No way was I imagining it.
People at school were friendlier. Made more eye contact. And from what I could tell there was only one explanation. Couple skating with Annie had made my social status skyrocket.
Jaxon asked during Monday’s lunch period, “So…what IS the deal with you and Annie? You’re not sitting with her. Are you guys trying to play it cool?” He ripped off all the cheese from his pizza and just ate the crust part but kept his stare on me. Zach lifted Jaxon’s discarded cheese off the plate with his thumb and index finger and ate it.
I shrugged. “Nothing since the rink. Haven’t even seen her today.” I pulled my phone from the front pocket of my jeans and checked for any missed calls or messages. No word from Kate for a few days now.
I broke the silence with a simple message to her. Hey. Unblinking, I stared at my phone, willing her to answer me.
Zach swallowed. “You avoiding her?”
“Who?” I asked, still wondering about Kate’s silence. I shoved my phone back into my pocket.
“Annie, you idiot.” Jaxon said. “There! I see her. She’s over by the vending machines.” He stood up and used his hands as a megaphone. “Hey, Annie! Come sit over heeeeere!”
It took a great deal of restraint not to hammer-punch his nuts. I hissed, “Sit down. Quit being an asshole.”
Jaxon waved around like he was drowning. “Yessssss, she’s coming! This is gonna be good.”
I had exactly ten seconds to figure out what I was going to say. She was headed straight toward us.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One. I had nothing. My mind drew a blank.
Zero words. One tied tongue. And two useless jackass friends.
“How’s it going, Annie?” Jaxon asked as she put her tray down next to mine. He lifted his eyebrows, flashing me a message: You’re welcome.
“Good, thanks for asking.” She sat on the bench next to me, legs slightly pointing away from mine. She gave me a stern look. “You coulda sat down over with me, you know. The bell’s gonna ring pretty soon.”
“I—I—I didn’t see you over there.” That wasn’t a total lie. But then again, I also wasn’t looking for her. Too chicken to scope the place out, I didn’t want to discover that she was happy elsewhere, not even thinking about me. That couples’ skate was a fluke. Sitting in my usual lunchroom spot was a safe, reasonable plan. She, or anyone else really, could easily find me, if that’s what they wanted.
The unfilled silence pained me. My friends were being quiet too, which was also unlike them. She had disrupted our boring, placid ecosystem. Actually, Jaxon had. Thanks, Jaxon.
Of all people, Zach spoke. “I ate alligator the other day.”
I scrunched my face. “What? Why? And where?” I asked, grossed out, but also relieved someone had said something.
“I won a gift card to that new Cajun restaurant last month, and my family and I went there for dinner. I had breaded alligator nuggets for the first time.”
“Does it taste like chicken?” We all three asked in unison and burst into a fit of laughter.
He took a sip of chocolate milk before answering. “Eh, actually, it tastes more like rattlesnake.”
I spat out a laugh. I’d spent years getting into peak physical shape and memorized every survivalist training guide ever published, but I could never be like Zach, who ate alligator and rattlesnake like it was no big deal. He had a strong constitution, like a billy goat. I got an upset stomach just thinking about Cajun spices.
The bell rang, and I jolted upright. “Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m on a strict reptile- and amphibian-free diet.” After a few pats on my stomach, I took a quick bite of my barely eaten supreme pizza. Bell peppers, onions, sausage, and pepperoni—“supreme” was an overstatement for such a shitty medley of pie toppings.
Jaxon snorted. “Good one, bro. See ya after school.” He stuffed in his earbuds and took off with Zach.
That left Annie and me. Alone.
“Walk you to your class?” I asked.
She hesitated, so I hedged. “Or not,” I backpedaled. “I’ll see ya later.”
“No, no, it’s fine, I just have to get my backpack from my locker for next period. Let’s go.” Our metal bench screeched on the linoleum as we scooted back from the table.
