sixteen #2
I wanted to keep pushing, but I stopped myself. There were things that I wouldn’t be able to understand about that period
of his life, and it was fine.
“Okay,” he said. “Your turn.”
I sighed. “There’s really nothing to tell.”
“Really? Nothing?”
Now I was heating up like a raw sunburn. All I had were flashes of embarrassing escapades that I barely wanted to remember
myself, much less share with another human being. Fleeting unrequited crushes, and once, an awkward kiss in a car that didn’t
lead to anything. Nothing resembling love, or anything close to it. My romantic life was a mostly barren wasteland, but Mount
Pierce wasn’t exactly a place that offered a lot of promising prospects, if I were being honest. As I approached seventeen,
I did worry, every once in a while, that maybe there was something about me that was just fundamentally unlovable. Or maybe
that I was broken, because I didn’t know what it was like to fall for someone. But unlike Alan, I felt confident that if it
happened to me, I would know right away.
These were not thoughts I could say aloud, so I just nodded. “I told you it was a short update.”
I was worried he would press, but he didn’t. He only smiled in mild disbelief and resignation and backed off. I was relieved.
We passed through a butterfly garden, bursting with orange and purple flowers in alternating clusters.
“Look,” he exclaimed.
“What?”
“Cassin’s kingbird.” He peered up keenly, leaning toward me and guiding my gaze up to the branches of a nearby tree with his
finger. “See its yellow belly and gray head? It’s rare to see around here. I have to log it. I’ve never seen one before.”
He turned toward me. His expression was so open, you could read the palpable delight all over it. His excitement was contagious.
He could make you care about some bird species you’d never heard of until right that very moment.
There it was, I thought in surprise. Standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, right before the sensation of falling.
We had dinner with Auntie Yang, Uncle Ma, and James. They made spaghetti and meatballs. They were perfectly fine spaghetti
and meatballs, but it was still strange to me that they cooked American food and spoke no Chinese with us. Auntie Yang wore
an apron with branches of lemon trees along the edges that she told me she had bought on the Amalfi Coast. They were like
a standard upscale white family.
Auntie Yang was a vivacious host. She regaled us with stories of their vacations and the funny passive-aggressive land battles they were having with a neighbor around the perimeter of the property and where it was properly located.
“They are putting up a fence,” she said.
“And the official survey of the property has the boundary four feet closer to their house than they thought it was—meaning the plot is supposed to be smaller. But they want us to honor where they originally thought the line was, which means they would rip out a line of beautiful birches we’ve had to accommodate their fence, and I just can’t accept that. ”
“Who cares where they put their fence?” Uncle Ma asked. “The property is big enough. It’s not like we’d notice the loss.”
“It’s the principle. They’re legally in the wrong about the property line and morally in the wrong for what they’re going
to do to the birches. And I’m going to fight them over it.”
“Seems a bit far to declare them morally wrong over some trees,” he said. “They seemed like nice enough neighbors until you
started antagonizing them.”
“Peter doesn’t have any sense of principle outside of the sciences,” she told us, her lips twitching.
I laughed.
Later, we all went to our own rooms early for the evening. Alan said he was tired from the drive this morning and was going
to collapse in bed. I was going to work on homework and possibly, possibly my college applications—the entire point of this
trip.
I opened the French doors to the garden. The sea breeze flowed in. I did a couple of math worksheets because they were mindless
and easy. I had three short essay questions to send via our online learning platform about Heart of Darkness . I finished everything for school I could as a valiant procrastination attempt before I turned to my applications again.
Alan had been right. Of course I wanted to study journalism.
I couldn’t realistically imagine myself doing another job.
What else would I study in college? Why hadn’t I even thought about it before?
Why hadn’t I ever had a conversation with Mama and Baba about it?
Sure, possibly they would object, but I didn’t give the option to in the first place.
I accepted defeat before an opening move.
That was how I continuously chose to navigate our lives. Follow the path of least resistance where I could. Hide or minimize
everything else. I didn’t know how to have any difficult conversations. Neither Sam nor I did. Maybe it was a skill we should
have learned—maybe it would’ve saved his life.
