9

STEPHEN

I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.

I thought I was making inroads with Simone, like she was starting to consider me as more than just a friend. I’ve been my best self. I’ve put it all on the line. I’ve been wittier and more outgoing than ever before. I’ve stretched, I’ve left my comfort zone, I’ve taken chances.

I let her see who I really am.

Thought that was good enough, that I’d finally be good enough.

She hugs me way more often than Kent and she’s always finding reasons to touch my hair. She says it’s because it’s so spiky and that she’s amazed at how immobile it is. She’s always trying to mess it up.

In my mind, my sad, mistaken, pitiful mind, I figured this was her way of signaling she might be open to something else.

Nope. Not even close.

At lunch today, she asked Kent about Owen. Was trying to find out if he had a girlfriend. Admitted she might “fancy” him.

I wanted to throw up my fish sticks and Tater Tots.

I can’t tell you what happened in my afternoon classes; they went by in a blur. Like it was Charlie Brown’s teachers up there lecturing, all “Waun waun waun waun waun.”

I felt my pulse throbbing in my head, and each beat of my heart pounded out the question WHY?, every thump increasing the pressure until my brain was going to explode. Was like a black cloud blew in and took away the color from every part of my life.

I didn’t even go to my Robotics Club meeting, normally my favorite part of the week. I came straight home.

I need to decompress so I put on my black Compton hat with the white Gothic lettering, turn up the speakers on my computer, and play the one song that can always make me feel better, that soothes my soul.

Before Tupac can even get to the chorus about laying him down in a bed of roses and sinking him in the river at dawn, my mother busts into my room. She says knocking’s a consideration for people who pay the mortgage.

“Ugh, no, this is the worst,” my mother says. On the outside, she looks like all the other women in the neighborhood, her statement jewelry and sleeveless dresses and hundred-dollar yoga pants. She’s always going to Pilates and playing tennis and drinking wine with her girls. But unlike a lot of the absentee parents up here, she’s totally a Helicopter Mom.

“Sorry, Ma, I’ll use my headphones.” I grab my Beats by Dr. Dre and go to plug them into my laptop, but she stops me.

She glowers at my computer, as though it’s personally insulted her. “How about not playing it at all? This music has a terrible message. No one says you have to go all Taylor Swift, but this stuff is garbage.”

I don’t argue with her.

Because I really can’t.

My mother’s family came to California from South Korea when she was in junior high. Her folks had nothing when they got here, but they worked their asses off, building a small grocery story in the Koreatown portion of LA, pouring all the profits into my mother’s schooling. They were so proud to be in America, the land of opportunity, where education could literally take you anywhere.

In the early ’90s, my parents were already married and Caitlyn—my sister—was a toddler. While my dad was taking classes towards his MBA at USC, my mom sometimes helped at my grandparents’ store. She was working there during the LA riots when the store was looted, ransacked, and finally burned to the ground.

The Korean community in LA refer to the riots as their sa-i-gu, meaning 4/29, which is the same kind of shorthand the rest of this country uses to describe 9/11. My mother never talks about what she witnessed over that six-day period. I think she just wants to forget the whole thing, which is probably why there’s very little Korean American about us.

Of course, I feel like the worst son in the world when she hears me listening to classic hip-hop, because it’s possible the music’s a trigger for her. She never says it is, but who really knows?

The problem is that these songs are what keep me sane, which is my dilemma.

I turn it off anyway.

My mother lingers in my doorway, as she’s clearly not done with me. “So, I called the Chalet. I asked them to drop off a brochure and price list at the Chastains’. I also touched base with Landscapes by Mariani and Greenworks. I figured they’d want to compare services to make an educated decision. Has Simone mentioned it to you? Given you any idea of their plans? I’m happy to make more helpful suggestions.”

Any compassion I feel for my mother dissipates. Her “helpful suggestions” are why Kent’s mom no longer calls her to play tennis.

“What the Chastains do with their lawn is none of my business, Ma. It’s none of yours, either.”

She clucks her tongue. “Stephen, property values are everyone’s business. They aren’t fulfilling the social contract. What, we’re supposed to be okay with our home’s asking price plummeting because they can’t call a yard crew?”

I grit my teeth. It’s grass, not a social contract.

My mother’s upset about Simone’s lawn, which is now unkempt, at least compared to the twenty other immaculately manicured homes on our street, one tidy green oasis lined up after the other. I just imagine Simone’s parents have better things to do than to chase after landscapers with a ruler, making sure the fescue hybrid is clipped to a uniform one point five inches.

Oh, yeah.

The crew that comes here loves Mrs. Cho.

“Ma, they’ll get their yard in shape when they’re done settling in. They’ve only been here a few weeks.”

“I just don’t want potential buyers to assume this town’s full of crack houses.”

Considering starter homes in our neighborhood go for one point five million and a bunch of Chicago Bears live here (along with tons of Fortune 500 CEOs and hedge fund managers), no one’s mistaking North Shore for Skid Row. And we’re not even in one of the “good” neighborhoods. Three blocks away, next to the lake, places start at four mil.

“Ma, is there anything else?” I ask, anxious to put on my headphones and start properly feeling sorry for myself.