In the senior corridor, Pete Haskill IV strolled straight over to me. My upper body shivered as he approached. I expected him to do the same handshake-back-slap greeting he did at the skating rink, but instead he switched it up by grabbing my arm and going back and forth like we were using a two-man saw. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. I’d never seen anything like it. It made me worried that maybe it wasn’t how the handshake was supposed to go, that maybe I’d forgotten to let go at the right time, and he was simply trying to pull his hand loose.
His voice dropped low. “You ready to talk about the grade thing?”
I cleared my throat and whispered to keep out of earshot of Annie, who was now applying lip gloss in the mirror of her locker. “Can I have more time?”
Abruptly, he let go of my hand. What was his deal with him always holding it? “How much more time are we talking about?” He scowled.
Maybe forever? “Can I get back to you in a couple of weeks?” I asked, my voice cracking. That would give me time to focus on the zombie competition with Kate. I could deal with Pete after that.
Pete smiled, like he had the upper hand. “Two weeks then, skiddo.” He slapped my back hard enough to make me choke on my spit.
Annie joined us, carrying her overstuffed backpack covered in purple peace signs. “What’re we talking about?”
“Nothing,” we both said, him firmly, me in high-pitched singsong.
“It sounded like more than nothing,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “But whatever, we need to go. The bell’s gonna ring.” Annie and Pete exchanged a look I couldn’t read and then acted like they didn’t know each other. We walked in silence to her econ class until she stopped a few feet short of the door. “Um, can we study together for midterms?”
A study date…with Annie. Oh man, I would have pinched myself to make sure it wasn’t a dream if it weren’t such a weird thing to do. When Jaxon found out, he’d high-five himself and say he’d orchestrated the whole thing from the start. Maybe he did.
“So…is it okay if we study together for exams?” Annie repeated with some hesitation. My speaking delay allowed me time to compose myself instead of pumping two fists in the air and strutting down the hallway like I owned the school.
With a steady-ish voice, I asked, “Sure, maybe later this week?” Annie bobbed her head and disappeared into the classroom. That was easier than I expected.
Feeling lucky, I checked my phone again for messages. Kate still hadn’t replied.
Time to write again. Team TBD competition is in a week, let’s discuss…Dicks?
Then, I meant Dicks hamburgers, not discuss dicks
Someone please take this phone away from me. I’ll stop typing dicks now
She responded so fast. I LOVE DIIIIIIIICKS!!! 7pm tonight
I swear to God, I’d never laughed so hard in my life.
* * *
“Jae-Woo!”
“JAE-WOO!”
I went around the house trying to track down my dad’s voice. Turns out he was on the roof.
“Next time, answer when I call you!” He barked when I came out the back door. If he’d screamed my name a third time, that meant full-on angry-Korean-dad escalation. Added chores. A grounding or two. More yelling. Threats of kicking me out of the house. In other words, the usual.
“Sorry, I was doing homework.” Which was a total lie, unless homework involved figuring out what to wear when seeing Kate.
Dad yelled, “I need water! Can you bring to me?” He pulled up his paint-splattered Hanes undershirt tucked into his pants and used the bottom of it as a towel to wipe his face. Dad’s face, neck, and arms were golden brown from being outdoors so much, freckled with sun spots. He never seemed to burn, despite his refusal to wear sunscreen. Underneath his shirt, pants, and socks was pasty white, translucent skin. Like a jellyfish, but a little grosser.
“No problem,” I hollered, jogging to the back door.
It was locked.
I jiggled the knob and tried again. I’d just come through that same door and deliberately left it unlocked.
A small pair of hands pulled back the curtains in the adjacent window.
“Lucy! Open the door. It’s hot out today.” It was an unseasonable eighty degrees outside, blistering by Seattle autumn standards.
“No, not till you ’pologize!” The curtain fell straight, and Lucy’s hands disappeared.
“For what?!” I banged on the door. “Open it. I mean it!”
“You called me a crybaby again! Say sorry!” True, I called her that a lot, but that’s because she was. Seriously, who cried when their toast was too hot? Blow on the stupid thing.
“I’m sorry.” I sighed. Sorry that you’re a crybaby.
“And say you won’t call me crybaby again.”
