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Yeah. I could tell her. She’d listen. But even if she didn’t argue aloud, she’d do it in her head. All love is conditional, and right now I don’t want to hear another but. I like you, but my shark is more important. I like you, but you just weren’t a priority in the moment.
It’s fine. I don’t need to push it.
“It’s not you, Anj,” I say, and in at least one way, this is true. “I told you. Sometimes I freak out. It just happens. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
Nobody’s but mine, for wanting stupid things.
Anj shifts uncomfortably next to me. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I saw this guy I know, okay?” It’s close to true. “He’s a friend of Gabe’s, and we don’t get along, and he tells me I’m fake, and…”
And I trail off, because it’s an effective lie. So effective, that Anj believes me.
“Oh.” Anj straightens. “That asshole. What’s his name, and where can we hide his body?”
Jay was a jerk. He also…almost, for a second wasn’t.
I shake my head wearily. “Don’t worry about it. He’s dead to me, and that’s good enough. Want to go find dessert?”
She looks at me a long time and sighs. “Okay.”
13
JAY
Even though my parents don’t drink, the morning after a party still feels like a hangover. The caterers cleared away the trash, but the house still feels subtly invaded—trampled paths, misplaced items on shelves. The silence seems to ring particularly loudly, as if the echo of a hundred conversations still lingers. Including the one I most want to forget—me telling Em I didn’t want to know anything about her. But we’re not revisiting that.
I’m in my parents’ house, and it doesn’t feel like home.
Not that this house ever felt like home to me. My parents had it built after my first year at university. I’ve only ever been a visitor to this space.
My dad pulls a pan from the oven, and the sweet smell of orange and cinnamon wafts over.
“Just a few minutes more,” he says. “If I ice them now, it won’t set.”
“Fuck the icing,” my mom responds. “I’m starving.”
People who hear my mom on the phone before they see her usually imagine her as tall and white, even though her legal name is Kerawak na Thalang. She can muster an impeccable English accent when she wants, one that she learned in a posh, century-old British secondary school in Hong Kong. She swears up and down that the King George V school is not Hogwarts, even though she was actually sorted into a house—Rowell, not Ravenclaw.
She’s tiny and brown, and today, she’s wearing a blue shirt—the color of her house. The smile she gives my dad as he bats her questing fingers away from the steaming cinnamon rolls doesn’t quite meet her eyes.
I don’t think he and Mom could be more different. And yet up until that day in December more than a decade ago, they were always there for each other. Their romance started the day my dad got lost looking for a writing seminar on the Stanford campus and ran into my mother swearing at a vending machine in Thai.
“It was love at first sight,” he used to tell anyone who would listen.
“No, it wasn’t,” my mother always corrected him. “It took me two weeks.”
My dad’s parents had been gently suggesting that he should find a wife on one of his summer trips back to Thailand.
“They wanted me to choose a nice, well-behaved Thai girl,” he would say, looking into my mother’s eyes.
“One point five out of four isn’t bad,” she’d answer. “I was a Thai citizen and I was a girl.”
He wrote books; she wrote code. He was from one of the oldest, wealthiest, proudest Thai families; she was ethnically Chinese and hadn’t lived in Thailand since she was a child. His parents were soft-spoken and polite; my mom swore up a storm and was far too Westernized for their tastes. Dad was an incurable romantic; Mom was blunt and questioning. He was a Buddhist; she was Muslim.
When I was five, I started kindergarten. After the usual introductions where we talked about what our parents did and where they were from, a red-headed kid at recess informed me solemnly that my parents were going to get divorced. Like his.
“Mom says that’s what happens when people are too different,” he told me.
It took two weeks of nightmares before my dad asked me what was wrong. He listened quietly when I told him, and patted my head.
“Your friend is wrong,” he said. “Your mother and I don’t argue; we disagree and we discuss. But if you look at us—really look at us—when we disagree you’ll see that it’s only our minds that are in dispute. Our hearts never change, no matter how different we are.”
My dad was right, I came to realize. Nothing could tear them apart. Not religious differences. Not a move to another country. Not my mother’s increasing work responsibilities nor her impossible schedule.
No matter how much they disagreed—and they did disagree—when they looked at each other, they always smiled. No matter how busy they were, they always had breakfast together. No matter how intense their schedule was, they somehow found a way to take a walk together at night. Even if my dad had to head down to the Cyclone campus near midnight to do it.
Nothing could get between them, I thought. Until I did.
They look okay now, if you don’t know what to look for.
My dad shakes a finger at my mom. “I will defend my rolls with my honor.”
“That’s a poor choice of weapon.” She pulls a butter knife out of the drawer. “Do you know how much military spending goes to the honor industry?”
“Mmm.”
“Approximately nothing—just a few metal doodads and whatnots. A knife, on the other hand—”
She makes a stabbing motion toward the cinnamon rolls, and he grabs her wrist. They start laughing.
The noise seems a little too loud, echoing in a silence that returns in full force when they are quiet again. Their laughter feels like a teacup that has broken into a thousand pieces and been painstakingly pieced together again. It’s laughter that recognizes the seams could burst at any time.
And when my parents put the teacup back together again, they didn’t use all the pieces. Their laughter doesn’t include me.
I don’t blame them.
Twelve years ago, my parents split apart. They filed for a divorce the year I left for university. Turns out, the paperwork never went through. They patched things up as best as anyone could. Now they have a new home, new decorations, and a new marriage. Some things can be reforged after they break.
They still broke.
“Stop it, Sai,” my dad says. “Are you twelve?”
“I lose a decade of emotional maturity for every ten minutes breakfast is delayed. You know this. But you had to show off with your yeast rolls and your fancy proofing.”
“You’ll wait and you’ll like them.”
“Oh, come on. What will a little pinch hurt?”
“Fine. Here. You can have a piece ea
rly. But just a piece.”
I look away from their murmurs.
“Oh, look,” Dad says. “We’re embarrassing Jay. It’s been so long since we managed that.”
I turn back to them just in time to see them exchange a triumphant fistbump. I’m not embarrassed. I’m glad that I didn’t ruin everything. I’m glad they still argue over cinnamon rolls and other trivialities.
“You’re both twelve,” I say.
“Yes,” my father says, “maybe, but on the other hand, the rolls are cool enough to ice. Crisis averted.”
“It’s about time,” Mom says as Dad turns his attention to the pan. “My stomach is shrinking in on itself. I swear it’ll turn into a black hole if I don’t eat.”
I shake my head. “Fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, that’s what you two are. That’s not how black holes work.”
“How do you know I haven’t already produced one? If the event horizon is small enough—”
“Don’t encourage him,” my father says, putting plates on the table. “We were going to talk to him about his work habits, remember?”
It’s ridiculous. I’m twenty-eight. I’m an adult, and one who is responsible for other adults at that.
Still, I hold my breath, hoping that they’ll scold me.
“Oh, yes.” My mother snaps her fingers and moves her plate to the other side of me, so that I am bracketed by them.
“You guys are going to lecture me about my work habits?” I fold my arms. “You two can hardly talk.”
My mother glances down. Her eyes linger—briefly—on my forearms, on the geometric designs that crawl up past my elbow. The ink curls into the back of my hands. Twelve years out, the ink has faded from crisp black to a more muted brown.
Halfway through my final semester in high school, I drove myself to Vegas. Disappeared for three days. Got tattoos that were impossible for my parents to ignore, impossible to cover without long sleeves and gloves that would have been entirely impractical in California.
I came home, heart in my throat, positive that this, this would finally trigger their wrath.