“Shouldn’t you be at your meeting?”

I say, “I didn’t feel well,” because that seems easier than telling her I’m heartsick, that I’m enveloped in blackness, that I keep punching myself in the thigh just to see if I can feel anything.

“Stephen, please. If you’re okay to listen to music, then you’re certainly healthy enough to study. Seriously. Your father and I will be mortified if you fail any more classes.”

Fail. Right.

She’s referring to the C that I got last semester in my speech class, a requisite for all students, and one that I put off as long as I could. Most kids take it when they’re freshmen. For everyone else, the class was our school’s only easy A, but it was rough for me. I killed it first semester when we were allowed to write out everything and work from a script. The extemporaneous speeches of second semester are what slayed me. I couldn’t get the hang of speaking off the cuff in front of a group on topics outside of my wheelhouse. I’d freeze up and break into flop sweat. My teacher giving me a C was generous.

For anyone else, one C would not a be a big deal, but speech class took me out of the running for valedictorian, thus ending the Cho legacy of being first in the class, which included my sister, brother, mother, and father.

They’re all so proud. Or they were.

The bitch of it is, I’d probably have given a kickass commencement speech, because I’d have been allowed to write that shit down first.

Speech class is what started me resenting Owen, too. I kinda liked him when we were kids. We even hung out sometimes because we lived two houses apart. But now he’s this useless stoner, this complete wastoid. How was he able to get up to the podium and ramble with perfect ease and at length about anything in speech? Like he could be a politician or something. I resented his confidence, his conviction in what he had to say. He made everyone in class look bad, particularly me.

Now he’s using that golden tongue to win over Simone.

FML.

My mother studies me as I’m stretched out. “You are not lying down to study, (a) you’ll be asleep in two minutes, and (b) you’re going to mess up your back. Use your desk.”

Then she exits, knowing I’ll be powerless to refuse.

I do what she tells me to, relocating across the room. I drop into my chair and roll over to the center of the desk, resigned. The “back” argument is one I’ll never win. She’s been oddly relentless about our spinal cords my whole life. Apparently she never got over it when that actor Christopher Reeve became paralyzed in a horseback riding incident. I guess she was obsessed with him, as she learned English watching Superman again and again. Due to her age or maybe the language gap, some part of her must have thought the movie was real. So, when he was hurt, she was traumatized.

I swear her obsessive overprotection is why I was never able to take the leap off the big diving board. I’d get to the edge and then I’d hear her in my head, talking about how she didn’t want to have to feed me through a tube, then I’d wuss out.

I’m sure my trajectory, my social standing, my whole damn life would be different if I’d have been allowed to play soccer. I spent the summer before seventh grade practicing on my own because I’d never been permitted to join a peewee league and I was tired of feeling left out. Plus, my sixth grade gym teacher had noticed my potential as a foreword and he’d encouraged me to try, even though starting in junior high is pretty late when you consider that a lot of kids had been playing AYSO since pre-K.

I memorized the rules and then I spent endless hours drilling, doing ball work like toe taps and inside-to-outside touches. Plus I worked on my sprinting skills.

I was respectable.

Maybe I wasn’t great, but I was skillful and quick and determined. I understood angles and trajectory and velocity so I could always get the ball to exactly where it needed to go. More than anything, I was motivated. Kent was always right there, helping me. I don’t know which of us was more jazzed when I was chosen for the team.

I made it through two practices before my mom found out and yanked me—literally yanked me—off the pitch. I was so humiliated. Such is my shame remembering that day, I still turn my head when we drive past the middle school soccer fields. Every single kid out there was laughing at me, except for Macey Lund. She was the only one who had any compassion. I’ll never forget her mouthing I’m so sorry as my mother frog-marched me to her waiting SUV.

Figures that now I’ll never have the opportunity to thank the one person who was cool to me back then.

Anyway, my mom said if I was so desperate to play sports, she’d pick one for me.

Now I bowl. I’m a frigging bowler.

Turns out, I’m a great bowler because the geometric portion of this game also comes easy to me. Aces. Owen was a star on the lacrosse team until he quit because he didn’t feel like playing anymore. He just threw away an opportunity I would die for. Such bullshit.

As for me, I participate in a sport where you can be fat, where you can drink, smoke, and eat pizza in the middle of a game. I excel at a sport where the median player age is, what, fifty?

How do I even have to wonder why Simone isn’t into me?

How could she like me?

I don’t like me.

I mean, I try to give myself positive self-talk, try to display a confidence I don’t feel. Like, if I say I’ll be successful, then I’ll manifest it into being, all Tony Robbins–like. I work to psych myself up by doing stuff like boasting about all my wins, calling my shot like Babe Ruth used to when he’d come up to bat and point at where his homerun was headed. I visualize. I storyboard out the exact outcome I want.

But every time I do, I feel like I’m destining myself to fail.

Then when I inevitably screw up, it feels worse than the time before and it’s harder to bounce back. The cloud of failure and desperation just gets bigger and blacker, thicker and more all-encompassing.

Am I ever going to get anything right? Then, if by some miracle I were to succeed, would what I accomplished be good enough for my family?

Probably not.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying.