“Your mouth,” sighed the photographer. “Could you please try making it less…scary?”
In response, Binh contorted her smile to include more teeth. The photographer, who had endured nearly five minutes of scowls and manic grins and crossed eyes that only grew worse when he tried to politely correct them, now ran out of patience. He threw up his hands and turned to Tan and Long. “If your friend doesn’t make a normal face for me, I’m kicking all you delinquents out of my shop.”
Tan, who was preparing to submit his application for the police academy, was the only one who had actually needed an ID photo taken today, but Binh had insisted that she and Long both accompany him to Ea Sup from Ia Kare. The two of them had shopping to do in town anyway—that afternoon, all of the year nines would be going on an end of the semester overnight camping trip to a lake in Ea Wy, and because Binh had the lowest grades and the most absences in the class, she had been tasked with purchasing drinks for the trip. Because Long had the highest grades, all he had been asked to do was make sure that Binh only used the school budget on nonalcoholic beverages.
“I’m sorry, sir! I’ve never been in front of a camera before! Am I doing it wrong?” chirped Binh innocently, spinning on the seat of her stool and flashing the photographer her most congenial and ordinary of smiles over her shoulder.
“Bé Lì,” snapped Tan in the policeman voice that Long sometimes caught him practicing when he thought he was alone in the house. “Just let him take it! You’re the one who wanted a photo, anyway.”
“I’m only doing it for you, so that you’ll have a picture of me to put up next to your bunk next year.” Her grin veered wicked once more. Tan was not able to stop himself from blushing. She was wearing a voluminous white button-up that the photographer provided for clients whose shirts did not comply with the government guidelines for collars. It draped over her like a wedding tent, and its ends covered her knees. “How did you even find a shirt this big, sir?” she asked, swiveling back around to the photographer. “Did you inherit it from some Americans?”
From the back wall where he was watching, Long chuckled. He and Tan had looked absurd when they had donned the enormous shirt for their own photos (Binh had forced Long to get a set taken too), but somehow their Binh was beautiful in it, even while grimacing in nine different ways to annoy the photographer. He had laughed softly, but Binh still heard him. She looked up and gave him a small, appreciative smirk, and the photographer, sensing that this was his only moment, clicked.
“You’re done!” said the triumphant photographer. “I’m done! Get out of my shop!”
Shaking her head at her own defeat, Binh slid off of the stool and wiggled out of the giant shirt.
“We’ll be back in an hour to pick up the photos,” Long said politely as the three of them were herded out the door.
“Not with her!” said the photographer. “Don’t bring her. I never want to see that face again.”
It was lunchtime. The trio piled onto the Honda that Tan had borrowed from one of his year-eleven classmates. Binh sat jackknifed at the front, her bony knees drawn up toward her chest and her feet balancing against the neck of the bike. Tan was in the middle, and Long was clinging on to the back. He wriggled his sneakers up onto the Honda’s foot pegs next to Tan’s and wrapped his arms around his brother’s torso.
“What are you doing?” growled Tan, trying to shake free of his grasp.
Long grinned at the back of his brother’s neck and held on tighter. “Why can’t I ôm my own anh?” he protested innocently. “I don’t want to fall off.” Truthfully, he was doing it because Tan was steering, and his arms were therefore around Binh. Long’s touch was to remind him that he was still there too.
His brother was clearly aggravated, which meant that it was working. “After my first year of physical training at the academy,” Tan declared, “I’m going to be too big to ride with three people. I’ll have too much muscle to fit on the bike.”
At this, both Long and Binh snorted with laugher—Binh so hard that she nearly fell over—sandwiching Tan with joint mockery. “Did you hear that, Long? Our kitten thinks he’s going to turn into a tiger!”
“Just you wait,” said Tan. “Just both of you wait and see.” But Long could tell from his voice that he was smiling too. They were still three, though they were stretched.
