29

Arriving at the front door, also open, she tried and failed to locate a bell or buzzer, and was about to lift the hand-shaped knocker when an elegant woman walked across the hallway and paused as she saw Vân Ước. She looked puzzled, clearly wondering who this girl was, standing in her doorway. She was not a Tiff, or a Pippa—a girl whose parents one knew. Vân Ước didn’t have mind-reading skills, but it was fairly obvious what Billy’s mother was thinking in the moment before an appropriately warm smile of greeting appeared on her subtly frozen face.

Billy came leaping down the stairs, barefoot, in jeans, hair hanging down in its characteristic wet tangle. She’d have to give him the low-down on the towel-dry one day. She was pretty sure he must just shake his head, like a dog, when he got out of the shower. She frowned—must not think about Billy in the shower. Too distracting for a walk through the minefield of his parent-inhabited house.

“Vân Ước! Great—you’re so early. You’ve met my mum? Abi.”

Vân Ước smiled, made eye contact, and held out her hand to shake hands with Abi, as Debi had taught her to do. “How do you do?” she said. People like Abi expected some formality, a straight-line version of Anglo good manners, which, to them, were simply “good manners.” In Vân Ước’s family, arms folded across the stomach and a gentle bow was the well-mannered greeting to an older person.

“Lovely to meet you, Vân Ước. Do join us in the garden. You’re our very first guest.”

Billy gave Vân Ước a friendly eye roll, as though to say, Yeah, I know, full on, and they followed his mother outside.

Mel appeared with a massive platter of gourmet-looking sausages. She smiled and said hello to Vân Ước, and started tonging sausages onto an equally massive barbecue hot plate.

“I don’t know about your mother, Vân Ước,” Abi said, “but I’ve found that if there’s a large group of young men about to arrive, who might also be having a beer, it’s a very good idea to have loads of sausages and bread ready to go.”

Vân Ước just smiled. Her mother had nearly flipped her lid when one young man was reported to be in the general vicinity of their apartment; a large number of them turning up might cause spontaneous combustion.

“I don’t think I’ve met your parents yet, have I? Are you new to Melbourne? A corporate transfer? From Singapore, perhaps?”

“Mum, don’t be such a stickybeak. Vân Ước’s family lives in Melbourne. She was born here. You don’t know everyone in Melbourne.”

“You’d be surprised, darling.”

“I’ll tell you three things about Vân Ước. She duxed honors math last year, equal with Michael Cassidy (whose parents you do know), she duxed French, and she is the best art student in our year.”

Vân Ước could see Billy’s mother assessing her in a blink; she was a scholarship social nonentity, and Abi was far from impressed to hear the three things. Whereas she was astounded that Billy had registered anything at all about her that predated the fateful creative writing class.

The doorbell rang. “And that’s all you’re getting,” said Billy, bending down and giving his mother a quick kiss. “And don’t forget you said you and Dad were going to be out tonight.”

“And we are, but we’ll be back before midnight, by which time we expect you to be saying good-bye to your guests and settling down for some sleep after such a big day.”

“Sure.”

Billy took Vân Ước’s hand, a gesture that delivered some much-needed reassurance, and which she saw Abi register immediately, as new arrivals flowed into the garden, greeting Abi and Mel, helping themselves to drinks, and setting up a volume of chatter that would continue to grow.

“Vince, can you chuck on some music, buddy?” Billy asked. Vân Ước could see that Vincent was thrilled to be the one selected; he headed back inside, fiddling with his iPod, and very soon Chet Faker was filtering through the French doors.

She sat in a garden chair in the shadows for ages. She felt like a shadow. Billy was so much the center of things; his crew members were elated at the day’s triumph—this regatta vindicated the grueling training regimen they’d been subjected to all summer. The guys, she saw, had mostly come preloaded, as they called it in media reports on underage drinking, so they were more than half pissed and could afford to drink at what looked like a moderate rate at their friend’s house. Naturally, she couldn’t drink; her parents would have a complete meltdown if she came home with alcohol on her breath.

Lots of them would go out clubbing after the party, armed with fake IDs, and keep up the drinking. She wondered how their bodies could stand it. She knew from ambient school chat that Billy’s were the sort of parents who would let other parents know that they’d be serving some alcohol, and it would be up to individual families as to whether that was okay. But once a critical mass had arrived, it was a free-for-all, and surely the parents knew that and blind-eyed it. When she looked at the ice-filled metal tubs decoratively placed on tables and laden with beers and bottled mixed vodkas, the girls’ preferred drink, she was amazed that anyone ever made it to school on Mondays.

