twenty-five #2
I had already told Morgan, so it should’ve been easier to say it to Mama, but it was harder. I would have to keep practicing.
“I am thinking about community college,” I said gingerly. “I could stay home. Live with you for another year. I could transfer
to another place later, maybe. When I’m ready.”
“Are you still afraid of what might happen? After—your brother?”
I wanted to say no. “A little bit.”
“I’m afraid too.”
“Really?”
“I know there is no reason to fear. But that doesn’t matter, does it?”
I shook my head.
“I will tell your father,” she said, taking a burden off my shoulders.
“Thank you.”
“Aiya, I should go. I have to make dinner for the family. Your aunts can’t cook at all. I can’t leave it to them. Oh—how is
Alan? He is doing well?”
My jaw tightened. “He is fine.”
“I’m glad.” She paused. “He was a nice boy, wasn’t he? You used to be very good friends. It’s hard to find good friends like
that. It was kind for him to drive you all last week.”
“Yes.”
“Take care of yourself while you are by yourself, okay?”
“Okay. Hey—Mama?”
She held the screen up closer. “Mm? What?”
“Did you talk to Alan about Nai Nai?”
She looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t talk to him before the trip?”
“What a question. We just asked Uncle Zhao if his son wanted to drive. Why would we talk to Alan?”
“No reason,” I said.
The room where the staff for the school newspaper, The Standard , met weekly was in a wing of Weston High I hadn’t gone to before. I got lost twice before finding it, and by the time I did,
I was ten minutes late.
It was a computer lab, with two rows of big silver desktops. A smattering of students were at the computers. Another group
sat clustered in the corner by the whiteboard. I could tell that they were having a news conference, sketching out where different
stories would go on which page.
I had found the ad for the newspaper and emailed the address. The editor in chief had emailed me back, telling me to come
to the after-school meeting to see where I could slot in.
Everyone was heavily focused on their activity at hand.
Nobody seemed to be expecting me, and nobody looked in my direction.
This was my worst nightmare, having to go up to someone and ask what I was supposed to be doing.
I was about to do the most awkward thing possible and back out of the room, when someone in the corner finally noticed me standing by the door and waved me over.
“Hi. Are you Stella?” A girl with clipped short hair and big, beautiful eyebrows met me halfway.
I nodded.
“I’m Marie, the person who you were emailing with.” She extended her hand, and I shook it. “You’re new, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever worked on a school newspaper before?”
“I was the editor in chief at my old paper.” I felt gross saying it, as though I were bragging, even though I was just stating
a matter of fact. “I mean, I came from a small town. It was a really small school. It was nothing like this. We published,
like, once a week, and had three staff writers.”
“No, that’s great. Well, I’m sorry that my job isn’t available,” she said cheekily, “but we have tons of other stuff that
you can do. We need a beat writer on features, sports, and also—do you know how to use Adobe InDesign?”
“I’m not great at it, but I can use it.”
“Fantastic. A designer quit, so even if you can do inside pages, that would be a big help. Whatever you want to do, we have
room for you.”
I surveyed the room. I was beginning to feel calmer, more in control of myself. This was familiar. It was a new space, and
I’d have to learn how to work with new people. But I knew how to do this.
“Thanks. I’m happy to be here,” I told her, and I meant it. “Put me to work.”
She grinned. “Welcome to the staff.”
I went to school as usual during the week and came home to my empty house. I kept mostly to myself.
Alan didn’t try to corner me at lunch again. I thought about texting him to acknowledge that I had jumped on him unfairly
for something he didn’t do, but every time I tried, I didn’t quite know how to start. His final accusation had been true,
and all I could do was lash out so he wouldn’t see the way it stung.
The orange marble sat on my desk now between two grooves of the wood slats, where it couldn’t roll off. Was it a worse betrayal
for him to have left it with me intentionally or was it better to have held on to something of his after all those years?
I couldn’t decide.
The one thing I couldn’t deny was that I missed him. I had gotten used to talking every day over the past week. And if I boiled
it down to the pure hard center of it, it was this: Being around him made me happy. It was why we had always been friends.
I allowed him to escape from his overbearing father, and he allowed me to escape from being an outcast. We were good together,
if only for a summer. I had never been able to recapture the feeling I had from being with him.
Not for the thousandth time, I wished we could start over to when there wasn’t any baggage.
Since that was impossible, I tried to ignore this particular sadness.
There was too much else to be sad about already. I was stuck in limbo for many things over which I had no control.
I didn’t know what it would be like to see Nai Nai, when I finally made the trip across the ocean. I didn’t know what Baba
would say about what I had done after Mama told him. I didn’t know, after all of this, whether I would ever get to a place
of openness and understanding with my parents.
