16. Nancy Might Not Be (That) Insane
I could always tell when my parents were mad at me.
I mean, they were usually mad at me for some reason or another. But when they were really mad at me, they’d switch from speaking Chinese to their badly accented English. That was when I knew it was time to pack the bags and grab the first available ticket to Egypt.
When Mr. Lotte dropped me off at home that night (slamming the door behind and revving off, probably to start drafting a lawsuit against me), I tried to sneak my way into the house. After the fiasco at Allison’s house, I was not in the mood for any interrogations about where I’d been. I was not in the mood for anything except throwing a pity party upstairs.
Unfortunately, my plan to sneak into my house and blend with the random Asian folks was void by the fact that said random Asian folks had all gone home.
Plus, my parents were waiting for me right when I opened the door. That made sneaking in a bit of Mission Impossible-like challenge.
There was also the issue of my body not being a dream candidate for sneaking, either.
I stared at my parents and just sighed. It figured. I never got away with anything, remember?
Mom and Dad stared right back. Their faces were perfectly peaceful and controlled, which was the only thing more dangerous than them throwing pots and pans at my head.
Nancy was right behind them. She was looking at me with an oddly piteous expression, like I was a sacrificial lamb up for slaughter.
I figured the lamb had it better than I did at that moment.
“Do you know what time it is?” Mom said in quiet English.
Before I could decide whether or not that was a rhetorical question, Dad interrupted her. He was a sight to behold. His hair, which had been carefully gelled for the party, was flying in every direction, and his freshly ironed dinner party shirt had gotten all creased.
“Who have you been with?” he asked, his voice just as alarmingly calm as Mom’s. “Who dropped you off just now?”
“Allison’s dad,” I said, resigned.
His eyes bugged out of his head. “Allison? Who is Allison?”
“My classmate.”
“A girl?” Dad was thunderstruck.
“Kevin, you’re not…are you dating the white girl?” Mom said faintly.
Really?
Out of everything Mom could have been concerned with—me sneaking out without telling anyone, Grandpa Zhou faking his death for me, me destroying a girl’s precious birthday cake and crushing dreams everywhere—she was worried about the possibility of me dating someone she hadn’t approved of?
It was all so ridiculous that I laughed. And then I kept laughing, so that Mom and Dad looked quite alarmed.
“Dating?” I repeated, snorting. “Yeah, right. Like any girl in her right mind would date me.”
Far from dating me, Allison was probably at home stabbing a voodoo doll of me for ruining her birthday party.
“Yeah, I don’t think any sane girl would be attracted to Kevin,” Nancy piped up. Good old Nancy always had my back.
Dad struggled with this development. “So…what? You have been out for how long now?” he said in a strangled voice, his neck reddening by the second.
“Um…two hours?”
“Two hours,” Dad repeated. “For two hours your mother and I have been lansacking this house looking for you!”
“Ransacking,” I corrected immediately. Then I wished I hadn’t when Dad’s face began to turn purple. That couldn’t be good.
“Son, I have never been more disappointed in all my life,” Dad said in a carefully controlled voice. Which was what he said every time I screwed up, so he can’t have been that serious this time...right? “We had to call the party off just to look for you, and all along you were fooling around with some girl?”
“Allison is not just some girl—”
“Kevin, I do not care who she is. You can’t just disappear on your own,” Mom snapped.
I threw my hands up and surrendered myself—to my parents or the forces above that were making a comedy show out of my life, I didn’t know.
“I’m sorry, okay?”
“Go to your room. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” Mom looked so sad that even though anger was still flaming through my body at my parents’ treatment of Allison Lotte, I didn’t defend myself. I could recognize when the fight was lost.
So I ran up the stairs and slammed the door to my bedroom, hating everyone and everything.
I hated the fact that my parents hadn’t even given me a chance to explain myself.
I hated that they automatically assumed the worst when they heard I was hanging out with a white girl.
I hated that Mitch had betrayed me.
I hated that he had probably been laughing at me all along, and I’d just been too stupid or stubborn to realize it.
I hated that thanks to him, the one girl in the entire world who didn't make me feel like an oversized moron was no longer going to associate with me.
Above all, I hated myself for never being able to do anything right.
Through the floor, I could hear Mom and Dad yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. Great. After ruining two parties in one night, I was now going to single-handedly cause my parents’ divorce. The universe really didn’t let up with its crap, did it?