I opened the page to the personal essay I had barely started. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to delete everything before it.
Name, birth date, high school, everything. I wanted to delete myself from the system.
It was dark now, and still, my parents hadn’t called me. I lay in bed, feeling like a kettle, slowly reaching a boiling point.
But there was nobody to yell at, nobody to hear the whistle.
I sat up. Opened the WeChat app. Our family chat was silent. Warm and reckless, I dialed Mama directly without asking to see
if now was a good time. I would make her worried, calling out of the blue like this. She might’ve thought something was wrong,
but that was a small benefit too. It was mean, but I wanted them to worry for once.
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to talk about. Only that I was tired of being ignored, relied upon to do the right thing
all the time.
“Hello?”
It caught me off guard. I’d half expected nobody to answer so I could feel self-righteously neglected.
Baba was there too. They were both sitting in Nai Nai’s kitchen, but nobody else seemed to be there.
“Liang Liang? Is everything all right?” she asked urgently, her anxiety manifest.
I swallowed. The pressure I felt to reassure her was already there. “Yes. We’re in Santa Barbara now. At Auntie Yang’s house.”
Her shoulders relaxed. “Good. I meant to call, but things got busy here.”
“The wedding?”
“Yes. That.”
Her voice was tense and clipped. I wondered what was going on. “What’s happening?” I asked. “Is there anything I can do to
help?”
“Oh, nothing. Just a bunch of silly things. Weddings are complicated. You don’t have to worry.”
I felt myself being brushed off like an errant fly.
“Have you turned in your applications yet?” she asked, pivoting quickly.
I thought about lying, maybe, just to get her to leave me alone. “No. Not yet.”
“But you’re getting closer?” she pressed. Beside her, Baba leaned in too, both of them listening intently for my response.
I stared at the screen at them. These two people who cared deeply for me but knew so little about me. And truth be told, it
was the same the other way around. Their lives before Sam and me, a total mystery.
It made me suddenly, deeply sad. We had been lonely for so long, that it had permeated our lives, and we didn’t even notice it. We were like fish, oblivious to the water.
“I’m not,” I said abruptly.
“Not what?”
“Not getting closer to turning in the applications.”
They exchanged looks, twin alarm bells. “Why? Is there too much homework? You have to prioritize this over your homework.
This is your future,” said Mama.
I tried to figure out how to say it. You should tell your parents that , Alan had said. I couldn’t tell them exactly the way I had told him. “It feels like this big thing,” I said. “Turning in
the applications. It means I have to do the next step. Go to college.”
“Yes.” Mama’s brows were furrowed. She did not understand, so I had to say more.
“I’m scared.” The words dropped hard. One-two punch. Heavy tomes hitting the ground, one after the other. I felt oddly exposed
talking about my feelings, like an oyster pried open on its hinges. We did not talk about feelings in our household. Only
American families got into those things. I couldn’t ever remember my parents asking me, “How do you feel about that?”
Not even after Sam died.
There was a long, empty pause.
“Why are you scared?” she asked at last, tentative.
“Because of Sam. I’m afraid to go. I just can’t do the applications. I can’t get over it.”
For the first time, I saw my parents’ expressions ripple with fear. Okay, I thought with a little measure of relief. Maybe for once, we were on the same page. They had felt it too.
Mama looked fragile. She touched Baba’s arm. He had been sitting quietly, but now he cleared his throat and spoke.
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” he said firmly.
Mama nodded in parallel, as though seeking to be convinced by his words too.
“You are not like Sam.”
But I was. I was literally the same set of DNA, half of Mama and half of Baba. All his latent weaknesses in me too.
When we first came to the United States, everything was so strange, but we used to take solace in the fact that the two of
us had always experienced life together. We could always relate to each other. We had the same upbringing, the same background.
I hadn’t said anything yet. Across the ocean, Mama wrung her hands in despair.
“This,” she said to Baba. “I worried about this. We should have stayed with her. We cannot just put Chen Wei away and think
that Liang Liang will not be affected. We cannot let him ruin her life too.”
Ruin my life? As though my life were some kind of object whose sole purpose was to be maintained and protected rather than
experienced. I flared.