I didn’t know if I would ever stop feeling the gap that Sam had left behind.
Being in the house all by myself made his absence seem more pronounced. The fact that my parents had relegated his belongings
into one room only made it impossible not to notice how the rest of the space was scrubbed free of any mementos.
Every time I passed the guest room, its door slightly ajar, I could see the cardboard boxes stacked high.
One afternoon, I came home, filled with a whirring tickle to take action. I couldn’t just sit on the couch and stare at the
blank four walls in our living room anymore. Or walk past the Room of Sam as though it were normal to have a black hole in
your house that everyone ignored as if it didn’t exist.
Tentatively, I pushed the door open. I half expected some cosmic force to stop me, but, of course, nothing happened.
It was just a room.
I sneezed. It was a little dark and dusty, since no one had been cleaning it. Motes of dust swirled through the air. I picked my way past everything and drew up the curtain to let in some light. I cracked the window to bring in fresh air.
The boxes were not arranged in any kind of thematic order, except that farthest away from the door, pushed up against the
unused closet, were four boxes marked “Dorm.” I had not gone with my parents to Cambridge to clean out his room after he died.
I hardly remembered the first week of aftermath, but they had done a quick twenty-four-hour trip out there without me, put
everything in boxes, and FedExed them to our house.
In the weeks after Sam died, I went back to school. I thought I came off as put together, but it must have been protocol in
these situations to get a referral to the school psychologist. I found myself sitting in the squashy orange chair as she talked
me through how to cope with loss. I told her I was okay and that I didn’t need to be there. Mostly, I just wanted to be left
alone. The attention made me feel simultaneously like I was underperforming my grief and like I should’ve been expecting a
complete meltdown at any moment.
“Your feelings may come and go for a long time,” the psychologist had said. “You may feel fine today but be unable to get
out of bed a week from now. That’s all part of it.”
“Part of what?” I asked.
“The first year.”
So that was what it was, I realized. An event momentous enough that everything in my life from then on would be measured by
its distance from that point zero.
“Will it be better after that?”
“It will and it won’t,” she said. “But you’ll have made it that far. That will feel like something.”
It was the most anyone had talked to me about what to expect from the grieving process. My parents and I exchanged words only
when we had to, as though each one cost us, and none of them had been about Sam dying.
We would be coming up on that full first year in a few months. I didn’t know how long my parents intended on keeping the room
untouched like this. Did they even have a plan for when they would eventually unpack everything? Or were they going to wait
until it all crumbled to dust out of sight?
I took a pair of scissors and sliced open the tape on the box closest to the door. It felt forbidden, but once I did it, I
was emboldened.
I took out his old clothes. Medals and trophies from the shelves in his room, always more numerous than the ones on mine.
His bedsheets. I unpacked an entire box of shoes. Worn-out sneakers, dress shoes, beach sandals. I found an entire box of
baby things that Nai Nai must’ve mailed over but my parents had kept.
I unearthed things that I barely even remembered he had. There was a dusty old kite from the back of his closet. Our parents
had gotten it as a gift for him one birthday, but it was in truth a gift to both of us, since we flew it together most of
the time.
Model airplanes, misshapen clay projects from school, little army men from two different sets, flash cards with his neat handwriting fading, notebooks, device chargers, board games, a pair of old headphones, a framed poem in Chinese calligraphy he had been gifted from our maternal uncle, a recorder from sixth grade, loose chess pieces, a stamp collection, a Nintendo Switch, a pair of brightly painted maracas, backpacks, sand everywhere from an exploded hourglass, a lamp shaped like a car, and books, so many books—
I kept unpacking, seemingly unable to stop. Everywhere, everywhere, looking for my brother among his possessions. They were
piled on the floor around me; I surrounded myself with what was left of him.
My chest ached like someone had put expanders in my ribs. I thought about what Mama had said about it hurting too much, but
it had hurt when we hid him away too. He was here now, in this house, with me, with my parents, with this new beginning from
year zero. It felt like I had exhumed him. It felt like a resurrection.
I found our old pictures with Sam, still in their frames, and I lined them all up in the living room. I would hang them before
leaving for China.
I knew then that the school psychologist was right. I was going to make it that first year. I would survive the earth’s full
revolution, all the way around the sun. I wouldn’t feel better, not every day, but I would keep going.
It was only long after it got dark when I noticed the mail had come through the slot in the door. I went to pick it up and put it on the table. There was a copy of The Standard from this week. It had been dropped off, not mailed.
There was a little orange tab marking a page in the back.
I turned to the bookmarked spot, page 3. It was the opinions section. A personal essay at the top. Byline: Alan Zhao.