Chapter 33 Chanel
Chanel
My senses come to me slowly, in fragments. The cool touch of the pillow. The distant beeping of a machine, shuffling footsteps.
An ache, deep in my chest.
I rub my eyes open, and rise gingerly from the bed to take in my surroundings. It takes me a moment to realize I’m in a hospital
room, and not an indoor garden.
“Oh my god,” I murmur, picking up the fat bouquet of fresh-plucked roses laid right beside my pillow.
Every surface in the private room is flooded with flowers, their rich fragrance almost entirely covering the smell of antiseptic.
Lilacs and daffodils bloom aggressively over my bedside table, some of them bearing signed cards, others tied with satin ribbons.
The only colors missing from this vibrant display of well-wishes are yellow and white. If not for this small detail, the absence
of mourning colors, I would’ve thought that I’d died.
Ares is asleep on the floor beside me, his head resting against the edge of my mattress. The ache in my chest sharpens. I don’t know how long he’s been there.
“Hey,” I say softly.
He wakes with a start, his eyes focusing on me, the intensity of his features almost too bright to look at. “Chanel?” He makes
a movement as if to hug me, then thinks better of it. “I . . . I’ll go call the nurse. Does anything hurt? How do you feel?
Do you need water? Fruit?”
“I want . . . lip gloss,” I say.
I don’t expect him to have any, but he produces a tube of lip gloss from his pocket. It’s the same cherry one I always use.
“Here,” he says immediately.
“You remember how to apply it for me, right?”
He nods. I thought he was gentle last time, but now he’s so careful with his movements that I’m tempted to laugh at him. Then,
staring down at the IV strip on the back of my hand, he says, very quiet, “I didn’t realize what Long Ge was planning, with
the fire. I was so scared. By the time I found you, I thought it was too late.”
Long Ge. So it hadn’t been Ares who’d started the fire; it had been Ares who had rescued me from the burning house. I hadn’t bet wrong,
after all. “You came for me,” I say aloud, just to confirm it, to prove it wasn’t a dream.
“Of course I did,” he says.
The TV is turned on behind him, the news playing at a just-audible volume, more background noise than anything.
But familiar images flash over the screen: my childhood house in its former glory, contrasted against a smoldering pile of ruins, the walls of the nearby buildings stained black, the dead lawn littered with shattered glass.
My throat tightens.
Then the scene changes to Long Ge in handcuffs, being dragged away by the police. He looks like he’s lost his mind, or maybe
his soul; his eyes are wild, his teeth bared as he shouts something inaudible.
“He’s in prison now,” Ares tells me quietly. “He’ll be there for some time; he did a bunch of illegal shit on top of making
minors work for him and burning houses down. They’ve freed all of them now, the minors.”
“Okay. Okay, thank god,” I say.
His expression darkens. “But he deserves worse than prison.” He’s staring down at my collarbones, and only when I follow his
gaze do I see the burn mark peeking out from under the gauze.
I inhale. “Oh.” It’s about the size of my palm, too high to be covered up unless I wear turtlenecks for the rest of my life.
“I asked the doctors about it,” he says. “It’ll get better, but . . . it’ll leave a scar.”
“Okay,” I repeat in a daze, my head buzzing. A scar. A permanent mark. My perfect image, irrevocably changed. I should be
freaking out about it, speed-dialing the top surgeons in China right this second, and yet . . . maybe it’s the fact that I
almost actually died, but it doesn’t feel like life-and-death, the way it would have a month ago. “Well,” I say weakly. “At
least prom is already over. I don’t have to worry about how it’ll look in prom photos.”
“For what it’s worth, you won,” he says.
“What?”
“Prom. I saw the results. Even though you weren’t there, you had the most votes. You were crowned prom queen—as you deserve,”
he adds, his voice soft. “But I’m really sorry you had to miss it. I know how much it meant to you.”
It does. Or it did. But prom feels like such a small thing now, so silly and frivolous and insignificant. Even the news of
my win doesn’t give me the rush of validation I’d always imagined. It’s just something that happened, a past life, the concerns
of a girl who hadn’t almost been burned alive.
“They also voted for me for prom king,” Ares says.
I bite back a small smile. “Congratulations? I mean, not that it matters to you.”
“Anything that matters to you matters to me,” he tells me simply, and he’s about to say something else when the door bursts
open.
“Chanel?” My mom rushes in, still wearing the same clothes I last saw her in, which is so rare that it’s all I can focus on
for a moment. My mom refuses to even wear the same pajamas two nights in a row.
