Nicki stopped short outside the duty-free store, causing me to nearly slam into her back. She seemed entranced by the bright lights bouncing off a display of jewel-colored perfume bottles.
“Let’s go in here,” she said.
“They won’t have gum,” I noted. “There’s another store down just a bit further.” I pointed, but she’d already started to weave her way through the aisles. She randomly picked up items: a stuffed bear holding a satin heart, a giant Toblerone bar, and a box of washed-out pastel-colored saltwater taffy. She inspected each one as if she worked for quality control and then put each back down. I trailed after her.
My mouth still burned from the jalapeños I’d had at lunch. Nicki claimed the best thing to eat before a big flight was huevos rancheros. She insisted the combination of protein from the eggs and cheese, along with the spice from the salsa, would ensure a good sleep on the plane. When I pointed out the entrée wasn’t on the menu, she’d raised one perfectly tweezed eyebrow. “Ordering off the menu is for the common person,” she’d declared. When the waiter came over, she turned on the charm, and before I’d known what was happening, he dropped off two custom plates just for us. And she was right—the huge meal made me want a nap.
Nicki grabbed a stuffed zebra and gave it a squeeze. “Things like this make me wish I had a kid brother or sister. Let me guess, you’re an only child too.”
My mouth fell open. “How did you—”
“Only children are different. They have to amuse themselves growing up. They’re independent, better problem solvers. There’s tons of research on it. I could tell by the way you’ve been talking. You’re just like me.”
Technically, I wasn’t just like her. I never knew what to say when people asked if I had any siblings. “About a half-dozen fully frozen” seemed too flip and required an explanation. Saying I was an only child felt like lying about the existence of my parents’ cryogenically suspended embryos. They were my brothers and sisters, just in cold storage in a medical lab.
My parents hadn’t had an easy time getting pregnant. Thanks to the fact that my mom was an early blogger, the whole world knew about their struggles. Then after three rounds of IVF, I took. My mom called me MBK on her blog—Miracle Baby Kim. She said she used the initials to protect my privacy, but how private could my life be when she plastered every one of my development milestones in cyberspace for the whole world to see?
Somewhere on the Internet there’s a picture of me as a three-year-old, wearing a tiara and giant pink fuzzy slippers, sitting on the toilet with the caption “MBK Finally Masters Potty Training!” The “finally” is a nice touch; nothing I like better than people thinking I was delayed in the hygiene department. My mom’s name was all over her blog; it didn’t exactly take a Mensa-level IQ to figure out that I was MBK. The truth was, she didn’t care how I felt about the blog. What she cared about were all the people who read it and gave her nonstop “you’re the best mom ever” feedback.
The year I turned ten, my mom wrote a long blog post where she announced to her legions of fans that she and my dad were officially giving up their efforts to have more children. They couldn’t keep up the nonstop cycles of IVF. It seemed Mother Nature didn’t have it in the plans for my mom to be the mother she wanted to be, with a minivan and the ability to construct something out of Legos while simultaneously preparing an organic dinner for her large happy family. And while she wanted to focus on her blessing (Beautiful MBK!), she could still grieve for what could have been and she would always see those frozen embryos as her babies. The Huffington Post picked up that blog post and ran it on their site. It’s one of their most downloaded pieces. They rerun it on Mother’s Day most years.
It was around that time that I started to become aware that I was a disappointment to my mom. When she’d imagined having children, none of them were like me. She wanted a daughter who liked to play with dolls and whom she’d punish with a wag of her finger, all while smiling at how adorable it was that I stole her makeup. My desire for tangle-free short hair and passion for books and blanket forts befuddled her. Why didn’t I want to skip rope outside with the other girls? Why didn’t I let her braid my hair into complicated patterns befitting a Disney princess? Why wasn’t I similar to her at all? How could she be a mothering expert when her own kid was so . . . awkward?
My mom was one of the first mommy bloggers. Thousands of people still read her site daily. They comment on her recipes (Super YUM Crock-Pot Meals!) and reviews of baby items (Bugaboo Strollers Worth Every Penny!). She’s blogged about how motherhood is hard and disappointing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. I can’t be the only one who realizes that she’s trying to talk herself into that fact. I believe that my mom loves me, I just don’t think she likes me. If she’d had more kids, maybe it would have made a difference. I guess neither of us will ever know.