“Hear that?” Nancy, who didn’t have a tactful bone in her body, poked her obnoxious head into the bedroom and squinted at my figure sprawled on the bed. “You’re disintegrating our household.”
“Shut up,” I said bitterly. “Your face is disintegrating.”
“Are you sure it’s my face and not your ability to think of creative comebacks?”
“Nancy, I’m really not in the mood.”
Surprisingly, my little sister actually shut up after that. She must have sensed that she was one button shy of pressing my very last nerve.
I heard the rustling of bed-sheets and thought she was going to bed without making a single snarky comment about my oversized body (something she had made a habit of every night we’d been bunking together). Maybe there was hope left in this terrible world after all.
Unfortunately, Nancy ruined my euphoria by rolling over and clicking on the light.
I blinked at the harsh flood of yellow and threw the sheets over my head. “Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep off this bad night here.”
“Oh, hush,” she said (she actually said those words to me). “I just have to turn in my science fair template online. I’ll be done in two seconds.”
“One, two,” I counted. “Time’s up.”
“You’re really funny, you know that?”
I sat up in bed and squinted at Nancy, who was quite a sight for sore eyes. Everything about her looked wrong on so many levels.
My sister looked like the average nine-year-old from the neck down. She was dressed in a girly pink pajama set, her feet tucked into a pair of fluffy slippers.
From the neck up, though, Nancy looked like a forty-year-old writer five minutes away from missing a deadline. Her face already held the telltale stress lines of old age, her hair was thrown in a haphazard ponytail, and her black-framed reading glasses looked way too old to have been in the kid’s section at the optometrist.
“Why is your science fair template due…” I squinted at the clock on my nightstand, “at eleven fifty-nine p.m. on a Friday, anyway?”
Nancy heaved one of her patronizing sighs, something she did quite often during our conversations. “It’s not due,” she said, like that should have been obvious. “I just have to be the first to turn mine in, and the school website begins taking applications in one minute.”
That explanation made even less sense to me than Nancy’s lecture on nuclear radiation two nights ago, which was saying something. “Oh. Is there a prize for turning the application in first?”
“No, idiot,” Nancy spat. “I just have to beat Leya Singh.”
“Leya who?”
“Will you stop talking to me? Leya is only the most academically competitive girl in the grade.” Nancy beat her head in frustration. “Ugh, and she’s so annoying! She’s always bragging about everything, and for once, I have to beat her. I have to shut her up.”
“You are in third grade!” I shouted, hoping to knock some sense into my sister. “You don’t have to do anything. You should be wearing diapers and playing dress-up, not out-competing a bunch of grade schoolers.”
Okay, maybe it had been too long since I’d been in the third grade.
It didn’t matter anyway, because it appeared Nancy wasn’t even listening to me anymore. She was staring at her screen so intently that if she leaned anymore forward, she would have probably fallen into her laptop. She clicked her mouse a few times and then a wide grin split across her face. “Yes!”
“Geez,” I said as I watched Nancy execute a bad rendition of the Wobble across the floor. “Stuff like this actually happens outside of ‘High School Musical’?”
Nancy stopped mid arm flail and gave me a withering look. “Just because you’ve never cared about academics a day in your life doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t, either.”
I shrugged. “I just don’t see the point in doing something I don’t like just to get a grade I don’t care about.”
“You are so going to regret that attitude when you’re applying to colleges in three years.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I don’t want to go to college.”
I’d said that last bit mainly to see what kind of hilarious reaction Nancy would give me (she collapsed onto her bed and just stared at me, speechless), but now that the sentence was out there forever, I really thought about not going to college.
What would be the point, unless it were for music school or something? The only thing I really wanted to do for the rest of my life was singing. And I didn’t need to waste time and energy on a crummy paper diploma to be told that I could launch a singing career. I could start right then and there if I wanted to.
Although there was the small issue of me not exactly having a star quality body, if you know what I mean.
“You have to go to college,” Nancy said finally. “Is that even a question?”
“Well, why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because…” Nancy faltered, probably the first time she’d ever done so in her life, and I could tell I was getting to something important here. She was clearly struggling to find an adequate response. “Because that’s just the way it is.”
“Because Mom and Dad expect it, you mean? Because I’m Chinese?” I was on a roll. “Because what?”
