TGIF! Finally.
It had been a whole week, and I still hadn’t found a way to explain to Kate that my five-year-old sister had found the hidden wig and gave it some “style” by taking liberties, adding blunt layers with her Crayola safety scissors.
Not only that, but when I tried to tug-of-war it from her little hands, Lucy screeched, “No! I fix it!” and glued the cut hair back to the wig with pink, glittery Elmer’s. Honestly, aside from the sparkles and random hair chunks that kept falling out, the mangier, matted mess looked much worse, but in a good way. I just hoped Kate wouldn’t be mad that the wig had left my chain of custody and fallen into the hands of Baby Vidal Sassoon.
I took the wig with me to my mom’s car so that Lucy couldn’t do any more damage while I was at school. Mom worked from home on Fridays, which meant it was my day to drive the carpool. I absentmindedly threw the wig in the back seat of the Honda.
Zach was my first pickup. He was standing by his mailbox, on time as usual. Clyde Hill Academy had a dress code, but Zach always bucked the system and wore the exact same thing every day: black Starcraft T-shirt, faded brown cords, and ’70s-style metal glasses that he’d had since seventh grade, which were uncool then but somehow had gone retro and come back in style. He practically cannonballed into the seat behind me.
“What the hell?” Zach shouted, pulling the hairy, glittery mass from beneath his ass. As he tried to throw the wig on the floor, not-quite-dried strands of glitter hair clung to his fingers.
I glanced at him in the rearview. “Hey, it’s not mine. It belongs to a friend. Pick it up.”
“Gross,” Zach muttered as he picked the wig back up and flung it at me. I tried to stuff it in the glove compartment, but it was jammed, so I dropped it into the center console drink holders.
Next stop, Jaxon, my best friend since middle school. He stood by his mailbox texting someone, his brown floppy hair nearly covering his eyes. He didn’t bother to look up as he plopped down in the front passenger seat and shoved his backpack down on the floorboard. Must be a new game. Or a girl.
“You playing Noob vs. Universe?” I asked.
“Huh? Yeah,” Jaxon mumbled. “Sorry, actually, no. Not right now. Annie’s saying she can’t ride with us today. She’s getting a ride with her new boyfriend.” He looked up with a pitying grin. “Sorry to break that to you, Natey. You missed your chance. Again.”
Oh.
Annie.
A long time ago, she used to hang out with us a lot more. But then she grew boobs and mostly only hung out with girls after that. We still had classes with her, but that was the extent of our social interaction. She asked us to carpool this year out of the blue. She was a little out of the way, but we still did it.
Annie dated a lot. Even back in sixth grade, she liked to be taken on real dates with guys, like ones where you had seafood pasta plus dessert and watched a newly released movie at the neighborhood dine-in theater with unlimited popcorn and seats that reclined.
I shrugged. “So it’s just the three of us then, until she dumps him. Whatever.”
Zach grunted, “Us three, plus that thing.” He leaned forward between our seats, pointing at the hairy mass sitting next to Jaxon and me.
With a full-body recoil, Jaxon nearly elbowed Zach’s face. “What IS that?”
“Belongs to a friend,” Zach answered, adjusting his glasses, parroting my previous explanation.
“But what IS it?”
I sighed. “It’s hair. A wig, actually. And as Zach said, it belongs to a friend.”
Jaxon’s eyes bulged. “What kind of friend? Like, a girlfriend?”
“I didn’t say that.” My face and neck burned so hot that I had to unbutton the top of my shirt. Luckily, neither of them noticed.
Jaxon leaned toward the wig. “But you have some girl’s hair in your car,” he accused.
Zach chimed in. “Maybe it belongs to a prostitute.”
“Thanks, Zach.”
Jaxon clapped his hands. “So, girlfriend or prostitute, which is it?”
I needed new friends. And an eject button for my passenger seats.
“It’s neither.” I sighed. “It’s just an escape room prop, okay? I need to bring it to work tonight.” I tried my best to make it sound like not a big deal. Not even a small deal. It was nothing. Nothing at all. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand.
Jaxon snorted. “For a minute there I thought you temporarily put aside your Tony Stark tycoon dreams and really had made time for a girlfriend. Honestly, I’d hoped it was true. Then you’d finally stop lusting after Annie.”
