face. It enrages him. He grabs me by the collar.

  “Fuck you. You think because you grew your hair out and you like poetry anybody’s gonna treat you any different? You think because you bring some black girl in here? Or should I call her African American, or maybe just—”

  But I don’t let him get the word out. I thought I would have to work myself
up to it, but I don’t have to.

  I punch him right in the fucking face.

  My fist catches him around the eye socket area, so my knuckles hit mostly bone. It hurts me more than it has any right to, given that I’m the one supposedly delivering this beatdown. He stumbles back but doesn’t fall flat like people do in the movies.

  This is, frankly, disappointing. Still, the look on his face is worth all the I’m-sure-they’re-broken bones in my hand. I definitely hurt him. What I mean is: I caused him physical pain, as was my intention. I wanted him to know that I, his Little Brother, could dish it out and not just take it. Now he knows I can hurt him, and that I’m done putting up with his crap.

  I don’t do enough damage, though. I watch his expression turn from pain to surprise to rage. He comes at me with his extra two inches and his extra twenty pounds of muscle.

  First he punches me in the stomach. I swear it’s like his fist goes through my stomach and out through my spinal cord. I double over and think that maybe I’ll just stay in this position, but he’s not having it. He pulls me up by my collar. I try to block my face with my hands because I know that’s where he’s going, but the stomach punch makes me slow.

  His fist smashes into the side of my mouth. My lip splits open on the inside from bashing into my teeth. It splits open on the outside because the bastard hit me while wearing some giant-ass secret society ring. That’s gonna leave a mark (possibly forever).

  He’s still got my collar in his fist, ready to deliver another blow, but I’m ready for him. I block my face with my hands and bring my knee right up into his balls—hard, but not hard enough to prevent him from having future little demon spawn children.

  I’m nice like that.

  He’s down on the ground, clutching the family jewels that he wishes were not Korean, and I’m holding my jaw, trying to figure out if I still have all my teeth, when my dad comes over to us.

  “Museun iriya?” he says. Which loosely translates to “WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?”

  ATTORNEY FITZGERALD’S FINGERS are steepled and his eyes are fixed on mine. He leans forward in his chair slightly. I can’t decide if he’s listening, or if he just wants to look like he’s listening.

  How many stories like mine has he heard over the years? I’m amazed that he’s not telling me to get to the point. I finish telling him everything about the night in question:

  The actors took three bows. They would’ve taken a fourth if the audience members hadn’t started filing out.

  Afterward, Peter and I stayed in our seats, waiting for our father to come back out to get us. We waited for thirty minutes before he showed up. I don’t think it was because he knew we were waiting. He appeared through the thick red curtains and walked to the center of the stage. He stood there for a full minute, just staring out into the now-empty theater.

  I don’t believe in souls, but his soul was on his face. I’ve never seen him happier. I’m certain he will never be that happy again.

  Peter broke the spell because I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “You ready, Pops?” he shouted.

  My father looked down at us with his faraway eyes. When he looks at us like that I’m not sure if it’s him who’s missing, or us.

  Peter got uncomfortable, the way he always does when my father does that. “Pops? You ready, man?”

  When my father finally spoke, he had no trace of a Jamaican accent and no Jamaican diction at all. He sounded like a stranger.

  “You children go on ahead. I will see you later.”

  I speed through the rest of the story. My father spends the rest of that evening drinking with his new actor friends. He drinks too much. On his way home, he rams his car into a parked police car. In his drunkenness he tells the police officer the whole history of our coming to America. I imagine he monologued for this audience of one. He tells the policeman we’re undocumented immigrants, and that America never gave him a fair shot. The officer arrests him and calls Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

  Attorney Fitzgerald’s brows are furrowed. “But why would your father do that?” he asks.

  It’s a question I know the answer to.

  CHARACTERS

  Patricia Kingsley, 43

  Samuel Kingsley, 45

  ACT TWO

  SCENE THREE

  Interior bedroom. A single queen-sized bed with headboard dominates the space. Perhaps a picture frame or two. The floor on Samuel’s side of the bed is overflowing with books. Stage right we see an opening to a hallway. Samuel and Patricia’s teenage daughter is listening, but neither Samuel nor Patricia knows it. It’s not clear that they would care if they did.

  PATRICIA: Lawd have mercy, Kingsley.

  She is seated on the edge of her bed. Her face is in her hands. Her speech is muffled.

  SAMUEL: It don’t mean nothing, man. We going to get a good lawyer.

