The Girl Most Likely To

Chapter Three

My parents were flourishing in their retirement. Ba started accordion lessons, which was a tragedy for anyone with their hearing intact. Ma got into sculptural paper crafts, which she learned from a neighbor. It was pretty amazing, albeit a little strange, to see them lounge at home and dabble in creative pursuits after watching them hustle to survive all their lives, through war and then after uprooting their lives to come to the US. When they wanted family time, they lured Angela and me back home on the weekends with food. This week’s menu was samlar machu youn.

“Stop, lah,”

Ma called out from the kitchen while Ba played his rendition of “Que Sera, Sera”

in the living room.

“You made me lose my place,”

Ba complained, pushing the bellows together for a discordant sound.

“I’m going to throw that thing away,”

Ma muttered to herself. She waited until Ba stowed his accordion in its case before putting in her hearing aids. “Lucas zài nǎlǐ? Tell him to come eat.”

“He’s coming.”

Angela set the table as the family gathered around it. “We can’t start dinner without your favorite son-in-law.”

I elbowed Angela. Why did she tease Ma like that? Ma was going to get started on how Lucas was her only son-in-law.

Ma threw a chilly glance at me but refrained from saying anything. “He likes this soup and he should eat it while it’s hot.”

She did love Lucas, whether he was the only son-in-law or not. Her eyes positively sparkled when Lucas finally wandered into the dining room and took his seat between Angela and my niece, Hailey. Ma passed him a bowl of soup, heaped with catfish, and watched eagerly until he took the first slurping spoonful of the sweet-and-sour tamarind broth.

“Mmmm,”

Lucas said, performing his heart out as the steam from his bowl fogged his glasses and colored his pale face with a dash of pink. Satisfied, Ma went back to scooping bowls for the rest of us. When she was out of earshot, Lucas whispered to Angela, “What soup is this again?”

“Just eat it,”

Angela replied as she dug into her own bowl. I suspected that she was tired of having to once again explain our culture to Lucas, but more importantly, it made Ma happy to see all of us eating together. It was hard to get everyone’s schedule aligned to make this happen more often. Angela still lived in Alhambra, only a couple of miles from my parents. But between busy careers and Hailey’s school schedule, they came to family dinners as infrequently as I did.

“Jīn wǎn zài zhèlǐ shuì hanh?”

she asked, punctuating the question with a Khmer twang as she passed me my bowl of soup, poured over rice, exactly how I liked it. Ma puckered her lips to point at the overnight bag I left by the couch, in case I didn’t understand. My Mandarin was rusty, but it wasn’t that bad.

I should’ve given my mother advance notice about sleeping over, but she was the one who always said I was welcome to stay. “You never have to ask to stay in your own home,”

she once said.

“Until Sunday.”

I winced as I bit into a hot chunk of pineapple. The burst of juice scalded my tongue, but it tasted divine. Nothing could compete with a hot meal on a cold evening. “The high school is having a reunion tomorrow.”

“I didn’t think you were going,”

Angela said as she served a bowl to Ba, careful not to spill anything on the 3D durian centerpiece that seemed to have been made with a million paper footballs. “I didn’t go to mine. Why bother when you can check Facebook?”

“Some of us don’t use Facebook all the time,”

I replied. Hailey nodded in agreement. At sixteen, she knew as well as anyone that Facebook was out of fashion for everyone too young to remember that it used to be called The Facebook. “How did you even know about it?”

I asked Angela.

“I saw the announcement on the marquee when I picked Hailey up from school.”

Upon hearing her name, Hailey chimed in. “You graduated twenty years ago, Auntie Rachel?”

There was a silent Wow, you’re old following her question. If I had said anything like this to my aunts at her age, I would have received a lecture about respecting my elders. But I considered myself a cool aunt and let it go. Hailey had likely heard it from my parents anyway.

“I haven’t been to the school since graduation,”

I said. “It doesn’t look like it’s changed that much.”

“Ugh, it hasn’t,”

Hailey lamented. “They don’t let us use the lockers anymore because they won’t open.”

The school was in greater disrepair than I’d thought.

“Will Josh be there?”

Ba asked, reminding me why I didn’t tell my parents about the reunion to begin with. After three years, they still couldn’t understand why Josh and I called off our short engagement. It never made sense when two decent people couldn’t make it work, but that was the case. Much of our two-year relationship had overlapped with our MBA programs. As it turned out, two ambitious, highly independent people in a relationship with each other meant that we only knew how to plop each other into our busy schedules. Josh and I weren’t as good at building the foundation needed to upgrade our partnership to a marriage. But in my parents’ eyes, Josh was a nice man with a job who was willing to marry me and that should’ve been sufficient.