Damn it, she was so smart. “I won’t call you crybaby again.”
“Ever.”
Sigh. “EVER. Now let me in, I’m serious. Dad is gonna be mad.”
A huge wave of relief hit when the lock clicked.
She scampered away. Good, she’d be out of my hair for a while. I swear, that kid had to be adopted. Or maybe I was adopted. How could two people so different be related? And I wasn’t talking just about her crybaby-ness. For Koreans, on the first birthday there’s a whole ritual around predicting the future of the one-year-old. Parents typically laid out a stethoscope, ruler, calculator, things like that, and in front of a whole crowd of people, the kid would walk or crawl to the item he wanted, and that would determine what the kid would be when he grew up. Unsurprisingly, I beelined to the hundred-dollar bill, and all of my parents’ friends roared with laughter, saying I’d be showered in riches.
My sister? She picked up a paintbrush and chewed on the brush end. My parents and partygoers gaped when Lucy grinned and revealed two front teeth covered in green Crayola watercolor.
Back then, it was hilarious how different she was from me. She was so unpredictable, stubborn, and full of emotion.
Now, not so much.
“JAE-WOO! Ppali! Ppali!” Dad screamed. HURRY!
In the fridge, we had kimchi. Pickles. Tubs of tuna and potato salad from Costco. So many apples. Everything but bottles of water.
No bottles of water anywhere, not in the pantry or in the garage. Not wanting to be screamed at again, I put some ice into a large thermos and added some tap water. That would have to do.
Outside, a heavy breeze came through and lifted the tarp from the roof, causing it to flap like a fish out of water before Dad could anchor it.
He cursed in Korean as I approached.
As I rattled the bottle, the ice clinked around. “Appa, here’s your water!”
Dad crouched and peered over the side. “I can’t come down. You need to bring it up.”
“I can’t.” He knew that. Me, on the rickety ladder, shaking with every footstep, falling to my death. Nope, no thank you.
“JAE.” Pause. “WOO.” The head shake. The disappointed tone. Him working his jaw back and forth. Translation: how could my only son, my oldest, be so damn scared of heights?
Blinking hard, I tried to push away all the memories that still haunted my dreams. My shoulder muscles clenched thinking about the time when I got stuck up a tree in my neighbor’s yard that was too tall to scale. In the pouring rain, it took hours for a firefighter to climb a ladder and coax me down. The time I pissed all over myself standing on the high diving board for the first time (and the last time). Two years ago, when our history class took a field trip to the Space Needle, and I was the only one who stayed on the bus. A rumor went around school that I couldn’t go because I was too poor to pay for admission. That was only marginally better than the real reason for not going. That I was too chicken.
I had two choices. To scurry up the ladder as quickly as my legs could go, give Dad the water, rush back down, and piss in my pants. Or I could compose myself, slowly take each step in stride, still piss in my pants, but over a longer period of time. Neither option was “good.” But Dad’s patience was running out. His disappointment was at an all-time high. I had to make a move.
Panic immediately set in, and my fingers and feet tingled like they were falling asleep. My blood pulsed through my hands as I gripped the ladder.
Pulsing. Hammering. Throbbing. Boom. Boom. Boom.
Six rungs. Just six steps. Twelve, if you count the return trip. I attached the thermos’s handle to a carabiner and hooked it to my pants belt loop.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Left foot, right foot. Don’t look down. Step one.
Left foot, right foot. Don’t look down. Two.
Left foot, right foot. Don’t look down. Three.
A blast of wind hit the ladder, causing it to shimmy. I gripped it tighter, and my knuckles turned white.
Left foot, right foot. Four.
Left foot, right foot. Five.
Dad had moved to the other side of the roof, unfolding edges of the tarp and weighing them down with broken cinder blocks.
One more step, then Dad could come get the water from me and I wouldn’t need to go up any farther.
Unhooking the bottle with my eyes mostly closed, I bellowed, “I have your water!” The thermos dangled like I was doing hypnosis.
“Put it down.” No “thank you,” “good job,” or “thanks for risking your life for my hydration.” I didn’t care, though. My main priority was to be back on the ground.