Ever since the first time they had been allowed to drive into Ea Sup on their own, when Tan turned thirteen and Binh and Long were eleven, they had developed a routine. They would buy a takeaway box of nem nướng with extra dipping sauce and bring it to the reservoir, where they would eat while watching the old men fish, and then when they had finished, they would climb down to the water’s edge and use the empty skewers from their grilled meatballs to try and spear eels.
“I don’t know why your class doesn’t just go to this lake to camp,” said Tan, in between bites of pork. “It’s bigger than the one in Ea Wy.”
“But this one smells like fish and gasoline,” Long said as he crunched a peanut-sauce-soaked cucumber. “And the lake in Ea Wy is closer.”
Next to him, Binh raised her eyebrows. “It’s more haunted too,” she said. “People are always accidentally falling in and drowning. I don’t know why Lady Huong decided that everyone should go spend the night there. The water ghosts are going to eat someone. Hopefully it’ll be her.” Huong was their class president, and Binh’s facetious nickname and dislike for her were due to her wealthy family; like nearly half of all of Ia Kare, Huong’s father was employed by the Ma family’s pepper company. But while most of their classmates’ parents worked in the Mas’ fields, Huong’s dad was their head of accounting.
Whenever Binh mentioned something involving the supernatural, Tan and Long would promptly attempt to steer the conversation away from it. This was perhaps the only way in which the brothers behaved like allies. There was a tacit agreement between them to never, ever bring up the incident in the graveyard, and to avoid all topics that might possibly lead to it—the dead, the undead, the pass in nearby Chu Dreh that was haunted by French soldiers, a spirit-possessed neighbor who had spent a full week speaking in tongues and eating nothing but bananas before abruptly returning to normal with no memory of it, the water ghosts of Ea Wy, the disappearance and rescue of the Ma daughter under mysterious circumstances back in the eighties, anything involving funerals. They didn’t even like talking about their own grandmother, because some suspicious Ia Kareians had started a rumor about her being a witch after she stopped leaving their house.
“We should go to the market,” said Long quickly. “We’re supposed to meet the group in front of the school gates at four.”
He had not been expecting Binh to nod in agreement. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s lots to do.” He was so surprised that his hand, which had been bringing a rice paper roll up to his mouth, froze midway, causing him to drip onto himself.
“Pig,” said Binh. She suddenly reached out and grabbed Long by the wrist, pulled his arm toward her, then, with one feral swipe of her tongue, lapped up the golden streak of sauce herself. She looked up at him and grinned, her face just centimeters from his skin, before she released the arm. Long stood up in mock disgust so that she wouldn’t see that he had goosebumps.
“What’s wrong with you?” he laughed, keeping the fluster from his voice. He wanted to look at Tan and see what his reaction was, but that would have given him away.
“I marked you!” said Binh, following him to her feet. “I got sad thinking about Tan going away to Saigon, so I’m making sure that you won’t be able to leave me too.”
Long looked down at the gleaming slug trail of saliva on his arm. “Of course I won’t,” he said.
“Yes he will,” Tan finally said. “He’s too good at school. Unless he cracks his skull open sometime in the next two years, they’re going to be throwing scholarships at him.” It was a compliment, but he was looking at Long as if he wanted to be the one to do the skull cracking.
Binh had climbed back on the motorbike. “He won’t,” she said. “Long, we’ll drop you off so you can pick up the photos while we go ahead to the market; you can meet us there.” She saw him opening his mouth to argue that he was supposed to go shopping with her and held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t you dare say it. I don’t need a money supervisor. If you say it, I will push you into this lake.”
Back onto the Honda they squeezed. When they arrived at the print shop, Long dismounted. “Give me some money,” he said to Tan. “I don’t have enough to pay for all three sets.”
Tan wiggled his wallet out of his pocket and tossed it to him with a pleased little sneer of superiority before driving off with Binh.
When Long entered the shop, the photographer scowled up at him from the counter and slid him a plastic bag that contained four surly Tans, four uneasy Longs, and four grinning Binhs. A 2x2 Binh was at the top of the pile. “Your brother’s friend could be so pretty,” said the photographer, shaking his head, “if she just learned how to control herself.”