  Samuel Kingsley is standing on his side of the room. He is hunched with his face in shadow. A spotlight shines brightly on the single sheet of paper he holds in his left hand.

  PATRICIA: And how we a go pay for a lawyer, Kingsley?

  SAMUEL: Lawd, Patsy. We figure it out, man.

  Patricia takes her face out of her hands and looks at her husband as if she’s seeing him for the first time.

  PATRICIA: You remember the day we did meet?

  Samuel slowly crumples the paper in his hand. He continues to do this throughout the scene.

  PATRICIA: You don’t remember, Kingsley? How you came into the store, then you kept coming back day after day? That was so funny. One day you buy something and the next day you return it until you wear me down.

  SAMUEL: Wasn’t no wearing down, Patsy. It was courting.

  PATRICIA: You remember all the promises you make me, Kingsley?

  SAMUEL: Patsy—

  PATRICIA: You say all me dreams would come true. We going have children and money and big house. You say me happiness more important than you own. You remember that, Kingsley?

  She rises from the bed and the spotlight follows her as she moves.

  SAMUEL: Patsy—

  PATRICIA: Let me tell you something. I didn’t believe you when we started out. But after a time I change my mind. You a good actor, Kingsley, because you make me believe all the pretty things you say to me.

  The paper in Samuel’s hand is fully crumpled now. The spotlight moves to his face and he’s no longer hunched. He is angry.

  SAMUEL: You know what me tired of hearing about? Me tired of your dreams. What ’bout mine?

  If it wasn’t for you and children them, I would have all the things I want. You complain ’bout house and kitchen and extra bedroom. But what ’bout me? I don’t have any of the thing them that I want. I don’t get to use my God-given talent.

  I rue the day I walk into that store. If it wasn’t for you and the children, my life would be betta. I would be doing the thing God put me on this earth to do. I don’t want hear nothing more ’bout your dreams. Them not nothing compared to mine.

  BUT I DON’T TELL ATTORNEY Fitzgerald that part—about how my father’s wife and children are his greatest regret because we got in the way of the life he dreamed for himself.

  Instead, I say, “A few weeks after he was arrested we got the Notice to Appear letter from Homeland Security.”

  He looks over one of the forms I filled out earlier for the paralegal and gets a yellow legal pad out of his desk drawer.

  “So then you went to the Master Calendar Hearing. Did you bring a lawyer with you?”

  “Only my parents went,” I tell him. “And they didn’t bring a lawyer.” My mom and I talked about it a lot before the appointment. Should we hire a lawyer we couldn’t really afford, or wait to see what happened at the hearing? We’d read online that you didn’t really need a lawyer for the first appointment. At that point my father was still insisting that everything would miraculously work itself out. I don’t know. Maybe we wanted to believe that was true.

  Attorney Fitzgeral
d shakes his head and jots something down on his legal pad. “So at the hearing, the judge tells them they can accept Voluntary Removal or file for Cancellation of Removal.” He looks down at my forms. “Your younger brother is a U.S. citizen?”

  “Yes,” I say, watching as he notes that down too. Peter was born almost exactly nine months after we moved here. My parents were still happy with each other then.

  My father didn’t accept the Voluntary Removal at that hearing. That night, my mom and I researched Cancellation of Removal. In order to qualify, my dad needed to have lived in the United States for at least ten years, have shown good moral character, and be able to prove that being deported would cause an extreme hardship on a spouse, parent, or child who was a U.S. citizen. We thought Peter’s citizenship was going to be our saving grace. We hired the cheapest lawyer we could find and went to the Merits Hearing armed with this new strategy. But as it turns out, it’s very difficult to prove “extreme hardship.” Going back to Jamaica will not put Peter’s life in danger, and no one cares about the psychological danger of uprooting a child from his home, not even Peter himself.

  “And at the Merits Hearing the judge denies your case and your father accepts the Voluntary Removal.” Attorney Fitzgerald says it flatly, like the outcome was inevitable.

  I nod instead of answering out loud. I’m not sure I’ll be able to talk without crying. Any hope I had is slipping away.

  I’d argued that we should appeal the judge’s decision, but our lawyer advised against it. She said we had no case and that we were out of options. She suggested we leave voluntarily so we wouldn’t have a deportation on our records. That way we’d have a hope of returning one day.

  Fitzgerald puts his pen down and leans back in his chair. “Why did you go to USCIS today? It’s not even their jurisdiction.”

  I have to clear the tears pooling in my throat before I can answer. “I didn’t know what else to do.” The truth is, despite the fact that I don’t believe in miracles, I was hoping for one.