Chapter 3 Chanel
Chanel
As the car swerves onto my street, I brace myself for sirens.
An ambulance, firefighters, the flames already spreading through the walls, eating away the fences and incinerating the rosebushes.
The destruction promised by the vision. But as my house comes into view, lit up by the orange porch lights, it looks perfectly
normal. It stands as extravagant and beautiful between the rows of villas as it always does, with its marble pillars and massive
garden and five-story modern wood exterior, the glass lift gleaming from the ground level up to the turret roof. Easily the
best villa in the area—my father had made sure of it when he bought the house as a first-anniversary gift for my mom.
My ears are still ringing when the driver parks outside the front gates and opens the car door for me with one white-gloved
hand, reaching for my purse with the other. “Welcome home, Cao Nüshi,” he says.
“Thank you, Hong Shushu,” I tell him, my voice smooth and warm despite the quiver in my chest. Even when my boots land on firm concrete, I feel like I’m suspended in another reality. I should be relieved everything is the same as it was, but the clamp around my heart only loosens slightly.
The fire hasn’t happened. But that could just mean it hasn’t happened yet.
I pause at the front door, taking care to smooth the fear out of my expression before stepping in.
My mom is upside down.
“. . . and hold for one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . feel the burn. Engage your core . . . ,” a smiling, serene-looking woman instructs from our TV screen. “Now, very slowly, lower
yourself back down. . . .”
My mom eases her famously long, toned legs off the wall, one at a time. Once she’s the right way up again, she dabs the sweat
on her forehead and moves into squatting position. She looks like she could walk into the TV and take over the fitness instructor’s
job at any second, with her perfect posture and purple activewear set.
“You’re home late,” she says. Totally oblivious to the fact that I’d seen this room on fire less than an hour ago, the white-oak
cabinets behind her collapsing, the high ceilings black with ash, and her pounding on the doors, trying to escape. I swallow
the lump in my throat and fight the urge to rush up and hug her and make her promise me she’ll stay safe, now and always.
It takes me a moment to even remember how to talk.
“I . . . was just out with a friend,” I say, unzipping my boots, my fingers quivering as I yank them off. “I’m going to go
shower—”
The fitness instructor speaks over me. “We’re almost there! Just three more to go. You feel that?”
I feel like I need to lie down and scream into a pillow.
“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
My mom finishes her set, her face pink and dewy and somehow still photoshoot ready, then turns around. Looks at me properly
for the first time since I entered the room. Frowns.
I’m wondering whether she’s sensed that something’s off when she steps closer. “When was the last time you got your hair done?”
I pat it self-consciously, try not to let my smile fall. “I don’t know. Like, three weeks ago?”
“Well, it’s looking really dry.” She picks up a strand between two crimson-painted fingernails to inspect it more closely, like it’s a frayed thread
sticking out from her favorite blouse. A problem she needs to snip away. “Have you been swimming? You know how badly chlorine damages hair—it’s already going yellow at the ends.”
“No, Mom. I haven’t been swimming. And I’ve been doing that treatment you recommended.” Honestly, I’d wanted to stop the treatment
three days after I started it. It requires an hour to complete, from washing your hair to slathering it in products to combing
it all the way through—gently, so the product has time to be absorbed—before washing it again. I’d rather go to bed an hour earlier, but my mom’s always
said that beauty requires sacrifice.
“The treatment isn’t enough. You should still book an appointment to get it checked out,” she tells me, in the same somber tone you’d tell someone to schedule a doctor’s appointment for a suspicious lump.
Ringing up the hairdresser isn’t exactly a top priority for me right now, but I nod to placate her. “Okay, I’ll call Tony.”
“Not the Tony who cut off two whole inches when I asked for only one and a half—I wouldn’t trust him with my hair again even
if every last salon on earth went into bankruptcy.”
“No, not him,” I agree quickly. “The other Tony.”
“The one in Sanlitun?”
“The other other Tony.”
She nods, the little crinkle between her brows lightening, and I release a small inward sigh of relief. It’s all I can do
these days—not make her happy, because nothing seems to make her happy anymore, but find and eliminate everything that might
upset her further. Like purchasing business-class tickets for a long-haul flight; you can’t avoid the turbulence, or the jet
lag, or the fact that you’re stuck in a metal tube, but you can at least make the ride a little more bearable.
