twenty-four
The house I returned to was lonely.
I watched Alan drive off from the entryway. This was the end of us, I thought. It would hurt whenever I’d see him at school.
Maybe it would never stop hurting.
I went inside. It was exactly as I’d left it. Clean and a little bare, because we still hadn’t finished unpacking. It was
a place we hadn’t made our own yet. I felt like a guest in my own home.
For a while, I meandered around, watched some mindless TV, even wiped down some dusty areas. It was mostly because I was suspended
in a state of numb stupor after everything that had happened. But I’d have to shake myself out of it soon, because at last,
time was running out on me.
This was it. The application deadline for the UCs was tomorrow night. Soon after, it would be Monday again. I’d have to go
back to school. And then four days later was the flight to China.
All these hours, days, trickling together. My world was closing in. And, as always, in my most critical moments: I was all alone.
Eventually, I made some stovetop ramen, adding an egg for protein, and ate at the counter of our silent cavernous kitchen.
The entire time, I stared at the picture in the kitchen of the four of us when Sam and I first came over. I had a subtle gap
between my teeth, which looked too large in front before braces. Sam’s arms were wrapped around Mama’s waist. He was wearing
a dark green polo. It was the only picture my parents had hung in the house.
I wondered where the rest of our pictures were stashed away.
I cleaned up after dinner, and there was nothing left to do but get ready for nighttime.
I took my suitcase upstairs, walking carefully past the room with the closed door, where all of Sam’s things were, still in
boxes.
I left everything in my room without unpacking, got into a pair of pajamas, and crawled into bed early, breathing in the scent
of my unwashed sheets. The familiarity enveloped me in its softness. I lay there for a long time, unable to sleep, but I breathed
deeply in and out, in and out.
I woke up the next morning to the gentle pattern of rain, soothing as a mother’s lullaby.
Outside, it was gray, and the downpour was light but steady. I stood by the back door and drank my coffee, watching with some
wonderment since I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen rain. It had been a dry month since we’d moved.
California felt less fantastical in the rain. It was finally a real place. One in which I now lived, no different from where we lived before. It had bad days too, and that was reassuring in a way.
I checked messages from my parents. I let them know I had made it home. They sent me a heart emoji and a jia you emoji for
the application deadline today.
The rain was meditative. It made me think of those summer thunderstorms we used to have in the Midwest, the kind that washed
the pavement clean and left the world smelling fresh.
When we first came over, my parents were so busy working all the time. They didn’t seem to know how to have children, or what
they were supposed to do with us. Most of the time, Sam and I were left to our own devices. Just us two, we chafed at each
other’s company, both of us wondering, perhaps secretly, whether we were enough for the people who had brought us into this
world yet seemed like strangers.
Still, when the weather was a washout, my parents used to stay in with us, playing games that we were way too old for, but
with no one watching, we’d participate gleefully without judgment. Mama would make paper masks, coloring them beautifully
and cutting out holes for eyes and mouths, and Baba would chase us around the house wearing them until we squealed with laughter.
Those memories lived brightly in my mind, like rare gems I had hoarded over the years.
Now, the rain reminded me of them. How delicate those days were. How fond. It had never occurred to me, but Mama had a real talent for drawing and an eye for art. Did she used to draw when she was younger? Why did she stop? How had I not asked her about that before?
I decided to get out of the house. I drove to a local café, one that I hadn’t gone to before. The inside had a lot of plants
and squashy armchairs. It wasn’t too crowded. The music was at a low hum, the way I liked it. I ordered an oat cappuccino,
and it tasted perfect. I knew I would come back here again. Maybe this would be my new go-to coffee shop—a tentative, hopeful
root to put down, because I lived here now.
I sat next to a window so I could watch the raindrops slide down the glass, my laptop open to my college applications. I had
started my essay on the trip, but it was terrible, all wrong. I deleted it entirely and took myself back to a blank page.
Alan might’ve no longer had a place in my life, but he was right about a lot of things.
I did want to study journalism, although it was something I hadn’t ever seriously discussed with anyone out of caution.
I was like a black box, even to myself sometimes.