Long bristled. “She’s my friend too,” he said, and opened Tan’s wallet so he could pay for the pictures and leave quickly. As he was counting out the bills, his thumb touched something harder than money. His eyes flicked downward. Tucked into the billfold, there was an unopened condom. Without thinking, Long took it out and dropped it into the bottom of his own knapsack. He was stopping it from happening, he told himself. But he did not let himself dwell upon what it was he was stopping.
When he arrived at the market, the photos stowed safely inside his knapsack along with the stolen condom, he sensed that something was not right. He saw Tan and he saw the bike and he saw Binh, but he did not see the three liters of Coca-Cola or the twenty-four water bottles that she had been instructed to buy. Instead, Binh was holding a plucked chicken in a bag, a bundle of coals, and a plastic sack of clear liquid that Long could guess was rice wine.
“What have you done?” he groaned.
“I couldn’t stop her,” Tan said, though he didn’t sound as if he had tried very hard.
“Change of plans,” announced Binh. “We’re going to the beach.”
None of them had ever been farther east than the national highway, or traveled more than forty miles from Ia Kare, or even knew how to swim, but Binh did not seem concerned by this, or any of the other objections that Long raised.
“The plan is perfect!” she said.
(The plan was foolish. It was not even a real plan.)
“We don’t need a map. If we just drive in the opposite direction of the road to the Cambodian border, we’ll get to the sea eventually. It can’t be more than, what, five hours? Eight hours? Ten at most if there are a lot of mountains? We already have a motorbike!”
(But it did not belong to them, and they were supposed to be returning it to Tan’s friend later that afternoon.)
“And we already have an excuse for where we’re supposed to be tonight. We’ll reach the ocean by dark, have a barbecue, sleep on the shore, go for a swim at dawn, and be back here by lunchtime tomorrow.”
(What would happen when the rest of the class realized that they weren’t coming?)
“Besides, I can’t return this chicken now.”
(That you bought with the school’s money!)
“I didn’t spend all of it! The change is in here—” She tossed Long the small tamarind-candy tin that she carried her things around in instead of a wallet. “Look,” she said, irritated by his reluctance, “do you really want to go to a small, haunted lake with two dozen people we can’t stand, just to have a Coke and a sapodilla and a bad sandwich and sing group songs about the Fatherland, and definitely get eaten by mosquitoes and possibly also get eaten by ghosts? If you think it would be more fun, you can still go with them.” She gave her head a canny tilt. “Besides, Lady Huong will miss you if you don’t go. Everyone knows she has a crush on you.” Long blushed furiously. “You can take the two-thirty bus back home from here and still make it, and Cadet Kitten and I will just go to the beach on our own.”
She and Long both knew that he had no choice.
The first problem they encountered was that they could not figure out which way Cambodia was in order to drive away from it. They spent ten minutes arguing about it while going in circles at the roundabout in Ea Kiet, then chose the wrong road and didn’t realize for another fifteen. When they finally found the correct route, they were only able to drive for another hour before they encountered problem two: the rain.
The sky did not warn them; one minute they were dry and the sun was warm without burning and Long was watching the black filaments of Binh’s hair blowing backward in the wind and thinking that perhaps this had not been a bad idea after all. The next, his entire body and everything he could see of the world was wet, the unpaved road was turning into brick-colored sludge, Binh’s hair was plastered to her face, and Long remembered that this was a terrible idea.
“Pull over!” yelled Binh as Tan struggled to keep the bike upright. The road had become the texture of warm margarine. Tan swerved and had to stick out a leg to prevent the confluence of motorbike and mud. Binh jumped to safety, clutching the bag with the chicken to her chest like it was an infant. Long tumbled off and managed to save his knapsack from hitting the ground but not the rest of him. The impact didn’t hurt—he just sank into warm, mineral squelch, and for a long moment he lay back and surrendered to it, closing his eyes and letting the rain strike his face. The ground smelled like goat hide and blood, like gasoline and fertilizer and sugarcane.