I put it down on the roof, then with my eyes fully closed, I felt for the next step down.
“Naaaaate!” It was Lucy again, directly underneath me. Dizziness hit hard when I tried to look in the direction of her voice. Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.
“Luce! I’ll be down in a second.”
She choked back sobs. “I broke it! I’m sorry!”
“Luce, move away! I need to focus.” I still had five steps to go.
Now crying hysterically, Lucy took a shaky hold on the ladder. My eyes squeezed shut even tighter. “Luce! Move!”
My body was in full-blown panic mode. Heart pounding, lungs burning, full-body tense and tingling. The burn of bile made its way upward. Ironic, since I was trying to make my way down.
My left foot searched for the next metal platform of safety one more time. Lucy wailed as I made it down a level.
The next time, though, my foot was too close to the edge of the rung, which I would have seen if my eyes were open.
I slipped, of course, banging my knees on the rungs as I lost my grip. The entire front side of my body from the neck down got a metal spanking. I winced as my knees clattered to the bottom.
Lucy had stepped out of the way just in time, thank God, or she would have gotten two boots to the face. Seeing me fall from the ladder made her finally stop crying.
Slowly, I stood to assess the damage. Ripped pants from snagging screws, skinned arms and knees, and a turned ankle.
Terrific.
“Lucy,” I groaned, hobbling toward the house. “What were you crying about? You distracted me, you know that, right?”
She gaped at the blood oozing from my elbow scrapes. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll be fine. I just need to wash off the blood and put some ointment on it.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry for Hermione too.” On the kitchen table, my limited edition Hermione figurine, circa 2002, lay outside her case. The box had been opened carefully, but Hermione was no longer in her Hogwarts robe. She was wearing a ball gown from Lucy’s Shimmer and Shine genie collection. “I wanted her to look pretty. With sparkles. But the dress is stuck.”
It took a few seconds before it hit me. “Lucy. That was worth five hundred dollars. FIVE! HUNDRED! DOLLARS!” I took her naked Shimmer doll and threw it across the room, so hard that it hit the wall and left a flesh-colored scuff mark on the off-white paint. Irresponsible Lucy, who flushed dolls down toilets, who ate paintbrush tips at parties, who threw away five hundred dollars. It made me so…ARRRRGGGHHHH!
My mom came into the kitchen with bags of Subway sandwiches. Lucy ran to her and hid behind her legs.
Mom swung open the back door and called out to my dad. “Jagiya! Time to eat dinner! I buy your favorite! Cold-cut combo foot long!”
“Can you please tell Lucy to stay away from my stuff? She ruined something I was saving!”
“Lucy, don’t bother Nate thing. You want him to bother all your toy?”
“Nooooo! I said I was sorry, Umma!”
“Don’t you ever go into my room and mess with my stuff,” I growled at her. “Mom, I’m gonna go out for dinner. Can you put my sandwich in the fridge? I’ll eat it for lunch tomorrow.” I opened the freezer and pulled out a bag of peas to ice my ankle.
Mom unpacked the subs and chips and glanced at me. “Why you go out in your zombie clothes?”
I glanced down. “Huh? These are my normal clothes.”
She shrugged but didn’t apologize. While putting groceries away, she also restacked and pulled out Tupperwares of banchan to make room. She used the Korean mom sniff test to measure edibility before putting it on the kitchen table. Her marinated soybean sprouts, radish kimchi, and sesame leaves made the cut. The spicy pickled cucumbers and spicy squid went straight into the swing-top trash can.
Subway sandwiches and banchan. Two cultures colliding to make culinary magic: this was the Korean American dream right here. KFC with kimchi was my all-time second-favorite combo.
Dad sat down at the kitchen table first, unwrapped his foot long, and crunched his chips. He refused to look at me. Neither of us brought up my painful fall because it brought shame on both of us. I was his “soft” son, unable to climb up and down a ladder.
Lucy still couldn’t use chopsticks, so she pulled out pieces of soybean sprouts with her fork. She grabbed a few pieces of spinach with her fingers when my parents weren’t looking.
