Chapter Ten #2
He was behind her, and she could tell from his voice that he was on the other side of the room, but Sabrina’s body tensed, knowing he was there.
She looked down at her polo shirt, and rubbed the apple juice stain that she couldn’t remove last night.
Like the girls she’d seen earlier, she wanted to brush her hair back with her hand, glance at him over her shoulder, and smile, but instead, she kept her head down.
She knew a part of her wanted to stay busy, for him to pass through the clubhouse and not even realize that she was there.
“Sabrina Chen,” he said.
She turned quickly and felt the end of her ponytail get stuck on the side of her face. She brushed it away.
“Oh hey.” She felt herself color as she ran her hands over the front of her shorts.
“You got a job here for the summer?”
“Yeah, saving money for college.”
“Oh yeah? Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach seeing all of us CHA Country Club brats at our leisure?”
Us. Our. He surprised her, and she felt like she had been slapped in the face.
She had expectations of him, of course, but not for such self-awareness.
Was he putting it on for her? Was the shame of his privilege real?
She looked at his neck color a shade of pinky-red as he spoke, and his eyes searched hers. What was he looking for? Reassurance?
“Not too sick,” she replied. The words had left her mouth before she could think.
“You like tennis?” he asked.
Sabrina had heard of Wimbledon but knew nothing of tennis beyond what she caught on television.
She knew that Serena Williams was a big deal, she had heard of Federer and Nadal, but that was the extent of her knowledge.
She didn’t understand how a game was scored, nor did she know what made one player good and another one bad.
“I don’t really know much about it, but I like what I’ve been watching today.”
“This is one of the big grand slams. I went to the US Open with Dad last year. It’s pretty awesome. I like tennis.”
“Yeah, I figured.” Sabrina looked at his tennis shoes, scuffed, with the laces loose and undone.
“Has Kit left now?” He didn’t look at her as he asked.
“We keep missing each other, but yeah, she’s in Tokyo now or on her way, I think. She’s going to have an amazing trip.”
“Yeah. So it looks like everyone’s taken off for the summer.”
More silence, and she felt the internal tug of wanting to stay but wanting the conversation to end.
“Well, I gotta go so…” Sabrina said, stepping away from him. The toe of her sneaker squeaked against the tiles.
“Hey, so Wimbledon starts soon. We can watch the highlights. I can show you how to score a game if you like. I’ll call you, Chen, that okay?”
He hadn’t waited for her response. He had assumed she would just say yes, and he was right.
“So we never talked about why you didn’t take this vacation, kid,” Eva said as she typed furiously on her keyboard, not looking at Sabrina as she spoke.
She tapped the keys with a staccato strike, and Sabrina noticed that every period she would press with her index finger, as if she were striking a typewriter. Next!
“We had a situation at home. I had to use the money I saved for my ticket.”
Eva looked up for a moment, then pulled at her bottom lip, deep in thought. Sabrina later came to recognize this gesture—it meant Eva wanted a cigarette.
“What happened? What was the situation?”
“We had a burst pipe that flooded our bathroom, and caused a ton of damage to our ceiling, and well, I needed to pay for it.”
Eva stopped typing and shifted her chair to face Sabrina.
“Landlord?”
“He’s away. And he’s kinda difficult, and we needed to get it fixed right away. It was damage control.”
“Your mother didn’t have the cash to fix this thing? Pay a plumber?”
“My mom is a janitor, Eva. She earns too little. We literally live from paycheck to paycheck. And I had this chunk saved up for my trip to China. A ton of babysitting and tutoring I did throughout the year.”
“Riiight…”
Sabrina had a sense of unease as she tried to read the air in the room. The longer Eva seemed to chew the inside of her mouth, the faster Sabrina’s pulse quickened.
“When did this happen?”
“Just before prom.”
“Prom? Oh gross. Tell me please you’d rather put your head in a vise than that sickening bullshit.”
Sabrina shook her head and grinned. “The vise, every time.”
“That’s my girl.” Eva laughed. “So tell me, do you have a Chinese passport? American passport?”
“Yes. I mean, I think so.”
Eva raised her eyebrows at her, and Sabrina started to feel queasy.
“You think so?”
“My mom was dealing with that part.”
The silence stretched between them, and Sabrina felt the dawning of a truth she had been avoiding for as long as she could remember. Apparently, Eva Kim already knew it.
Sabrina stood up and her chair made a screeching noise on the floor. She walked to a filing cabinet and pretended to look for something.
“It’s a damn shame, this unforeseen event. I don’t know what to call it,” Eva said.
“Yes. That’s what it was.” Sabrina shrugged, but her eyes were starting to well up. “A force majeure,” she whispered.
“Well, let’s call it providence. You never would have come to me if that shitty pipe hadn’t burst in your bathroom.”
···
Later that day, as the sun started to set over the city’s skyline, Sabrina sat on the bus to Manayunk, leaning her head on the scratched window.
DAVE: Hey Chen, are you free tomorrow afternoon?
She started to type, then deleted her message. Her heart raced.
She was working with Eva Kim the next day. With one sentence, her summer could change. Could she say yes?
SAbrINA: Hey, I’m working downtown at the Coalition tomorrow until around 4:30.
What had changed since Kit had gone away? Or was that the very thing that had changed? Perhaps he was just filling the time, and she was the only one still in Chestnut Hill for the summer.
DAVE: Coalition?
Sabrina forced herself to put her phone down before she began to type a response.
Earlier that day, Eva Kim had told her how she had kept a lawyer waiting for seven weeks before drafting a reply on behalf of her client once.
There’s real power in silence sometimes, kid.
As long as you use it at the right time.
It’s kind of like the idea of not caring, right?
Suddenly you’ve got nothing to lose. Silence will turn some people into total maniacs, so use it when the moment’s right. You hear me?
Five minutes later, she saw he was still online. Maybe he was waiting for her, and she finally began to type.
SAbrINA: The Asian American Immigration Coalition. I’m doing an internship there this summer.
DAVE: Cool. So come over to mine after. We can hang out.
Hang out …there it was, she would be alone with him.
Again, he didn’t ask. It occurred to her that the Harrisons were not accustomed to asking or waiting for a response.
She ran her finger over the screen of her phone and studied his messages again.
She pictured him moving on to messaging someone else.
She was just one of many on his chat list. But for Sabrina, there was nobody else.