I was scared to dream, scared to try. It was a safe way to live, but a diminished
one.
I watched people come in with friends or alone. I watched a girl with pink hair flirt with one of the baristas. I watched
someone wheel in an old woman—her grandmother, perhaps—with tubes in her nose and the brightest grin on her face.
There were other ways to be. Life could be big and bold.
It could be fearless. You could expect pain and disappointment, but you could expect a lot of other things too.
You couldn’t choose what to let in and what to keep out.
You’d have to let it all in, everything all at once.
Even if it felt like too much. A soul could stretch, though. I believed that.
I worked on the rest of the application all day. I ordered a panini for lunch and returned to the seat I should’ve been paying
rent on for how long I’d claimed it. I wrote the essay about Kit and the all-American girl I wanted to be, the one that Alan
said I should. I talked about moving across the ocean with my brother and not ever feeling like I really belonged. The one
thing I was good at, where I seamlessly fit in, was finding other people’s stories and telling them right.
It wasn’t the unvarnished truth, of course. Not the way I would’ve told it to someone I knew. It was trite and imbued with
an air of the dramatic. I had squashed the messiness of real life into the four corners of a college application essay. But
it was what colleges liked to hear.
I packed up my stuff and went home. The rest of the evening seemed to go by slowly. At long last, I was done with my application
entirely. I had read it three or four times for typos.
I could’ve hit Send at any point, but I held off on pushing that button. I had the seed of an idea, one that I hadn’t explored
before. It would not be my parents’ first choice. Perhaps they would be angry or disappointed. Perhaps they would refuse to
help me and want nothing to do with my plan. I had never done anything so brash, so irreversible before.
It was funny and kind of sad, but even now, I wondered what Sam would’ve thought.
I would probably wonder for the rest of my life, but soon—very soon—I would be surpassing him in age.
Eventually, I would have to stop talking to him in my mind, because the version of him I was keeping would stop being meaningfully him.
He would be frozen at eighteen, and I would go on without him, making all new decisions, all new mistakes.
Would it matter what eighteen-year-old Sam would think of thirty-year-old Stella? I would have to let him go.
The minutes ticked by on the clock. Undeniable. Inexorable. Still, I left that application page up, unsubmitted.
Until eventually, time ran out. The future we had planned for me at a UC next year disappeared for good.
I thought I might feel panicked that I let it all go right at the very end, but I didn’t.
Mostly, the space inside my head was quiet. And I was tired.
Outside, it had stopped raining. Tomorrow, it would probably be sunny again.
I got into bed. I fell asleep easily.
As though after all this time, my body had finally remembered how.
Weston High had chugged easily onward without me for a week.
I slid back into my schedule with hardly anyone noticing my absence, even the teachers. I had left little of an impression,
it seemed. It was a good reminder, though, that no matter what was going on in your own life, it was not that important in
the grand scheme of the cosmos. Life would go on, no matter what.
Morgan was still there in US Government, her deadpan expression unaltered upon my return.
“Did I miss anything important?” I asked.
She shrugged with a fluid single-shoulder movement. “Not really.” She gave me a thirty-second monotone rundown of the foundations
of democracy. “We got A’s on the two assignments,” she said. “So thanks for doing your part, I guess.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
She gave me a curious look. “How were the UC college tours?”
Her question surprised me. She always struck me as uninterested in wanting to engage much. “Fine. I didn’t end up applying,
though.”
“That bad, huh?” she said, a glimmer of humor playing on the edge of her voice.
“Well, I just wasn’t sure it was the right choice for me.” I disliked how defensive I sounded, but I couldn’t help it.
“Hey, it’s fine. Who’s judging? I’m not going.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I’m doing community college for a couple years and then transferring.”
I straightened in my chair. “Like in town?”
“Yeah, I mean, that’s why they call it community college, no? Lots of people do that. Unlike some of the people at this school, my family’s not made of money, so I’ll save
a bunch and then graduate with the same degree they will four years later.” She smirked. “It’s like a life hack.”
“That’s what I’m doing too,” I said. “Staying local.”
Saying it for the first time made it sound right. Who would’ve thought? Me telling Morgan Park before anyone else.