Behind us, a car revved its engine, and in my rearview, a black Dodge Challenger tailgated so close it was like I was towing the damn thing.
Jaxon turned around. “Is that guy serious?” I hit the blinker to pull over, and Jaxon leaned over and swatted my arm. “Bro, you are not pulling over to let him pass. You’re going the speed limit, and yeah, you’re driving a little grandma-like in a grandma-like car, but you’re not pulling over. He can reroute.” Jaxon’s nostrils flared like a bull ready to charge.
To our left, the revving grew louder, like those Harley-Davidson guys who drive around together with those high handlebars, engines fart-blasting for no good reason.
Zach muttered, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” and sank down into his seat.
The Challenger whipped around on my left, driving on the wrong side of the double yellow line, and passed me. With the windows down, the aviator-wearing passenger yelled, “Nice antique!” I couldn’t initiate a stare-off because I had the bad habit of steering in the direction I looked.
But Jaxon got a good look. He rolled down his window and scooped a handful of change from Mom’s parking meter fund in the glove compartment, which he’d yanked loose.
“Wait, what are you doing?” I squawked.
Jaxon didn’t answer. He was too busy chucking the coins out the window with his trusty pitcher arm.
PING! PING! PING-PING! His aim was impeccable, showering the black Dodge with currency. My heart raced as I peeled around the first street I could take on my right. In the distance I heard the Dodge screech to a halt, but I’d already created some distance. If I weren’t the one driving, my eyes would have been squeezed shut. My shoulder muscles clenched to my ears from the trauma.
Zach wiped his brow with the cuff on his sweatshirt. Exasperated, he groaned at Jaxon, “You owe Nate a buck fifty. At least.”
Jaxon opened his wallet and pulled out two ratty bills. “Nice reflexes, Nate. All those driving games and that quick karate shit you do all the time came in handy.” He dropped them in the cup holder on top of the wig. “Keep the change.”
Sweat trickled down the sides of my face as I pulled into the one open spot in the Clyde Hill lot, between a Lexus SUV and Tesla sedan. “Okay, assholes. Get out.”
“Thanks for the ride.” Jaxon fussed with his hair in the window’s reflection while I locked the car.
Zach mumbled something, maybe a “thank you.” Not much of a talker, that guy. I gave him a head nod in return.
The parking lot on the south side of campus was closest to the senior hallway. The brand-new “coming soon” STEM building was also nearby. Sometime after the holidays, the headmaster would cut the ribbon to unveil state-of-the-art computer labs and science facilities, the best in the nation, thanks to the generous corporate endowment from Digitools, Inc., the largest, evilest tech behemoth in the world that happened to be headquartered in downtown Bellevue. Half of the kids at my school had parents who worked there.
At the school’s side entrance, Peter Haskill the Fourth and his preppy gang of other Clyde Hill legacy bros leaned on the brick wall, chatting about how some guy from an opposing soccer team “deserved that punch to the face.”
Pete Haskill. The Fourth. Clyde Hill Academy legacy. Captain of every varsity team sport offered. And the guy at school who frequently asked me how my karate skills were coming along and would then do some fake-ass karate chop on my neck, yelling, “Bruce Lee, ha-yaaa!” He’d done it for so many years I didn’t even flinch anymore, and lately he’d ended it with a friendly hair muss. Back in junior high, he used to ask me to teach him Korean curse words, but my third-grade Hangul vocabulary couldn’t offer him much on that front. I stopped going to the weekly half-day Saturday language classes because I had too many other activities. Something had to go. That something was Korean.
He also joked a lot about my skid status, meaning he did all the laughing, and I took the brunt of his “jokes.” Other than this infrequent, ignorant, slapstick racism, he never targeted me, and his friends left me alone too. He wasn’t a horrible guy to me, all things considered. He could be worse for sure—I’d seen him do worse—but that didn’t mean he was a good guy to any of us scholarship kids. On a ten-point asshole scale, he was pretty up there. Pushing above the seven or higher range, into real assholedom.
Pete’s boys moved toward the door, creating a bro barrier. Jaxon and Zach squeezed through the body fortress with no altercations.
But Pete stepped into my path when I tried to pass. “Hey, Nate. How’s it going?” Most guys at our school called other guys by their last names. But my last name was Kim, and that made me sound like a girl. Thanks to bro courtesy, guys just called me Nate.
