two
I was getting tired of starting over.
The past year had been full of figuring out how to adjust to our new reality in different ways, but this was the biggest change
yet.
I wanted to get on a plane and fly back to the only house I’d known in the United States, back in Mount Pierce, Illinois.
Failing that, I wanted to go back to sleep for another three hours.
But in this, like most things, I had no choice.
My alarm clock was ringing. It was morning. I was in San Diego, California. I needed to get to school—my new school—so I could
finish out my second semester of senior year, in this place where I had nothing and knew nobody.
Well, not nobody.
My head throbbed. I had a hundred thousand worries here. Almost everything ranked higher than that particular problem.
It was seventy-five degrees outside, and we had a palm tree in our new backyard.
Two facts that I could not process, given that it was also January.
Baba had said when we moved here that it would give us the mood boost we needed, as though all we had been missing was a little bit of sunshine.
As though we had just been suffering from an acute case of seasonal affective disorder.
If only it were that easy. I would’ve suggested that Baba simply go out and buy us some SAD lamps instead of finding a job
on the other side of the country and uprooting what was left of our lives.
The golden sunlight filtered into my bedroom like a mockery. My window was open. Winter wasn’t supposed to be like this. It
just didn’t feel right.
Of course, nothing had felt right since Sam had died, so maybe it didn’t matter.
I put on the first clothes I could get my hands on at the top of my unpacked boxes.
When I got downstairs, Mama was waiting with a fresh steamed bun for breakfast in the kitchen. Baba must have already left
for his new job at the cybersecurity company headquartered here.
She raised her eyebrows. “You will wear that to your first day of school here?”
I looked down. I was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt from being on my old school’s newspaper staff. The shirt had been washed so many times that the cheap iron-on lettering was crumbling off.
Mama spoke Chinese to me, and I answered, always, in English. It was the way it had been since Sam and I moved to the United
States to join them in Illinois, and we started going to school there.
“It’s fine,” I said. “The other clothes smell like travel. I have to do laundry.”
“It’s important to make a good first impression as a new student. The teachers don’t know you yet.” She paused. Her worry
pumped through the air in the room. “I still don’t understand why they did not put you in the advanced classes, like you were
at home.”
I noticed that home slipped into her phrasing too easily. I was slightly heartened that she, too, still felt as though this were not home yet.
“In Illinois,” she corrected. She looked heavily concerned, an expression I was too familiar with over the past couple of
months. There was no detail of my life that was too minor not to fret about, no facet of my future she couldn’t polish over
and over in her careful hands. After all, it was only me she had left to mold. I had to fill the place of two.
Under her scintillating attention, I was suffocating. I had to get out of here.
“I don’t know. I will work it out with the school counselors. I’m sure it was just a mistake with the transcript or something
when I had it transferred over.”
Her forehead relaxed. “Yes, that would be good. I know you will take care of it. You are good with these things.”
I took the bun and wolfed it down in two bites, even though I wasn’t hungry at all.
“Are you nervous?” she asked, a sliver of her worry creeping back in.
“No,” I said automatically. “Don’t worry about me, Mama. I will be okay. It’s just a new school. I’ll make the adjustment.”
I was so used to lying to her. It came out easy. Like a bird flying, or a tree shedding its leaves in the fall. I lied like
it was all I knew how to do.
Weston High School was going to be different. The social hierarchy, the teachers, the curriculum. I knew all that. I was going
from a lowly ranked public school with a bare smattering of AP classes to one of the most highly ranked public high schools
in the state, with a standout science program, access to college courses at the university, a complete suite of AP and IB
classes, two high-tech labs, and a student body that regularly fed to the Ivy League every year.
Yet for some reason, the thing that I couldn’t get over was that Weston had outdoor hallways. I had never seen anything like
that before. The corridors had an awning over top but were open-air. They crisscrossed through a large square courtyard.
And the courtyard had orange trees. Seriously, orange trees. I felt as though I had moved to another country, not another
state.
Besides that, it meant that a significant portion of the student body could see me walking down the hallway as I headed toward my first class, in my sweats and old T-shirt. I was new, I wasn’t dressed like everyone else, and I looked ridiculous.