“I don’t know,”

I replied. Before my parents asked me to beg Josh to take me back, I added, “If he does, maybe I’ll meet his new girlfriend.”

My fib pleased no one. Ba sucked something out of his teeth. “Two daughters and I only have one grandchild.”

“Ba,”

Angela interjected, like a referee blowing on her whistle. Lucas and Hailey kept quiet to stay out of the crossfire. “Keep me out of it.”

“I’m trying, Ba,” I said.

“You’re trying?”

He scoffed. “Mǔ zhū huì shàng shù.”

There wasn’t any use arguing with him once he started with idiom, but did he have to use this one? 母豬會上樹 was the Mandarin cousin to “when pigs fly,”

except it had a gendered take that I didn’t appreciate. I’d like to see a male pig climb trees.

Ma was more discreet with her feelings. She combed her fingers through her silver bangs, as she tended to do when she was worried. “Josh’s mom didn’t say anything when we went for our walk last night.”

When Josh and I were together, I was thrilled that our moms became friends. I didn’t think they’d carry on their friendship, though, after we broke up. Fortunately, my mom had nothing to add when it came to Josh. “How’s work?”

Normally, I would’ve welcomed the subject change, but I wasn’t about to go down this rabbit hole. My parents knew nothing about my former job despite the countless times I’d tried to explain it to them. Now neither of them was going to take my very temporary unemployed status very well. Ma and Ba had worked since childhood because work decided whether or not they’d eat that day. I didn’t expect much empathy for wanting time off to go find myself.

“It’s good,”

I said. That wasn’t exactly a lie. It was very good that I no longer worked for a company that didn’t value loyalty. I’d spent the last ten years fighting my way up the ranks, but all it took was one email to cancel everything I’d worked for. Getting laid off hurt, but I knew what I was getting myself into when I chose the entertainment business. It was a fickle industry. One day everyone would decide something was the in thing, and the next day it was out. A part of me had hoped that I was somewhat protected by being on the business side of things, but no. The long hours I sacrificed counted for nothing. I was spat out like the fish bone my dad not so delicately hacked into his hand and then dumped onto the supermarket advertisement that lined the dining table.

“Good,”

Ma echoed, sounding sad. She didn’t say anything else, but she leaned in to run her fingers through my asymmetrical bob. It was like she was projecting her worry onto me, or maybe she hated that one side of my hair was longer than the other. It was likely both. The most important thing was that she didn’t ask any further questions, saving me from making up some lie. I couldn’t shake off Angela quite as easily, though.

My parents were like the CEOs in the family: they only dealt with high-level topics, like when I was going to get married and have children. Angela was like my immediate supervisor who knew the ins and outs of my day-to-day life. She saw right through my vague answers. After dinner, she followed me into my room and sat at my old computer desk, where my humongous Dell desktop still perched.

“When will Ba get rid of this thing?”

Angela ran her hands over the keyboard. “I keep telling them to drop it off at an e-waste event.”

“Because they’re hoarders.”

Our parents didn’t get rid of anything. My bedroom looked exactly as it did when I was in high school. I’d bet a million dollars that there was still a stack of Delia’s catalogs underneath my bed.

“I saw the news,”

Angela said as I unpacked my clothes. “Were you affected by the layoffs?”

Times like these, I hated that Angela and I looked so much alike. It was like I was looking in the mirror having a conversation with myself, except one of us had a steady graphic design career, a husband napping on the couch, and long hair of equal length.

I hung up the outfits I borrowed from Nat’s closet. She always had better taste in clothes than me. Angela correctly interpreted my silence as confirmation. “I won’t tell Mom and Dad, but do you have anything lined up?”

“No, but I’m sure something will come up soon,”

I said, taking a shot at optimism, but it didn’t land. Angela forged on with her line of questioning.

“Have you started looking? Doesn’t it take awhile to find something?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get around to it.”

I shouldn’t have been annoyed with Angela. These were all reasonable questions. She was looking out for me, as usual. Angela always had more applicable advice to give than our parents did, whether it was about writing personal statements or getting birth control. But now that we were older, I wished she’d left some things for me to handle on my own.

“Which outfit do you like better?”

I asked, hoping to divert Angela’s attention with pretty clothes. I held up a drapey black gown. Nat had worn it once to a premiere, and it landed her on several best-dressed lists.

