Monday morning I drift through the halls of Westview, mind somewhere else entirely. The halls are decorated for fall, with fake leaves drooping from the doorframes and pumpkins everywhere. A more sanitized version of autumn. I miss my old school, where they went all out for Halloween. Every door would be decorated by the last week of September, with a giant werewolf statue dressed in the basketball jersey outside the gym, complete with headband and matching shorts. Here, decorations are probably frowned upon as a distraction from what we “should” be focused on.

I keep thinking about Tina. About understanding things from Tina’s point of view. Maybe we’re both trapped, tethered to our reality, just like those ghosts. My impossible dream of growing up to be like Yuja Wang—with her stunning performances and gorgeous costumes—the opposite of what Tina wants. She wants to be herself, and I want to be someone else.

During one of the breaks between classes, I text Delia.

Me: i know i should be patient, but i need to know

Me: why did you say not again when i mentioned the wishes?

Me: is my sister in danger?

Delia: It’s easier if we talk in person. Do you want to go out for lunch?

Delia told me to wait for her by the front entrance. She roars up in a motorcycle, dressed all in black. Some of the other students stare, curious at her appearance.

“I have an extra helmet if you want to ride with me, or I can park and we can walk.” I take the offered helmet, eager for us to talk. The only other time I’ve been on a motorcycle is when we visited Taiwan. Baba borrowed a scooter from one of our relatives for when we wanted to get around the city. The feeling of the wind in my hair as we sped down the street was both exhilarating and terrifying.

The traffic near the school is steady during the day, and Delia maneuvers us around the cars easily until we find a spot to park on the street.

“I got a craving for noodles, that all right?” she asks, and I nod. Even though there are people sitting outside waiting for a table on the benches, Delia strolls into the noodle shop like she knows someone. She waves at one of the servers, who puts us at a table in the back corner.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been to this restaurant, though the decor seems familiar, like many Hong Kong–style cafés seem to follow. Glass-top tables, chopsticks and soup spoons and napkins in their holders you have to pull out yourself, laminated menus that are always a little sticky with pictures of the various noodle dishes. Another server brings over a silver pot of tea and two cups for us to pour on our own.

“The beef noodle here is excellent,” Delia says, and then leans in, speaking conspiratorially. “The new chef is Taiwanese. But their shrimp wontons are really top-notch too. I’ve had them for years.” I sneak glances at Delia while I look over the selections on the menu. She runs her fingers through her messy hair, trying to untangle the strands, still blue but slightly more faded now. I don’t know anything about her except for her kindness, the way she helped me and spoke up for me, even though she didn’t have to. I somehow knew even though my question about the wishes was intrusive, she wouldn’t mind answering.

The server comes by again, speaking in the brusque way that those of auntie age usually do in these cafés, and we put in our orders. Delia pours us both tea in the cups and nudges one toward me. I put my hand around it, savoring the warmth.

“You’re doing okay?” She looks at me over the steam of the cup, making her features waver as she blows gently on the surface to cool it.

Maybe it’s the tea. Maybe it’s the way I feel, unsettled and adrift. I crave some sort of reassurance, some sort of promise that everything will be fine. Which is why I messaged her. Because she survived whatever Shen alluded to. Whatever encounter she had.

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to her,” I say quietly. “She’s my sister.”

“Maybe you won’t believe me, but I’ve been exactly where you are,” Delia says. She leans forward on the table, huddling in on herself. “Someone I…cared about also came under the thrall of a temple.”

Her gaze unfocuses then, as she speaks to somewhere above my head.

“Two years ago, I was a senior in high school, and my biggest worry was that I wouldn’t get accepted into the same university as my girlfriend.” Shen had said she graduated last year, so I thought she wasn’t too much older than us, but whatever happened must have delayed her graduation somehow.

“She knew her parents wouldn’t let her go to her dream university. Not prestigious enough for what they envisioned for her. The plan was for us to move out east, get whatever scholarships we could, move away from here and from our parents’…reach. It would be just the two of us, taking on the world.” Her voice remains light, as if she is speaking about someone else, and yet I can see her grip tighten on the napkin she is slowly crumpling in her hand.

“Hope came to me one day, excited. She said she found a wandering temple, one that traveled over from Taiwan. The god is supposed to be very…” Her forehead scrunches as she tries to find the word, snapping her finger each time as she struggles with the correct term. “Very…靈…accurate? Prophetic? A true god. A powerful god.