I stopped and gave him a half wave. “Hey, Haskill, good I guess?” My voice cracked.
Jaxon and Zach turned around to see if I needed any help. I waved them off. They went ahead to class but kept looking back as they walked down the hallway.
Pete used his massive hand to sweep his tousled Tom Holland hair out of his steely blue eyes. “Serious question for you, Nate.” Apparently, we were getting right to business. Enough chitchatting.
“Okay.”
“You’re probably already done with college applications, right? You were doing early action?” He pulled his phone out of his front pants pocket to check the time.
“Yeah, I’m almost done. I still need to get the regular-decision ones ready just in case, but they’re basically finished.”
I racked my brain to anticipate his next comment, to get ahead of this line of questioning. Was he going to ask me for college application help? To write his college essays? I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Good, good.” He forced a smile, and I forced one back in return. Panic inched up my chest, wriggling like a worm.
“A bunch of us friends of yours at school have a favor to ask you. No pressure.”
Yes, pressure. Enough with this Tony Soprano shit already.
“Since your early applications will be in soon, and schools are going to make their decisions on last year’s transcript, we were wondering if we could pay you to, um”—he shrugged as he spoke—“throw your GPA? So like, some of us doing regular decision have a better chance at getting into college if you do that. It’s like in sports, when the top-ranked team gets knocked out of the competition.”
“Wait, what?” I balled my fists to stop their shaking. “What do you mean, throw my GPA? Are you talking making B’s?” I paused. “Or C’s? Or are you talking…F’s? And how would this even work?”
He chuckled, the way villains did in movies before murdering someone. “Nothing that would get you in trouble or alert Headmaster Jacobson. A few of us could say we made honor roll and headmaster’s list our first semester senior year if you and some other nerds bumped down a few spots. We were thinking a few B’s is all, your excuse being getting senioritis. We’d be willing to pay more for C’s, though, obviously.”
Obviously? Earning money this way hadn’t even crossed my mind, though, knowing Pete, maybe it should have. This was shady as shit. He’d found some weird loophole that made this all technically possible. The bulk of the college scholarships I’d applied for would not be compromised because the high GPA requirement was through end of junior year, and not many of them took into account my fall and spring senior semesters. I’d maybe be blowing my shot at valedictorian. But could I live with myself knowing I’d whored myself out for some cash?
“You asking Sanchez too?” She was the other person in our class with the highest GPA. But she wasn’t on scholarship—her dad was some hotshot executive at Amazon. She didn’t need the money.
“I wanted to talk to you first. Seemed like we could come up with a mutually beneficial arrangement. You help us out. We help a skid.”
I cringed. In other words, I was poor and needed money, and he and his friends were rich and had lots of money. See? We could help each other, in Pete’s simple view of demand-side capitalism.
I went ahead and asked what I wanted to know. “How much money are we talking here?”
“We can talk price later, but the gist of it is, we’d make it worth your time.” His gaze traveled up and down my body. “I like you, bro, so I’d like this to work out in your favor. It’d probably be enough to get your mom a new car, one of those that self-park. Depending on how extreme you’d want to go, though, maybe we could get you a self-driving car, like mine.”
He had a Tesla Model X. The one with the ridiculous bat-wing doors.
I already knew the cost of a new Accord, around thirty grand. A self-parking one would probably be a few thousand more. I’d hoped Mom’s car might last a few more years so I could buy her a newer one after I graduated from college.
Pete was offering me thirty grand, or maybe even more, without having to wait four years. With any leftover cash, I could invest in stocks or put all of that into a savings account. Or just buy Mom a brand-spanking-new sedan and use the extra money to seed my business ideas. Her car could come with Bluetooth and seat warmers and other fancy shit like that.
The warning bell rang. Three minutes to get to first period.
Pete and his buddies moved aside. “Oh, and for my little brother, we could offer twenty thousand for you to take his SAT. But we can talk about that later. It’s not as urgent ’cause he’s a sophomore,” Pete said.
I pushed the door with my entire body weight and exhaled loudly when I heaved myself through.
Damn it. This was a lot of money on the table. It was shady. It was wrong. But it was tempting.
With all the morning’s painful events, I tried to focus on the positive. In just ten more hours, I would see zombie Kate again.
