I’m sitting at the table in the main room with my laptop in front of me, but Wei won’t let me get to it yet. She’s hovering over me with a washcloth and a bowl of warm water. She’s also got a little tin of root-based Chinese salve that smells like ginseng and menthol had a baby, and the baby took a dump.
“Ow,” I say.
“Shh,” she says.
“Young Wei,” says Sun, “we have to talk. Ouyang is dead. Zhao will find out soon. He doesn’t know that Old Ai helped us, but there is a chance he will suspect something. He’ll probably suspend all Happy Year’s operations. Old Ai will be isolated, and this place may become unsafe.”
“Big brother,” she says without looking up, “would you please boil some water for tea?”
Sun stares at her for a beat, then turns away and walks to the kitchenette.
Wei steps between my legs to get a better angle at the tear on my earlobe. She puts one hand on the back of my neck.
“Tip your head back,” she says.
I obey. “Sorry I don’t smell so good right now. There was some peeing.”
“Mmhmm.” She dabs the salve on the tear with a Q-tip. “There. Now, no fighting for two to four weeks, okay?”
She rests her hands on my shoulders and gazes down at me, her lips slightly parted as she smiles the secret smile. I meet her gaze and nod. Then she straightens up and steps away.
“You’d better get that ticket,” she says.
“Right.” I scoot my chair forward and call up a discount airfare site on my laptop. Sun is arranging the tea things on the table. Wei perches on a chair with one leg folded beneath her and plucks two tea canisters off the tray.
“Wulong or chrysanthemum?” She turns to Sun. “So early, it’s the appropriate time for wulong. But you’ve been out all night playing games, haven’t you? So perhaps you would like to drink some chrysanthemum tea and have a nap.”
Sun sits up very straight in his chair. “Young Wei,” he says, “Ouyang came after us. He kidnapped Xiaozhou. You know we had no intention of seeing him at all.”
“Yes, of course.” Wei narrows her eyes at him. “But you were ready for him, weren’t you?”
“I have to prepare for every contingency,” Sun says. “You know that better than anyone.”
“And so you knew when you came here that maybe you would kill Ouyang and jeopardize Ai’s position. And you came here and asked for his help anyway.”
“If Old Li’s original plan had worked, it never would have happened.”
“Stop hiding behind Old Li,” Wei snaps. “You always know how things will happen.”
Sun looks down at his lap. “That’s not at all true,” he says quietly.
We sit there in a silence so tense that I just stare at my screen, not daring to touch the keyboard. Then the tea timer goes off and Wei stands up. She pours two cups of chrysanthemum tea and places them in front of us. Then she walks out of the room.
I sit on the side of my bed with my computer in my lap and book a flight from Beijing to LAX that leaves just after 9:00 P.M. That more or less maxes out my only credit card, so I pay down the balance with the last of the money in my student bank account in case I need to buy a couple more tickets back to Los Angeles. In case Sun and Wei say yes to my proposal. I realize that it’s a good thing I’m not enrolled this semester, because at this point, I wouldn’t be able to afford textbooks.
No insurance money after all. At least I have the cash Dad left me. I check the orange shoebox under my bed, and lo and behold, Sun has already returned the forty grand we were going to give to Feder. We haven’t used much of the Chinese currency. It’s enough to tide us over until we can sell the house or figure something else out.
So Perry Peng was closer to Ouyang and Zhao than he was to Dad. He could even have been the one who did the killing—Peng, Rou, Ponytail, or someone else working for the wrong brothers. Maybe it was some poor sap who had no choice. Maybe I don’t care anymore. Like Sun said, Ouyang is dead, and Gregoire will help us expose Ice. I want some more answers out of the laptop, but what I really want is to get the fuck out of Beijing and bring Sun and Wei with me. Leave this cycle of lies and violence and start something new.
Once I’ve cleaned myself up and put on some urine-free clothing, I find Sun still drinking tea at the kitchen table.
“Did you reach Gregoire?” I ask him.
“Not yet.”
“Maybe he’s still sleeping.”
Sun nods to his tea. Lowered head, submissive posture. Sun and I were a lot alike in a way. We were cast in our roles by the same charismatic leader. Sun, a stand-in for Dad’s past, and me, a vision of his future. Playing sports, watching MTV, and disrespecting your parents, haha. Dad must have been referring to Juliana when he wrote that line of his letter. I didn’t give him much trouble. Sitting against that wall as he timed me on his watch. Choosing a practical major, one of the ones he approved. Hopping on a jet to China to go wrestle with his past.
