13
SO THIS IS WHERE EVIL LIVES.
I stare at the building in front of me, two stories of stone and wood that I had to walk fifteen minutes to reach from the bus stop, surrounded by carefully landscaped lawns. There’s a security booth with two security guards by the imposing wrought-iron gate.
I clutch my backpack to me and take a deep breath: I have arrived at the Taslims’ lair.
Given all that had happened between us at the last open mike on Sunday, I hadn’t expected Royce to honor his offer to tutor me, but on Tuesday, he had messaged me to give me his address and ask me what subjects I needed help with, we worked out a mutually cool time slot, and now here we are. If he can be a professional, so can I.
My jaw gapes as the gate opens once the security confirms my visit is expected, revealing the sheer size of the mansion glinting in the late-afternoon sun. This isn’t a house, surely. It’s a resort. A sprawling urban resort in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Kenny Hills. I glance down at my outfit—black leggings and faded sea-green tank top—and look back at the house: I should have worn a ball gown, or at least something with feathers, surely.
I walk hesitantly up the short driveway, my mouth dry. Normally, Royce was supposed to tutor his charity cases at the library, but he must have his reasons for suggesting his home, none of them friendly, I’m guessing.
I ring the bell and a low, gravelly voice on the intercom panel asks me for my business. I identify myself and the heavy doors open; a woman wearing black linen pants and a white cotton linen long-sleeved tunic smiles and ushers me in without further comment. I am looking everywhere, at everything, transfixed, trying not to gawp. Everything in the house is dazzling. The muted brass mirrors and framed art; the floral accent walls with custom, hand-painted silk wallpaper, the vintage carpets, brocade throw pillows; the ornate lines of the dark wood furniture. The air smells of creamy flowers, and incongruously, the sea. We were right in the middle of a city, and the traffic was gone. You could even hear the susurrus of swaying palm trees, the swish of bougainvillea bushes brushing against the french doors of the living hall, overlooking a perfect lawn spilling into a view of the KL skyline. And a lapis-blue tiled pool, long enough for laps, fringed on three corners with a lotus pond. Every detail was harmonious, not an element out of place.
The maid gestures at a sunlit room to the side of the living hall, where a small rectangular black marble-topped table was flanked by two armchairs. There’s a chrome multitiered stand on a side table with a plate of blush and lemon-yellow macarons almost pearlescent in their beauty, ringed with glass jars of cookies and granola bars, pitchers of mint-and-cucumber water, and a lumpy brown slab of cake. Royce is seated with his back to me, and my heart flip-flops—in disgust, of course—at the sight of his disturbingly good posture. I admire the lines the way any sportsperson would, that is to say with decided clinical detachment.
“You’re on time,” he says as I take a seat.
“Of course,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I be?” Actually, I had planned on being ten minutes late, but somehow public transport was bang on time today, thus thwarting my power play and I ended up being fifteen minutes early.
He shrugs, his lip twitching. “I thought you’d be late on purpose.”
“I’m not an ingrate.” He’d seen through me like I was rice paper.
He raises an eyebrow, a look which somehow only serves to underscore the resting symmetry of his face, which of course makes me even more irritated at him.
“You look nice.”
I glance down at my outfit. “Right,” I say. I gesture around me. “So, you trying to impress me or something?”
Now it’s his turn to look uncomfortable. A light blush tints his face. “We could have stayed at the library, but I thought…the chairs here are more ergonomic and, uh, after your accident and all, yeah, the wooden chairs at the library…”
Was that the real reason, and not sheer intimidation? I wiggle around and decide he might have a point. “Thanks,” I reply.
“Plus, I have way more refreshments. There’s Ladurée macarons and freshly baked sugar cookies and banana cake, if you want. I, ah”—he clears his throat and brushes his hair off his forehead—“made the cake.”
The ice inside me thaws. “Dude, you’re the one tutoring me, I should be feeding you.” I root around in my backpack. “Here, this is for you.” I place the packet of melty Haribo gummy bears, which in hindsight seem inadequate. Grossly inadequate. I squelch lower in my seat, which is difficult because they really are very comfortable and ergonomic.
“Thank you,” he says, accepting my paltry offering and for whatever reason blushing even deeper red. “Would you like some cake?”
“Sure,” I say, giving the slab a dubious glance. He saws a piece off what should be a soft, chewy cake and puts it on a plate with an audible thunk. Golden Boy does not look like he’s a baker, but who knows? Royce is a star athlete, a great student, and good-looking (objectively)—maybe he’s also a clever baker.
I steel myself and take a dutiful bite. Triumph and despair fight for supremacy. The cake is hard as pavement, but I swallow it and offer a best-guest-ever smile. “Tas-tasty,” I manage to say.
