I cannot sleep. Every fiber, every muscle of my body, is still full, floating high with window thoughts. When the boy left, my mind went with him, dashing through imaginary streets, all the way home.
I’m running down the dirt road, past fields and fields of grass as bright and green as a liquor bottle. Past the stray dogs that beg at farmers’ steps for clumps of dried rice. Past the distant violet ridges of the mountains. I pass my father—back bent and splotched with sweat—knee-deep in the rice field’s murky waters. I pass my mother—hanging laundry to dry under the breadth of her ginkgo tree, arms mottled dark with storm cloud bruises. I go all the way until I reach my sister, so we can be together again. Just as she wished.
Would I go home if I found a way to get past these bars? Or would I go see the sea? The expanding-chamber possibilities are terrifyingly endless, just like its waters. The thought of being out in the world—alone—is enough to make me stop breathing.
But would I be alone? There’s the boy and what he said: I want you to see it, too. Something about his voice, his eyes, makes me think I’m not the only one whose insides are smoldering.
But I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. And the longer he’s gone, the more these things start slipping, the way a dream fades with each waking hour of the morning.
My restless body is twisting, turning under every one of these thoughts when the humming starts. It’s like the noise a spirit would make—soft and keening. It curls under my door, calls me to where she is.
The hallway is wrapped in dark, its lanterns hanging dim and smokeless. The sound—a thin, waiflike song—slips through the cracks of Sing’s door, slides through Mama-san’s lock. It brings bumps like small mountains over my flesh.
When I draw close, the wailing stops. There’s scrambling, the sound of slippers on floorboards, and the heavy thud of palms against wood shaking the door.
“Please! Please, give me more.” Sing’s voice is loud. Too loud. “I’ll be good! I promise!”
I’m frozen in the hall, looking at all the dead lanterns. They hang in rows, still and bulbous, like crimson moons that have been harvested and strung up to dry.
“Just one more! Please!” Sing screams. “I’ll do anything! Anything you want!”
The door shudders again. The rage behind it grows as if there isn’t a girl there anymore, but a wildcat that’s hissing, spitting, snarling to get to her cubs. But there are no cubs. There’s only me, and somewhere in this maze of lanterns and dark there’s a needle waiting to slide into Sing’s veins and give her another few hours of relief.
“I need it!” Her growl falls apart into a sob. “Please!”
And in these words I hear all that Sing has lost. No matter how many times Mama-san brought a belt across her back, no matter how many men ducked in and out of her bedroom, Sing always managed to stay strong. Always dreamed.
I need it.
I.
Need.
It.
Her words echo and swell and flood, become the blood and marrow of this dark hall. So loud that I don’t hear the footsteps that bring Fung to my side. He looms over me like a nightmare—a shadow stretched extra long. There’s a syringe in his hand and a twist on his lips. His eyes are dark, dark, like the lumps of spent coals my mother used to dump behind our shack.
My body is all tremble, waiting for his shout or the quick slap of his hand, but Fung does neither. He stares a moment longer. The dark, dark eyes and the dragon above them betray nothing.
“You should go back to your room,” he growls.
I obey. Walk back to my bedroom and its window full of bars.
There’s no room for dreamers here. No room for risk.
And there’s no room for me out there. Not really. As I told the boy: I can’t go home, not even to see my sister. My father is waiting there, with a thirst and an itch and an empty wallet. He’d sell me again and my mother would watch again, her bruised eyes heavy with tears.
And I don’t even know where the sea is. Or what I would do if I managed to reach it.
The ambassador does not make my heart sing, but I know every freckle on his body. I know his favorite dish is eel sautéed with mushrooms and bamboo shoots. I know he always hiccups three times in a row. I know he is the youngest child of two factory workers. I know that he’ll still give me the apartment.
The boy won’t even tell me his name.
I bury my head deep in my pillow, but I can still hear Sing. Her screams barrel through the door, punch into my eardrums like metal chopsticks. Haunt me with all the possibilities of needles and failure, what the unknown might actually cost.
Maybe I really am my mother’s daughter.