“Everything looks good,” she says to Mrs. De La Cruz, who seems genuinely happy to hear my mom say that. Then my mom turns to me and says in Chinese, “So Tong’s going to take me to a hotel and—”
“Wait a minute, you’re not staying here with me tonight?” I ask.
My mom looks at me. “There’s only one bed!” she says.
“We can share,” I fire back. Frantically, I get up from the bed. Please don’t leave me here with these strangers, I plead with my eyes, at the same time readying myself for the all-too-possible scenario of her ditching me for the spa.
Mrs. De La Cruz jumps in. “You can have Dani’s room, madam. Dani and I will share. You don’t mind, do you, Dani?”
Dani scrunches her face. Oh, she minds.
“That won’t be necessary,” my mom says. “We’ll be fine in Claire’s room.”
My mom kicks off her Marni sling-back pumps, and I’m almost tempted to grab them so she can’t leave.
My mom and I sleep side by side. She tosses and turns, and despite what Mrs. De La Cruz says about how it’s a Tempur-Pedic mattress, I can feel her shifting. With every move, the contents of my stomach jerk up and down like we’re at sea. Mrs. De La Cruz made chicken afritada for dinner, a Filipino chicken stew, which, while delicious, was also heavier than I’m used to.
“Stop moving, Mom,” I whisper. “You’re making the whole bed shake.”
“I can’t help it,” she hisses back. “This bed is too soft. How can anyone sleep on something so soft?”
She thrusts her body against the mattress, trying to find a comfortable spot. I feel the chicken ramming up against the back of my throat.
“Mom, I think I’m going to be—”
Before I can say the words, it happens. I don’t have time to make it to the bathroom. I throw up, and it splatters on top of the blanket.
My mom jumps out of bed and screams.
“Tressy!” she yells, forgetting we’re not in Shanghai.
I cover my mouth—there’s more coming—and with my free hand, point to the trash can.
Instead of giving me the trash can, my mom starts waving her arms. “Don’t! Stop it! Not here!”
I jump out of bed and run to the trash can, where I puke up the rest of the chicken.
When I look up, my mom’s gone. She’s not in the room.
Dani and Mrs. De La Cruz come running in. I cringe with embarrassment, wishing my mom hadn’t woken them up, as I sit on the floor hugging the trash can.
“Don’t worry! We’ll help you!” Mrs. De La Cruz says. Dani quickly hands me a towel and leads me to the bathroom to wash up.
When I return, I see Mrs. De La Cruz bent over the floor, scrubbing up my mess while my mom pats awkwardly at the floor with flimsy squares of toilet paper, trying to help but making more of a mess. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen my mom clean. And it shows.
My mom’s phone rings.
“It’s your dad,” she says. She looks to Mrs. De La Cruz. “Do you mind if I take this?”
“Go,” Mrs. De La Cruz tells her. “We’ll take care of this.”
My mom puts an appreciative hand on Mrs. De La Cruz’s back as she leaves. Dani takes her spot and scrubs next to her mom silently. In the silvery moonlight, I can see her frowning. I can’t believe my mom would leave them to clean up my mess. Then again, of course she would. It’s what she’s been doing her whole life.
I bend down and join Dani and her mom. Mrs. De La Cruz squirts bleach on the floor, and the smell clogs my throat. Not at all how I imagined my first night in America.
Ten
Dani
You should have seen my mom—“yes, madam,” “no, madam.” And the Wangs, the way they sat there at dinner like it was a restaurant. They didn’t even offer to help clear the table or wash the dishes. And later, when Claire threw up, the way her mom just left us to clean up the mess, it docked on my forehead like raindrops how utterly spoiled they are.
Early the next morning, Claire’s mom’s driver takes us to school. Heads turn as Claire gets out of the car. She’s in white frayed jeans and a blue silk tank top. Wisps of long jet-black hair fly in the wind as she throws her leather backpack over her shoulder. The boys stare at her—all legs and boobs and silky skin. Standing next to her, I feel myself disappearing into the background, like a pygmy seahorse.
Claire seems oblivious to all the eyeballs on her, or maybe she’s just used to it. She moves her aviator glasses up to the top of her head as she follows her mom to the main office.
“I gotta go to class,” I tell them. “Good luck today.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you later!” Claire says.
I open my mouth to say, “Maybe at lunch,” then close it. I’m certain by lunchtime, she’ll have firmly established herself at the top of the crazy-rich-Asian pecking order and she won’t want to hang out with me and Ming.
Zach’s at the library waiting for me after school when I arrive.
“You’re here!” Zach says when I walk in. He looks and sounds so surprised.
“Of course I’m here,” I say. I take a seat next to him.
“I was worried you weren’t going to come,” he says.
A few kids walk by. Zach opens his laptop and pulls up his English paper. Zach’s not in the same English class as me. I take a look at what he’s written, our fingers brushing as I pull the computer toward me. It’s a narrative nonfiction piece about his mom. Zach wrote about the time his mom came home and she was really sick and he had to take care of her all by himself. As my eyes move across the page, I’m surprised by how honest it is. Yes, there are some grammatical mistakes. But there’s also truth and pain to it.
“It’s awful, right?” he asks. “Should I start over? Let’s just start over.”
I shake my head. “No, no,” I tell him. “It’s good. You just need to expand on it.”
He looks relieved. I ask him questions to help him flesh out the details. How old was he when this happened? Seven. How’d he take care of her? He cleaned her up, put her to bed, and made her get up to drink water every couple of hours.
“What did she have, the flu?” I ask out of curiosity.
He looks down and shakes his head.
“No,” he says quietly. “She was just drunk.”
Oh. I follow his gaze to his hands. His fingernails are short, his knuckles calloused like mine. My mom says you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their hands. I look at the worry in his eyes at what he’s just revealed. It makes me want to tell him about all the times my mom’s gone out looking for my dad in the wee hours of the morning.
But instead, I say, “That must have been really hard for you.”
Zach shrugs. Doesn’t elaborate. He rubs his nose and points to his essay. “So you think it can be fixed?” he asks.
“Oh yeah, totally,” I say. I put my hands to the keyboard and start fixing his run-on sentences and his misplaced modifiers. I show him how to add some of the details in. Our arms touch as I type, and I keep mistyping, I’m so distracted. When he reads back the essay, a smile beams on his face.