Angela pointed at the cream pantsuit in my other hand, which Nat had worn to last year’s upfronts. “You’re going to a reunion in a high school gym. Who are you trying to impress?”

“No one,”

I said too quickly in my effort to sound casual. Angela’s eyebrows shot up close to her hairline, closer than the time she tried Botox.

“Hey.”

Angela’s voice dipped, sounding much softer than usual. “I won’t judge if you want to get back with Josh.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at her misdirected sympathy.

“Nuh-uh,”

I said before Angela could let the idea sink roots into her brain. Did she really think I was hung up on Josh? We’d broken up three years ago. Then again, what was time? Here I was, indecisive about what to wear because of someone I hadn’t seen in half a lifetime.

“It’s going to be the first time I see my classmates in a long time. They’re all doctors and professors now,”

I said to steer the subject away from my love life. I didn’t lie to Angela. There was a part of me that wanted to show my old friends that I was just as successful as them—or at least I was before I got laid off. I wasn’t going to show up and let them patronize me with their pity either. I held up the suit against my body. “What do you think? Does this say ‘sexy Hollywood executive’ to you?”

Angela leaned back in her chair as she evaluated the look. “What do you wear under the blazer?”

“Nat didn’t wear anything underneath except double-sided tape,”

I recalled.

“That’s not going to pass the dress code,”

Angela retorted.

I scoffed. “Tell me they’ve updated the rules in the last twenty years.”

It never made sense that I had to wear shorts that fell beneath my fingertips when I held my arms by my side, but boys (at least in 2003) could wear baggy cargo pants that fell off their asses. I sifted through my overnight bag and found a black cropped camisole. “Do you think they’ll let me onto school grounds wearing this?”

Angela blew out a low whistle. “Call me if they send you to the principal’s office.”

She called Hailey into the room. “What do you think, Hailey? Can Auntie wear that to school?”

Hailey leaned against the doorway as she assessed the suit. “School administrators would say that’s the kind of outfit that would quote-unquote ‘distract boys.’”

Perfect.

“Angie!”

Ma shouted from the kitchen. “Do you want mango?”

“Oh, I gotta go.”

Angela jumped out of her seat. “I have to stop Ma before she sends me home with a whole box.”

I stopped Hailey before she followed Angela out. “Wait. Can you help me with something?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Don’t tell your mom.”

This had Hailey intrigued. She closed the door behind her and parked herself on my bed. “Can you help me look someone up on the internet?”

Hailey whipped out her phone from her back pocket. “First name, last name, occupation?”

Wow. She was on it.

“Um, Danny Phan. Occupation unknown.”

The lack of information didn’t stop Hailey from typing. “Who is this Danny Phan?”

The boy who confused me more than calculus. “Just someone I used to know.”

“Why is this a secret, then?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Ugh, boys,”

she said. Ugh, boys indeed.

Hailey flipped her phone around, showing me her screen. There was an image of a museum curator named Danny Phan from Sacramento wearing a quirky pair of clear glasses. “Is this the guy you’re looking for?”

“No.”

It wasn’t my Danny.

Undeterred, Hailey swiped to the next search result. “How about this guy?”

Clearly, she wasn’t using a discerning eye. The picture was of some gamer named Danny Phan who looked young enough to be my kid. “I’m looking for someone from my high school.”

Hailey scrolled through her phone. “There’s a lot of Danny Phans, Auntie. You don’t know anything else that could narrow it down?”

I shook my head. That didn’t turn out the way I expected. “I thought your generation was supposed to be good at technology.”

“We are,”

Hailey said, tapping her screen at lightning speed. “See? I searched your name and found all kinds of things about you, like how you were one of the folks laid off from FreeStream.”

She scrolled further. “As reported on Deadline and in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.”

“Okay, that’s enough.”

Damn. The one time I made the trades, it had to be about my layoff. “Don’t tell your Popo or Gong Gong.”

Hailey kept scrolling until her eyes widened. “You have an IMDb profile? What movie were you in?”

I groaned. Nat had a small part in a low-budget, raunchy teen movie and got me in as an extra. Needless to say, the film hadn’t aged well. “You don’t need to know.”

By the time I said this, Hailey had read my short acting résumé. “You were ‘Asian Girl #2’ in a movie called The Summer Before Last? Did you have any lines?”

Hailey should’ve been able to infer my answer given that my character had no name.

“No,”

I replied. Thank god, though. I was a terrible actress. I got roped in only because I happened to be visiting Nat on set that day and they were short on extras. “I had to act like Nat’s Asian friend.”

