“What’d you do with that lollipop your sister gave you?” Meifeng barked. “Dropped it again?”
And Austin, remembering his loss, scrunched up his face and cried.
* * *
IVY KNEW HER brother hated these weekends with their grandmother. At five years old, Austin had none of the astute restraint his sister had had at his age. He would howl at the top of his lungs and bang his chubby fists on the ground until Meifeng placated him with promises to buy a toy—“a dollar toy?”—or a trip to McDonald’s, something typically reserved for special occasions. Meifeng would never have tolerated such a display from Ivy, but everyone in the Lin household indulged Austin, the younger child, and a boy at that. Ivy wished she had been born a boy. Never did she wish this more fervently than at twelve years old, the morning she awoke to find her underwear streaked with a matte, rust-like color. Womanhood was every bit as inconvenient as she’d feared. Nan did not own makeup or skincare products. She cut her own hair and washed her face every morning with water and a plain washcloth. One week a month, she wore a cloth pad—reinforced with paper towels on the days her flow was heaviest—which she rinsed each night in the sink and hung out to dry on the balcony. But American women had different needs: disposable pads, tampons, bras, razors, tweezers. It was unthinkable for Ivy to ask for these things. The idea of removing one’s leg or underarm hair for aesthetic reasons would have instilled in her mother a horror akin to slicing one’s skin open. In this respect, Nan and Meifeng were of one mind. Ivy knew she could only rely on herself to obtain these items. That was when she graduated from yard sales to the two big-box stores in town: Kmart and T.J.Maxx.
Her first conquests: tampons, lip gloss, a box of Valentine’s Day cards, a bag of disposable razors. Later, when she became bolder: rubber sandals, a sports bra, mascara, an aquamarine mood ring, and her most prized theft yet—a leather-bound diary with a gold clasp lock. These contrabands she hid in the nooks and crannies of her dresser, away from puritan eyes. At night, Ivy would sneak out her diary and copy beautiful phrases from her novels—For things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal—and throughout those last two years of middle school, she wrote love letters to Gideon Speyer: I had a vivid dream this morning, it was so passionate I woke up with an ache… I held your face in my hands and trembled… if only I wasn’t so scared of getting close to you… if only you weren’t so perfect in every way…
And so Ivy grew like a wayward branch. Planted to the same root as her family but reaching for something beyond their grasp. Years of reconciling her grandmother’s teachings with her American values had somehow culminated in a confused but firm belief that in order to become the “good,” ting hua girl everyone asked of her, she had to use “smart” methods. But she never admitted how much she enjoyed these methods. She never got too greedy. She never got sloppy. And most important, she never got caught. It comforted her to think that even if she were accused of wrongdoing someday, it would be her accuser’s word against hers—and if there was anything she prided herself on other than being a thief, it was being a first-rate liar.
2
OUTSIDE OF MEIFENG, ONLY THE neighborhood boy, Roux Roman, knew about Ivy’s thieving. He was seventeen years old and built like a telephone pole, with black hair and gray-blue eyes always narrowed in contempt at all the idiots around him: the noisy Hispanic boys loitering on the stoops (fart-knockers), the disabled folks collecting food stamps (lazy leeches), his useless teachers at school who taught that the world was a just meritocracy, and most of all, his own husbandless mother, who was widely known by everyone to be a whore, though no one dared use this word within Roux’s earshot.
They had met four years earlier, when Ivy had caught him breaking into Ernesto Moretti’s backyard shed. The Morettis vacationed every summer by the Cape, an event Ernesto bragged about for months beforehand, and the Morettis’ shiny red sedan was already gone from the driveway when Ivy came across Roux unscrewing the nails from the corners of the heavy black padlock on the wooden door. Instead of minding her own business as Meifeng had always instructed her to do (the straightest tree is the first to be cut down), she’d called out, “What are you doing?”
Roux cursed when he saw her, but he didn’t deny that he’d been caught red-handed. She immediately liked that about him. She had long been fascinated by Roux Roman, having sensed a kindred enterprising spirit beneath his rough exterior. He was always going around the block trying to earn dimes and quarters for bringing up your groceries or shoveling your car out of the snow—though he never attempted to shovel the Lins’ old Ford, having enough sense to recognize a lost cause. Indeed, his eyes turned defiant and he even smirked a little as if to say, What does it look like I’m doing?
Ivy considered tossing the word police around but no one in Fox Hill, the Lins included, trusted the authorities to solve their problems. “I can keep a lookout for you,” she said.
Roux’s black eyebrows rose to his hairline. “Who are you again?”
She told him her name. “We’re neighbors,” she added.
“Stand over there and let me know if any cars come.”
Ivy sat in the grass and pretended to work on her Baby-Sitters Club scrapbook she’d brought with her, having planned to go “camping” that afternoon in the dense woods behind the Morettis’ house. Her eyes diligently scanned the winding street for cars that never appeared. Five minutes later, Roux emerged from the shed hauling the wheels of Ernesto’s bike—“for revenge,” he said, but when she asked him what Ernesto had done to him, Roux wouldn’t tell her. She watched as he reinstalled the padlock, wiped away his fingerprints (she’d been impressed by this detail—he appeared quite the deft criminal), and then, before she could react, he snatched her scrapbook from her hands and flipped through the worn pages. He looked at her with ridicule and a little pity. “Gee, you sure are a creepy kid.” In between all the glossy magazine cutout girls, labeled with the names of the Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy, Stacey, Mary Anne, Dawn, Mallory—Ivy had replaced the only Asian character, a Japanese girl named Claudia Kishi, with a photo of herself in her favorite blue dress with the lacy sleeves and sash as wide as her palms.
“It’s a joke,” she said.
“Sure,” said Roux. “And I’m Santa Claus.”
Ivy never got around to “camping” that day. She and Roux spent the rest of the afternoon at the dilapidated Fox Hill playground with its plastic slide and rusty swing set, feeding her picnic lunch of baloney in potato bread to the pigeons. Through an unspoken agreement, they met every day for the rest of the summer. The park. The library. 7-Eleven. The creek. The Fox Hill playground where they spent many torpid hours gorging on blackberries straight from the bushes that toppled over the chain-link fence. One afternoon, Roux showed her his shabby spiral-bound notebook of ink drawings of houses with propellers, bicycles floating on soap bubbles, cars growing enormous black wings, like those of a bat. It was his way of opening up to her, Ivy knew. In return, she lent him her favorite library books and even copied a Sylvia Plath poem she liked on pink stationery paper she found tucked in one of her neighbor’s magazines, presenting it to him with a magnanimous air. Give with one hand and take with the other. But of her mother’s moods, of her family’s Chinese ways, of her shoplifting, she kept quiet for now. Knowledge, like money, was foolish to give away for free. You could never get it back.