“A little of both, I suppose.” Nancy slowly shut her laptop lid, her eyes still trained on mine, which made me feel uncomfortably like a bacteria specimen being scrutinized under a microscope. “How did you turn out like this, Kevin?”
“Like what?”
“So Americanized. Don’t you feel pressure to fit in with the rest of the Asian kids?”
“No,” I scoffed. “Why would I want to be lumped in with a bunch of math and science geeks?”
“But you must feel bad about disappointing Mom and Dad.”
“Not really,” I lied. Then I sighed. “Okay, maybe a little.”
Nancy gave me an oddly wistful look. “Well, I feel the pressure all the time.”
“You do?”
She nodded, and I sat there for a moment, unsure how to take this new development. My little sister had always struck me as one of those rare individuals who had life handed to them on a rose-colored platter and cruised through everything at the top of the pack. Hearing her be so frank about the problems in her life was a little…unsettling. It was like learning that girls did fart after all (a fact that had unfortunately been spoiled for me at the tender age of six, thanks to Grandma Zhou and her…gassiness).
“Yeah. Like today, for instance. I got asked out by one of the smartest Chinese boys in the sixth grade, and—”
“Excuse me? Which grade?”
“Sixth.”
“Sixth graders are hitting on you?” I demanded, outraged. That was like me getting hit on by a ninety-year-old lady, almost.
And why the hell were kids who’d barely graduated preschool dating?
For the first time, I understood what it was like to feel brotherly overprotective of my little sister. “And did you report this chump for being a disgusting old pedophile?”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “Kevin.”
“Did you at least kick him where it hurts?”
“No! Why would I do that? You are so weird,” Nancy muttered. “Anyway, don’t beat him up, because I turned him down.”
“Oh. Why?”
“I thought of what Mom would say.” Nancy sat up taller, put this really ridiculous, hoity-toity expression on her face, and did a scarily accurate impression of Mom’s broken English. “Ai-ya, that boy will interfere with your study! No dating until you marry! Now go work on book report!”
For some reason, probably because I was delusional with exhaustion, that actually made me crack up.
“And that’s just the beginning. I’ve given up so much in pursuit of all these perfect grades,” Nancy sighed. “Friends. Sleep. Sometimes even eating.”
That sobered me up. “Now that’s crossing the line.”
Nancy just shook her head and climbed back under the covers, switching off the light so that we were shrouded in darkness again. “You don’t understand, Kevin. Someone’s gotta make sacrifices around here to satisfy our parents. And if it’s not you, then everything—everything—falls to me.”
As I lay there, listening to the low thrum of the house appliances, it occurred to me that my little sister might have hated my guts much more than I’d always said I hated hers. And she had every reason to.
Nancy was right. I never tried in school or anything I wasn’t interested in. Years ago, when Mom forced the two of us to take piano lessons, I hardly cared to learn the song ‘Chopsticks’. Nancy had shouldered the responsibility of playing complicated Mozart’s Concerto pieces during piano recitals at age six, while I played with my Gameboy in the corner.
And that was just one exampl. I realized all at once that I had never once helped Nancy out with anything while she was busy stretching herself to fit all of our parents’ demands, never once even tried to understand my sister and her reasons for being who she was.
In conclusion, I was a terrible person. This night had proven that several times over.
“Nancy?”
After enough time passed that I thought my sister had fallen asleep, she finally replied. “Yeah?”
“Sorry.” I paused. “And thanks.”
“What are you getting all sappy for, doofus? Just stop being so moronic all the time is all I ask.”
Even if this night had been weirdly terrible and philosophical all at once, it was good to know Nancy’s unlovable personality would never change.
As for me, I wasn’t planning on doing a complete attitude makeover or anything, but I supposed I could start with the little things.
Very little things.
*****
On Monday, I found out that there was something worse than being a fat outcast in school: being a fat outcast who was about as liked by his only friends (now ex-friends) as a rat in a sack lunch.
In English, it didn’t take me long to figure out that Allison was no longer talking to me. In fact, she wasn’t even breathing the same air as me.
When I sat down in my regular seat, she snatched up all her things and relocated to the other end of the room, where Tommy Masters and Donny the Antisocial Poetry Nerd exchanged smug looks.
I half-expected Vanessa to make a snarky comment about Allison’s obvious blow-off, but she wasn’t talking to me, either. Apparently that bite Liang Liang had given her was still stinging.