Don’t you even care who you become? Jules’s words echo in my head.
“Sun, would you come back to the States with me? I’ve been doing some thinking. It’s not about Rou Qiangjun or the head-of-security guy—I want to put the police onto them if I can, and if you can help me, that’d be great—but that’s not the point. Look, you could stay at the house. Maybe work at the restaurants or something, and start teaching martial arts.”
Sun is looking at me with wide eyes. Finally: the cat caught by surprise. “I just have a tourist visa. I don’t have a green card. I couldn’t stay.”
“We’ll figure something out. I thought about this. Jules can marry you so you can get citizenship. She’s got a bleeding heart; I mean, when she’s heard how Dad treated you, she’ll do it in a second. He owed you this and a lot more. I understand if you want to stay here, but I’d really like it if you could come back with me.”
Sun looks back into his tea and knits his brow, but I can’t read him—did my offer move him, or just remind him of all the things he’s been denied?
“Just think it over, okay?”
“No, no. I’m sorry.” Sun shakes himself out of his reverie. “I do not need to think it over. Of course I will go. You don’t know how tired I am of this place, this life. I want to crawl out of my own skin, some days, I—thank you, Xiaozhou. Thank you.”
“I can’t begin say how welcome you are.” I round the table to put a hand on his shoulder. “Just think about all those tacos you’re gonna eat.”
Sun pats me on the back. There’s a lot of heavy sentiment weighing on his voice. “Xiaozhou, I am grateful to know you. Even though you are so quiet, I can see you are a loving person. You have really changed me. I wish we could have met in different circumstances.”
“I feel the same.”
A moment of silence catches us in this way: me standing beside him, my hand on his shoulder, his hand on my wrist. I let it seep all the way to where it belongs inside of me before I tell him that I’m going to ask Wei the same question.
He nods knowingly. “So you lost the no-games game?”
Wei’s room is a lot more deluxe than mine, which makes sense given her seniority in Ai’s branch of the Happy Year family. It’s spacious, with a full bathroom en suite and a walk-in closet. She’s got a big circular bed that seems to have one pillow on it in every size they make pillows. Xiaofang, her slow loris, is sound asleep in his own little round bed on the floor next to hers. Everything is done up in shades of blue, from the plush navy rug to the summer-sky sheets that match her pajamas.
“I can’t go to America,” she says. I’m just inside her door and she’s standing in front of me, very still, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Look, Sun says he can get you a tourist visa within forty-eight hours. I can pay for your flight. We’ll meet you at the airport, and there’s a place for you to stay. Maybe you can claim asylum. All of it, we can figure something out.”
She looks down and smiles slightly, as if to herself. “I know you like me. But it’s not possible for me. You would not be happy.”
“No, no, that’s not it. I mean, of course I like you. But I don’t want anything from you. I just want to be your friend. To help you. To make things right. You shouldn’t stay here.”
“This is who I am,” she says with a hint of frustration. “I can’t just go to the United States and become a waitress or a nanny. People are a certain way. They can’t change as much as you think.”
“Okay, well.” This isn’t going the way I thought it would. I fish around in my tired brain for something persuasive to say, but nothing floats to the surface. I walk over to her formidable vanity and snatch up a pen. “Sun and I are leaving tonight. I’m going to write down my email here, in case you want to get in touch. Tomorrow, six months from now, a year, whenever. It’s a standing offer.”
I scribble down my email address on a scrap of paper and put the pen down, but terrible fear keeps me from walking away: fear that as soon as I leave this room, I will never see this person again. I rest my weight in my hands on the vanity and take a deep breath.
Wei walks over and stands beside me. She tips her head onto my shoulder and my mind is filled with the smell of expensive shampoo. “Did you see this?” She plucks a black tube of lipstick off the vanity and twists the two halves until something clicks. A round hole in the side of the lid exposes a tiny nozzle.
“Not lipstick?” I ask.
She rolls her lips inward, holding in her secret smile, and shakes her head. “Pepper spray.”
“Yikes,” I say in English.
“I have to prepare for every contingency,” she says in a spot-on impression of Sun’s woodenness, still holding in her smile, until our eyes meet and we both burst into laughter.
“It’s not funny,” I say, holding my stomach, gasping for breath.
She nods big, her shoulders shaking.
After our chuckles subside into sighs, she says, “What will you do now?”
“I dunno. We’re still waiting to hear about the laptop. And Sun is trying to get ahold of Gregoire, but I’m guessing he sleeps late. I’m really exhausted. Maybe I should do like you said and take a nap.”