When he picked his body up again, his entire back half was coated orange. He waddled over to the side of the road to join Tan and Binh, who were crouching down even though there was nothing to crouch under, because it felt better than just standing. Long stepped out of his shoes and then clumsily wiggled out of his jeans, draping them over the motorbike, mud side up, to rinse them in the downpour. Shivering in his underwear, he swore to never leave home without a raincoat again for the rest of his life. As he squatted down and wrapped his arms around his thighs to hide them, Binh jokingly wolf-whistled, and even Tan, pushing the dripping hair back from his face, gave his rare real laugh—the one where he wasn’t trying to keep his voice low and policemanly or his eyes from vanishing into slivers.
Long would try and picture it later—the three of them, rain soaked on the side of the road in a place that was even more of a nowhere than the nowhere they were from, Binh cradling her chicken, Tan still a person that he could recognize, his own scrawny, pantsless fifteen-year-old self—and wonder how they could have ever been so happy.
When the rain finally stopped, the sodden trio set off once more. Long tied his wet jeans to his knapsack so that they could flap behind him like a flag and dry while they drove, his bare legs broiling in the restored afternoon sun.
They got lost again, but because there were so few markers and road signs, by the time they began to suspect that they were going the wrong way, it was much too late. When they tried to ask for directions to the beach they were met with shrugs and blank stares. In places like these, towns that were so small they had numbers instead of names, no one went to the ocean. No one ever went anywhere. The raw chicken was starting to smell, the motorbike was running low on fuel, and sunset was approaching. Long’s jeans were dry but had hardened to a crispy and uncomfortable texture that hurt his skin when he put them back on.
“We’re just going around in circles,” lamented Binh. “We’ve been driving toward those mountains in the distance for ages, but they never get any closer. I’ve seen those exact same cows three times.”
“You don’t know that for sure. All cows are identical,” Tan said halfheartedly. He had slowed them to a crawl now, driving as if the bike itself was dejected because it knew that they were not going to make it.
“It’s this place,” said Binh, her voice just loud enough for Long to hear it over the engine and just loud enough for him to detect a note of genuine despair in it that he had never heard before. “It’s this land. We’re lost and going around and around because it wants to keep me here. It’s never going to let me leave.”
The raw hem of the evening was now beginning to descend. When they spotted a section of hill that was covered in large, flat boulders, smooth and not too far from the road and free of the kind of shrub that snakes liked to hide in, they finally decided that it was time to stop.
“At least we have the chicken,” said Long, trying to comfort Binh. “And the coal stayed dry. We’re still having a barbecue, even if we’re not at the beach.” He was concerned by how uncharacteristically defeated she seemed.
But she started to cheer up once Tan had gotten the fire started; she ripped a hole in the corner of the rice wine bag with her teeth and began to suck from it. While Tan constructed a makeshift rotisserie out of some sticks and a coat hanger that Binh had pinched from the market back in Ea Sup, she and Long passed the bag back and forth between them. By the time the stars came out, Binh had achieved a level of tipsiness that made up for the joviality she had started the trip with and then lost.
“Take out my wallet,” Binh said to Long. “There’s a deck of cards in there.”
He retrieved them from the tamarind tin and dealt them each thirteen. They played three practice rounds of tiến lên together while Tan finished fortifying the chicken. It didn’t matter—once Long dealt Tan in, they both lost to him every time. Eventually, Binh got fed up with it and started periodically snatching cards out of his hands and tossing them into the fire to try to get him to lose. Tan still managed to win anyway.
“This isn’t fun anymore!” she finally said, flinging her cards away in frustration. “You’re too good! Do something else you’re good at instead and fix my hair for me.” She yanked an old elastic—clearly on its last legs—from the end of what had been her attempt at a braid and then handed it to Tan, who dutifully assumed his position behind her.
Even Long had to admit that his brother’s fingers were impressively deft as they smoothed and unsnarled the Binh nest without the aid of a brush and then began to neatly replait. “Why are you so good at that?” he wondered aloud. He had never asked him before.