He drops his gaze down and says shyly, “I’d never baked before yesterday.”
And it shows, I don’t say. So, his modus operandi when it comes to competition is to poison them. But what he doesn’t know is this—I’ve grown up eating my mom’s home cooking, so there. I spoon another bite into my mouth and chew with enthusiastic crunches to show him I was the alpha, not him. “Mmmmmm, delicious,” I say. I gesture around me. “And nice house.”
“Thanks.”
I look around at the walls of photos. They were mostly of Royce’s parents and him, interspersed with some shots of what I presume are Royce’s extended families. “Wow, is that everyone in the Taslim clan?”
There’s a moment of hesitation before Royce says curtly, “No.” I guess sharing time is up, so I pull out my textbook and notepad. Royce does the same.
A servant, a stern-faced woman in her sixties wearing a linen samfu in light gray, comes in with drinks. She gives me a cursory nod before reminding him, in Bahasa Melayu, that he has a session with Master Zhang.
Royce sighs and thanks her.
“Who’s Master Zhang?” I ask in my casual voice, remembering Zee’s quest for me, i.e., to unearth dirt on Royce.
“My chess tutor,” he says.
“Yikes.”
“Yikes is the word,” he replies.
“I can’t believe you have to attend chess lessons.”
“Me neither. I hate chess so, so much. But apparently it’s good for reasoning or whatever.”
“I hate studying in general,” I say. “I wish I could just sleep through the rest of school life and wake up at the good part.”
He regards me with interest. “And what’s that, Ms. Chan?”
“Working adulthood.” Having money and freedom—win.
“What’s your dream job?”
I flick imaginary lint off my T-shirt collar. “You really want to know?”
“Yes, I do, Chan,” he says. “I need to, uh, know what my tutee wants in order to, uh, align my strategy with their goals.”
“Unless you want me to end you, don’t laugh.”
His face turns serious. “I would never.” He pauses, the smallest hint of a smile quirking his lips. “Especially at your sets.”
I burst into hacking laughter, as does he. The tension breaks. I meet his smile with a genuine one of mine.
“Okay, seriously now, Chan.”
I exhale noisily. “Sports management at the national level, and failing that, physiotherapy.”
“You want to be a physio?”
“Don’t sound so shocked! It’s, like, sports adjacent, so why not?”
“Dream jobs aren’t why-nots, they’re supposed to be nothing-else-comes-close. So, what’s your real dream job?”
“I don’t have the money to dream,” I tell him.
He laughs. He actually thinks I’m joking. “No seriously, what?”
I close my eyes. Maybe he put some truth serum in his cake, because I tell him about my secret, actual pipe dream. “I’d love to write for a living, y’know? I’m not really sure in what capacity, but definitely something full-time, maybe even teach a little on the side. I love how a single alternate word choice can make a sentence dance—” I close up. “I’m being silly. Forget it. It doesn’t matter. I have to be practical, and physio is a safe one that’s not getting replaced by robots anytime soon.” I grimace. “Or AI.”
“It’s not silly at all, if it’s what you want,” Royce says. “I’ve watched some of Zee’s makeup tutorials—you know, the ones cowritten by you. You have talent.”
I redden with the warmth of his praise. “And yours? What’s your dream job?”
“Stand-up comedian,” he says without hesitation. He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Now that’s a dream all right.”
“I’m sure if you wanted to—”
“Let’s drop the subject,” he says, a curt note in his voice. “What I want doesn’t—” He drags a palm across his face, and when the hand is down, his game face is back on. “Just so you know, if you’re thinking of becoming a physio, you’re going to have to learn to love physics.”
I nod, although my mind is elsewhere. It’s funny to think of Royce, the Royce Taslim, having dreams and desires that he can’t fulfill and being, well—trapped, although I might be projecting. No one is trapped in a life like Royce’s.
Royce turns to his lesson plan. “BTW, I’m glad I’ve had a chance to be your tutor. I’ve always wanted to get to know you better.”
I blink. “Oh really? Why?”
“I don’t know….You’d be walking around school with Zee, laughing and chatting, and I’d think, There goes a girl who’d hide a body for her friend.”
“Th-that’s a really strange way to sum someone up in the first instance.”
“Okay, then you look like someone who I’d want to be friends with.”
My face warms. “Thank you.”
He opens up the textbook, his voice all businesslike now. “We should get started.”
He starts droning away on some boring equation stuff thingy, so my mind drifts. I catch myself staring at the curve of his bicep, the smooth tension of the muscle underneath the tanned expanse in a less-than-detached way, and I pinch myself so hard under the table that my eyes prickle with tears.
