* * *
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, Ivy discovered another one of Roux’s secrets. While she was purchasing her usual five pounds of baloney at the Morettis’ deli for her and Austin’s school lunches, she accidentally dropped a quarter in the soda aisle and followed it down the hallway to a lacquered red door, slightly ajar, with a brass handle. There were people inside. She heard urgent whispers followed by a gasp, then a man’s low growl. Mistaking the sounds for ones of pain, she peeked through the crack. In front of a heavy black desk, she saw Roux’s mother kneeling in front of Ernesto’s father. Mrs. Roman’s bony arms were wrapped around his portly midsection, her cheek pressed against his thigh.
Ivy thought they were engaged in a struggle at first—they were rearing and gripping and grunting the way she’d once seen two Chinese oxen butt horns over a brittle shrub—but then she realized the sounds were of rapture. Mr. Moretti’s belly was tan and curved, there was a line of black hair running down the brown skin, like a path of trees on a mountain, and when he writhed, the trees all waved in the gentle breeze. She must have watched them for minutes, beset with a mix of fear and furtive curiosity that kept her rooted in place. Mrs. Roman finished whatever she was doing. Mr. Moretti made a low groan. He looked up and stared straight at Ivy. Slowly, without moving his head, he reached down and tapped Roux’s mother on her cheek, almost a slap, but Ivy didn’t see what happened next because she had turned and fled.
Outside, Roux was smoking a cigarette, still wearing his swim trunks from where they’d spent an afternoon by the creek. He’d refused to go inside the deli with her, claiming it was filled with vipers. When she burst through the door, wild with agitation, she grabbed his arm and tried to tow him away with cries of “Let’s go! Come on!” but it was too late. Seconds later, Mrs. Roman came hurrying out the door, smoothing down her dark hair. Two deep slashes gathered around the inner edges of her eyes, creasing away from the nose in an expression of perpetual exhaustion. She said something in rapid Romanian. Roux looked at his mother. He looked at Ivy. He threw his cigarette on the pavement and squashed it with his heel. “Let’s go.” His tone was flat, his face impassive. Mrs. Roman continued to shout at Roux even after they’d turned the corner. Ivy thought how strange it was that even though Mrs. Roman spoke Romanian and Nan Chinese, how similar they sounded when shouting, like a flock of angry ravens, the consonants clipped and hardened by anger. Maybe anger was the only universal language.
On the walk back to Fox Hill, Roux was utterly silent. Ivy felt dirtied by what she’d seen but a part of her was also slightly thrilled, it stirred something in her stomach, like a soft sigh. She looked down at her hand, still clutching the plastic bottle dripping with cold condensation. “Oh! I forgot to pay for my Mountain Dew!”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” said Roux finally, in disgust.
Ivy opened her mouth to say—what? That she felt his shame as her own? That their mothers sounded like angry ravens? Instead, she found herself telling him about the thieving.
Roux’s reaction was one of delight. “I knew you were hiding something. I knew I was right about you.”
“Okay but—”
“And your grandmother?”
“She only—”
“But which houses?”
Ivy tried to explain that it wasn’t truly stealing, they were only taking small objects Americans themselves didn’t value. Roux didn’t care. He was already looking at her with a new respect in his eyes—and something else, insistent and hungry. She noted the dimple on his right cheek, like a comma on an unmarked page, and she wondered why he didn’t spend any effort to clean himself up. Certainly, he could be cute if he tried even a little. Wear the right clothes, get a haircut, smile at a few girls, and bam—transformation. It would be so easy for him to disguise himself as any other all-American boy, and yet he made no effort to do so, whereas she, who took such pains with her clothes and mannerisms, would always have yellow skin and black hair and a squat nose, her exterior self hiding the truth that she was American! American! American!—the injustice of it stung deeply.
* * *
“THAT RUSSIAN BOY is no good,” Nan said one day, out of the blue.
Ivy knew immediately who Nan was referring to. “He’s Romanian,” she said.
“That boy is stupid. How can he be anything else without a father? And what does his mother do for him? Nothing. I see her coming home in the mornings with her hair pulled up in that ridiculous way. Where does she go all night long, leaving her son alone at home? There are only two types of people who stay out all night: burglars and bad women. You stay away from him, you hear me?”
Ivy jabbed at her rice.
“And they’re poor,” Nan added in afterthought. “They live here.”
“So do we.”
“We’re different,” Nan said sharply. “Baba has a master’s degree.”
Ivy pointed out that Roux’s father could have a PhD for all they knew.
“Stop talking nonsense. Go help Grandma with dinner. I have to study.” Every hour Nan wasn’t bagging groceries at the Hong Kong grocery store on Route 9, she was poring over her tiny blue Chinese-English dictionary in a self-organized curriculum only she understood. Ivy once remarked facetiously at dinner that if Nan bagged groceries at an American supermarket, maybe she would learn English faster. It was the first and only time her father slapped her—on the back of the head, without a word, forceful enough to make Ivy’s ears ache for hours afterward.
That fall, Shen started his new job as the computer technician at Grove Preparatory Academy and Ivy was transferred to her new school. Her parents did not say it was because of Roux, but of course, Ivy knew it was.
“What are you wearing?” Roux crowed the first time he saw her in her uniform, so fresh out of the shrink wrap everything still smelled of plastic. “Is that a clip-on tie?” He reached for her neck—he was always snatching whatever he wanted from her—and Ivy couldn’t jerk away fast enough to avoid his greasy fingers, which had been shoveling down a slice of Giovanni’s pizza moments ago, from soiling her pristine white collar.
“Look what you did!” she yelled, but he only sneered in his usual condescending way. She licked her thumb and dabbed at the stain. “It’s Grove Academy’s uniform,” she snapped, knowing instinctively this would hurt him. “I go there now. Over in Andover.”
“Your family win the lottery?”
“I tested in,” she lied, “on scholarship.” She’d read plenty of novels about scholarship students at fancy boarding schools conquering the social chasm through a mixture of grit, charm, and beauty (most of all beauty), to find love among the heather and horse stables. Up to then, she had been perfectly content imagining herself at the local public school, like every other kid in Fox Hill. Now it was beneath her.
She tried her best to avoid Roux after that, sensing the growing divide between them, but he who was so astute at sniffing out her embarrassment was surprisingly dense when it came to her intentions toward him, mistaking her reticence for timidity. He didn’t get the point until the day he’d asked her, for the fifth time, to hang out with his “boys”—the same boys he’d once called fart-knockers—and Ivy finally exploded.