Nicki sniffed a bottle of Burberry Brit perfume and then spritzed a tiny bit on her wrist. She held out her arm for me and I leaned in.
“Nice,” I said, but she’d already moved on to the next display.
She stared up at the tower of Grey Goose vodka. “Want some for the flight?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t think even you can talk this place into selling us booze.”
Nicki winked and I noticed she was wearing a hint of a shimmery eye shadow. “Who says they’re going to sell it?”
My heart picked up speed. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure we were alone. “You’re going to steal it?” I asked, lowering my voice. My heart rabbited into overdrive.
“No, we’re going to steal it,” she said, her light brown eyes sparkling. “No one ever suspects the nicely dressed girl with a British accent. They think I’m too posh to sink to thievery.”
A swarm of spastic butterflies tried to take flight inside my lungs. I was pretty sure I didn’t look too posh to be arrested. “I don’t know . . .”
“Up to you.”
The chatter from the two clerks at the front of the store as they debated the merits of Ryan Reynolds seemed unnaturally loud to my ears. I bit the inside of my cheek. “What happens if we get caught?”
Nicki’s lips curled up, Grinch-like. “Bad things. That’s why we’ll do it so we don’t get caught.” Her head tilted slightly toward the bottles of booze. “They haven’t put on the plastic antitheft devices yet, and I don’t see any cameras.”
She was right. Every other bottle in the store had a black plastic disk attached around the neck, but the display of Grey Goose was naked. I could almost hear the angel and devil perched on my shoulders. One advising me to do the right thing and go on to the next store and buy a pack of Trident like a good girl, and the other telling me that it wouldn’t kill me to take a risk now and then. Where had playing it safe gotten me? I wanted to be someone else, anyone else. Maybe if I wanted to change the course of my life I needed to change the things I did. Be someone who did daring things, like Nicki.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
Nicki poked my leather tote bag. “When it’s time, grab the closest bottle and drop it in.”
“How will I know it’s time?”
She tapped me on the nose. “You’ll know because you’re smart.” She turned back to the perfume display and grabbed a small bottle. “I’m going to check the price—my mom loves this stuff.” She’d taken only a few steps when her foot hooked into the handles of a brightly colored canvas bag stamped with a maple leaf and the words CANADA FOREVER, sitting on the floor among other similar bags.
I opened my mouth to warn her, but she’d already jerked forward with a loud oomph. Her arms flew up as she fell and the bottle of perfume collided with the ground with a brittle smash. A cloud of a citrus and musk scent filled the air. The clerks flew to her side.
I was about to do the same when I realized this was it. My hand jerked out as if it were under the authority of another force and yanked a bottle of vodka off the display, plopping it into my tote. I jammed my elbow over the top of the bag to pinch it shut and hustled to where Nicki was now standing between the two clerks. My heart beat out of control.
“Are you okay?” I asked, surprised that my voice didn’t crack with the electric tension filling every inch of my body, zapping down my nerves, lighting me up from the inside.
“I’m okay. I think.” Nicki looked down at the broken glass on the floor and her eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“You’ll have to pay for the perfume.” The tall clerk pointed to a YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT sign by the entrance.
Nicki drew herself even straighter. “But I wasn’t being careless. I tripped on your bags, which were all over the floor.”
The mouth on the tall clerk pressed into a tight line, like a slash across her face. “If you don’t pay for it, we have to call a manager.”
Panic flashed like a bright white light. I had to do something. I kicked the canvas bags now strewn across the floor. “You should call a supervisor. Maybe if you hadn’t been so busy talking, and instead had straightened up this mess, it wouldn’t have happened at all. You know, if she’s hurt, you’re liable. My dad’s a lawyer—he deals with this stuff all the time.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to swallow them back down. I hoped I was right. My dad was a dentist. Any legal knowledge I had was from watching The People’s Court when I stayed home sick from school. What had I done?
Nicki’s lip twitched. “Now that I think about it, my back is quite sore. I hit the floor pretty hard.” She rubbed the base of her spine.
The tall clerk looked ready to clobber Nicki, but the shorter woman with her hair tied up in a mountain of tiny braids put her hand lightly on the arm of the other. “We’re certainly sorry you fell.”
Nicki met her gaze. “And I’m sorry that the bottle broke.”
