Chapter 2 - I'll Be a Home for You

my own mother blackmails me

(nothing new, really)

Aang

At the end of the school day, Remy and I get into my mom’s unnecessarily large SUV. Ugh, Americans.

“First day of junior year!” She blasts the horn.

“Mom! I told you last year to stop doing that!” Like this day hasn’t been painful enough after having to share breathing space with her in the counselor’s office.

Mom flashes a smile at my best friend. “But Remy loves it.”

“I really do.” He nods, his blond hair even lighter after the summer. He’s wearing a red polo shirt, and his jeans are stained with paint.

“How was the summer in Alabama?” Mom looks at Remy in the rearview mirror as she starts the car. The engine rumbles to life.

“It was good.” His Southern drawl is stronger than before the holidays. “Nana taught me a new embroidery stitch, and Pops took me hunting.”

How he manages to fit his two personalities into one person, I’ll never know.

“Sounds like a perfect summer for you.” Mom pulls out of the parking lot. “Aang, how was your meeting with Ms. Foster?”

“It was okay.” I put on my seat belt.

“Just okay?” Remy elbows me. “You’ve been bothering Ms. Foster with emails the whole summer! And bothering us by talking about the emails. And now you don’t want to say more than okay? What happened in there?”

“It’s not bothering her when she’s literally our guidance counselor.” I cross my arms. “And she told us not to annoy her until senior year. Can you imagine?”

“Us?” Remy raises his eyebrow. “Who’s us?”

Shit.

“I meant me. She told me not to annoy her.”

“Aang …” Mom lowers her voice. “Tell us what happened with the guidance counselor, or no homework after dinner.”

I groan, sinking into the seat. “That stopped being funny a long time ago.”

“Ms. Jane, do not listen to him! It gets funnier every time you say it.” Remy punches me in the arm. “Now, spill!”

These two nosy bastards will hold me hostage in this car until I disclose this information. I know that much.

“Ms. Foster basically forced me to have the meeting together with JJ. How is that allowed? I understand she’s overworked, but—”

“JJ was there?” I catch Mom’s grin, specifically reserved for her. I haven’t seen that smile in over a year, and it better not be making a comeback.

“Unfortunately, she was. And I had legitimate concerns about my college application. But Ms. Foster goes off about how colleges want unique personalities, and JJ comes out of nowhere with how I should join cheerleading, and Ms. Foster thought it was the best idea ever?”

Remy’s eyes go wide. “You’re joining cheerleading?”

“Obviously not. It’s a stupid American sport, and it won’t help me get into Stanford.”

“I don’t know, Aang.” Mom merges the car onto the highway. “It sounds like cheerleading would make your application more interesting. And what else will you do? Play football?”

They both giggle.

“Cheerleading and football are not the only sports in existence.” I roll my eyes. “I could do dragon boat racing, for example.”

“What’s dragon boat racing?” Remy asks.

I cite the Wikipedia article I read. “It’s a Chinese team water sport with dragon-shaped boats, twenty paddlers, a drummer, and a steerer, invented to honor Qu Yuan, a poet who—”

“We don’t live near a body of water,” my mom interrupts. “How exactly do you plan to row a boat?”

“If we lived in Hong Kong, that wouldn’t be a problem,” I mutter. Instead, I’m in this hellhole of an American suburb where the closest I get to Chinese culture is eating at Panda Express.

Mom brakes too aggressively, and my chest digs into the seat belt. “Sorry, noticed the red light too late.” She forces a chuckle and looks at me in the mirror. “Unfortunately, you’re not in Hong Kong, Aang. So maybe consider cheerleading? You never know, it might become your favorite thing.”

I scoff.

“I agree with Ms. Jane. You need more hobbies than learning Cantonese and doing math equations,” Remy says.

I sink further into the seat without responding. Silence fills the car.

Remy takes out a notebook and starts working on a new embroidery pattern. My mom switches on the radio and squeals when the station plays her favorite song, “Lucky.” She belts out the chorus. She’s as excellent a singer as she is a comedian. I put my headphones on.

Let’s assume I have lost my mind and want to do cheerleading. I have Chinese school on Monday and Thursday evenings. There’s no way I can do both in the same day.

