Chapter One #2
Sabrina took a breath and closed her eyes for a moment, as though she were about to jump into a cold pool.
“I’m trying to figure out how I can get to China before college. I want to go visit my family. Or at least see this place I’m supposedly from.”
This wasn’t what Kit had expected to hear. It took her a moment to take it in, until thought after thought tumbled out, one after the other.
“What do you mean? Like this year? For real?”
“Well, yeah, I mean I gotta do it soon. I haven’t really talked to my mom about it yet. You know how she can be. I’ve been saving up money from tutoring and babysitting jobs. I think I’m going to have enough by the end of July.”
Kit nodded. She did know how Sabrina’s mom could be.
Kit’s usual exasperation with her own mother would disappear the moment she saw Lee Lee Chen with Sabrina, enforcing her rigid rules that often made no sense to Kit at all.
It was in these moments that she allowed herself to be grateful for her adoption by a nice, liberal, upper-middle-class Pennsylvania family.
The kind of parents who would let her stay out late because her friends were.
The kind of parents who congratulated her for simply trying even though she achieved mediocre grades and showed no real promise in sport.
You got your dad’s hand-eye coordination, that’s for sure , her father joked.
She was relieved that they allowed her to experiment with her clothes when she started to care about how she was dressed, and even helped her shorten the hem of her school uniform skirt.
She was thankful that they bought her a cell phone at almost the exact same time that all her other classmates got them. Sabrina was never given such freedoms.
And somewhere deep in the recesses of Kit’s mind were thoughts that never passed her lips.
She was happy that her life was nothing like Sabrina’s.
She didn’t dare consider how it might be to be raised by a mother like Lee Lee Chen.
She thought of all the parties Sabrina had missed because her mother did not believe in socializing outside of school hours, or the times that a trend for a certain water bottle or backpack had swept through the girls in her class and Sabrina had looked on, with the same old items she had started school with that year.
Don’t you ever just want to say no? Kit wanted to ask Sabrina, but she knew her friend well enough to know she never would. They were built differently.
“If I save and work these summer jobs for the first month, and get going with the passport application, I might be able to visit for two weeks in August. Just before college starts. Even if I don’t manage to go to Mom’s exact birthplace, I could see some of China.
I could see the land, listen to the people. Travel, finally. You know what I mean?”
“Why do you want to go so much though? Like, do you even know the people you’d have to stay with? And what if you hate it there? And you’re on your own?” The moment Kit said it, she felt foolish.
“I guess that’s the whole point. I don’t know anything about what to expect. That’s the part that’s exciting to me. It’s about knowing where you’re from. Where you belong. You know what that feels like, of all people.”
The silence dragged on for a moment too long. Kit wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
There was a constant struggle within Kit: her need for control, to always have exactly what she wanted, battled against the kindness she also wanted to give.
Most of the time it was easy, because Sabrina was the people pleaser.
They had been friends in kindergarten, first and second grades, and then they stopped talking.
Kit couldn’t remember why, but something had shifted in her circle of friends.
If she really examined it, she would come to realize that her mother had nudged her toward their family friends and their children.
Their friends, who lived in their neighborhood.
But Kit wouldn’t realize this until much later in her life.
Sabrina referred to the years that Kit and Sabrina were no longer friends as “when you were in the group.” Kit barely thought of Sabrina at all during this time.
She had not deliberately broken away. In fact, her memories of those years were like any eight-year-old’s: the spotlight was on herself.
Her mother had organized her social life with the care expected of a Chestnut Hill Academy parent.
Kit went on playdates at large mock-period houses after school.
She carpooled with Casey and her sisters to ice-skating in the afternoons and attended birthday parties.
During the time she wasn’t friends with Sabrina, her world existed purely within a five-mile radius of Germantown Avenue, the main boulevard that ran through her leafy, well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia.
Kit’s life was a rhythmic composition through the seasons: summers eating ice creams the size of her head at Bredenbeck’s after camp, pumpkin picking at Maple Acres Farm, choosing Christmas trees with her father, Terry, behind the Saturday market, and Easter egg hunts at the country club.
In the summer, they rented houses next to her parents’ friends down the shore with activities packed into each day, so Kit was never bored.
That is why she never thought of Sabrina during those years—there wasn’t time.
···
When Kit turned nine, there were three unbearable weeks of school when she cried every day in the car and begged her mother to let her stay home.
There was a trio of notoriously cruel girls who were a few years older than her, and she had somehow come into their line of fire.
Overnight it became Kit’s turn to be their source of amusement.
During a freezing February morning, the name-calling began.
“Kit Herzog has got tiny eyes. Kit Herzog has a mustache of blackheads. Kit Herzog has such gross dark hairy legs. She’s a tarantula from the jungle.
” Her eyes were not slanted, nor did she have a mustache of blackheads or hairy legs.
In fact, she was remarkably less hairy than the girls calling out to tease her, which seemed to her the greatest injustice of all.
When Kit was younger, she had a tendency to attract attention.
Unlike Sabrina, she was loud, and until these taunts began, she was unfazed by older children—if they were game, she would play or talk with them.
Sabrina, on the other hand, maintained a well-practiced invisibility that kept her out of trouble, making her body as small as it could be, folding into herself, disappearing into a crowd.
Kit’s voice carried across a room or a playground, and she was always conspicuous to both new friends and enemies.
During those weeks when she was the target of the mean older girls, Kit’s eyes were red from the panic every morning of what she faced at school.
Please please don’t make me go to school today , she begged Sally.
The three older girls stood in the corner beside the library when she walked in.
They all had the same mousy hair, freckles scattered across their noses, they could have been siblings, wearing the same hoodies from J.Crew in red, with mittens hanging out of their sleeves.
She searched for the teacher, a point of safety.
The clock showed another four minutes before Mr. Greenhill would come out and tell them all to go to class. But it was too late, they’d seen her.
“Hey, look who it is,” they started. “I could see her mustache from the other side of the room.”
Kit dipped her face into her fleece collar.
“Ewww, yeah I can see it, even though she’s trying to hide her face from us.”
The librarian, Mrs. Bleecker, walked past, and they all chorused their good mornings with playful smiles stamped across their mouths. Good morning, Mrs. Bleecker.
Kit’s stomach lurched.
They started to walk toward her, she tried to edge closer to Mrs. Bleecker, and suddenly, she felt a weight crash against her, her backpack pushing her forward, four or five steps out of control before she regained her balance.
She looked behind her to see Sabrina staring at her wide-eyed, as if to say keep moving .
And all Kit could remember after that was getting away from the girls and sitting down at the desk beside Sabrina’s, relief settling over her.
Even when Kit had been in “in the group” and distant from Sabrina, there was never a moment when she couldn’t reach out and find Sabrina there if she wanted to, and she always did.