The short clerk smiled, her white teeth as bright as the wall tiles. “Well then, why don’t we just decide that no harm’s been done?” The tension that had been coiling inside me released.
“Are you sure?” Nicki asked. Her eyes were so wide, she looked like an anime character. When the clerk nodded, Nicki reached for me. “We should get back; our flight will be leaving soon.”
I nodded solemnly as if I were very concerned about timeliness. Every muscle in my body clenched as I walked over the threshold, anticipating a piercing alarm going off, but nothing happened. Nicki gripped my elbow. “Don’t look back. Only guilty people look behind them.”
My neck stiffened and I kept moving forward down the hall. The adrenaline that had rushed through my system seconds ago was now bailing ship and I felt lightheaded. My bag weighed a hundred pounds. I half expected every person we passed to develop x-ray vision, see through my tote, and point me out as a shoplifter. Nicki seemed to sense I was barely holding it together, and she pulled me along until we reached an empty gate area. We both started giggling as we dropped into a row of seats.
“I can’t believe I did that,” I said. I opened the bag expecting the vodka to be missing, a figment of my imagination, but the bottle was there. I glanced quickly at Nicki to see if she was impressed that I’d actually done it.
“Since we’re headed to England it would have been more fitting to have nicked some gin, but a girl has to work with the opportunities she’s got.” Nicki patted the side of my leather bag. “You were perfect. When you said that line about how I could sue them, I wanted to cheer.”
I shook my head. “Are you kidding? As soon as I took the bottle, all I wanted to do was run for it. I felt like I was going to freak out at any moment.”
She laughed. “But you didn’t. Being good at something doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard or scary—it just means that you keep moving forward when other people quit.”
I laughed. “I tend to be a quitter. I’m scared of everything.”
“Like what?”
I rolled my eyes. “I could make a list a mile long. For starters, I’m terrified of heights. I won’t even go to my grandparents’ new condo in Miami because they live on the twentieth floor. Usually when things scare me, I’m the first one to bail. I won’t go skiing, kayaking, or anyplace that looks like it will have spiders, and I get hives when I have to go to the dentist and my dad’s a dentist.”
Nicki wrinkled up her nose. “Now, I get the dentist phobia, but heights? If you’re going to be scared, be scared of something good.” She laughed. “You were scared to take the liquor, but you did it. That’s the difference between ordinary people and extraordinary. Extraordinary people might be afraid, but they do it anyway.”
My chin lifted slightly in the air. The shame over stealing was mixed up with pride in doing something risky. I wanted to brag about what I’d done and apologize all at the same time. Most of all I wanted her to keep talking. “I still can’t believe I did that,” I said. I wanted her to understand I wasn’t someone who did things like this. Heck, I wasn’t someone who did things at all, but maybe it was as simple as deciding that I didn’t want to be that person anymore.
Nicki threw an arm around me and gave me a half hug. “Think about it. I wonder what you might do if you let yourself really go? You know, every accomplishment starts with the decision to try. And then keep trying, even when it’s hard.” She smirked. “And of course, if life gives you an opportunity, take it before it disappears. Or at least before they put the antitheft device on it.”
I packed up what she said and placed it carefully into my memory. It struck me that her advice was important. Not because I wanted to become a master criminal—I felt bad about taking the booze and couldn’t imagine doing it again. But . . . I liked that I’d done it at least once. Been like Nicki. Daring. Not afraid. She seemed to have figured out the secret to life. All the brochures for the Student Scholars program had stressed how travel made a person grow. I’d secretly thought it was a bunch of marketing bullshit. How could a change in geography make a difference? But maybe it was possible: I could evolve into someone else. I could almost picture my mom’s approval . . . and the blog post she’d write about it.
The public-address system squawked and announced that our flight would start boarding. I couldn’t believe how the three hours had flown by. I pulled the bottle slightly out of the bag. “Do you want this?”
“You keep it. I don’t know the whole story with the guy and girl back at the gate, but I suspect you need it more than me.” She pushed herself up from the seat with a ladylike grunt. “We should get going. I still want to get that gum.”
I reached for her arm before she started to walk away. “Thanks. I was feeling really down before.”
“That’s what friends are for!” She poked me in the side as if I were being silly.
“Well, I appreciate you making me a friend after only a few hours.”
Nicki smiled. “Don’t you know? I decided we were friends the instant we met.”