Billy finally managed to penetrate the wall of people and reached her just as his father appeared at the doorway into the house.

His presence was electric. Like Billy’s mother, this guy was a perfectly polished magazine version of “parent.” He oozed authority. Billy broke away from her, with obvious regret, and went over to stand next to his father, who looked at him with pride and ownership, but no apparent warmth. Vân Ước got the feeling, looking at them together, that it could be this relationship that fueled Billy’s restlessness.

They looked like superior beings framed in the backlit glow of the French doors.

It clicked for her, the thing about Billy—he was no longer comfortable in the role he’d been assigned. He looked the part. He knew it perfectly. It just didn’t play so well anymore.

“Guys, a quick word,” Billy’s father said to the crowd. The noise died down. “Congratulations for today. You rowed like the winners you are. We’re going to kill it this year! Here, and then in England. Row, Crowthorne!”

Vân Ước nearly jumped out of her skin to hear the whole group yell back, Row, Crowthorne! This must be what they all did standing on riverbanks at regattas. A whole new world. A strange world.

“I DIDN’T HEAR YOU,” shouted Billy’s father.

“ROW, CROWTHORNE! ROW, ROW, ROW! ROW, CROWTHORNE!”

“That’s more like it. Party here after Head of the River—it’ll be a third-generation win in this house, so the least we can do is buy the drinks.”

He raised a hand in farewell and disappeared to hoots and whoops of approval. Someone turned the music up.

She heard the inevitable bitchy comment about her clothes: “Check out Vân Ước. She’s come as a dude.”

Dude, fraud, misfit—sure, that was about right; the shape of not fitting in was almost comfortably familiar.

She held a glass of mineral water and moved about the terrace as though she were looking for someone. A strong pang of wishing for Jess swept through her, and she wondered where little glass vials were when you needed them.

The world was full of contradictions and things that couldn’t be explained. The interesting edge of science was located at that point: trying to explain the inexplicable. Making the intuitive leap. It was where all the creativity happened in that field.

She castigated herself; a dumb wish wasn’t science—it wasn’t anything close. Puzzling over it for the umpteenth time, she still couldn’t come up with a theory to explain why this was happening, but what she was feeling was real, happening in the physical world, not just in her imagination.

Even at the opposite end of the terrace from Billy, she was conscious of his awareness of her. The party was keeping them apart, but he was moving toward her as though she had gravitational pull. It wasn’t natural. Unless you were a planet.

It was obvious, unavoidable: Vân Ước had to find the writer who taught that class and ask her about the vial. But how could she even broach such a ridiculous topic? You know that little vial in the creative prompts box? Have you ever heard of unexplained magical events following its use by a student? Please! Who was she kidding? It wouldn’t be possible to say such stupid words out loud. And how would she even find her?

She paused beside a table, under a tree, checked her watch and looked around, as though she expected someone she knew to arrive at any second.

“Hey.”

Finally! Someone was going to talk to her. It was Vincent. She was pleased and, even though she didn’t like him, she smiled. He was going to make her look normal. A normal, partygoing, socialized person.

“Can you move? I can’t reach…” He stretched an arm past her as she stepped sideways. She was blocking his access to the beer.

“Sorry.” She looked for Billy. He was still being waylaid. She smiled in response to his apologetic grimace. It was like one of those horrible dreams when you want something to happen but it’s all slowed down and ends up being unattainable. Time for a bathroom visit. Surely that could kill ten or fifteen minutes.

By the time she emerged from the bathroom in response to someone banging on the door, the music had been turned up again, and the French doors framed a group of girls dancing with arms up in the air, shouting along with Taylor Swift. She stayed inside and stood on the edge of a group. She smiled, listened, and tried to look interested, but no one acknowledged that she was there, or said anything to include her in the conversation, so she slipped away and found herself in the entrance hallway of the house.

She headed outside to the front garden. Why not just walk home and tell her parents someone gave her a lift? What a relief to have that brain wave. There was no rule that said she had to stay. Billy could have tried harder to reach her sooner. Longing looks only got you so far.

Groan, Holly and Pippa were standing like sentinels on either side of the gate.