Only a fluctuating third of Tan’s face was visible in the firelight, and it was orange. “Because of Dad,” he said. “You were too young, so you don’t remember, but he used to make hammocks. Not string ones—the real kind, made out of tree fibers or some shit. He learned how from Ông Nội.” Addressing Binh, he explained, “Our dad’s dad was originally from some island down south.” He tied off the braid he had made but let his fingers rest on her hair for a moment longer. “When I was seven, he sometimes used to let me help him with the twisting if he was too drunk. He always said that I inherited his hands.” All three of them fell silent at the mention of the late Duc Phan’s hands. Duc Phan’s hands were the reason that Long and Tan’s mother only wore long sleeves. Duc Phan’s hands, drunk and clumsy with a lighter, were the reason that half of their house had burned down ten years ago. Duc Phan’s hands had finally done Duc Phan himself in for good when Long was twelve and Tan was fourteen.
Binh reached behind her head and gave a light squeeze to one of Tan’s inherited hands. There was an ugly part of Long that wondered if Tan had made the story up, had brought their father up, for this exact purpose. “But at least you know that there was one good thing in what you got from him. My aunt and uncle always tell me that I inherited nothing but evil from my parents, but that they will keep praying for my soul even though I am a child of irredeemable sin!” she said, mimicking the intonation of a fanatical preacher. All Long and Tan knew about Binh’s aunt and uncle was that they had adopted her when she was an infant and were staunch Christians.
By now, the chicken’s transformation into charbroiled succulence was nearly complete. Tan basted the bird with the tiny pouch of chili lemongrass oil that had accompanied it and Binh squeezed the last drops of the rice wine into her mouth. Long gathered up the deck of cards and packed them away in the tamarind tin. As he was unzipping his knapsack to stow it once more, Binh suddenly remembered the pictures they had taken.
“Show me my photo!” she demanded excitedly.
Long drew one of the Binh 2x2s from their protective sheath and handed it to her, careful to hold it by the edges so he wouldn’t get prints on her face.
Binh took it from him without bothering to do the same. She brought her face down to examine its own miniature reproduction and stared at it for a whole minute without saying anything. Finally, she lifted her head again, and with a smile, she abruptly flicked the little photograph into the fire.
It was deeply upsetting to Long to watch the little Binh blacken at the edges and then burn away into nothing but a pencil-shaving-sized curl of ash and a plume of smelly, chemical smoke. “Why would you do that?” he said. “That was you! And that was…that was money!”
“I didn’t like that she was trapped inside it,” said Binh. “I was letting her out.”
“Oh, she’s just drunk,” said Tan, taking the chicken off of the coals. “And you’re drunk too. Don’t breathe in those fumes, Binh. You probably poisoned the meat with it.”
The three of them were so hungry that they ripped into the chicken without letting it cool. Tan went straight for the tail and then worked free the fatty strips of the inner thighs. Long tried to tear a whole leg off for himself but the meat was too slick and his fingertips too sensitive—the blackened chicken claw burned him when he grabbed it—so he settled for stripping off little pieces of skin and lowering them into his mouth. Binh separated the chicken’s head from its body with a cartilaginous crack and began to gnaw off the rubbery neck flesh. In less than ten minutes, they had eaten the bird down to its skeleton, and then they sat back and licked the grease from their fingers in the dying light of the coals.
Long, still in the comfortable stage of intoxicated wobbliness, lay back to look at the stars. Somewhere behind him, Binh announced that she was going to find a place to pee, and he heard the light slap of bare feet on smooth stone moving away from them. He wished that he had gone to piss too—he felt uncomfortable whenever he was alone with his brother. Binh was the only thing that made being around each other bearable, but Binh was the reason that they had begun to feel themselves branching apart in the first place. Driving was all right because they didn’t have to talk, but he and Tan tried to avoid all other scenarios where it was just the two of them. If the situation was inescapable, they would spend it in silence. But here, unexpectedly, Long heard Tan’s voice in the dark:
“She’s not yours.”
“Huh?” Long started to raise his head, but Tan’s hand shot out and pushed it firmly back down again, just enough that his molars clacked together when he hit the rock but not so hard that it stung.
