Once I find my real aristocratic parents and determine my birthright, not getting into college will seem unimportant.
That’s when I hear whispering. Someone is laughing girlishly again. Samira. Maybe it’s the acoustics of the pantry, but I never realized that her laugh sounded like a donkey imitating a hyena.
“Which colleges do you think Iris got into?” Mr. Chadha-Fu asks.
Mrs. Chadha-Fu laughs. “Iris? College? That’s an oxymoron.”
I suddenly can’t breathe. My lungs have disappeared.
This is because most of the people that I once cared about are gossiping about me. In my living room!
“She’s a very nice girl,” Mr. Chadha-Fu announces helpfully.
My face grows jalapeño-hot.
Samira laughs quickly. “I’d be shocked if she got into any. Iris … just … doesn’t have a very high IQ.”
Her words cause me to gasp out loud.
“She has never been good at anything that is important.”
The Chadha-Fus laugh.
I drop the jar of half-eaten Nutella. It makes an unreasonably loud clatter. I try to catch it, but my elbow knocks over stacks of canned tuna and boxes of macaroni and cheese. I accidentally smear Nutella all over the pantry walls.
I don’t know why I’m so shocked by Samira’s words. For some reason, her second betrayal hurts more than the first. I have been nothing but kind and generous to Samira.
Heat floods through my neck and prickles across my face like an unrelenting rash. How could I have wasted ten-plus years of gifts and gossip and texts and phone calls and friendship on her? The pantry suddenly feels like a radioactive sauna. Black dots, like chocolate chips, scatter across my corneas.
Is my brain combusting?
Tears are leaking uncontrollably from my eyes. I can’t help it. Maybe my parents are right that I’m a complete, uncategorized disaster. Hurricane Iris, Category 10. A national danger to myself and others.
Suddenly, I don’t care if everyone knows I’m home.
I don’t care anymore.
Bursting out of the pantry and stampeding into the living room, I barely care that globs of Nutella are smeared all over my hands and mouth. I don’t care if I look like a deranged, snack-deprived vampire. I whip out my iPhone.
“How dare you say these things about me!” I sputter. “Here’s your shitty photograph!”
Samira’s smirking mouth drops open. Her entire face transforms into a hideous sweet-and-sour-pork-chop red, and the Chadha-Fus at least have the decency to look ashamed. They avert their eyes and stare at the leopard-print rug on the floor. I quickly take their shame-faced picture. Mrs. Chadha-Fu is holding the college acceptance letter in her lap.
“Get out of my life!” I shout at Samira, whose mouth hasn’t closed yet. “First you steal my boyfriend and then you talk behind my back! You’re right about me not being smart. I trusted you!”
My mom and dad suddenly appear in the living room. They look queasy and horrified, like they both have food poisoning simultaneously. My dad is actually clutching his abdomen and staring at the wall behind the Chadha-Fus. Is he praying to the wallpaper or Buddha?
“I think you should go,” my mom says firmly to the Chadha-Fus, who stand up and race to the door, as if there is a sample sale at Prada.
“Don’t worry, I’ll text you your photo!” I shout at them.
Tears are falling onto my iPhone like there is an actual typhoon inside my eyeballs. But I manage to press SEND and wipe slimy Nutella off the screen at the same time.
How is it possible to feel so abandoned and hurt and alone all at once?
It’s like I’ve accidentally swallowed a whole tube of Nair’s extra-strength hair removal.
This kind of internal pain should not be real.
Suddenly, Beijing looks a tiny bit more appealing than staying parent-less, boyfriend-less, and best-friend-less in Bradley Gardens. If you had to choose between a broken kneecap and a fractured elbow, which one would you choose?
It’s a game of which location would be worse.
10
Forbes Asia Top 30
I can barely sleep on the 15.5-hour plane ride to Beijing.
Even though I’m terribly sad and disappointed in everyone and myself, I have a plan.
In front of me, in addition to my usual magazines, I have bought a special-edition Forbes 30 Asia, which profiles the richest women and men in Asia. Like the Ivy League student that I should be, I’m flipping through it, making a list of potential parents on an airplane napkin. As I passed Hudson News in Terminal 1 at JFK, I had a brilliant last-minute thought that I could be a descendent of some Bill Gates of China.
Whoever said that I couldn’t think outside the box?
I’m determined to prove that my genius has been hiding deep inside me for seventeen years.
Forbes has done all the research for me, and it’s just up to me to narrow down the candidates. Math is so easy when genetics and inheritances are at stake! If this question were on the SATs, I’d have aced it.
Anyway, I’ve successfully vetted the billionaires by eliminating the people who are either too old or young to be my parents, like the whiz kid Cai Teng, who is only fifteen.
At the top of my napkin parent-list is Penelope Xia Xu, who is Shanghai’s #25 billionaire in clothing manufacturing for several lingerie stores in America. She seems like she could be my mother. Her forehead is large and sloped, which is what my fake dad believes indicates abundant success in one’s career. But I’m not sure if Penelope Xu looks fun and spontaneous enough to have a love child with a movie star. She’s so … stern-looking. But sometimes the most unexpected people have the biggest, juiciest secrets. Like my Goat dad.
Then there’s also a tall, slender man called Xie Fei at #12, the head of a big data research organization, and #16 Dai Feng, a short, balding dude who built his own startup construction company. Both of them are average-looking, but they’re the perfect age to be my parent.
I also tried eliminating people based on their facial features. But then I realized, what if some, if not all, of these gazillionaires had plastic surgery? I can’t eliminate that possibility, can I?
So my final parent list is at fifteen.
Fifteen out of thirty. That’s not bad, is it?
After my fake dad drove me to the US consulate to get my tourist visa for China approved, my fake mom took me to Macy’s to buy “thank-you hostess” gifts for my uncle, aunt, and cousin. I found a pretty pink beaded fringe scarf from H&M and super-fun, humongous hoop earrings for my cousin. Then my parents and I headed to Macy’s makeup counters to buy my aunt a deluxe Clinique moisturizer gift set that has twelve tiny vials of face and hand cream. We even found a nice blanket-soft leather Coach wallet with double zippers for my uncle.
“Listen to your uncle,” my fake dad said in a monotone at Air China’s counter at JFK. He sounded hoarse because he had been talking to my guidance counselor and principal for hours about letting me leave school a month early before graduation. At first they were seriously concerned about my lack of a diploma, but my dad promised them that he would make sure that I received my GED online. At this point, my dad had argued, it was better to “completely throw away a burned holiday dinner and start all over again.” I didn’t exactly understand what he meant, but the school administrators agreed.