Chapter Thirty-Three
The next morning, Khoi and I are in my room, fudging with performance improvements. He’s showing me how to benchmark our code to assess our latency bottlenecks—basically, see which parts of our code are slowing the whole thing down—when my phone rings.
It’s Olive. We haven’t spoken since I left Oregon. I’m so surprised, I pick up.
“Char?” Her breath comes out all choppy. “I’m worried for your mom.”
“What’s wrong?” My mind takes a dumpster dive through the possible worst-case scenarios. Car accident? Stroke? Tsunami? All three at once?
“My dad,” she says, and my heart sinks. “He’s been drinking more lately. He lost a lot of money back in June. It’s getting bad…” She doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t need to.
“Olive. Do you have a safe place to go?”
“I’m at, um, Drew’s,” she says. There’s an awkward pause as we both remember I used to fool around with her man.
“Your mom is trapped in the house. He won’t let her out.
Or, like, he says she can leave, but he won’t let her drive, and he’s always tracking her whereabouts on her phone, so basically she’s trapped. ”
Panic rises in my chest, but I force myself to keep talking. “That’s awful. Did you call the cops?”
There’s a pause, and then she says, “He’s still my dad.”
Of course. I squeeze the phone tight. “So you left her there all alone?”
“Don’t be so judgmental,” she says. “You’re the one who ditched us first.”
I’m tempted to hang up right then and there, but I can’t. I’ve got to come up with a plan. “Okay. I’ll call the police, then.”
“No, that won’t help,” she says. “He’ll just play nice when they drop by to do a wellness check, then take it out on your mom. You know how it goes.”
She’s right. I do know how it goes, because that’s how it has always gone in the past.
The answer is obvious. I have to be the one to save her. I can’t be here, safe and happy in this cushy camp thousands of miles away, while my mother is caught beneath the thumb of a monster. I’ve been lying to myself all summer. But I can’t run from the truth any longer.
I thank Olive for letting me know, then end the call.
Khoi is staring at me. “What’s happening?”
My body feels taut, wired with energy. Quickly I explain the sitch while my brain kicks into overdrive.
I’m not sure if I can scrape together enough money to buy a last-minute flight back to Portland.
And let’s say I can orchestrate a jailbreak.
I don’t know where we’ll go after that. Maybe I should google women’s shelters in Oregon.
“I’ll buy the flights,” Khoi says. “We’ll bring her back here. She can sleep in Aisha’s old bed until you figure out what to do next.”
His expression is so sincere it makes my heart hurt.
“Khoi. This is too much. I can’t accept this.”
“I’ll come with you,” he adds.
“No, don’t,” I say. “I can go by myself. You should stay here, work on Hello World.” The submission deadline is this Friday, two days from now.
“Char, if this is about your stepdad—the one who gave you those bruises—then I think, for your safety, I should come with you.” He takes my hands into his own. “You know I don’t care about the money, right?”
But it’s not about the money.
I don’t want him to come to Chinook Shore. I don’t want him to see the fist-sized hole in our living room wall, the empty beer cans littered on our kitchen counter, the overgrown weeds strangling a lawn nobody has bothered to maintain. I don’t want him to see all the ugliness, all the shame.
Khoi and I can be together in this sparkling, hopeful place where everyone expects their future to be bubblegum pink. I don’t know if we can be together elsewhere.
If he sees who I really am, and the horrible place I come from, he won’t want to be with me anymore. He’ll run away. I wouldn’t even blame him.
But his expression is stony, determined. I can’t fight him on this. And I can’t afford to dawdle. I have to rescue Mom. Even if it means losing Khoi.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s get on the next plane to Portland.”
About nine hours later, Olive is waiting at Arrivals.
She’s driving Drew’s dad’s girlfriend’s car—the same one that I used to kiss Drew in.
It still has that same melted-crayon smell.
I buckle myself into the passenger seat and ignore the torn condom wrapper in the cup holder. Khoi slides into the back.
“Hey, I think you might have a moth infestation,” he says suddenly. “There’s a little hole in this seat.”
“That’s a cigarette burn.” My stepsister glances at him through the rearview mirror. “I’m Olive. Are you Char’s boyfriend?”
He blushes. “Um, uh, I, we, uh—”
“We’re figuring it out,” I say.
“Okaaaaay.” She turns her attention to the road. That’s one great thing about Olive. She knows when to stop asking questions.
As we cruise down the freeway, Khoi tries to keep the convo alive.
He exhausts all the usual small-talk topics: the weather, summer plans, college apps.
Olive gives nothing but clipped, one-word answers, which doesn’t deter him from firing off yet more questions.
I have to respect the guy for trying, but like, c’mon. Read the room. Or the car, I guess.
After Khoi asks for her favorite math theorem, she’s had it. Instead of answering, she cuts her eyes to me. “Does your mom know that you’re coming?”
