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.
Chapter Five
Kate
Could hair glands sweat? I had to assume yes, because it happened when I wore too heavy of a sweater, or when I got the flu, or when my anxiety took over both my immune and nervous systems, especially before theater performances. Or, in this case, when I knew I’d be seeing Nate again.
My head itched so much that I needed a full dousing in cortizone cream. That’s what I got for buying a cheap replacement zombie wig from a nonreviewed third party on Amazon.
In the escape room parking lot, I scratched the hell out of my head using all ten fingernails, from my hairline, to above my ears, to the back of my neck. Note to self: google “scalp eczema relief.”