I could feel Vanessa’s glares on the side of my neck the whole time while Goldberg lectured on participial phrases. It made me very, very nervous, because I kept picturing that Vanessa would lean over, take a chomp out of my neck, and suck my blood out like a Capri Sun.
I don't know, maybe I'd been watching too many horror movies.
And because Mitch and I were no longer on speaking terms, I didn’t go to our usual table during lunch that day. In fact, I didn’t even go to the cafeteria at all. I did something unheard of for the greatest failure of the century: I headed to the school library.
It took me several missed turns and wrong hallways to even find the dang place, because I’d never even stepped foot in there before.
It was a sign of how broken my bro-bond with Mitch was, that I was willing to bury myself with all those boring books rather than sit in the cafeteria and breathe the same air as that traitorous numbskull.
The second I entered the library, I wanted to run back out.
Not just because there were so many books I thought I was going to break out into a rash, but also because when I swept my eyes across the area, the only available seat I could spot was right next to that social disaster Yue Han.
Naturally, he was passing his lunch in the library.
Then it occurred to me that I was passing lunchtime in the library as well. Which put me on the same level as Yue Han.
I got the sudden urge to throw myself off the school roof.
Then the worst happened: Yue Han spotted me. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I were any other person, but this kid had always had some freaky notion that the two of us were friends just by race association. Even though I’d done my best to blow him off, he still hadn’t gotten the message, judging by the fact that he flagged me down like an airplane when our eyes met.
“Over here!” Yue Han whispered.
I looked around the library, realized nobody cared who I was talking to, and figured I had nothing to lose. I made my way through the maze of bookshelves and sat down next to Yue Han, who started speaking to me in Mandarin so rapidly that my eyes crossed trying to follow what he was saying.
I finally put up my hands. “Whoa, big guy. Let’s speak in English. We’re in America.”
Yue Han stared at me and then sighed, muttering something under his breath—the Chinese word for ‘Americans’, I thought I caught.
“Okay,” he said in his weirdly accented English. “Let us forget our beautiful native tongue and adopt this ugly foreign one, then.”
“Um...okay,” I said. It was best not to argue with certified lunatics when they got like this; I saw that on an episode of 20/20.
My gaze fell upon the thick book lying before Yue Han and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head when I realized what it was.
“Are you studying for the SATs, dude?” I demanded incredulously.
“Of course. Are you?”
I choked back my surprise, but not very well. “Heck no! We are in the ninth grade.”
Yue Han beamed. “That is correct.” Then he continued smiling, which alarmed me even further. “You are very lucky, Kevin. You have had the privilege of studying for these wonderful tests since you came out of the womb.” He sighed. “America has so many opportunities.”
I made an odd strangling noise in the back of my throat. I couldn’t believe I was actually having this conversation; it felt like something out of the Twilight zone. “Er…yeah. How long have you been studying for, then?”
“Me? Since I moved to America.”
“When was that?”
Yue Han tilted his head up and thought for a moment. “Seven years ago.”
Okay, this was just getting ridiculous. Even Nancy hadn’t started prepping for her SATs yet, and Nancy was the craziest study junkie I knew.
I stared at Yue Han, who stared back at me, and I realized that even if we were from the same culture, there was a huge language barrier between us.
“Dude, you need to get laid,” I said finally.
“What does that mean?”
I didn’t reply. Instead, I folded my arms together and lay my head down on the table, trying to get some sleep before I was forced to go back to that hellish jungle they called high school.
Even this obvious move didn’t discourage Yue Han, who wouldn’t have recognized a subtle ‘go away’ message if it smacked him upside the head. He poked me sharply on the arm.
“Ow!”
“I just came up with an idea. Would you like to me to tutor you in the SATs? And in turn, can you help with my English?” Yue Han looked flustered. “I am having a hard time making friends, and memorizing that script for the musical.”
I stared. I wasn’t sure how to break the news to him that it wasn’t his language that needed improvement, but his personality.
But maybe I could help him with that. I mean, I was a pretty nice guy, kind of. Maybe not much else, but I wasn't the type to stand by while my fellow countrymen were fed to the sharks...usually.
“Sure, I'll help you out. But no SAT tutoring.”
Now if only I didn't turn out to regret this. That was all I was asking for.