CHAPTER TWO
I’m pretty sure my cousin gets married.
Almost certain. I do my best to pay attention as she goes through the rituals while the guests sniff into their napkins and the children continue munching on the candy. The only reason I know what the rituals even are is because my mom had been talking about them before we left the house. First, the pair must bow to the sky and the earth, and then to their parents, and then to each other.
Wine is poured into little ceramic cups. Vows are probably made, and the scene is probably beautiful, a celebration of true love and whatnot against a backdrop of brilliant scarlet and gold banners.
I would know for sure if I weren’t so distracted by Cyrus and his reactions. Or, rather, his lack of reaction. He’s the only person here who looks decidedly unmoved. Unimpressed. He barely seems to be paying attention to the bride and groom at all—he spends more time watching my aunt fold up her silk handkerchief into a neat square after she wipes her eyes.
“What’s your problem?” I mutter as Xiyue starts to move toward one of the round tables, one hand balancing a glass of wine, the other holding on to her new husband’s arm. “This is meant to be a happy occasion. They’re in love . ”
“They think they’re in love, as most newlyweds tend to,” Cyrus says with a shrug. “It’ll pass.”
“Or,” I counter, “they could grow old together in a yellow cottage with its own vegetable patch and duck pond.”
This earns me a brief head tilt. “Is that your dream for the future?”
“God, no,” I say. “Ducks scare me. My dream is—”
I stop halfway, reaching for something that’s no longer there. My dream was to become a successful model, to see my face in magazine spreads, to meet the most esteemed designers and walk the most influential runway shows and get invited to the most exclusive parties. Not even because I thought it’d be fun, but just to say I was there. It used to be so simple, so clear-cut.
Now I have no idea. I imagine myself graduating from high school, and then—nothing. It’s like trying to spot a distant shore through ocean fog, or recognizing a stranger’s face from miles away.
“To sleep,” I finish, looking off to the side. Xiyue has already moved on to the neighboring table, where all the elderly aunties take turns pinching her cheeks and showering her with their blessings. “To sleep forever.”
“I believe you’re describing death,” Cyrus says.
“At least it’s attainable.”
He makes a light scoffing sound. “A low bar.”
“Yes, well—” I’m distracted by a sudden, harrowing realization as Xiyue begins walking over to us. “Oh my god.”
“What?” he asks immediately, shifting forward.
“ We’re not expected to say anything, are we? To Xiyue, I mean.”
“Of course we are,” he says, looking confused by my panic. “It’s basic etiquette. You don’t need to give a speech—just offer up a few congratulatory words or something.”
“I—I can’t—” I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. My Mandarin skills are limited to simple greetings and common sayings in my household, such as “stop leaving your cups everywhere” and “clean out your wardrobe” and “math requires practice.” None of them are applicable here.
“I know,” one of the kids speaks up from the other side of the table. She looks no older than eight. Her hair is bunched into pigtails that bob around when she grabs another handful of candy. “Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi.”
“What—what does that mean?” I ask, tracking my cousin’s movement out of the corner of my eye.
“It means you wish them a happy marriage, and hope that they start a healthy family soon,” Cyrus explains.
I hesitate. “Are you sure?”
“You can look it up if you don’t believe me,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Okay, thank you so much,” I tell the little girl, both genuinely grateful and devastatingly humbled to be receiving Mandarin help from someone half my size. “And thank you too, I guess,” I say to Cyrus with far less enthusiasm. “So it’s … What was it again?”
“Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi,” he advises. Even though we’ve both grown up here in LA, his pronunciation is perfect, but I don’t have time to be annoyed about it.
“Got it.” I repeat the phrase rapidly under my breath as my cousin and her husband approach. Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi. It’s only a few words. Even though I might not understand them, I can rely on my short-term memory to know the sounds. I just have to focus and recite them until it’s my turn. Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai —
“I thought your Mandarin was decent,” Cyrus says.
Dammit.
“Please don’t talk to me right now,” I say, wiping my hands against my dress. “I’m concentrating.”
Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai.
“I can tell. Your concentrating face looks the same.” He points to the space between his brows, then to mine. “You get this little crease here.”
Xinhun. Xin. Hun.
Zhu nimen xinhun—
“ But really. Have you been slacking off on your Chinese studies these past two years or what?” Cyrus asks.
I glare at him. “Could you not—”
“Hi!” Xiyue appears at our table, her husband following close after her. She smiles over at me expectantly, her glass of wine refilled. And then she waits. Her husband waits too. This is my first time seeing him up close, and he has the sort of face that just belongs to a banker: a soft jaw, gelled hair, round glasses. He would look great with square frames though. I’m debating whether to offer this fashion tip when I remember what I’m meant to do.