She pushes the disobedient bangs out of her face. “Do you want to take a nap with me?”
My jaw must be hanging open because she quickly annotates this thunderbolt with two stern words: “No sex.”
“What? Uh, right. Yes. Yes, I do want to take a nap with you,” I say quite formally, and we both laugh giddily again.
“Okay.” She walks over to the big round bed and starts tossing pillows onto the plush rug. “You turn off the lights.”
After I hit the switch by the door, I’m reminded by the pitch-blackness that these rooms have no windows.
“Uh,” I say.
“Follow my voice,” she says. “Come here. Come here. Watch out for the pillows.”
“You have too many pillows,” I say when I finally reach the bed.
“Mmhmm,” she says, and starts pulling my clothes off. All of them.
“Whoa.”
She takes my hands in hers and presses them together in front of us. “The rule is, these hands do not touch me,” she says. “Do you understand the rule?”
I close my eyes and nod obediently. Nothing happens.
“Did you just nod? I can’t see you,” she says.
“Oh, right. Sorry. I’m so tired. Yes, I understand.”
“Good.”
Then we are lying in her bed. She rolls me away from her and snakes one hand under my neck and onto my chest. She puts her other hand on my stomach and presses herself against my back, and I can feel that she is naked, too, her breasts against my shoulder blades, her pubic fuzz against my lower back, her lips directly behind my ear.
“Are you comfortable?” she whispers, and I truthfully answer that I’ve never been more comfortable.
“Good,” she says. “Remember the rule.”
We rest like this for a while, and I’m almost asleep when her fingertips start to roam from my stomach to my ribs, then my hip and my thigh, then back to my stomach. I feel her breath get a little deeper in my ear and her nipples tighten against my back. I’m rock hard by the time her hand gets there. I seem to hear her smile as she lets me go and gives me a pat on the butt before reaching her hand up to her mouth and licking her palm. She does this a few times in the long minutes that follow, methodically using her hand to bring her saliva to me until I’m slippery and slick.
I feel drunk with tiredness and excitement. I try to take stock, to tell myself this is happening, but the pleasure is too overwhelming for me to process and file away as thought or memory. She fondles me, lingers, retreating to caress the rest of me whenever I get close to the edge, all along breathing into my ear and holding me to her chest with her other hand, rocking me ever so gently front to back until I lose all sense of time, place, and self. How long does she touch me? Twenty minutes? Thirty? My mind shuts down, and all I know is this endless moment in which I more or less become pure bliss, and she becomes the god of a little world defined by her fingertips. And then her hand quickens; she slips her tongue into my ear; she wraps her hand around the tip of me, and I explode, a pulsing wet ecstasy, into her palm. She claps her other hand over my mouth as I tremble and convulse.
After I’m soft and my heartbeat returns to the sane range, she kisses my cheek and then rests her head behind mine on the pillow. I try to roll toward her, but she commands me to stay put with a wordless murmur. Then I feel the back of her hand moving along my back and spine, and her breath against my neck becomes a rhythmic panting. It dawns on me in my tiny animal brain that she’s rubbing my come over her stomach and breasts. The hand moves down and speeds up, and the other hand moves from my chest to my mouth. I part my lips and accept her fingers with a grateful tongue, and somewhere deep in my abdomen the hint of another erection stirs and I almost laugh aloud in my exhaustion.
After bringing herself off in a series of gasping shudders, she wraps herself back around me with both arms and gives me a sticky squeeze. It’s then that I finally teeter over the threshold into a slumberous void, my last thought really genuinely being that I am content never to wake again.
* * *
“Do you not understand the rule?” Holly said, a triumphant smile on her face. “I can explain it again.”
“That’s such—but—okay, I’m just saying, we won, like, four, five games in a row just now,” Andre said. “And nobody has said shit about no NBA Jam rule.”
Sophomore year, the weekend after the end of the basketball season: Holly and Jeanie had just knocked us off the table in a hard-fought beer-pong match, and Andre’s competitive nature was getting the best of what he liked to call his General Mellow.
“Did you play anyone else who lives here?” Holly asked, faux sweet. “Because it’s a house rule, ask anyone. But I really don’t mind, we can run it back and beat you guys again.”
“Umm, excuse me?” Janelle Pearson leaned over the table and popped her gum. “But Tyler and I have been waiting for, like, an hour?”
“Fine, who cares? We won five straight, we can retire, right, Victor? Kobe.” Andre shot a high-arcing fadeaway with the remaining Ping-Pong ball; it caromed off the edge of Holly and Jeanie’s last cup.