Ares stands up and steps back from me with what seems like a superhuman level of self-restraint, letting my mom take his place
by my hospital bed. Then he excuses himself quietly from the room, glancing over his shoulder at me with every step on his
way out.
“Thank god you’re okay,” my mom says, her face ashen. “I still can’t believe it—”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whisper. Because even underneath the overwhelming relief that she’s alive, that I was the one caught in the fire instead of her, there’s the guilt gnawing at my insides. I should’ve been more strategic, more careful. I should’ve prevented the fire from happening at all.
“What are you talking about?”
“The house,” I say, too weak to lift my arms all the way, so I nod toward the TV screen instead. “Everything’s ruined.”
“It’s just a house. You’re safe and I’m safe.”
“But it was our home,” I say, my voice breaking. It’s not just the house I’m grieving. It’s my childhood, the last happy memories I had of
my family together, burning into rubble. Now my dad’s gone, and the house is gone, and I guess my childhood really is over.
I was never going to save it in time.
Even if it hadn’t burned . . . there’s simply no way to return to what it was before.
“I’m really, really sorry,” I tell her.
“Stop apologizing. How is any of it your fault?” my mom demands. “If anything, I should’ve known . . . you tried to warn me about Long Ge,” she
says, her complexion paling further. “Ever since they told me what happened at the house, I’ve been thinking about it. At
the party, you tried to warn me. And I didn’t listen.”
“To be fair, he was your old friend,” I say softly.
“Barely,” my mom says, shaking her head.
“We weren’t even that close in high school.
He wasn’t close with anybody—he was picked on a lot by the other kids.
Mostly they tried to humiliate him, but sometimes they got violent with him too.
They’d challenge him to fights he could never win, and they never played fair.
That’s how he got the scar on his cheek.
One of the older boys had brought a knife to the fight and .
. .” She trails off, wincing at the memory.
“I felt sorry for him, especially after that fight, so I would try to be nicer to him. Invite him to join me and my friends for lunch if he was alone. Smile at him when I saw him in the corridors. I suppose I was the only person he could have considered a friend at school, but I never thought much about it. I certainly wouldn’t have thought it’d end up like this. ”
“That’s just . . . that’s so sad,” I whisper.
“Which part?”
“All of it. Everyone.”
“It is,” she says, folding her hands on her lap. She touches the empty space on her ring finger, a phantom feeling maybe,
an old habit that hasn’t died yet. “When he reached out after the divorce, it surprised me, but I—I didn’t suspect anything,
when I should have.” Her fingers curl. “Instead I just let myself enjoy his affection and attention and all the shiny business opportunities
he was offering me—”
“You needed someone. I get it,” I say.
“But you needed someone too. You needed me,” my mom says, and I feel my throat burn with the truth of it. Because even when
I’d conditioned myself to need nobody, I did need her.
“Mom, I—” My voice cracks over the word, a sob rising inside me.
“Shh. It’s okay, come here, baobao,” my mom says, drawing me into a tight hug.
I breathe in the familiar floral notes of her perfume.
Chanel No. 5, the same as my own. I’d always loved the smell on her, had begged her for my first bottle on my fourteenth birthday.
“Ba ni xia zhao le ba?” You were scared, weren’t you?
This whole time, I’ve been trying to keep it together, to act like a grown-up who knows exactly what to do, to be there for
my mom. But now, the last of the fight in my body shatters. Of course I was scared, terrified out of my mind, terrified still,
and I’m clutching her, sobbing, nose running, while she strokes my hair.
“Don’t worry about the house. We can always build another home,” my mom says softly.
I sniff. “It won’t be the same, though.”
“It won’t be,” she agrees. Doesn’t try to convince me it’ll be better, but somehow, that’s what calms me down. Her acceptance
of it. I can’t bring myself to do the same, not yet, but in time—who knows?
And for now, I bury my face against the soft fabric of her shirt, and I cry and I cry and I no longer bother pretending, and
it’s weirdly cathartic, to just feel, even if the feeling isn’t pleasant.
“I’m here,” my mom murmurs. “I’m here.”
So I guess not everything is ruined. Say there was a version of the future where the house had burned, but my mother had also been trapped inside. Or
Ares hadn’t come to save me. Say that had been the original vision all along. What I did couldn’t have been utterly futile,
then. I couldn’t stop the future in its tracks, but I could change it, even if only by a little. That matters. It all matters.
“How are you feeling?” Ares asks for the seventh time the next morning.