Dad is all smiles when I open the apartment door. “How’d it go?”
“No one showed,” I say.
The smile drops off his face. “Oh. I’m sorry, bud.”
“I don’t mind,” I tell him.
“You were waiting all this time?”
“Yeah—it was fine, though.”
“You sure you aren’t disappointed?”
Why do parents ask questions like that?
“Seriously, Dad. I’m one hundred percent fine.”
Except that I have just lied. I hate lying. And I don’t even know why I did it.
Dad says, “How about we go to Yum Li’s for dinner tonight?”
Yum Li’s is one of my favorite restaurants of all time. I feel kind of guilty because I know he’s suggesting it to cheer me up about something that didn’t really happen, but I say, “Yeah, Yum Li’s sounds good,” and let Dad squeeze my shoulder and pat me on the head.
“Why don’t you get started on your room,” he says. “I’ll finish up these bookshelves.”
When I think of all the work Dad put into our house it’s pretty sad. But mostly I feel sorry for myself, because the coolest thing about it was my room. A long time ago, Dad took apart a fire escape—a real fire escape, from a building that his office was demolishing—and he rebuilt the bottom level of it inside my bedroom. He bolted it to the wall, and even attached the original ladder. I had a bed up there, and he made me these built-in cubbies for all my stuff. I had the most excellent room of any kid I know, and we had to leave it behind.
“It’s built in,” Dad explained. “Part of the house. And the buyers love it.”
So do I, I wanted to tell him. But I didn’t, because he looked so miserable.
At our new place, I have Dad’s old bedroom furniture from when he was a kid—a bed, a desk, and a bookshelf, all made out of the same dark wood. His mom kept it in her garage all these years, and a couple of weeks ago Dad drove it to Brooklyn in a rented van.
I start to unpack my boxes, wondering whether there’s a kid in my room at this very moment, climbing up and down my ladder and putting his stuff in my cubbies.
We’re crossing the lobby on our way to Yum Li’s when I see Candy and a woman who must be her mom coming in through the front door. Candy’s lips are stained bright blue.
“Hello,” the woman says, smiling and holding the door for us. Dad says hi back and I wave at Candy, but she stares straight ahead as if she doesn’t even see me. I forgot that we’re not supposed to know each other.
“They must live in the building,” Dad says when we’re outside. “I wonder if that little girl has any older brothers or sisters.”
“She does.” Oops.
“She does? When did you—”
“I mean, probably she does. She looks like the little-sister type.” Now I’m feeling guilty again.
He gives me a funny look, and so I do what Candy did—just stare straight ahead and act as if I don’t notice.
At Yum Li’s, I forget all about feeling guilty. Just looking at the food on other people’s tables makes my mouth water. We order soup, scallion pancakes, cold noodles with sesame sauce, and spicy shredded beef with broccoli.
Yum Li’s isn’t like most Chinese restaurants, where they rush the food out right away. Here, you have to wait. No bowls of crunchy noodles and orange goop, either. It’s just ice water and the smell of other people’s dinners.
Once Mom told Yum Li that he could have a big classy restaurant in Manhattan if he wanted to. “The big-business types would pay triple for your food,” she told him.
But Yum Li looked around at his peeling wood paneling, laminated menus, and hanging plants, and said, “What, more classy than this?”
I shake some vinegar into my hot and sour soup and stir it in. Dad only likes won ton soup, even though sometimes Yum Li teases him: “That’s kid soup!” he tells Dad. “Time to grow up!”
Dad wants to talk. I can tell by the way he leans toward me and says “So? Tell me things!” Which is his playful way of asking me to pour my heart out.
“You tell me things,” I say. I’m just being dumb, but he gets this serious look on his face and says, “Okay. Well, today has been tough. It’s really hitting me, I guess, that—on top of, you know, everything—the house is someone else’s now.” He fishes in his soup for the last won ton dumpling. “I had a good talk with Mom on the phone,” he says. “She sounds really—good. And it’s been great to have your help today.”
I don’t want to think about Dad needing me. I wish I had just told him something about school instead of asking him to tell me stuff instead. I could have told him about volleyball, maybe. About the slow clap, and Dallas’s foot in my stomach. But it’s too late now because it feels like all that would only make him feel worse.
Dad leans back to give the waitress room to put down the rest of our food. “You remember how to get home from school tomorrow, right? To the new place?”
“Dad, are you serious? The apartment is closer to school than our house was. Is. Whatever.” The point is that we’re still living in the same square mile of Brooklyn where I’ve spent my whole life.
We stop talking and eat everything, and I mean everything, including the cut-up oranges that come with the check.
“You were hungry,” the waitress says, studying the orange peels. Dad has scraped out the bitter white stuff with his teeth—according to him, it’s full of vitamins. She puts a little plate on the table: our fortune cookies.
Fortunes are another thing about Yum Li’s. They’re not normal.
Dad cracks his cookie open, pulls an extra-long fortune out of it, and reads aloud: “I read an article about those dark splotches on the sidewalk, and it turns out”—he flips the fortune over to read from the back—“those splotches are all chewed-up, spit-out, walked-on gum. Next time use the garbage can!”
He looks up at me. “I don’t even chew gum!”
I open my cookie. My fortune says, Why don’t you look up once in a while? Is something wrong with your neck?
Like I said: not normal.
When we leave the restaurant, Dad and I start walking home in the wrong direction, and we don’t even realize it until we’re in front of Sixth Sense Driving School on the corner. Neither of us points out that we were walking toward our house. We just turn around.
At the apartment, I stretch out on the bed and think about how Dad used to lie right here when he was a kid. He probably never thought about the fact that his own son would be lying in his bed one day. I wonder whether Dad and I would have been friends, or if he would have been friends with Dallas Llewellyn, or Carter Dixon, or what. It’s kind of a bummer to think your own dad might have been someone who called you Gorgeous.
Dad comes in, looking around the room. He’s always looking. He nods approvingly at the bookshelf, where I’ve stuffed all my books and games. The Scrabble box got stepped on at some point, and the letter tiles went everywhere. I rescued most of them and piled them on the desk. Dad plops into the desk chair and starts making neat little stacks out of them. He can’t help himself.
“So,” he says. “What do you think so far?”
“It’s good,” I tell him.
He reaches out to pat the bed and then shifts over to sit on the edge of the mattress. “I forgot to buy breakfast stuff. Want to wake up early and eat at the diner before school?”
“Sure.”
“Great.”
We say goodnight. From the bed, I can see into the hall and a little into Mom and Dad’s room. He’s got some music on low, and he’s putting their bed together with a wrench. The phone rings, and I hear Dad say, “Hey, Lisa.” Mom’s older sister.
“Yeah,” he says, “everything is stable.” Then his voice drops.
It’s weird that the ceiling is so far away. At home on my fire escape, I could almost reach up and touch it. I feel smaller.
I’m trying to get comfortable when I feel something under my pillow. I pull it out—an index card. Tilting it to catch the light from the hall, I read:
NEXT MEETING TOMORROW
—S.
I bolt upright, flick on the light, and look around. Safer has been here. In my room.
I walk around, opening the closet door and squinting through the window to the fire escape. I get back into bed, and then I jump up again to look underneath it. But there’s no sign of anyone.
This is when I realize that Safer might be what Mom calls an unknown quantity. In other words, even weirder than I thought.