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“You’re right, Genie. What you deserve is some kind of joint program along with some merit fellowship grant money to do with as you please. All the grant money in fact. You deserve it all.”
“Aw, let’s leave a few bucks on the table for the other meritorious fellows.”
“You’re so kind, Genie. Genie? Genie?”
“Genie?” Anna said. “Are you okay?”
I blinked. Someone calling me kind was too much to believe, even for a daydream.
“The story of me,” I parroted.
“Try this exercise,” Anna said. “Completely ignore the essay prompts and word limits for now. Write about yourself however you can, with your thoughts, your feelings, some personal anecdotes. Get something down on paper first, and then we’ll refine it from there.
“Who is Genie Lo?” she said, wiggling her fingers. “That’s what the admissions board wants to know.”
There is no Genie Lo, I wanted to shout. Not the kind that lived prettily in air-quotes. There was a sixteen-year-old girl from the Bay who answered to that name, but there wasn’t some sparkling magic nugget underneath that I could dig up, polish, and put on display.
I swallowed my pride and smiled.
“I think I get it,” I said. “I’ll have a better draft next time.”
I left Anna’s completely fried, but that wasn’t anything new. I bought two coffees from the café next door that was too fancy to sell a “large” and chugged one immediately. The other I took into the cab with me.
The taxi was a waste of money, but in my current state I couldn’t handle getting back on a bus. The driver took a different route downtown through the financial district, which was mostly empty on the weekend. We pulled up to a building that only looked like a bank. The second half of today’s trip.
I opened the door to the gym and was immediately greeted by the latest remix of the latest EDM hit. The girl behind the counter who tagged members’ badges with a bar code reader smiled and waved me on by.
It wasn’t crowded, not on a weekend afternoon. The gym was gigantic—an orchard of pulleys and benches—but I found him in the corner wiping chalk off the barbell grips. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned.
“Hi, Dad.”
My father beamed and gave me a big hug.
Then, without so much as a word, he held up his hand
s. I grabbed them and we began trying to twist each other’s arms off, laughing the whole time.
I don’t know when playing Mercy became our standard greeting, but I did know that he hadn’t won in a very long time. Dad wasn’t much bigger than Mom.
As soon as I’d bent his wrists beyond ninety degrees, he squawked, “I give, I give!” I let go and he shook his hands out. “I don’t remember you being that strong last month.”
“Coach Daniels has us doing grip training now,” I said. “We squeeze tennis balls.”
“They’ve got a class here like that for the rock climbers. You should see the new wall they’re planning. Shhoop. Goes all the way to the top.”
I listened to him enthusiastically describe the various improvements going on at the gym as if he were an owner and not part of the cleaning staff. Business must have surged again recently, the energy rubbing off on him. It was good to see him like this.
My father was born the same year as my mother, but you wouldn’t have known it from looking at him. He was the portrait of Dorian Gray that took all the slings and arrows of Time bouncing off Mom’s youthful skin. Only his still-dark hair kept his weathered face from looking painfully old for his age.
Dad was a specimen that not many people saw out in the open, or at least admitted to seeing. He was a failure. An abysmal, no-bones-about-it failure. One of the worst things you could be in this era.
My family used to be slightly more prosperous. That’s not saying much, but it was a meaningful difference, a trip to Disneyland’s worth, perhaps. Dad used to work at an insurance company when I was very little. He had a modest, nondescript career, but a career nonetheless.
Until one day, to hear Mom tell the story, he decided he was too good to work for someone else. He quit his job, took out a loan, and opened a furniture store, like an idiot.
In Dad’s version it was a calculated risk, an attempt to get the better life that his wife had always passive-aggressively demanded. He’d carry cheap inventory in parts and assemble it with the help of cheap employees and sell it to cheap customers. A foolproof plan.
I have memories of the store. The desks that smelled like dust no matter how much they’d been spritzed with lemon. A whole series of glass coffee tables that only came in octagons. I used to run between the aisles of the showroom, before I learned not to by way of a splinter the size of a toothpick buried in my cheek.