But I still unlock my phone, angling it so Remy can’t see it, and google Stanford cheerleading team. A photo app notification appears before I click on the first result. A memory from two years ago!

The world has been made to laugh in my face.

My thumb hovers over the notification. I know which photo will appear if I tap it. I tear my eyes away from the screen and look out the window as Mom turns onto a smaller street.

My pulse jumps.

We’re passing her favorite bakery. At least, what used to be her favorite, due to their provision of “proper bread.” She never explained what that meant.

A vanilla scent fills my nose, even though there’s no way I can actually be smelling the bakery from inside the car. I turn back to my phone and frown. My thumb must have twitched, because instead of the notification, three faces stare at me.

Freshman Remy, laughing at the camera, pointing to my red T-shirt with the beginning of a joke visible: Parallel lines have so much in common …

Freshman me. My hair is shorter, my glasses bigger. I’m frowning, but there’s an upward curve to my lips that I’m fighting. I’m looking at her.

Freshman JJ, taking the selfie of us, but smiling at freshman me. Before she snapped the picture, she told me I looked good in the T-shirt. I told her the T-shirt was abominable.

You didn’t have to buy it.

I knew I didn’t have to. But she had asked, and the next thing I knew, I was walking to the register.

The car door opens, snapping me out in time to say bye to Remy. He strolls across his lawn and sits in a rocking chair on the wraparound porch. He goes back to sketching without even attempting to enter his house. Mom waits for a couple with a stroller to cross the road to Admaston Park, which separates our neighborhood from Remy’s, before driving away.

Since everyone seems hell-bent on torturing me today (myself included), I scroll through the photos that we took together freshman year. At the mall. At the library. At my house. At Remy’s house. My knuckles slowly turn white around my phone.

I should have deleted all of them after the fight.

When we get home, Mom goes to her study. I run up to my room, but halt midway through the staircase. I almost forgot.

I tiptoe down to the study and peek through the partially closed door, where I can see the altar: a red shelf holding a bowl of water, a vase of fresh daffodils, a candle, a wooden racehorse, and an old, yellowing photograph of my grandmother. Mom bows three times in front of it and says something in Cantonese. It’s the only time I hear her freely speak her mother tongue. I can’t call it ours. She puts a pack of cigarettes in front of the photo. She puts a new pack there once every couple of months. And always on my first day of school. I tried to add incense sticks to make it look like a proper altar, but she says she doesn’t like the smell. I wonder if the ancestors weep when they hear her say that.

I move away from the door. And like every day, the Hong Kong-shaped hole in my heart gets a little bigger.

In my room, I grab my laptop from the desk and flop onto my bed. My tacked-on Bruce Lee poster watches me from the opposite wall as the screen lights up and the Stanford Mathematics department website greets me. Once I’m near San Francisco, everything will be straightforward. Effortless. Over 62,000 people born in Hong Kong live there, and even more descendants. Cantonese is spoken in the streets. Restaurants make actual Cantonese food.

But to join a cheerleading team to get there?

Preposterous.

I try to run through all the reasons JJ gave this morning for why this is such a terrific idea. But I remember less the reasons and more how she sounded. American.

Freshman year, she pronounced said like set, job like jop, and think like fink, along with hundreds of other differences that made up her accent. Now, that sound is gone.

But when she started talking about Stanford and cheerleading in the guidance counselor’s office, she became more frantic, more desperate. And became ant, and she rolled the “R” in cheerleading. She sounded like she did before. Before she joined the cheerleading team at the beginning of sophomore year and lied about it for weeks. Before she started showing up late to Mathletes and forgetting our plans. Before the fight happened.

Before I made her choose.

When she asked me to join cheerleading, she sounded like she had before all that.

I open a new tab to check the timetable for the bus to the next town over where Chinese school is. To confirm that it would be logistically impossible for me to do cheerleading and Chinese school on the same day. Sure, cheerleading would be a few hours earlier, but the bus schedule in this part of central Massachusetts was created specifically to get people not to use the bus. I scroll down to the afternoon service.

My hand tightens around the laptop.

Well, fuck.