People stared.
I tried to ignore them. At the same time, I wanted to stare too. Back home, I had been one of two Asians in our small high
school. The other kid was a third-generation Vietnamese guy, while I spent the first eight years of my life in China. To Mount
Pierce’s student population, though, we were basically the same.
Here, it was like I had moved back to Asia. If I had to guess, two-thirds of the student population were some kind of Asian.
But it wasn’t like being in China. These people were all very American in the way they dressed and the way they looked. I
was surrounded by tanned skin, straight white smiles, and glossy hair. The girls had perfect eyeliner that I’d never been
able to master. Mine always seemed too thick or too thin, and the flick at the end was never at the correct angle. A lot of
girls had dyed hair that started off dark at the roots but lightened to a smooth caramel at the ends.
My flat black hair seemed so boring and unfashionable in comparison.
Behind me, I caught snatches of people speaking Chinese. I turned around, startled. Two girls almost ran into me.
“Watch where you’re going,” one said in perfect English.
They were like me, completely bilingual. Yet they were flipping back and forth in public, as though it were nothing. I never spoke Chinese with anyone except my family.
The girl who had spoken watched me expectantly, as if waiting for an apology. I wanted to say something to her. I wanted to
tell her that I was like them. It would’ve been silly, but it was all I could think about.
In the moment, though, I couldn’t summon anything to say in either language. I could see their eyes traveling up and down,
taking in what I was wearing.
Before I could say a word, they shrugged and brushed past me, continuing to babble in Chinese about some guy in their AP Chem
class.
I stood there for a minute as people rushed around me. I gathered myself, shrugged my backpack on my shoulder, and resumed
my path toward Wing C, where my first class was waiting.
I wondered how I was going to navigate this place, so utterly different from anywhere I’d lived before. My life had been uprooted
once, when I moved from my grandmother’s small village outside Xi’An, China, to the utter center of the Midwest in Mount Pierce,
Illinois. And now, it was being uprooted again. It hadn’t occurred to me that this change might be just as big as the first
one.
I sat in the counselor’s office during my lunch period, nervously tapping my fingers against my thigh.
“Let me pull up your current schedule,” the woman behind the desk said. She was youngish. Maybe in her mid-twenties. Her brown hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, and she had bright red glasses. “Sorry, the internet is a bit slow today.”
I scanned the walls of her cramped office. I tried to create a plan for what I was going to say to advocate for myself. The
Stella of a year ago would’ve written bullet points in advance. But the Stella of a year ago also wouldn’t be in this predicament
in the first place.
“You’re enrolled in all standard curriculum for a senior in the state of California, except that we allowed you to transfer
over to the AP Literature class here.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I have my transcript from Mount Pierce, and I was in three other AP classes.” I was in all the AP classes
that Mount Pierce offered. I handed over the piece of paper to her.
She scanned the sheet. “Right. AP Bio, AP Calculus, and AP European History. I remember.” She hesitated. “Ms. Chen, our curriculum
here is rigorous, perhaps even more rigorous than what you’re used to. And your grades the first semester in those courses...
they aren’t what we’d expect for someone continuing on that track here. Even if you were a current student, we would’ve been
having serious discussions around whether you should consider easing up.”
She slid the paper back across the desk. I could see the grades popping back out at me in bold. C- in AP Bio. D in AP Calculus.
C+ in AP European History. A- in AP Literature, the one class I’d qualified to keep here.
My parents hadn’t seen these grades. I had quietly ferreted away the copy before we moved and vaguely blamed it on address problems when they didn’t receive anything in the mail.
“I’m sorry. I cannot justify slotting you into those courses here. I would be setting you up for failure, when it will already
be difficult to jump into a class halfway through. Second semester is going to go so quickly. There is no time for catch-up.”
She tilted her head, not without sympathy.
Seeing the letter grades in front of me felt freshly humiliating. I had never been assigned anything like them in my life,
not even when I had first moved to the United States and didn’t speak a lick of English. I wasn’t always straight A’s, like