Talk about art imitating life.

“It sounds bad,”

she surmised.

“It was,”

I confirmed. The movie had gone straight to video. Nat played Asian Girl #1, who was only there to wear a skimpy outfit, but her part had enough lines to get her into SAG. Fortunately, there were better parts for Asian American actors these days. The other day Nat received a script for a buddy comedy set at a haunted mansion. She’d play a veteran detective stuck with a rookie on a case. The premise was campy, but the dialogue kept me laughing. I’d jotted down a few notes and was reminded of my days doing script coverage as a production intern. I hoped Nat didn’t mind. She hadn’t asked me to read her scripts, but it was a thrill to find a gem.

“Don’t waste your time looking for the movie.”

I shooed Hailey out of my room. I didn’t need to know more about my career lows. I wanted to know more about Danny, but I guess I had to get to know him the old-fashioned way.

I arrived at Commonwealth half an hour early, even though I’d tried hard to busy myself during the day to avoid sitting in the parking lot with nothing better to do. I had looked into booking myself a real vacation, but I couldn’t commit to it in case I needed my savings a little longer. Then, for fun, I had read a script that Nat’s agent had sent to her. It was a romantic comedy about a woman who discovers she’s dead and her former boyfriend is a lying scumbag. In the process of taking her ghostly revenge, she runs into her ex-boyfriend’s best friend, leading to an unexpected romance. The script was sharp, and the lead part played to Nat’s strengths, but the business side of me knew that it was going to have a hard time getting funding. The current marketplace favored large tentpole movies. I had written notes in case Nat wanted to talk about it. That had only taken me until lunch.

There was so little to do at my parents’ house. I didn’t talk with them very much because they gardened all morning. I was so desperate to do something that I even washed my car in their driveway. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. When I was working, I dreamed about having free time. Now that I had it indefinitely, I felt . . . lost. I’d never experienced this before.

Parked in the school lot, I still clutched the wheel. My pulse was pounding under my skin. Why was it so hard to relax?

A knock on my window pulled me out of my head. I couldn’t believe it. Danny was staring down at me, with one hand on the roof of my car, probably wondering why I was strangling my steering wheel. His Facebook picture didn’t do him justice. His hair, which used to have spikes sharp enough to impale someone, now swooped like the wind. His once-bare face was defined by his goatee. There were some wrinkles and a hint of dark circles under his eyes, but those had been there as long as I’d known him. He’d put on a little weight, but who hasn’t? I wasn’t complaining about the way he filled his gray suit. He still reminded me of the cute boy I wanted to talk to the most, but now with the handsome patina of a grown man.

It was getting hot under my blazer, reminding me that my killer suit was meant for a grand entrance. But no. I’d been relegated to reuniting with my former friend in our high school parking lot underneath the shade of solar panels.

Danny’s eyes tracked my face, probably noting how I’d changed. Then his lips parted. Those damn soft lips. I had to stop giving his mouth so much credit. We had kissed so long ago. It was possible that the way it turned my world upside down was a figment of my dramatic hormonal imagination.

“How did I know you’d be the first to arrive?”

he said when his eyes landed back on mine. The friendly teasing was surprising, but not unwelcome. If Danny wanted to start this reunion with a clean slate, I was game. My life had already unexpectedly started over.

I rolled down my window. “Do I win a prize?”

“Yeah.”

His head pointed toward the school. “You get to set up the balloon arch.”

My manicure protested. “You didn’t hire someone for that?”

“Do you know how much that costs? An arm, a leg, and then some.”

Danny dipped his head, his nose barely crossing the threshold of my window. He was staring, his gaze heavy, probably withholding questions like How have you been? and What have you been up to? Yet here I was, wondering if I could get an arm, a leg, and then some. This close, it was hard to deny that he was attractive.

“What were you doing out here anyway?”

I asked instead.

Danny tilted his head toward the school. “I had to make sure that gate was open.”

Gate?

I looked out the windshield. What do you know? I hadn’t noticed the gate until Danny mentioned it. It didn’t exist when we attended school. It was tall enough to make ditching class impossible.

Danny tapped the roof of my car. “Come on. I’ll walk you in.”

First the personal invitation, and now this. Present-day Danny was more mature than I anticipated. I rolled the window up and opened the car door. I made an effort to step out calm and collected, like I looked this chic on a daily basis. I watched Danny’s face, which I could see clearly since we were standing in between two cars with only a foot between us. I followed where his eyes dipped, first to the small gold pendant on my necklace, then trailing down my camisole to my exposed navel and stopping where my hands clutched the handles of my Celine purse.

