Chapter Thirty-Eight
Everything aches. Even breathing hurts. I don’t want to move. All I want to do is curl up on the grass until I fossilize. Maybe MIT scientists could study me. Here, we have the world’s first specimen of homo heartbreakus …
But I don’t have time to mope. I have to track down Edvin Nilsen and agree to join his program.
I walk back to Kresge, where the Alpha Fellows and their families are fanned out on the lawn.
Stella pops a small wave at me, which I return.
Jenni-with-an-i is posing with the cartoonishly giant check while her parents snap photos.
Haru is lingering nearby with this embarrassingly lovesick expression.
The twins are playing some game that involves kicking the crap out of each other’s shins. Everyone seems drunk on sunshine.
Edvin is chatting with Obi and a Black woman who might be Obi’s mother, but when he sees me, he excuses himself. “Char! Have you given the offer more thought?”
My heart speeds up. This is it. If I agree, there’s no going back.
Goodbye, Khoi.
“Yes, I’ll join,” I say. “Thank you for giving me a chance.” He’s truly saving my life. “Quick question. Um, I don’t have Boston housing after tomorrow. Do you know if Nexus could help with that?”
He blinks, confused. “You don’t want to return to Oregon first? We weren’t planning to onboard you for another few weeks. We need to finalize the entire cohort, and then you’d all start in September.”
I’m not about to explain my family drama. “Maybe you could give me an advance payment on the stipend, and I can use it until the program starts?”
“Char. Don’t sweat it. If you need a place to stay tomorrow, we can put you up in a hotel for several days.”
There. Problem fixed in two seconds. I nod like this is no biggie, like his help isn’t the only thing standing between us and the five-star hotel known as a park bench.
Having money must be like playing life on easy mode.
Edvin wants to meet in the Marriott tomorrow to do paperwork before the press conference. Since I’m not yet eighteen, my mother will have to sign too. We discuss a few more details, and then he excuses himself to shake more hands.
I scan the lawn. Everyone is with their parents, their families. Shouldn’t the Astors be here? Surely Khoi’s aunt and uncle would pull up. They live so close. But Khoi is nowhere. He’s simply gone.
When I get to the dorm, Mom is back. She says that she spent the day walking into restaurants and asking for a job. She’s starting as a dishwasher at P.F. Chang’s on Monday.
“At the library, I made a Facebook account and reached out to friends from grad school, but none of them have responded yet. I can’t blame them. It’s been years since we’ve spoken. I’m sorry that I can’t do better, baobei.”
She doesn’t need to stress about our short-term logistics. “It’s okay. I figured it out.” I tell her about Edvin Nilsen and the Nexus incubator program.
“What about Khoi?” she asks. “Is he doing the program too?”
I shrug. “Nah. We broke up.”
“Are you okay?” She tries to hug me, but I duck away.
“It’s whatever. It was just a summer fling, and now the summer’s over.” I don’t want to get into this with Mom, so I change the topic. “But hey, don’t worry about housing. Edvin said he’s going to put us up in a hotel.”
I’m expecting her to be happy, but her eyes glitter with tears. “I feel like a failure. What sort of example did I set for my daughter? I’m forty years old. I don’t have a job to support you. I don’t even have a home for you to go back to.”
If I weren’t so wrecked, I would probably comfort her. Shrug, say it’s fine, I’ve got everything under control. But I’m already barely keeping it together. So all I do is nod.
Besides, maybe she’s right. She should’ve done better. I don’t want to be too mean about it, but like, she hasn’t been much of a mom recently.
Anyway, I should know not to rely on anybody else. I was straight-up delusional letting myself trust Khoi like that.
I spend most of the night staring at the ceiling, going through our last conversation like it’s an infinite loop.
Why doesn’t he get why I had to go with Edvin?
Is he really so stuck in his bubble of privilege that he can’t see how this deal might be life-changing for me?
And why did he have to pick that moment to say he loved me? God.
And it was so freaking unfair how he expected me to say it back! Like, sorry, bro, I have bigger problems here. It’s like he thinks this is a fluffy romantic K-drama and I’m out here trying to survive Squid Game.
I can’t even muster the energy for anger anymore. There’s only this emptiness, like somebody has excavated my insides with a fork.
I never fall asleep. Morning arrives silently, buttery sunshine spilling through the crack between the windowsill and the pull-down blind.
My meeting with Edvin is at nine in the conference of the Kendall Square Marriott. The hotel is wedged between a bunch of biotech startups and AI research labs. Mom and I post up in the lobby. She gives me a wide berth so I can look more independent, more adult.