I said, “Good game,” and shook hands with Holly and Jeanie, provoking a smile, giggles. Because I’m sweet or because I’m a pathetic dork? Another mystery to me. Who shakes hands after beer pong? I shook my head at myself as we retreated to the back porch, where Eli was sitting on a musty couch, smoking a joint with a girl I didn’t recognize.
“Y’all finally lost?”
“Yeah,” Andre said. “Victor, you fell off.”
“Too much beer. Plus, Holly makes me nervous.”
“C’mon, man.” Andre shook his head at me. “When are you gonna stop pining and make a move?”
The girl put a hand on Eli’s knee and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, then staggered off in a kegward direction. Eli blinked down at the spot on the couch that she’d vacated. “Shit,” he said, then looked back up to me. “So, Holly Michaels, huh? You like that in-charge, alpha female thing? Think she’d strap one on for you?”
As usual, Andre came to my defense. “You got it all wrong, Eli. Our man Victor here is a true romantic and a postchauvinist. So he’s naturally drawn to strong women such as the lovely Holly. Right, Rice?”
I didn’t respond, just tipped my head onto the couch cushions and tried to exhale away some drunkenness. It didn’t matter to me if Andre thought I was a romantic or Eli thought I wanted a good pegging. What mattered to me was that I’d been in college for eighteen months, and the optimistic box of Trojans under my bed was still covered in shrink-wrap.
“Andre all day! What it is, nigga?”
“You already know, son!”
Snapback caps and tapered fros loomed over me. I tipped myself upright in time to see Andre bounce off the couch and exchange elaborate daps with three brothers of Omega Phi Pi. Back during Freshman Rush, Omega had heavily courted Andre, who managed to fend them off without stepping on any toes; now, he came and went freely at their parties, usually without bringing Eli and me along.
“Why does he hang out with those guys, anyway?” I said to Eli after Andre and the Omegas had drifted away from the couch with nary an acknowledgment of our existence. “That’s not, like, who he really is.”
“You mean, black?” Eli drew on the joint, spoke in a high whine as he held smoke in his lungs. “I’m pretty sure he’s black.”
“You know what I mean. We live with this guy who reads bell hooks and makes pierogis from scratch, but they hang out with some slick brother who says things like ‘this nigga be like’ and ‘what’s Gucci, my killa?’ So why does he have to front like that when he’s with them?”
Eli nodded skeptically and tried to pass me the joint, but I waved it off. Finally, he exhaled, a thin stream of smoke vanishing up into the warm sky. “He’s just code-switching, V. You think those other guys talk like that all the time? That guy Rashid, in the Clippers jersey? He’s magna cum laude, man. In physics.”
“Seems a little phony to me,” I said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Yeah, sure, dude, like we can always be perfectly honest about who we really are, that’s super-realistic,” Eli said, waxing stoned. “Look at me, I have to pretend to my parents that I don’t eat shellfish and constantly wear a skullcap to acknowledge the divine presence above my head. Victor, sometimes we’ve got to be who people want us to be. And when we do that, yeah, we’re protecting ourselves, but we might also be protecting the other people. Man, most people are just playing roles most of the time. Trying to get something: love, sex, money, respect, whatever. And it’s great that you’re not like that. But.”
“But?”
“But it’s ridiculous that you expect other people to be like you. And hey, you don’t even speak English with your Dad.”
He kind of coughed, gagged, and snorted at the same time.
“You show me someone who’s the same person in every situation,” he said, “and I’ll show you a psycho killer.”
I might have pressed my point if Janelle hadn’t flopped down onto the couch on the other side of me. Janelle Pearson had been in my Finance 100 section, and we were once paired together to make a presentation for which I ended up doing most of the work. By custom she sat among a gaggle of her sorority sisters, but she occasionally caught up with me after class to borrow my notes and ask with a sly smile if I was “still on the basketball team.”
Janelle was wearing a white skirt and a pale pink crop top that showed plenty of her amber skin. Her sun-streaked hair was pulled back into a half ponytail; her eyebrows were plucked to near extinction.
“Hey, Victor!” she said.
I responded in kind and introduced Eli, who offered her the joint.
“Oh my God, no, thank you. I just pounded so much beers. Those volleyball lesbos really know how to throw Ping-Pong balls, I’ll give them that.”
“So you lost, too, huh?” I said. “Another victim of the NBA Jam rule?”
“The what?”
“Nothing.”
A silence. Eli elbowed my ribs. Then Janelle laid a finger on my forearm.
“I’m gonna go take a shot. Wanna come with me?”
