"Lan Zhan? Do you know? When you finally decide 'this is it; I'm done', your whole world starts to get really quiet. I could hear the blood pumping through my veins louder than the battle going on around me. I could hear each tear drop as it fell of...
But if Mary thought that was the end of her worries, she was sadly mistaken....
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September, 2016
"Eleanor! Michael! Matthew!" Mary yelled up the stairs at her children. "We were supposed to leave ten minutes ago! Get a move on!"
Michael gave his spiked, blue-dyed hair one last look in the mirror, and reminded himself that his sixteenth birthday was only two short months away, and then he could get his ears pierced. He had the perfect earrings already purchased and packed for once the holes healed up. "You're never going to pass as a Korean Oppa, no matter what you do," Matthew teased. Michael flipped him off with a smirk. As if the majority of American girls swooning over Korean idols could tell the difference between a Korean Oppa and a Chinese Gege. They'd see a six foot tall, slender, handsome Asian man with a BTS style of haircut, hear a few Anyoung haseyos and anios ina perfect Seoul accent, and immediately wonder if he was an up and coming KPop star. And since he'd be wandering around with the other college freshmen, they wouldn't even realize that he wasn't yet sixteen. He checked the bookshelf to make sure all the books he wanted to bring were packed. "You're never going to have time to read them anyways," Michael egged. He pawed through a backpack bursting with Manga novels. "Why do you read this crap anyways?"
"I like it," Michael stated. They were a mental escape from this house. A way to pass the time until his parents decided he was old enough to leave.
He deliberately did not look at the single sheet of paper tacked to his side of the cork board on his way out of the room; he had long ago memorized the acceptance letter's contents. The paper was yellowing and starting to curl; it had been pinned there almost four and a half years ago. Today was move-in day for Eleanor and the rest of the Freshmen at BU, and the parents had agreed that with Eleanor living just across the river, he could finally move to Cambridge and begin studying at MIT. Four and a half fucking years after being accepted into their Mechanical Engineering program. 'A child prodigy' they had called him.
Both of his parents were born in China, his mother in Beijing and his father outside Shanghai. When Eleanor was born, the parents were determined to raise her as bilingual in both English and Mandarin. They had continued with that practice after the twins were born. But Mary enjoyed watching Asian dramas regardless of the country of origin, so it wasn't uncommon for a Korean or Japanese drama to be on the TV. Mary had taken the twins onto campus one day just after Michael turned three, and they encountered a Korean family that was lost and trying to find the Admission Building. Michael had immediately given them directions on how to get to the building, in perfectly accented Korean.
He was tested, of course, and determined to have a natural affinity for music, languages and mathematics. His parents, in an attempt to keep his brain occupied, bought him a piano and a violin and enrolled him at a local music school. They also put him in foreign language classes. Korean, Japanese, Thai, Cantonese as well as Mandarin and English soon became the common languages coming out of his mouth. When that didn't keep him out of trouble (if he didn't like his regular school teachers, he would answer questions on quizzes and tests in whatever language he happened to think of the answer in and demand that they score it based on if his answers were correct, not whether they were too uneducated to read it), they enrolled him in more advanced math and science classes. At ten, he received full marks on the AP exams in BC Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry. And at eleven, he interviewed with CalTech and MIT. He decided on MIT as it was closer to home and so he was more likely to be allowed to go.
