Debris had fallen in a pile of Sheetrock and beams-and furniture: an office desk cracked in two across its middle; several chairs; a computer monitor, its glass unbelievably intact; a metal file cabinet bent into an L; and other objects too beat up to recognize. He felt around them gingerly. Then his fingers touched what he had been afraid of finding: a portion of a human body. It was an arm, sticking up through a gap between two rollaway chairs. He could tell from the rigor mortis that the person had been dead for hours. He stepped away, heart hammering, though this wasn’t the first body he had touched, by any means. It was the asthma that was making him jumpy. He touched the inhaler in his pocket, longing to use it. But he had only one dose left. He had to save it for his story.
He decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the body.
THE COMPANY TOOK THEIR SEATS AGAIN. SUNLIGHT FELL ON some of their faces. Uma wasn’t sure if she felt better because of that. The light seemed to be coming from very far away, and soon it would be gone.
Tariq wasn’t in the mood to continue, but Lily wouldn’t let him be.
“You can’t stop here! Who were those people Ali was living with? Did you like them? Were they…terrorists?”
Tariq said, “They didn’t tell me much about themselves-only that they were planning a march. They ordered pizza for dinner and wouldn’t take any money from me. What I liked best is how close they were to one another. Like brothers. Watching one another’s backs.”
“Will you come back to America?” Lily persisted. “Will you live with them? What about Farah? What will happen to her if you come back?”
Tariq shook his head. He had no answers. “From having put up my story against the others, I can see this much: everyone suffers in different ways. Now I don’t feel so alone.”
Lily put an arm through his. “You could stay with us,” she said, surprising Uma. “You remind me of my older brother. He’s in my story.”
“Very well!” Cameron said. “I can take a hint as well as the next person. Go ahead and tell your tale.”
12
When I was too young to know better, I was a pleaser. That’s what my parents tell me. Their story goes like this: “When you were little, you were so cute. You recited Chinese nursery rhymes whenever guests came over, whether anyone asked you or not. And now, look at you. We can’t even get you to come out of your room to say hello.”
Sometimes it’s like this: “Whenever your mom made dumplings, you insisted on helping, even though you made a mess all over the kitchen floor. But now that you’re old enough to be useful, you refuse to enter the kitchen, and you’re always complaining that eating Chinese food makes you smell bad.”
Or, “Remember that favorite dress you had when you were in kindergarten, pink with cherry blossom flowers all over it, and bows? You loved it so much. You insisted on wearing it to school every day. We had to hand wash it each night so it would be clean and dry by morning. Now-black, black, black, all the time. Do you even wash that T-shirt? And is that black lipstick?”
You get the idea.
My parents thought my metamorphosis from charming caterpillar to stinging wasp came from teenage angst combined with evil American influences, but they were wrong. I gave up on being a pleaser because of my older brother.
My parents believed-and I secretly agreed-that Mark was the perfect child. In fact, he hardly seemed like a child at all. He was polite and obedient and serious about his studies. Most of his friends were from Chinese school. He wanted to become a scientist specializing in cancer research, and by ninth grade had already written a paper that went on to win a national science award. My parents would have preferred that Mark become a doctor or a businessman. (In addition to the supermarkets he inherited, my father owns a large Chinese import-export business that my mother helps him run. They’re terribly proud of that business and were hoping to pass it on to Mark.) But they understood and admired Mark’s humanitarian calling-and made sure all their friends did, too. I’d overhear them at Spring Festival parties: “Anyone can get a medical degree and make money, but to spend your life discovering a cure for those poor, suffering people-ah!” They would stop there, overcome by emotion, forcing the listener to complete the sentence: “Now that’s true dedication.”
“AND THIS IS THE YOUNG MAN I REMIND YOU OF?” TARIQ ASKED.
I KNEW IT WAS USELESS TRYING TO COMPETE FOR MY PARENTS’ attention by being good. For a while, I tried to hate Mark, but my heart wasn’t in it. When he had time (which wasn’t often, what with his schoolwork and Kumon classes and music lessons and science fair projects), he let me come into his room and check out his old Dragon Ball Z cards or listen to his favorite bands (downloaded from illegal Internet sites, he confided to me). I would watch him play Knights of the Old Republic and give him advice, which he sometimes listened to. When I had trouble with homework, he tried to help, though most of his explanations went above my head. He spent weeks on science projects that awed me: elegant solar systems that rotated at different speeds around a sun, or intricate contraptions with beakers and burners that extracted water from ink. And he let me touch them. How could I not love him?
But I had to do something about my pathetic standing at home. I didn’t plan on being seriously bad, like the girls the aunties gossiped about who ran away from home and got pregnant. I wanted to be just sufficiently disobedient to force my parents to notice me. I started with little rebellions-not making my bed, refusing to go to Chinese language class, coming down late for dinner so the family would have to wait for me, not turning in homework on time so the teachers would send home a note for my father to sign. I slept late and missed the school bus, forcing my mother to drive me to school. I acted up in class and got sent to detention, where I became friendly with kids who smoked in the bathrooms and got into fistfights and drank cough syrup to get high and cut themselves.
Soon I was getting plenty of attention at home. Gramma cried and talked about evil spirits; my parents yelled, grounding me, taking away my iPod, cutting off my allowance. It didn’t satisfy me the way I’d thought it would; I only felt emptier. But I couldn’t just turn around and become my old good-girl self. I was too stubborn. I started dressing in black and experimenting with cough syrup myself-thanks to Gramma, who catches chills easily, we always had some lying around. One day I skipped school and went to this tattoo parlor with Kiara and got my eyebrow pierced. Boy, did that get me a lot of parental notice!
Things were going downhill fast when Mark came to my room one night. I told him to get out-I thought he was going to lecture me, like the others-but he didn’t get angry. Instead he gave me a long, narrow box, and when I opened it, I saw it contained his old flute. I remembered that, although now he played the violin, for a while he had taken flute lessons. He gave me a stack of music books and offered to teach me. “Let’s just keep it to ourselves,” he said. I think it was the idea of having our own secret that appealed to me. I suspect he knew it would.
We decided to meet for lessons after school at a park in another neighborhood. Mark warned me that he would be able to teach me only the rudimentaries of flute playing, but the very first time I put my lip against the embouchure, I had the strangest feeling, as though I had done it before. And perhaps I had, in some other lifetime. How else did I learn so fast?