“You don’t wear glasses anymore,”

he said when his attention returned to my face.

“Lasik,”

I replied.

“You seem to be doing well.”

Something shifted in Danny’s tone, and I couldn’t pinpoint why. His voice lifted, like he was questioning me.

“Uh.”

I looked down to see what he was seeing, in case I was missing something. “This old thing?”

I ran my hand against the smooth leather. “I got it as a gift for myself after my promotion.”

“Congrats. Doing what?”

“I’m a manager of global business at FreeStream.”

I heard the present tense of my statement after I said it. It was force of habit, but any attempt at correcting myself stayed in my throat. Without my former job, what else could I say about myself? I swallowed that sad thought. I had to sound more convincing if I wanted to carry this charade for the rest of the night. “You might have heard of it if you’ve scrolled down far enough in the app store.”

Danny made a somewhat agreeable sound as he turned toward the school. I followed him in, trying to decipher what all of this meant. This secretive side of Danny was all too familiar and ever confusing.

“What about you?”

I asked. My heels clacked hard against the concrete as I caught up to him. Commonwealth High School was composed of five interconnected courtyards, like the dots on a die. We crossed campus diagonally, taking the shortest route to the gym. I dodged the old tree in the center quad that dropped spiky brown pods that used to get stuck on my cardigans. “What do you do now?”

“I, uh . . .”

Danny shrugged, like it was boring, but then he cleared his throat and stood a little taller. “I’m an executive coach.”

“You are?”

I fished my phone out of my purse and googled “Danny Phan executive coach.”

“Why do you sound so surprised?”

Because I was! Whenever I looked Danny up, I never came across an executive coach. Now that I knew his job, it was tragic how quickly my screen filled up with pages about him. According to his own website, Danny graduated from UC San Diego and had a career as a project manager before becoming an internationally certified professional coach. Below his bio, there were logos of Fortune 500 companies, representing some of his notable clients. I scrolled down with a mix of awe and wonder. What kind of wisdom did Danny have that he imparted to these higher-ups? Would he happen to have any advice for a failing former executive experiencing her first layoff?

Danny turned around to find me lagging behind because I was glued to my phone, stalking him in every sense of the word. “Hey, don’t do that.”

He sounded modest, but his website boasted several deliverables. “Let me help you become a confident leader. Together, we can overcome the self-doubt that’s holding you back and create a path toward your goals.”

His glowing client testimonials had me eating my words. One was quoted saying that Danny helped their team unleash their potential, leading to increased sales. Who was this Danny they spoke so highly of?

“I’m sorry,”

I said. I shouldn’t have underestimated him. That was what had gotten me into hot water with Danny in the first place. “This is great. I’m impressed.”

“I’m glad you think so,”

he said in a tone that wasn’t glad at all. My compliment didn’t help, apparently. I stopped in my tracks.

“Are you mad at me?”

Still? I wanted to add. I was ready to forget our last fight if he was.

Danny stood a few feet away from the weak navy-and-white balloon arch that hovered over the open gym doors. “How can I be mad at you? We’ve barely said hello.”

“What is it, then?”

I asked, copying Danny’s stiff stance. Whatever it was, I could handle it. Forget about sweeping things under the rug. Anything was better than this guessing game we were playing. “Did I say something wrong?”

Danny’s nose flared, and just when I thought things were going to get heated, he shook his head, admonishing me. “You haven’t changed.”

March 2003

SuperxSaiyan85: have you seen emotion eric?

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: ??

I clicked on the link Danny sent me and up popped a grainy image of an Asian man looking surprised. I thought this was a prank, but as I clicked around I discovered that the entire point of this website was that this Eric guy posted a new picture of himself with a different facial expression, as requested by his “fans,”

for lack of a better word.

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: uh is this the kind of thing you’re into?

SuperxSaiyan85: you don’t think it’s funny?

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: I think people on the internet are weird

SuperxSaiyan85: don’t judge. aren’t we all a little weird?

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: yeah but that’s what screen names are for. No one has to know my weirdness except me

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: and you

SuperxSaiyan85: you mean you’re not an asian baby girl? lol

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: don’t laugh. you’re not a Super Saiyan. Except for your hair

SuperxSaiyan85: that’s why emotion eric is funny. It’s refreshingly honest

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: you should send him a request to emote “refreshingly honest”

SuperxSaiyan85: nah I’m waiting for his take on “gassy”

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: you do that