This time, my mom sits up. She unbuckles her seat belt, comes over, and puts her arm around my shoulders.
“It’s okay.” She shushes me.
“It’s not okay!” I sob. “You’re sending me to a foreign country to live with strangers!”
My mom digs through her Saint Laurent purse for tissues.
“You’re making a scene,” she says, ordering me to stop.
She hands me some tissues and tells me to wipe my face. But the tissue’s too coarse and it only makes me cry more. My mom gives up and goes back to her seat. For the rest of the flight, she buries her face in a magazine and pretends she doesn’t know me.
Eight
Dani
My mother paces the house, nervously chewing on her fingernail as she dusts.
“Everything must be perfect,” she says.
We’re in the spare bedroom, trying to move the mattress into my mom’s room. The smell of adobo wafts from the kitchen. We’re switching mattresses so Claire, our guest, can have the good one. I try not to wrinkle my nose as I move the bed. We had found it lying on the side of the street. It was the perfect size and in good shape. But it had been sitting next to a trash dumpster for so long, even now, if you put your nose up to it, it still reeks of banana peels and sour wine.
The stench brings me to earlier today, cleaning the carpet in Heather’s house. I can’t believe she’s buying her way to Snider. And the fact that a college debate coach would write her speeches for her, trading the most important thing a debater can have—his principles—for cash! It makes me sick, the privilege. If that’s what my teammates are doing, do I even stand a chance?
“Dani!” my mom yells, jolting me from my thoughts. Her nails are digging into the mattress. “C’mon, put a little muscle into it!”
“Sorry,” I say. I help her drag the mattress along the frayed brown carpet. “Are you sure about this?”
“Positive,” she says, “She’s our guest. She should get the nice bed.”
I can’t believe my mom’s giving up her Tempur-Pedic memory-foam mattress. It’s her most prized possession, the one decent thing my dad ever gave her before he left. They picked it out together. She told me the story a thousand times, how they both lay down on the bed, her with a swollen belly, him with his dirty shoes, which he took off before lying on the bed in the store. Less than a year later, when I was barely six months old, he split. But for that one moment, she said it was like lying on a cloud. And now she’s giving her cloud to some girl she’s never even met.
“I really think you’re overdoing it,” I say.
My mom stops moving the mattress for a second. “You’ve never been around rich people before,” she says. A long time ago, my mom worked for a wealthy family in Hong Kong as a “helper.” A helper is what the people in Hong Kong call a maid who lives with you.
I would have been humiliated if I’d ever been a helper, but my mom still talks about it with pride. How Madam was so important and Sir so successful. How they took her on trips and always stayed in the nicest hotels because “Madam never stayed anywhere less than five stars.” How little John and Bennie, the two boys she watched, were so adorable. She talks about them as though they were her own kids.
Some days, I think she prefers her fake family to her real one. I think a part of her regrets ever leaving them, coming here and having me. On those days, I sit with my knees to my chest on the rancid mattress in the spare bedroom, thinking of how I’m gonna prove it to her. I’m gonna prove to her that I can do it. I’m gonna make it in this world, even if all those around me are cheating.
“All right, you guys ready? Heather, you’re up first!” Mr. Connelly announces on Wednesday.
We’re practicing in the auditorium, and Heather smiles as she gets up and goes to the podium. I squeeze my hands into balls, hoping she won’t use the speech she bought off Coach Evans, that she’ll somehow come to her senses, but she delivers line by line what he fed her. As she recites all the glorious reasons why we should tax inheritance at 100 percent, I almost want to laugh, because I’m pretty sure if we did tax inheritance at 100 percent, she wouldn’t be able to afford the speech she’s just given.
“Da-amn!” Mr. Connelly exclaims, slapping the seat in front of him and jumping up when she’s done. “That was amazing, Heather!”
Heather beams.
I’m next. I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. I walk to the podium and try my best to debate the merits, even though it’s extremely hard going up against a forty-year-old, two-time national-champion college debate coach masked as a teenager, which is effectively what Heather is.
“That was . . . good,” Mr. Connelly says. I feel his letdown as I lean against the podium and squint into the light. “But with a little more feeling next time?”
I nod, shifting my weight as I take in Heather’s delighted smile. When I get back to my seat, Mr. Connelly turns to me and asks, “Something wrong? You’re usually so on fire.”
Heather’s totally cheating, I want to say.
Instead, I shake my head and vow to do better next time.
At the end of practice, Mr. Connelly tallies up our scores and announces who the team captain will be at our next tournament in Irvine. “Heather!” he says. He pulls me aside. “I’m sorry, Dani. I really wanted it to be you. But scores are scores. And Heather’s are higher.”
Heather walks over, chewing loudly on her gum as she puts a hand on my shoulder. “Oh well, there’s always next time, Thunder Girl!”
Ming meets me after school. The two of us walk over to the agency together. I kick a rock as I tell her what happened with Heather.
“That’s so messed up,” she says. “And I thought America was supposed to be different.” Her shoulder droops, tired from carrying her violin case. I noticed she’s stitched the words Fearless Female with string on her violin case. “Joanne’s.” She smiles, catching my gaze, referring to the fabric store one town over. She switches shoulders. “Anyway, you’ll still beat her, trust me. Something at the tournament will trip her up. She can’t memorize everything.”
That’s what I’ve been telling myself too. Still, the unfairness stings. Ming kicks a rock to me and tells me about her host dad. “Yesterday he offered me a beer. I told him I don’t drink, and he got mad and said drinking’s a part of American culture,” she says.
“So what’d you do?” I ask.
“Well, he started screaming and yelling, and one of his kids started crying. So I took a sip.”
Whoa. I stop walking. I know we’d been joking around a lot about Underwear Kevin, but this sounds serious. Forcing a minor to drink? I ask Ming if he’s done it before.
Ming shakes her head. “No,” she says. “And, really, I can handle it. Trust me, I’ve seen worse.”
I don’t know what that means. “Why don’t you tell the school about it?” I ask. “They might be able to switch you to another host family.”
“I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. The school’s been so kind and generous already,” she says.