Rival Chemistry

Chapter 1 Champagne News

Champagne News

“Dad,” I began, “Mom. I have some news.”

My parents looked at me across the wide dinner table as if they had forgotten I was there.

And maybe they had. It had been months since I last made the three-hour train ride to Hartford, and I had barely spoken since arriving tonight.

Mom took a sip from her chardonnay, and Dad patted his lips with his linen napkin.

“You’re pregnant,” Mom guessed in a flat voice. Her eyes were on the pale-yellow wine as she swirled it in her glass.

My brain misfired, and my heart jumped into my throat. “What? No!” I said. “It’s about a job.”

“Excellent,” Dad said. “You’re finally accepting my offer.”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair, palms pressed flat on the table. I hoped I looked calm and in control, but the slight narrowing of Dad’s eyes told me he could tell I wasn’t.

“You know I appreciate the opportunity to join Burke Limited,” I said carefully, “but I have to decline. I’ve accepted another offer.”

The only indication that Dad heard me was the subtle tightening of his jaw. I held my breath while I waited for the axe to fall.

“And what might that be?” Mom asked.

“I’m going back to Newbury Academy this fall,” I announced with all the confidence I could muster. “Teaching chemistry.”

There. I said it. Schrodinger’s box was open. Unfortunately, it looked like the cat was dead.

My parents stared at me with their already thin lips pressed into even thinner lines.

“You’re really going to teach high school?” Mom asked. Her face pinched as if she had just sucked on a lemon. “I didn’t think you were serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be serious?” I asked. “I just spent the last four years at Columbia getting a chemistry degree and teaching certificate.”

Dad cleared his throat. “And of course we supported your… little hobby, but you’re twenty-eight years old. It already took you embarrassingly long to start your higher education. You’re overdue to fulfill your responsibilities to this family.”

“I’m old enough,” I said as calmly as I could in spite of the agitation building in my chest, “to make my own choices.”

“But teaching.” Dad spoke with the disdain of someone who found a cockroach in his cappuccino.

“Teaching at Newbury,” I said. “If the school is good enough to attend and patronize, then—”

“Education is a service industry. It's a dead-end job, not to mention, beneath you. At Burke, you would lead your own division.”

The room felt stifling. Beige walls closed in on me from all sides. My eyes were locked with my father’s. It was nearly painful to sit under the weight of his derision, his disappointment, but I couldn’t break.

“I don’t want a division,” I snapped. “I want to teach chemistry, and I’m starting next week.”

“Enough.” His fist fell on the table, rattling the china and silver. “I will not continue to support—”

“Good, because I don’t want your money!”

My chest felt impossibly tight. I hadn’t meant to say that, but once the words were out of my mouth, they felt right. I couldn’t deny my privilege, but I was done using it as a crutch. Righteous excitement bubbled in me like a shaken champagne bottle.

Across the table, Mom refilled her wine glass from a cut crystal decanter. “Matthew, what’s the harm in letting her dabble a little longer?”

“My career isn’t dabbling,” I insisted at the same time my father said, “She’s been dabbling for ten years already.”

Mom shrugged and took a sip of wine. “So, what’s another year?”

Her nonchalance hurt even more than Dad’s disdain.

As soon as I reached the train station for the trip home, I changed out of the damn Chanel slingbacks that had tormented my feet all through dinner.

My mules, lovingly broken-in over years of strolls through Central Park, were a one hundred percent improvement over the designer torture devices.

But the damage was already done. The pinching was gone, but the relentless ache persisted throughout the train and subway rides.

I felt every step of the climb to my fifth floor walk up on the Upper West Side.

Despite the late hour, a lamp had been left on, bathing the living room in a warm, welcoming light.

I kicked off my shoes and stood barefoot on the doormat for a moment, stretching out my toes and pressing them into the soft, pink shag.

If I could bottle and sell this feeling, I’d never need Dad’s money again.

The reminder felt like accidentally scratching a scab off a fresh wound.

I groaned and slunk over to the sofa where I promptly collapsed into a pile of throw pillows that were much more cheerful than I was. I took the opportunity to yell into the cushions, the sound muffled by downy fluff. It helped, but what I really needed was a friendly face.

I rolled onto my side, hugging a magenta, velvet bolster to my chest. My parents would have called this behavior unbecoming. But I didn’t need to worry about what they thought anymore.

“Silvia,” I moaned. I sounded at least half as pitiful as I felt.