“Hi, Vân Ước,” said Pippa. “How are you?” She was drunk.

“Hi.”

“Tell me”—she leaned in, then turned sideways to blow her smoke away from Vân Ước—“do you get back to China much? Because I love Shanghai. Love. It.”

“My family actually came from Vietnam, originally.”

“Oh, gosh, sorry. Well, Hội An is beautiful, too.”

“So I hear. I haven’t been.”

“Are you going away this year, Pippa?” asked Holly, grinding out her cigarette on the flagstone path.

“Sicily in September. My parents are so boring. What about you?”

“We’re not even leaving the country. Port Douglas. My parents are so tight.” Holly looked at Vân Ước. “What’s up—lover boy ignoring you? Has he hooked up with someone else? What did you expect? Is the guy who lives here really going to go out with someone who works in a paper hygiene hat?”

That was it. He’d asked her to his stupid party. She’d been snubbed, ignored, bored, and now insulted. She was going back in there, and if he wasn’t available immediately, she was going home. Surely by now he’d been stopped and hugged and congratulated and had chatted and joked with every stupid person there.

They almost collided, he entering the house from the terrace, and she returning there.

He put his arms around her, moving to the music. “All I wanted tonight was some time with you, and here it is, finally.”

She looked up into his eyes. “Why do you think I’d want to dance with someone who thinks it’s cool when little birds get electrocuted?”

He laughed in protest. “Way to trash a romantic moment. It wasn’t that the little bird got fried; it was the odds. I mean, what are the odds? Come on, it’s never going to happen, is it? But it did.”

“Probably something like the odds of us going out.”

“Nuh, that was a sure thing.”

“Take a look around and see what your friends think about it.”

Billy looked around and, of course, saw nothing but smiles. She was the one getting greased off in private.

“They’ll get used to it,” he said, leaning down and kissing her.

She pulled away. Public kissing. This was so far outside her experience, she couldn’t even begin to tell him the number of ways it made her uncomfortable. She failed hard all the way around the social merry-go-round.

“I’ve got to go” was what she managed to say.

“Right now? Really?”

“Yup, well, soon. I’m being picked up.”

He looked annoyed. A whole party had eaten him up like ice cream, but the one thing he wanted wasn’t available.

“Hey, I was lucky to be able to come at all.”

“I’ll walk you out, then, I guess.”

They headed out through the house and she let go of Billy’s hand in the front garden. By the time they were halfway down the path, they were a respectable distance apart. She could see the chicken-mobile through the gate. She should have realized; of course her father and Bác Bảo would arrive early.

Holly came hurrying in from the street, where she’d been smoking again, if smell was anything to go by. “Billy, there’s some super-suspicious-looking Asians in a van parked right outside your place. They’ve been lurking there for ten minutes.”

Vân Ước recognized this as another perfect test of Billy’s infatuation. It killed her to keep engaging with an idea she rejected, but surely only magic would get Billy past the social faux pas of going out with a girl who rode in the Happy Chickens chariot.

“Don’t worry; it’s my father. He works for the man driving the van. They’re here to pick me up.”

“Can you say sorry to your dad if we’ve kept him waiting?” said Billy.

Vân Ước and Holly looked at Billy with competing levels of disbelief.

“Sure,” said Vân Ước, smiling. “See you on Monday.”

“Should I come out and say hi?” Billy asked.

“Maybe next time,” Vân Ước said, enjoying Holly’s gaping surprise.

Vân Ước walked out the gate, opened the passenger-side door of the van, and climbed in. Her father would never register that the tone in which the smoking girls on the footpath said, “Good night, Vân Ước,” and, “See you, Vân Ước,” was coated with insincere smarm.

She was going home in an unapologetic pumpkin. Her clothes had been clearly inappropriate all night. But she didn’t need to rush out or even to leave a sneaker behind. Unless the whateverthehellitwas expired over the weekend, Billy would know exactly where to find her on Monday morning.

She was expecting to have to explain to her father, and Bác Bảo, why her classmates were smoking on the footpath at the rowing ceremony dressed in skimpy evening dresses, so it was like getting a free kick when, instead, they expressed their disappointment that the teachers would smoke at an official school function. Thank heavens for too much hair and makeup. Those girls did look more like twenty-five than seventeen. And her father was clueless about what girls like these typically wore on any occasion.