Royce happens to glance at me and mutters, “I hope you’re not crying because of physics. Or me.”
“It’s cramps,” I say, without thinking. Oh shit, maybe he thinks it’s—“It’s not those cramps!” I hasten to add. “Just my butt falling asleep!”
His eyes drop to my butt, and a look I can’t decipher flashes across his face. I’m wearing my least-flattering running leggings, which are a little threadbare and tight.
“I should stretch!” I start stretching with great vitality. “My physio says I’m stiff.”
Royce says, in a strange voice, “It’s very important to stretch.”
Great, he probably thinks I’m weird. Not that it matters what he thinks. I start sitting down but stop midway. In the course of my stretching, I’ve become uncomfortably aware that my bladder is full. “Erm, so where’s, like, your, erm, powder room?” I have never used the phrase powder room in my life.
“Down the hallway, turn right at the third door. Do you…?” He makes a show of getting up to lead me there, but I wave him down. I’m sure there will be a toilet. Somewhere.
I find it—well, one of them—and spend an inordinate amount of time testing the very luxe selection of hand creams.
“Find it?” he asks when he smells me entering the room.
I nod as I slid back into the seat. “So, why are you hiding your stand-up from your parents?”
“Because they would shut it down in a flash. It wouldn’t be”—a sardonic smile—“brand appropriate.”
I think about all the fancy society and business magazines, the fawning coverage in old and social media. The Taslim name is a brand that screams aspirational living. Innovation. Flair. Prestige. Those pesky rumors of illegal logging and land clearing are just rumors, and if they are ever proven to be, you can just point your finger at your third-party contractors being lax, and everything goes away if you can pay enough people to lawyer and PR the shit out of your dirty laundry.
“How are you doing all the comedy nights, then?” Royce does at least three a week. “What about your bodyguards—”
“I have my ways,” he says wryly.
We pretend to concentrate on the lesson in front of us. After a while, I say, “In spite of your previous apology, you’re still weird around me at comedy. Why?”
“You noticed?”
“Everyone noticed. It’s impossible not to.”
He tousles his hair with a rueful expression on his face. “The truth is, I’m a little…jealous of you.”
“You’re jealous of me?” I say, surprised. How? “Why?”
“Because you’re naturally talented in the only thing I care about. And more importantly”—he picks an invisible crumb off the table, not looking at me—“you can be your true authentic self and talk about your everyday life onstage whereas I must invent some stupid persona just so my parents don’t find out about my stage work.”
Oh. That. “Yeah, your average-Joe performance stinks, but not because your lines aren’t good, at least from a technical perspective, maybe.”
“Mayhap,” Royce says.
I grin. “I think the reason they aren’t as good, especially when I’m around, is because they aren’t authentic to you.”
“I thought so,” he says, nodding. “Before you came along, I could fake it well enough because I was pretty sure no one in the audience knew me.”
“But you don’t have to make up an entire backstory even if you’re trying not to expose the fact that you’re, well, rich.”
“I’m still trying to figure it out, trying to meld my humor with the topics I want to talk about but feel I have no right to talk about because of who I am,” he says.
“You’ll figure it out,” I say. “You’re not…unsmart.”
He chuckles. “Thanks? But seriously, for the record, I like…I like watching you do stand-up. I think you’re funny and, um, inspiring.”
“What do you mean?” I say, scooting over just a little because I want to give him a chance to communicate better.
He shifts closer, too. “When you want something, you go for it. You’re very direct and no-nonsense, which is so refreshing, so…uh…y’know…”
Our gaze meets and I am suddenly aware of how close our fingers are, practically tip to tip, and that no one is moving away despite the shamelessness of it all.
My gaze travels to his lips. Kissssmhiiiimmmmm, my traitorous brain opines, even as everything else in me is screaming, Bacteria!
I give myself a mental shake and recall the face of a soldier who’d died in the grip of tetanus in one of my history books, which works to cool down my ardor somewhat (death should). The bacteria that cause tetanus is everywhere, and for unvaccinated individuals, an unfortunate slip in attention allows the bacteria to breach the defenses, leading to a death of great agony and needless contortion. In short, tetanus, like love, takes advantage of our carelessness, and I can’t afford to mess up again.
If I’m not winning, no one in my family is.
“Are you okay?” Royce asks, reaching for his cup of cucumber water. Apparently, I have not been giving myself a mental shake but a real one.
“Right as rain,” I say. “Now come on, if you want to root in my box later, you better get to work first.”
Royce spit-takes so hard I could see the veins in his face. “Do you hear yourself speak?” he says when he finally gathers himself.
“Yes.” That was a tactical deployment of innuendo on my end.
Royce shakes his head and turns a page, smiling. “Every day, Chan. Every day.”