“No, thanks.”
Once she was gone, Eli said, “Dude, you know Janelle Pearson?”
“We had a class together, that’s all,” I said. “How do you know her? I thought you just met.”
“I follow her on Instagram. We’ve met, like, four times, but she has never once remembered me. I can’t believe you just blew her off like that. I’d be more angry if I weren’t still in shock.”
“What, ’cause I didn’t go take a shot with her? Dude, Janelle Pearson and I have zero in common. I don’t think she’d really go for a guy like me.”
Eli stared at me for a minute, shook his head, and then pulled out his phone. “Victor, we’re not talking about marriage. Look at these photos. She’s either in a bikini or drinking or both. She just pounded some beers and then asked you if you want to take a shot. I doubt she cares how much you have in common.”
I took the phone out of his hands and scrolled through Janelle’s admittedly sexy feed as Eli continued to scold.
“She’s half Puerto Rican. Look at her belly button, dude! You’re telling me you don’t want to go find out what she smells like? You know, Victor, you’re always complaining about not getting any, but seriously you wouldn’t know pussy if it hit you in the face. You’re obsessed with this weird notion that girls think Asian guys are nerds. You’re not a diminutive gamer from Daegu, you’re a racially exotic college athlete. I’m an uncoordinated programmer with eczema and freckles, and you have the nerve to complain to me about your girl problems?”
#happyhour. #beachbody. #YOLO. Maybe Eli had a point. Maybe I needed to loosen up. Our second season of college basketball had just ended, and I continued to escape notice from the coaching staff despite practicing harder than anybody else. Maybe my disappointment had led me to be a little too hard on myself. Like everyone was always telling me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go find out what she smells like.”
“Don’t do it for Eli.” He produced a pack of gum from his pocket and offered me a stick. “Do it for Victor.”
I popped the gum into my mouth and stood up from the couch. “Nǐ de yánxíng hé nǐ de nèixīn bù kěnéng suíshí yízhì de—It’s impossible for your conduct to always align with your heart,” Dad once said, a grim look on his face.
I found Janelle in the kitchen, and pretty soon we had rinsed out a couple of Solo cups and located a handle of Bankers Club. What’s your major? Where are you from? What’s the best part of being in a sorority? I asked questions, listening, being careful not to make jokes or open up about myself or anything silly like that. She brushed her hand against mine, she leaned close to me, she had gotten a C in Finance 100.
She smelled like coconuts.
Should we do another shot? Had it always been this easy, and where had I been? Pretty soon she was leading me up the stairs, pushing me onto a bed, pulling off my T-shirt. She was doing slurpy kisses on my belly, telling me she’d heard I worked out a lot, but wow. She was pulling at my belt, and I was praying I’d be hard by the time she got there, when Holly walked in with three or four people behind her.
“Uh, wow. That’s unexpected!” Holly said, wheeling around, herding people back into the hallway.
“Don’t you knock?” Janelle exclaimed.
“Not usually on my own door,” Holly called over her shoulder.
I was on my feet in an instant, halfway after her, telling her I didn’t know, I thought—
“Don’t sweat it,” she said, and pulled the door closed in my face.
I turned back to Janelle. She had kicked her shoes off and lain down on Holly’s bed. “Don’t worry, she doesn’t care. Come back over here.” She licked her lips. “I need to see the rest of that ripped bod.”
I blinked at her a few times, then turned back around and headed out the door. Holly was just disappearing into a room down the hall.
“Wait,” I said. “Holly. Can I talk to you for just a second?”
She squinted at me, came back out into the hallway, walked over slowly, folded her arms in front of her. “What’s up?” she said.
My face went hot. Saliva pooled in my mouth. It vaguely occurred to me that I was rip-roaring drunk. I said I didn’t know it was her room. I wouldn’t have gone in there with Janelle if I had known it was her room.
“Look, I already told you, don’t sweat it.”
“I know you did, I just—there’s something else I wanted to ask you. Would you like to have dinner together sometime? Or lunch? You don’t have to. I mean, maybe I could call you about it.”
Holly looked away, blushed, traced a shape on the wall with her fingers. “Victor, I—”
Some dude poked his head out of the doorway behind her. “Holly, babe, can’t find a lighter,” he said.
“Okay, one sec,” she said. The head disappeared. Holly turned back to me, reached out, and rested a hand on my shoulder.
I noticed that I wasn’t wearing my shirt.
“Victor, you’re a sweet guy,” she said. “I like that about you. But you really don’t know the first thing about timing, do you?”
Then she turned and walked away.