* * *
“This is too hard!” Lucy wailed, throwing her yellow pencil across the kitchen table. She folded her arms and buried her face. All you could see were two short, lopsided pigtails rising and falling with her breath.
She was right. What kind of kindergarten teacher thought it would be a good idea to do a multibranch family tree project for homework? A clueless, sadistic one, that’s who. A teacher who didn’t realize that Korean families like ours didn’t have any relatives living close by to ask about familial history. That families like ours maybe didn’t know full names of our great-grandmas or great-grandpas. That both sets of grandparents had passed away and we never got to know them because they lived in another country, across an ocean. Mom’s parents died before I was born, and Dad’s parents only visited the States once when I was a baby before they passed away.
I helped with Lucy’s assignment the best I could while wolfing down my frozen dinner. “Mom, Lucy needs to fill out her family tree homework. It’s due tomorrow. She needs our grandparents’ names. Your parents and Dad’s parents.”
Mom’s breathing deepened as she hand-washed the dishes in the sink. The plates clinked against the coffee mugs when she added them to the drying rack.
“Mom, Lucy needs our grandparents’ names,” I said louder, rephrasing it slightly.
With the back of her right wrist, she brushed her short, jet-black hair from her eyes. “Yi Sung-Soo,” she said finally. “That was my father name. Kang In-Sook was my mother.” She shook out the excess water from a washed ziplock bag and turned it inside out to dry on the rack.
Lucy scribbled down the names on the blank lines. “How do you spell it? I wish we had an Alexa to ask how to spell stuff. All my friends have one. Mollie’s can make fart noises if you ask it.”
Mom painstakingly rattled off the spelling, letter by letter. “You don’t need any Alexa. You have Nate. He is almost as smart as Alexa,” she joked.
“And I can make fart noises too,” I teased. “Just say the command.”
Lucy giggled as she wrote over her words a second time in a black marker, making our family tree more permanent. She asked, “Am I done?” and slid the paper next to my drink.
I shook my head. “We need our other two grandparents on Dad’s side.”
A glass tumbler slipped from Mom’s soapy hands into the porcelain sink. Lucy covered her ears and yelped.
We both knew not to bother Mom while she picked up the pieces of her literal slipup. The number one unspoken rule in this Korean family was that my parents could point out and punish kids’ mistakes, but we weren’t allowed to point out theirs. We were never, ever allowed to question their judgment. If I’d been the one to drop that glass, Dad would have scolded, Nate, you never look what you are doing! Jeongshin charyeo! As if clumsiness could be punished out of me.
Dad walked in just as Mom finished cleaning up. Lucy asked for the grandparents’ names again. At the rate this homework was taking to complete, we’d be finished when Lucy was old enough to be a grandparent herself.
He opened the fridge and pulled out a Hite beer that he’d just gotten from the Korean supermarket. With his other hand, he pinched his forehead. “Kim Jung-ho is my father. Kim Jung-hee is mother.” The slam of the refrigerator door and the loud crack of the can opening punctuated the end of his sentence.
Lucy paused. “Wait, Appa. You said is. Twice. Are they still alive?” She’d heard the same thing I did. But I didn’t dare violate the Kim family rule by questioning his word choice.
Dad abruptly left the room and didn’t give her an answer. Lucy puppy-dog-eyed me. Were our grandparents alive? Mom and Dad had come into my bedroom one night when I was Lucy’s age to tell me our grandparents on Dad’s side had died in a car accident and that going to Korea for the funeral was too expensive. I cried and cried that night, devastated that I’d never have grandparents to visit, and that no one would visit me. That no grandparents would call me to wish me a happy birthday. No Christmas presents either. Not that they ever did any of that anyway when they were alive. I’d never questioned anything my parents told me about our family. We both turned to Mom for answers, hoping she would explain what was going on.
Mom spoke, finally, crushing my hope. “He mean to say was, not is.”
He’d made a grammatical blunder.
I’d never seen my mom book it out of the kitchen so fast. We heard muffled shouting behind my parents’ bedroom door, but the Kim family rule prevented me from barging in there to ask why they were yelling at each other.
Lucy put a smiley face on the top of her paper. “All done! You can make fart noises now.”
I watched Lucy slide off her chair, cramming her homework into her open backpack by my feet. Even with my excitement about seeing Kate at work, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my parents were hiding something.