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“Don’t be.”
Another lull. This time Roma didn’t hurry to fill it. This time he only waited. He knew that Juliette detested silence. She detested it so viciously that when it followed her around with the air of a ghoul, when it skipped between her and whomever she was walking with, whether it be enemy or friend, Juliette would scrape away at herself just to find a weapon to counter it.
He stayed silent. And Juliette caved.
“Cai Junli,” she said monotonously. “Change up the pronunciation a little and Junli turned into Juliette.”
Her name was no secret; it was merely forgotten. She was just Juliette, the heiress who came from the West—with the American girl’s dress and the American girl’s name. If the people of Shanghai dug deep into the recesses of their memory, they would find Juliette’s Chinese name lurking somewhere between the age of their grandfather and the residential address of their third-favorite aunt. But it would never rise to their lips upon instinct. What was instead spoken was what Juliette had slowed down and distorted earlier into a full name: Zhulìyè.
“You never told me,” Roma said. He was staring ahead. “Back then.”
“There were a lot of things I didn’t tell you,” Juliette replied. Just as dully, she too added, “Back then.”
Four years ago, the city was not the same. Many men still kept their hair long, in what was called a queue, one braid trailing down their back with the front of their scalp shaved. The women wore their garments loose, their pants straight.
So everywhere Juliette went, she went in her bright dresses. She sneered at the ugly clothes other girls wore, and when her mother dared attempt to have her adhere to the usual fashion, she tore the bland shirts from her closet and ripped them into shreds, letting the strips flush in swirls down the newly renovated plumbing. She trashed every qipao and tossed aside every silk scarf Lady Cai tried to compromise with. To avoid being recognized when she colluded with Roma, she threw coats over her gaudy costumes, of course, but she was always treading the line of recklessness. Juliette had almost preferred the thought of being caught a traitor over putting on the same clothes as everyone else. She would have rather been an outcast than admit the blood in her veins was a product of the East.
Juliette liked to think she had come down a bit from her high horse since then. The second time she returned to New York, she had seen the darkness behind the glamour of the West. It was no longer so great to be a child constructed with Western parts.
“I picked it myself.”
Roma visibly startled at her words. He hadn’t expected her to say anything more.
“Your name?” he clarified.
Juliette nodded. She did not look at him, did not even blink. She said, “The kids in New York made fun of me. They asked what I was called and then they laughed when I told them, repeating those foreign syllables back at me over and over again as if speaking it in song made it funny.”
She had been five years old. The wound of the mockery was healed now, covered by tough skin and rough calluses, but it still stung on bad days, as all old injuries did.
“My name was too Chinese for the West,” Juliette continued, a wry smile on her lips. She didn’t know why her face had morphed itself into amusement. She was anything but amused. “You know how it is—or maybe you don’t. A temporary thing for a temporary place, but now the temporary thing is burrowed in so deep it cannot be removed.”
As soon as those words came out, Juliette felt a pang of nausea hit her throat—an immediate visceral realization that she had said too much. Ditzy flapper Juliette, who was meant to help her survive the West, had dug her claws in so deep that the real Juliette didn’t know where the facade stopped and where her true self began—if there was even anything left of her true self, or if there was anything in there to begin with. All her cousins—Rosalind, Kathleen, Tyler—they had English names to accommodate to the flood of Westerners controlling Shanghai, but their Chinese names still existed as part of their identity; their relatives still addressed them as such on the occasion. Juliette was only ever Juliette.
The air was sticky. They had been walking for long enough to enter the French Concession, strolling alongside a row of identical houses with glaringly bright walls and generous patches of greenery. Juliette pulled at her collar, grimacing when Roma opened and closed his mouth.
“Juliette—”
Was the line between enemy and friend horizontal or vertical? Was it a great plain to lumber across or was it a high, high wall—either to be scaled or kicked down in one big blow?
“We’re done here, right?” Juliette asked. “Do what you will with this information. I’m sure the link between Zhang Gutai and the Larkspur will give you plenty to work with.”
Juliette veered left, picking a shortcut through a yard that would take her to the next street. The grass here grew up to her ankles. When she dropped her shoe down, the ground seemed to swallow her, dipping and softening simply by her step. It felt like a welcome—a hurry, a come through.
Until Roma clamped a hand on her shoulder, forcibly stopping her.
“You have got”—Juliette spun around, slapping his hand off her—“to stop doing that.”
“We’re not finished,” Roma said.
“Yes, we are.”
The shadows of the nearby house were heavy. Roma and Juliette stood right where the shadows ended, right at the strict divide between light and gloom.
Roma looked her up and down.
“You still think it’s a scheme within the Communists, don’t you?” he asked suddenly. His voice dropped an octave, as if realizing that they needed to minimize the volume of their argument while standing on a street like this. In the early-morning light, it was hard to remember what danger tasted like. But one wrong move—one wrong pers
on looking out their window at the right time—and they would both be in deep trouble.