“It wasn’t something I understood very well.” Delia shrugs. “My mom went to church. She didn’t force me to believe, but I didn’t learn a lot about the traditional gods and all that because of it. I wanted Hope to be happy though, and what was the harm? It sounded kind of cute…a place that grants wishes. The power of positive thinking.

“But she was…different after that. After she entered the temple. At first it was small things, like things she liked before, she didn’t like anymore. Or the other way around. But soon she was obsessed with what she wanted, no matter how much she had to suffer for it, and no matter who else she hurt along the way.”

“And what was it that she wanted?” I ask, even though I’m a little afraid of what Delia will say.

Two bowls of noodles are placed before us before she can answer.

“Eat first.” She gestures, handing me a pair of chopsticks, the conversation interrupted for now.

A clear broth with wontons floating inside. I stir it with my chopsticks to find thin noodles underneath. Some green onions on top. A few pieces of bok choy. The scent that comes off the bowl makes my stomach growl, and I realize I barely ate anything this morning. Delia pushes a container of chili oil before me, and I drizzle a scoop over everything. The oil makes swirls on the broth, and for a moment I’m reminded of the mirror in Tina’s room, feel myself falling in….

I squeeze my eyes shut. Stop it. I quickly scoop up a wonton in my mouth and take a bite, burning my mouth in the process. I blow on the other half of the wonton, more careful this time, The wonton skins are thin, almost translucent, so that the pink of the plump shrimp can peek through. I slurp it up with some of the broth, which is a little sweet from the shrimp and not too salty.

“What happened to her?” I ask after I swallow, eager to know the rest of her story.

“She got what she wanted,” Delia says simply. “She’s studying neuroscience now at Yale, on track to get into medical school to study psychiatry. Living the dream of every Taiwanese immigrant parent.”

I busy myself with scooping more wontons into a bowl. Contemplating this. Could it just be that her girlfriend changed her mind? That she decided what her parents wanted for her was safe, that it was the way she should live her life?

Delia’s expression turns hard. “I know what this sounds like. This is how most people react when I tell them about Hope and the temple. But I am telling you, as someone who spent almost every day with her, whatever she was before she left for school…she was not Hope!” She slams her hand on the table once, twice for emphasis, rattling our dishes.

She looks pained as she utters the next words: “When you are as close to someone as we were. When we spoke to each other about our dreams and our wishes. When she became something that we said we both despised…”

“You said though that she got what she wanted,” I say. “What did she wish for?”

“She wanted her parents to accept her,” Delia says.

Isn’t that all we want in the end? What we all secretly wish for? For our parents to welcome us with open arms and say they’re proud of us? But that’s a sort of dream usually found in movies and shows. It’s not the reality I will ever know. My parents care for us in the way they know how, which is to push us to excel, even if it will break our relationship in the process. Even if it will break me.

“But it wasn’t her parents who changed. It was her. She morphed into a dutiful daughter. Obedient, meek, agreeable. Into someone I didn’t even recognize.”

They challenge us by pushing us down, tell us that we’re not achieving our true potential. It works for some people like me, who will try my best to climb back up that scaffold, to achieve what I’m capable of. But Tina…the more you tell her to do something, the more she wants to do the opposite. The more she will fight back. Not like how she is now.

The noodles sit heavy in my stomach.

“I was forbidden from seeing her. I was an obstacle in the way of their daughter’s glorious future.” One corner of her lip turns upward, mocking herself. “And she didn’t fight them. She didn’t fight for me. For us. She let her parents send her away without a word.

“But I would be fine with that if I was only a distraction, a chance to rebel. Except I couldn’t get over the fact that there is a temple out there peddling wishes. Wishes that changed the girl I loved, that could hurt others as well.”

“So what did you do?” I whisper. Did she make a wish too?

“I went looking for the temple,” Delia continues, braver than I would have been in her shoes. “I had a blurry photo that Hope had taken secretly. The storefront was an art studio, but the store itself, what was hidden in the back…all of it was gone.”

I make my way through the rest of my noodles, contemplating this. I can tell from the determined way she spoke that she would have done anything to figure out the answer, no matter the cost, so that she could help the person she cared for.

“I started spending more time in Chinatown, asking around about this temple, trying to find out more about it. That was when I met Shen’s family. They found me and…told me to stop looking.”

That makes no sense to me. “Why would they do that? Aren’t they supposed to be the good guys?”

“They told me that no good will come out of my investigation. They’ve been following the effects of the temple for a while, tracking them….” She looks at me, serious. “There have always been people who try to take advantage of others. Scammers, liars stepping on other people to try and get ahead. Whatever the Temple of Wishes is, they’re not that. They’re real.”