As I wait, my eyes fall on the television mounted on the wall. The digital clock at the bottom of the screen says it’s 8:54 a.m. On TV, there’s a news anchor speaking into the camera—boring—and I’m about to look away when the news ticker catches my attention.
DEFENSE COMPANY NEXUS ENABLING ICE IMMIGRATION RAIDS.
As a video of an arrest plays, a female voiceover says, “Recent government documents have revealed Nexus’s role in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents by providing software that identified the whereabouts of undocumented people.
To date, ICE has arrested over a thousand people with Nexus’s help. ”
Onscreen, there’s someone with a blurred-out face being led away in handcuffs. And even though I intellectually know the blur is good, that they deserve their anonymity, that they don’t need their face blasted all over the news, it still hurts. Like this person isn’t even a person anymore.
It feels like somebody just stabbed me in the solar plexus.
Suddenly everything that Khoi said about Edvin Nilsen makes sense. The defense contracts. Do you truly think they’d be a good partner for Hello World?
There’s the ding of an elevator, and Edvin’s assistant, Janelle Lim, strolls toward me with a clipboard.
“Char? Come upstairs. Mr. Nilsen is ready to see you now.” Then she sees my face. “What’s wrong?”
I can’t muster the words, but she glances at the television screen and does this oh, dear kind of sigh. “Oh. That.”
Her nonchalant attitude makes me blurt, “How can you work for a company that does this?”
“The media blows things out of proportion,” she says. “They thrive off sensationalism.”
So she’s not outright denying it. “So you guys are helping with…” I wave at the television screen. “Whatever the hell this is.” When she says nothing, I add, “My mom is an immigrant.” And Janelle is Asian too.
“They aren’t like us, Char.” Janelle fiddles with her glasses. “They came here illegally. Our parents came here the right way.”
“I don’t think we’re all that different,” I say, thinking about the people I interviewed while doing product research for Hello World. The lady from Venezuela who sobbed because she couldn’t go back to see her sick mother. Or the guy who crossed the border by himself at age fourteen.
The people in my own life. Lola’s mom is undocumented. My mother only got her citizenship through marriage.
If I sign with Edvin, am I betraying all of them?
I want to hurl.
She shrugs, her face impassive. “You shouldn’t make any rash decisions here. Working with Mr. Nilsen could be very good for your career.”
She’s not wrong. I need the cash and the clout. I need the safety net that comes with being all buddy-buddy with a billionaire like Edvin Nilsen.
I wonder why aligning myself with a white guy so often ends up with me hiding some part of myself. Like with Drew and letting him call me Mulan. And it’s not just me. My mother with Michael. Stella with Lucas.
“Just… give me a moment,” I say. My head is woozy.
“Mr. Nilsen is a busy man,” Janelle says. “He has a hard stop at ten a.m.”
But before I can respond, the elevator dings again and Edvin himself struts out. He’s wearing a Patagonia vest over a plain black T-shirt and a Swiss watch encrusted in diamonds.
He gives me a perfunctory nod. “What’s taking so long?”
Janelle tries to motion to the TV screen, but the story has already shifted to whatever recent dumb remark our president made about another world leader. I guess the Nexus scandal was only worth two minutes of airtime.
So she goes, “Char found out about the collaboration with Homeland Security.”
Is that why Edvin pushed to close this deal so quickly? He probably knew this news was about to break and wanted me to sign before I heard.
He tilts his head. “So…?”
“So it’s wrong,” I say, and then immediately cringe at how childish it sounds. If Khoi was here, he’d be more eloquent. He’d be able to nail exactly what is so gross about this. But Khoi isn’t here, and my thoughts are too frantic and blobby to translate into words.
Edvin groans. “Are you serious, Char?”
“You know Hello World is for helping immigrants, right?”
He seems genuinely confused. “Those people are losers. Losers! You have nothing in common with them. You’re a fighter.
You’re one of the good ones.” And even though that is an absolutely disgusting thing for him to say, there’s still some small, stupid part of me that perks up like, He thinks you’re special!
Mom walks toward us. “What’s happening?” she asks me in Chinese.
Edvin gives a once-over to her baggy jeans and graying hair, and for a brief moment I think I glimpse contempt in his eyes.
I don’t answer her. Instead, I say, “Please, I need more time to think.” It comes out so soft, like a little girl’s voice.
“We don’t have time. The press conference is happening now,” he says.
Of course. The press conference.