“I would never hang out with those people.”
“Aw, they’re not that scary.”
“They’re poor trash.” Nan’s words. How far Ivy had already come.
All color drained from Roux’s face except for the ears, which turned a scalded pink. She could see the film of sweat over his upper lip where the faint shadow of a mustache was starting to grow.
“When’d you become such a stuck-up bitch?”
“When’d you become a total loser?”
He raised one hand—Ivy instinctively shielded herself—but he was only reaching into his back pocket. He threw something at her, yellow and small, it hit her squarely on the chest and bounced to her feet. She picked it up. It was an old photo of herself in a threadbare blue dress, clearly one of Meifeng’s yard sale finds, with a cheap costume-like sheen over the balloon skirt. She couldn’t fathom where Roux had gotten the photo until she turned it around and saw the dry patches of glue—and then she remembered her old scrapbook, the magazine cutouts, the first time she’d discovered the empty gap between Stacey and Kristy, where she assumed her own picture had somehow come loose and was lost.
* * *
WITHOUT ROUX, IVY had no friends whatsoever. She was lonely but what she craved wasn’t friendship. Girls and boys “hung out” at school but real progress was made outside of school, at parties, and Ivy was never invited to any parties. She’d learned (in theory) the mechanics of popular games like suck and blow, spin the bottle, seven minutes in heaven, apple biting, wink, the classic truth or dare, and other acts that were not games but real life. In the girls’ locker room, she heard Liza Johnson tell the story of when Tom Cross had unzipped his fly and guided her hand to his crotch—“while my dad was driving in the front seat,” Liza said with fake horror. Ivy wondered if Gideon did such things as well. He and Tom were best friends; they did everything together. Ivy wondered what she would do if Gideon were to grab her hand and guide it to the mysterious, slightly grotesque manhood underneath his shorts, or lean over and kiss her with tongue the way Henry Fitzgerald kissed Nikki Satterfield in her cheerleader uniform at the last pep rally, one pom-pom dangling from Nikki’s hand like a shower of blue-and-white confetti. But Ivy had never even held a guy’s hand, let alone kissed one, and the only time she ever felt desirable was when she looked at the photo of herself in her childish blue-sheen dress (why had Roux kept it all this time?) and then a restless longing would throb throughout her entire body, keeping her tossing into the night, waking with bruised tender eyes, so that Meifeng would feel her forehead in the morning for fever.
Then one morning, two weeks into summer break, Gideon Speyer telephoned and invited her to a small gathering to celebrate his fourteenth birthday—“just a sleepover with friends”—and amidst all of Ivy’s stammers and high-pitched giggling, she somehow managed to choke out that she’d be there. Afterward, she stormed to the bedroom she shared with Meifeng (“Where are you running off to now?”) and stuffed her face underneath her pillow until her mouth was full of cotton, muffling the screams of panicked happiness. That night, she wrote in her diary: Everything will be different now.
But there was the problem of getting permission from Nan. Ivy told her mother she was invited to spend the night at her classmate Una Kim’s house. She even used the line she reserved for emergencies: If you’re not going to let me make friends, then why even send me to this rich-people school? It was sheer luck that Una lived three blocks down from Gideon in the new homes over in Andover. Nan’s expression had been a scowl, she didn’t say yes or no—a bad sign as Nan’s thoughts typically turned more paranoid over time.
In preparation for the party (Ivy had determined she would sneak out of the house if it came down to it, Meifeng was a sound sleeper), she pierced her ears with a sewing needle, having stolen a pair of dangly heart earrings earlier that week and hidden them underneath the pile of underwear in the bottommost drawer of her dresser. It was hard to get the earring hook exactly straight through her new earhole and she winced with pain as she dug the metal this way and that, trying to find the outlet in her flesh on the other side. When she finally got both earrings on, her earlobes were hot and tender to the touch. She was delighted.
Unfortunately for Ivy, the lock to the bathroom door had come loose that very afternoon and Nan walked into the bathroom in the midst of Ivy’s vanities, sewing needle in hand, making a kissing face in the mirror. Nan went berserk. She slapped Ivy across the face, once, twice, then tried to pull the earrings straight out of Ivy’s newly pierced earlobes—which then caused Meifeng to come running and start hitting Nan with the fly swatter, screaming: You’ll rip her ears off! You’ll rip her ears off! The fight lasted for what felt like an eternity, a frightened Austin and stoic Shen, used to these displays, taking cover in the bedroom.
Since then, Nan had said no more about the pierced ears and had been, in fact, more lenient toward her daughter in the following four days. That was the Chinese way: corporal punishment followed by an excess of kindness. Nan hit Shen all the time and then made his favorite soup afterward and fussed over his health. When pushed too far, Shen also hit Nan, then promised to quit smoking. Meifeng never hit Ivy but she hit Austin almost every day, telling him it was for his own good, he should be thankful she made the effort to discipline him, her grandson, as those poor American kids with lazy grandparents grew into hooligans, unspanked and unloved. Then she’d bring him to a McDonald’s for a Happy Meal. In the Lin household, you were rewarded for being punished. Thus, Ivy was allowed to attend the sleepover.
* * *
SHE WENT TO Kmart to “pick up” a birthday present for Gideon. She would have preferred to go to the big mall in East Maplebury, but that would have required asking Shen to drive her and asking him for money, and then she’d have to explain what she was buying for “Una.” Instead, she loitered around the electronics aisle at Kmart, watching the employee behind the counter flip the pages of People magazine; five shoppers walked by and the woman didn’t look up once. Reassured, Ivy walked over and picked up the pair of marine binoculars she’d been eyeing. The little attached booklet stated that they were waterproof, fog-proof, and shock-protected with rubber armoring; the optics featured multicoated lenses for excellent light transmission. It was the perfect thing for a boy who loved to sail, who kept photos of boats taped in his locker and read Yachting World the way other boys read Playboy. Just as she made up her mind to stuff them into her backpack, she saw Roux. The surprise and recognition was mutual. They hadn’t spoken since the photo incident, almost a year ago. She saw that he was wearing a red employee polo, with a white name tag clipped to his breast pocket, and like all uniforms, it suppressed his individuality while also seeming to reveal his truest, most essential self.
He walked over in a loping, unhurried way. “Whatcha got there?”
“I was trying to see what that woman was reading.” Ivy pantomimed holding up the binoculars like a spy, then placed it back onto the shelf with artful indifference.
Roux’s face took on a faint, ironic smirk. “I work here now—in case you haven’t noticed—so you can’t swipe things from here.”