“Shhh. Don’t move. She’s not yours, because you have everything already.”
“Tan, I don’t—”
“Shhh.” Tan’s fingers were still pressing down on Long’s forehead, except for his thumb, which was stroking the side of Long’s temple in an almost comically tender way. “You turned out smart. You’ll get to do anything that you like. You were too little when Daddy was still around, so he never hit you. You already got to be the lucky one. So you don’t get to have her too.” Tan now moved his hand from Long’s head to his forearm and ran his finger over the spot where, nine hours ago, Binh had licked away the spilled sauce from his nem nướng.
He drew his hand away as they heard the patter of Binh’s feet approaching once more.
“Binh, all that junk you threw into the fire did something to the chicken!” Tan yelled over to her. “My stomach doesn’t feel good!”
“I think you’re actually right!” she called back cheerfully, voice echoing across the rocks. “I just took a really weird shit!”
Tan turned back to Long, and there was no trace of his earlier menace. He reached over and gave Long’s stomach a little pat. “Good luck,” he said with a laugh. “It’s probably coming for you too.”
Still lying on his back, still a little afraid to open his mouth, Long wondered if he was much drunker than he’d thought and had only imagined everything that had just happened with Tan.
The fire was dead, and they each claimed a spot on the rock to sprawl out on. Tan fell asleep instantly and started snoring, but Binh shifted positions for nearly an hour, until her breaths slowed and her own snores—softer, raspier—began too. Long had not moved from his initial spot by the fire. He wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake. He felt asleep, but his eyes seemed to be open, because he was looking across the rock at the lumpy indication of shadows that composed Binh’s body. Was he dreaming? He never dreamed. But how else could he explain what he saw next?
She was still unconscious, but her mouth had fallen open slightly, and at one of its corners, something was forming that looked like a drip of blood, or a tiny ember on her lips. It was such a vivid, burning scarlet that Long could see it even in the dark. As he watched, the red bead grew longer, but instead of trickling onto the ground, it began to rise into the air, like a thin, glowing ribbon of smoke uncoiling from her body. For some reason, Long did not feel afraid, even as it continued to stretch itself skyward and then, when there was at least a meter of it floating in the air, the rest of Binh slowly began rising too. Long wondered if he should get up and grab hold of her, to keep her from drifting away into the night. But when sleeping Binh had reached a height of about a foot, she just hovered there, above the rock. The end of her long braid still rested on the ground, like a black umbilical cord. Her hands were folded over her stomach. Her brow was furrowed. The sky had now lightened enough for Long to see it. This was why he was so certain he was not dreaming.
Long opened his eyes. It was morning. Binh was kneeling in front of the ashes and burying their chicken carcass, and Tan was doing sit-ups. The act of eye opening indicated that they had been shut; he had been asleep after all. Of course it had been a dream. Still, he could not stop himself from going over to the spot where Binh had been sleeping and circling it, unsure of what kind of evidence he was searching for, but trying to find it anyway. He stared at her lips when she wasn’t looking, secretly pleased to have an excuse to do so.
None of them needed to say it out loud. They silently climbed down the hill, and Tan wheeled the motorbike out of the bushes where they had hidden it and turned it back to face the way they had come. Binh did not climb on immediately. She stood in the road, her hands balled into fists, staring in the opposite direction, over the dusty ochre immensity and at the mountains in the distance that they had never reached. Long could not see her face, but he could read her fury in the rigid way she held her back. Part of him feared that she was going to start running down the road, determined to make it to the sea even if she had to go by foot. Another part of him wished that she would do it, just to save him from having to witness the look of disappointment on her face when she turned around. But Binh did not let him see it; when she finally turned away from the mountains and walked back to Tan and Long and the motorbike, she hid her face behind her hair.
They began to drive. At the back of the seat, Long let his arms dangle down by his sides. When the motorbike ran out of fuel two miles from the nearest town, they tried all pushing in unison at first, and then took turns. Every so often, Long glanced hopefully up at the sky.