Mom said, “Jae-Woo, your birthday is coming. We can get pizza from Papa John. Maybe I make you brownie cake?”
Lucy lifted a sprout from her plate and dangled it next to her mouth. “Why can’t we go have pizza and games at Chunky Cheese?”
Dad grumbled, “Don’t play with your food!”
Lucy ate the sprout and picked up her fork to stab at the rest of the vegetables on her plate.
Mom snorted. “Nate is too old for Chunky Cheese. That is little kid place.”
Frustrated, I sighed, “It’s Chuck E. Cheese’s, not Chunky Cheese—”
Mom cut me off. “That’s what I say!”
“Me too,” Lucy added.
Mom muttered, “What is Chucky mean? Chunky Cheese make more sense.”
There was no point in arguing about this. I gave up. “Why can’t I have a Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream cake?” For the last five years, I’d had Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough plus Fudge Brownie with M&M’s and Oreo crumbles on top. It was a custom order, and a yearly tradition.
“Those cake are expensive, Jae-Woo.” Dad shook his head, pinching between his brow.
Mom and Dad were back into thrift mode, a cyclical event every few years. Last time it happened was when Lucy was born. My parents returned some onesies and bibs they’d gotten from neighbors and friends just to buy me new running shoes because I’d had a growth spurt, as many middle school boys did. Our groceries went from name-brand to generic. Home repairs went on hold and were never resumed. Though I became aware of our circumstances over time, the Kim family rule prevented me from asking or arguing with them about it. Not that my parents would open up about personal matters anyway. It wasn’t something they ever did, even when they directly affected me. Like, say, being too poor to afford an ice-cream cake and party, and not just saying that directly.
Lucy looked up at Mom with watery eyes. “But I like that cake too, Appa. Umma.” Tears popped out and streamed down her cheeks.
I glanced at Mom and Dad, but both sat with pursed lips.
“That’s okay, Luce, Mom makes amazing brownies,” I said, trying to defuse the Lucy time bomb. Mom’s brownies were straight from a box, but Mom added chocolate chunks into the batter, making it gooey and extra-chocolaty. “And maybe this time we can add a scoop of ice cream on top.”
The two things Lucy loved most: chocolate and ice cream. Her crying stopped instantly.
I looked at Dad, hoping to catch his eye and give him a reassuring “Lucy crisis averted” smile, but he was too busy staring at the stack of mail on the counter. After putting his beer down, he opened one of the letters. Color drained from his face while he read. When he finished, he ripped the note in half, threw it in the trash can, then stormed out of the room, leaving his half-drunk Hite beer sweating on the fake marble-top.
When Mom ran after him, I fished the letter out of the bin and skimmed it fast.
Seattle Mutual Savings and Loan
1200 Broadway
Seattle, WA 98104
Dear Mr. Kim:
We are writing to inform you that your request of loan modification for your home mortgage payments has been reviewed. Regretfully, we are denying your petition. While we understand that you have recently been terminated from your IT consulting position with Zeneration, Inc., we do feel that there is a possibility of you being hired elsewhere with your strong credentials.
Per your request, we have deferred your payment for the next month, as a courtesy, but late fees on the previous months of nonpayment will not be waived. We hope this will provide your family with some financial relief.
Sincerely,
Bernie Akins
Chief Loan Officer
Dad had lost his job? And no one told me? The guys in the IT department loved him, so none of this made sense. He could probably get a job at another company, right?
Now there was way more at stake for winning the zombie competition. We could lose the house.
Lucy broke my concentration. “Nate! What did the trash note say?”
Think quick. “It says…be nice to your brother on his birthday. It’s from Santa.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Can Santa give you an ice-cream birthday cake if Umma and Appa don’t?”
I smiled. Oh, Lucy. If there was any leftover prize money, I’d definitely buy myself an ice-cream cake. And fine, maybe I’d get Lucy one too. And maybe take us all to Chunky Cheese to celebrate. A joint gift from Santa and me. What an amazing birthday that would be.