There was no response.

“Silvia,” I called again, a little louder.

Still nothing.

I sat up on the sofa, still clutching the pillow like a life preserver, and pitched my voice even louder.

“Silvia Grace Nguyen! I know you can hear me through these cardboard walls.”

The walls in this building were probably made of concrete or wood or some other normal building material, but they were about as good at blocking sound as noble gasses were at conduction—which was to say, terrible.

People told stories of real born-and-raised New Yorkers falling asleep to the sounds of car horns, random shouting, and the occasional gunshot.

But after two sleepless nights in the city, I invested in a three-dollar box of earplugs from the corner bodega and resigned myself to the fact that I might never be that type of New Yorker.

“Give me a minute,” my roommate replied from our shared bathroom.

“M-kay.” I flopped back down onto my side to wait. I pulled my long, blonde hair out of its bun and shook out the waves. My headache immediately began to ebb.

An impossibly-long thirty seconds later, the bathroom door opened to reveal a petite Vietnamese woman in cotton pajamas and fluffy socks that she insisted were knit from genuine muppet fur.

Silvia took a moment to regard me. “Well,” she said, “you don’t look any worse for the wear.”

“Naturally,” I agreed. “All of the trauma is on the inside. And also on my feet.”

Silvia leaned in to inspect a blister. “Not the slingbacks again. Your poor toes deserve better.”

“Oh, you know Mom and Dad. It’s either dress appropriately for dinner, or sit through a twenty-minute lecture about how a Burke of the Connecticut Burkes must uphold a particular standard of propriety.”

“I still think those two are batshit crazy.”

She sat down on the arm of the sofa, and I rolled onto my back to face her.

“You won’t hear me disagreeing. But they’re my parents.”

“I still don’t understand why you had to see them in person. I feel like this could have been a phone call. Or an email.”

I rolled my eyes. “They probably would have found out even if I didn’t tell them at all—their social circle is so small. But doing it myself, in person, felt necessary, you know. Like closing one door before I open another one.”

There wasn’t much else to say on the subject.

Over the last five years of rooming together, Silvia and I had discussed my parents many times, usually after a bottle or two of wine.

We always reached the same conclusion: my parents were pretentious, manipulative, and brazenly egotistical.

In a word—they sucked, even if they had bankrolled my life.

“I know what we need,” Silvia announced. “I have a bottle of Prosecco chilling.”

“Say less,” I said, and let her pull me to my feet.

I followed her to the line of cabinets that served as our kitchen and found a pair of flutes. She retrieved the sparkling wine from the refrigerator and started picking at the foil.

“Do you need to vent?” she asked.

Leaning back on the edge of the counter, I sucked in a deep breath. Then, I dropped my head back and blew out a sigh.

“It went exactly how I thought it would,” I said, suddenly feeling exhausted all over again. “We were in the Lesser Dining Room, because why wouldn’t we be? Then, I sat through four excruciating courses while they talked through their standard repertoire of dinnertime topics.”

I’d heard variations of that conversation five hundred—five thousand—times.

“Dad and Grandpa are still deadlocked in negotiations for some contract with a firm in Bangalore,” I recounted in a sing-song voice. “But not to worry, my brother is wooing a new client which will reinvigorate cashflow.”

“Oh, good. I was so worried,” Silvia muttered, twisting the wire cage off the cork.

“The renovations are finally complete at the Whitmore Country Club, and wouldn’t it be nice to get brunch on Friday after a quick nine holes?”

“Yes, definitely. Everyone has time for nine holes on a Friday morning,” she said. She got the wire off and started tugging on the cork.

“Great grandma is home from the hospital after recovering from her fall last weekend. A new nursemaid has been hired since the last one was clearly incompetent.”

“Clearly,” Silvia said. The cork wasn’t budging.

I took the bottle from her and removed the cork with a loud pop.

“Show off,” she said with a smirk when I handed back the open bottle. I dutifully held the glasses while she poured with a flourish. Then, we both sipped.

“I sat and sat until I couldn’t stand it anymore. And finally, I just blurted it out.”

Silvia held up the bottle, and I nodded. She brought it with us and set it on the coffee table while we settled on the sofa, and I recounted the rest of the conversation. Afterward, Silvia wrapped me in a tight hug, her chin resting on my shoulder while she squeezed her tiny arms around me.

“Fuck them,” she said as she released me. She wiped a few tears from her cheeks.