I rise hastily to my feet and hold up my untouched glass of orange juice. “Zhu nimen …” As I talk, I notice that the ballroom has fallen quiet. A few people are even pushing back their chairs or craning their heads to look at me.
It’s a strange feeling, but not a new one.
Most of the guests here must still think of me as the model, thanks to my mom’s constant promotional-slash-humblebrag posts on WeChat. That’s what everyone from my current high school knows me as too—and it’s by design. After the Incident, after the first and second school I transferred into and left again because nobody wanted me there, I knew that unless I wanted to graduate a social pariah, I needed to change something. Not in an Eat Pray Love way, but quick, shallow changes, Band-Aid fixes to hold myself together while everything was falling apart.
So I cut my hair at a salon recommended by all the prettiest influencers. Learned how to do my makeup. Blasted songs about loving yourself as you are while working out to remold my body into something else. Poured my savings into completely revamping my wardrobe—out went the comfortable sweatpants and basic, faded shirts, and in came the suffocatingly tight dresses and crop tops that always left my stomach cold.
The shocking thing was that it worked. When I joined my current school mid-semester last year, I had already become the swan. Enough time had passed that the rumors about me no longer traveled faster than the transfer papers did, and being conventionally attractive changed everything . I was still the same person, but only I knew that. Instead of being called cold and unapproachable, I was suddenly cool and unattainable. Instead of quiet, I was mysterious. Instead of weird, I was alluring. When Cate and her pretty, popular friends approached me on the first day of school, Cate’s first words to me were: Oh my god, I love your hair.
And when a model scout gave me her card outside a frozen yogurt shop just a month later, Cate had been even more excited than I was. Modeling, I realized, was the ultimate key to cementing my social status at my new school, the final stage in my transformation. It’s just one of those jobs where there’s something inherently shiny and interesting about the title. Something desirable. That’s why I held on to it for so long, even when it felt like I was holding on to a jagged cliff edge: because I’ve never been shiny or interesting on my own.
Then someone coughs—Cyrus—and I snap back to the present.
The wedding. The blessing.
The words I need to say, but now can’t remember.
“Zhu nimen xinhun …” Panic lodges itself in my throat. What was it? Yu? Yao? Yin? “Yiyu,” I say, which sounds about right. “And, um, zaosheng …” I do a frantic search through my sad vocabulary bank. What’s the word that usually comes after sheng ? “Shengbing.”
There’s a pause.
If the ballroom had been quiet before, it’s completely silent now.
Looks of horror travel swiftly from table to table. My aunt is frowning right at me, shaking her head in clear disapproval. Cyrus has a fist pressed to his mouth—either to keep from laughing, or maybe just to keep himself from making some kind of unhelpful remark. From across the room, I can see my parents: My mom is dragging a hand over her eyes, as if to shield herself from the scene, and my dad’s face is twisted into a sympathetic grimace. My cousin and cousin-in-law are frozen to the spot before me. They both appear stricken, their eyes wide.
A sinking feeling rolls over my gut, even though I still have no idea what went wrong. Only that something must have.
Then Xiyue’s face crumples, and the silence cracks as she bursts into tears.
I stare in stunned, confused horror as she flees from the room as fast as the tight fabric of her qipao will allow, her new husband chasing after her. “Xiyue! Xiyue—wait!” Then, as if my words have set off the world’s most chaotic game of tag, my aunt chases after them too, but not before she sends me the most withering glare I’ve ever received in my life. It stings like a slap, and I have no doubt that if I weren’t related to her, she would actually march over here to strike me.
“What … did I do?” I whisper to Cyrus.
“You really don’t know what you just said?” he asks, pulling me back down into the seat.
“No?” Ice fills my blood. My gaze flits from the guests’ appalled expressions to the open door where my cousin fled. It seems impossible that just seconds ago, she’d been happy and head over heels in love, and now, this might go down in our family history as the most disastrous wedding ever. Because of me. “No … What? I was just repeating the phrase—wasn’t I?”
“You were supposed to wish them a happy marriage and healthy children. Instead,” he says, with the air of an executioner right before the ax drops, “you told them you hope they have a depressing marriage, and that they fall ill quickly.”
***
The wedding ends early.
Once it becomes apparent that my cousin isn’t coming back anytime soon, the guests scatter, murmuring to themselves and eyeing me on their way out like I’m the car crash that’s been blocking the freeway. Nobody’s even tasted the wedding cake, which is starting to melt, the clay figurines of my cousin and her husband sliding off the top.