I’m about to retreat to my bedroom, where I can freak out over the vision in private, when her gaze snaps from my hair to
my waist. And just like that, her frown is back, her mouth puckering as if she’s taken a sip of expired mung bean milk. “Have
you been eating?” With her, this question is never the conversation starter you so often hear over the phone in Beijing, the
friendly equivalent of “How are you?” It’s an accusation.
My stomach twists. “Not much. I mean . . . I had some California rolls for lunch, but I only had like, two of them.” I speak faster, feeling like I’m pleading guilty in court. “And the serving was small to begin with.”
She repeats the same movement she used with my apparently damaged hair, except this time, it’s the flesh above my waistband
that she pinches between two nails. It hurts a little, but I resist the urge to flinch away. Or shove her hand away. She’s going through an extremely difficult time, I remind myself. She’s grieving a marriage. She means well. She’s your mom.
She’s your only parent left.
But even though I’ve vowed to erase my father from the family portrait, and I absolutely should not be missing that lying,
cheating asshole, I feel a twinge deep inside my chest. Before, whenever my mom slipped into a lecture about cutting out rice
or trying some new, model-approved trick to suppress your body’s natural hunger cues, my father would jump in to defend me
faster than my mom could push my food out of reach. “Aiya, just let our daughter eat what she wants,” he’d said one night, sliding a plate of pork potstickers across the table to me with a wink. I’d been eyeing them all dinner,
my mouth watering through bites of cold cucumber. “She’s still growing.”
“If she eats whatever she wants, she’s not going to be able to take any photos,” my mom had protested.
“Now, Coco, my dear, that’s literally untrue. There’s no prerequisite to getting photos taken,” my dad had said. “Do you think cameras ask you to enter your body mass index before you’re allowed to use them?”
My mom had rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. I want her to eat well, but if she doesn’t look her very best, those netizens will tear her to pieces. I’d rather that I be the one to warn her beforehand than for her to have to suffer the consequences after.”
“Those netizens are bored, lonely strangers making meaningless comments about other strangers’ bodies on the internet. They
won’t care if your daughter’s starving, but you should,” my dad had pointed out, with the air of authority he often employed
to wrap up his big annual meetings. “Chanel,” he’d said, turning to me, his expression warm. “Eat.”
“. . . eat less,” my mom is saying.
I nod again. I can feel all the remaining energy in my body leaking out.
Finally, my mom releases me, and I make my escape down the hall, into the bathroom, where I splash ice-cold water on my face,
as if I can simply wash the events of tonight away. But even with my eyes closed, the water running down my cheeks, I can
still see the vision. . . .
This house going up in flames, and everything I’ve ever known burning down with it.
There’s a brief, blissful lag in my memory when I wake the next morning: those colorless moments between sleep where all I
know is the stiffness in my neck muscles and the soft, lavender-scented fabric of the blankets cocooned around my body.
Then I remember everything.
The lake and the fire and Ares Yin.
It doesn’t feel real, not when the moon is gone from the horizon and the buttery daylight is spilling over one side of my bedroom. Maybe it wasn’t real, I think hopefully, pushing the blankets off and stretching, my toes finding the fluffy pink slippers laid out on the
floor. Maybe I imagined it.
I try to tell myself this on the ride to school, until I’m almost convinced. As I head off to math for first period, my panic
from yesterday starts to feel like a silly overreaction. It had felt like the world was ending in the darkness, with the eeriness of the park after midnight, the surreal quality of the moonlight
falling over the waters. But it could all be smoke and mirrors, like the atmosphere of a haunted house on Halloween. Terrifying
when you’re in it, yet so clearly fake when you’re out of it.
I breathe a little easier and lift my chin, remembering to smile at everyone who greets me in the corridors:
“Hi, Chanel!”
“Hey, girl.”
“Chanel, holy crap, your dress in your last post? So gorgeous—”
“Did you hear about the party Jake Nguyen’s throwing at his place?”
“What outfit are you wearing to—”
“Morning, Chanel!”
“I love your lipstick shade—where did you get it?”
“Chanel, are you free next weekend for—”
“Oh my god, did you see?” Rainie Lam asks excitedly, dropping into the seat beside me. She runs a hand through her long hair,
which she’s recently dyed a honey brown that looks almost blond beneath the classroom lights, and opens up her laptop to a
school email.