“Uh. No… I was scared to text. She wouldn’t pick up any of my calls.” I know Michael has full access to her phone. That never struck me as weird or controlling until recently. I wonder what other glaring red flags I missed.
She purses her lips. “Then what’s the plan?”
Step 1: Distract Michael.
This is Khoi’s role, since my stepfather won’t recognize him. He suggests setting off firecrackers to lure Michael out of the house, but both Olive and I veto that idea. “He might come after you with a shotgun,” I say.
Khoi laughs and then stops upon catching our faces in the rearview mirror. “Oh, you guys aren’t joking.”
It’s surprisingly difficult to come up with a schtick that will buy a few minutes.
Michael isn’t big on politics, so posing as a canvasser won’t work.
Khoi isn’t the right age or gender to be slinging Girl Scout cookies.
And after I get him to do his best impression of a Jehovah’s Witness?
Let’s just say that he should strongly consider other careers besides cult leader.
“Dad really likes to gamble,” Olive says. “If you try to convince him to take a crazy bet with huge upside, that could work.”
So Khoi decides to spread the gospel of Bitcoin.
Step 2: Fetch Mom.
Olive pulls up a block away from the house. She’s still got a key to the back, so while Khoi climbs the steps to our front door, I dip around. The doorbell rings, and then there are heavy footsteps from inside. The door opens and Michael hits him with, “Whaddya want, son?”
“Hi, sir! Do you have a few minutes to hear about a fantastic money-making opportunity?” Khoi’s voice is plastic and two octaves higher than normal—a dead giveaway he’s freaking out. But he powers on. “I’ll give you this amazing twenty-dollar bill if you listen to my entire pitch.”
“Why not.”
Michael steps out onto the porch, and the front door closes.
I immediately unlock the back door and rush inside, not bothering to take off my shoes. Michael can scrub away whatever muddy footprints I leave behind. I hope they stain.
My mother’s curled up in the master bedroom, swathed in blankets.
The lights are off and the blinds are shut.
Everything is bathed in a grayish gloom.
The faint glow of the TV flickers against the wall.
It’s playing some C-drama on low volume, so the dialogue comes out muffled and distant. The air smells faintly of stale tea.
She looks listless and sad. Her hair hangs around her face in damp, limp strands. I can’t recall the last time she seemed truly happy.
But when her eyes land on me, there’s a spark of life. “Char? You can’t be here. Michael will be upset.”
“Get up. We need to go.”
She pauses the show. Onscreen, Wang Yibo freezes mid-sentence. “What are you talking about?”
“Olive is parked around the corner. We have a plane ticket so you can come stay with me at MIT. But we have to go, right now.”
“Why would I leave? I’m fine here.” But she says it like she isn’t sure she believes her own words.
“No. This is not fine.” I gesture wildly at our surroundings. “This is not a life. Mom, when’s the last time you even went outside? How long has he been keeping you in here?”
“I have to pack,” she says. “Everything I have is here. I’m not ready at all.”
“I know you’re not ready.” Frustration simmers in me. “It doesn’t matter. Michael is keeping you trapped. This is fu—um, messed up. How do you not see that?”
“Stop,” she says. Her eyes glimmer with tears. “Please stop.”
“Mom. Right now, my—my friend is distracting Michael, but I don’t know how long he’s going to be able to do that. We have to run. We have to leave before Michael returns. It isn’t safe here.”
She still isn’t moving, so I pivot. “If you’re not going to leave for yourself, leave for me. I can’t ever be happy, even if I’m thousands of miles away, if you aren’t safe.”
“You can learn to be happy, Char,” she says. “I’m so proud of you. And the new life you found for yourself. You’re so brave. Unlike your old mother.” She says it like she’s on her deathbed, and it makes me want to cry.
“I’m not leaving until you leave too. And how do you think Michael is going to react if he sees me here, in his house, after he told me never to come back?” I fold my arms and stare her down.
Here we go. It’s finally time to find out if she loves me enough to conquer her own fear.
Please, I silently beg. Please, make the right choice. Because if Michael actually catches my ass here, I don’t know what he’ll do. Not even Khoi will be able to save me from my stepfather’s wrath.
After what feels like a century, she stands up. Relief floods me.
Without a word, she takes my hand and we’re shadows, sneaking out of the bedroom and past the kitchen. She slides on her shoes and snags her purse.
“Leave your phone,” I whisper. “He can track your location with it.” Thank God Michael never cared enough to add me on Find My Friends.
“But—”
“Mom, we’ll buy you a new one. Your data is uploaded to the cloud anyway. Leave it.”
After a pause, she unzips her purse and gently places her phone on the floor.
Just as we slip out the back, I hear the front door creak open.
Step 3: Run.