If the floor weren’t made of absurdly shiny marble, I’d dig a ditch right this instant and lie in it forever.
My dad excuses himself to go to the bathroom, and my mom heads off in the same direction my aunt and cousin went, her heels echoing down the corridor. Then it’s just me and Cyrus left in the bloody aftermath, the crimson streamers and slowly dying flowers spilling out around us. I have no idea why he’s still here, other than to watch me suffer.
And I’m absolutely suffering. While Cyrus has been standing by the entrance, I’ve circled the entire length of the room about a thousand times like a caged animal. My stomach won’t stop twisting in on itself, tighter and tighter and tighter until it feels like I might vomit. How could I have messed up everything with just a few wrong words? How do I keep messing things up?
“I think they’re talking about you,” Cyrus says quietly when I pass him on my thousand-and-second lap.
My heart clenches. I jolt to a stop next to him and strain my ears. Sure enough, through the closed doors, I can hear my aunt’s voice, rising over my mom’s softer, apologetic one. It’s like listening to a whole different person. Gone is the self-assured lawyer who addresses almost everyone—babies, businessmen, waiters, puppies, you name it—in the same clipped, no-nonsense tone. Right now, she just sounds like a chastened child. My aunt is probably the only person in the world who can have that effect on her.
I attempt to focus on the conversation, but I can’t understand anything either of them is saying, except for my name, which pops up at an alarming frequency.
“She says your cousin is having second thoughts,” Cyrus murmurs.
I turn to him, my wariness waging war against my need to know exactly what they’re talking about.
“She’s really superstitious, apparently,” Cyrus continues translating, his brows furrowed in concentration, his ear pressed to the door. “Won’t stick her chopsticks upright in rice. Hates the number four. She doesn’t even like to use four exclamation points in a row. She took a trip all the way to this sacred fountain at the top of the Yellow Mountain last month, just to pray for a happy marriage, but … she thinks her marriage is doomed now.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and wonder if it’s physically possible to die from guilt. Like, maybe the sheer weight of it will crush my organs. And if not that, then maybe my aunt’s disapproval will do the trick. I keep replaying the way she glowered at me before she chased after her crying daughter, like she was affronted by the very idea that we’re connected by blood.
Her voice grows louder now, sharper, until eavesdropping becomes unnecessary. It would be harder not to hear her speaking. My name comes up again, spat out.
“She says …” Cyrus hesitates.
“Tell me,” I say through gritted teeth. “Just tell me.”
He clears his throat. “She says … your mother should be ashamed of herself for raising such an ignorant foreigner.”
An ignorant foreigner. I try to hold the words out at a safe, painless distance, like when you have to grab something hot from the oven, careful not to let it burn any exposed skin. But my mental grip slips, and it burns me anyway, searing my face and my chest. I twist my head toward the wall so Cyrus can’t see my expression.
“Leah,” he begins, in a tone that sounds suspiciously like sympathy. “I think—”
“I don’t care what you think,” I cut in. It’s almost a relief to find a target, to distract myself from the minor fact that I’ve most certainly just gotten myself blacklisted from every single future family function and made my mom lose face in front of the only person she feels insecure around. “What are you even still doing here?”
“Waiting,” he says.
I blink. “For what? The wedding’s over.”
“For who ,” he corrects me. “Do you know how busy Dr. Linda Shen is? And she must receive hundreds of emails begging her for a letter of recommendation every day, so of course I had to—”
“Hang on. You’re here to see … my aunt?” I demand incredulously. “For a letter of recommendation ? Oh my god. Were you even invited to this wedding?”
“I have an invitation to the wedding.”
I don’t miss the subtle distinction. My brows rise.
“Okay, fine, a friend of a friend was invited by your cousin’s husband,” he admits, straightening the cuff of his sleeve. “They weren’t planning on coming, so I asked them to give their invitation to me.”
I add opportunist to the long list of names I’ve saved for Cyrus in my head. It’s probably the most flattering one on there. I toss insensitive asshole in too for good measure, because when the doors swing open and my aunt steps out, Cyrus practically launches himself off the wall in her direction.
“Dr. Linda Shen,” he says, and I swear he just made his voice deeper. “I know you’re busy, but if you have a second, I wanted to—”
My aunt walks right past him as if he doesn’t exist. On any ordinary day, this would be incredible to witness, but any spark of petty glee I feel is quickly stamped out by the fact that my aunt seems determined to ignore my existence too.
Then my mom emerges, and the look on her face makes everything in my body turn cold.
“In the car,” she grits out. “Now.”