Is this what opens the door in my brain? Is Ms. Holden’s attention the thing that crowds out my terror and brings the answer rushing forward?
I remember key words in a yellow box in our textbook, a grand, grave painting of dozens of longhaired European men.
“Sovereignty! Osnabrück is where the second treaty was signed. The first treaty was at Münster. These treaties ended the Thirty Years’ War. The treaty at Osnabrück started a new political order in Europe. The Peace of Westphalia. Westphalian sovereignty!”
“Sehr gut!” Ms. Holden says, pumping her fist. “From a B to an A minus.”
But now I can’t stop. “The Thirty Years’ War began with the Defenestration of Prague. The Protestants threw the Catholics out the window to signify their defiance to the people in power. But no one died, which, I mean, is good; it was more symbolic—”
“Rocking that knowledge and memory,” Ms. Holden says, and nods at me, a nod that means I should sit down. Some of my classmates clap a little. So I sit. I feel like I’ve been running; I wish I could bend at the waist and breathe hard. I feel magical for a moment, capable of any victory. I hardly hear Rika’s and Melissa’s muttering.
Ms. Holden grins at me again, stands behind her podium, and rests her hands on its surface.
Her hands. All my desire comes back. My own hands sweat. I sit on them.
Later, Mary gazes down at me, interrupting my walk home.
I heard that students in the past used to put underwear on her head, so the faculty moved her higher and threatened students with expulsion if anyone did it again.
I wonder what she would look like with a bra on her head. I wonder if Ms. Holden put a bra on Mary’s head when she was a student here.
I wonder about Ms. Holden in just a bra.
I press my palms against my eyes.
When I look up, some teachers walking by give me warm nods. They like when students contemplate the Mary statue.
Work
I unlock the front door to our townhome. I do it quietly, not knowing who’s here yet. I sidestep one of the open cardboard boxes always partly blocking the entryway, halfway filled with corned beef and clearance clothes from Ross.
I tug off my sneakers and slip my feet into flip-flops. My mom sits at our old wood table, penciling and erasing in a dollar-store Sudoku book. She hasn’t changed out of her slacks and button-down shirt yet. I wonder if something annoying happened at work; she usually plays Sudoku to relax. Numbers calm her. One of the many ways my mom and I are super different.
A classical music station is set low on our old FM radio.
Behind her, on the kitchen counter, is a wooden statue of Jesus’s head, his suffering eyes looking heavenward, toward magnet memorial photographs of my parents’ moms. His head is a mess of thorns, but his neck bears the necklace of fresh white flowers my dad places there every week.
I can hear my dad too, upstairs in their bedroom. He’s speaking Tagalog, and tinny voices respond through his laptop speaker.
Near Jesus are piles of my parents’ bills and work invoices. My mom sorts them out every day, noting purchases on budget spreadsheets on our secondhand laptop, since, being a coder (I don’t think I’ll ever understand exactly what my mom does, her superbrain is an eternal mystery to me), she’s the only one in our thousand-square-foot radius who excels at Excel.
Besides the portion of my crazy-high tuition not covered by scholarships, our food, and some money they send back home, there aren’t too many other purchases to record. Sometimes they’ll buy a ninety-nine-cent DVD from the drugstore discount bins—ridiculous action movies and sci-fi that makes my dad giggle his high-pitched giggle. Buying an old DVD every few weeks is still cheaper than a subscription.
At night I always think about how I can shove that 3.2 grade point average closer to the golden 4.0. It’s the least I could do for all my parents’ crappy workdays and budgeting on my behalf. But there always seems to be something. That hard unit in chemistry, angle degrees, sentence mapping, the back of Ms. Holden’s neck.
I’m steeped in shame. I’m sure that somewhere, there’s a better version of the daughter my parents could have had—a violinist/aspiring scientist/freelance model like my cousin Bea, maybe—and then my mom glances up.
“Oh, why are you standing there? Come here. Gutom ka ba?” I think she’s going to go into the fridge to feed me something, but she looks back down at the grid and sets her pencil to it again, seeing another pattern.
“Ma, I thought I should show you,” I say.
She looks up over the rims of her reading glasses, suspicion wrinkling her forehead. In early elementary school, I’d bring home notes about when I wouldn’t stop crying over being left out, or when I stomped on boys’ toes and made them cry. I haven’t brought home much since high school started. Now I hand her the quiz.
“One hundred!” She stands, startling me. “Come, we’ll go to In-N-Out. Tara na.”
“I just wanted to show you! You don’t have to take me out!” Though I know she loves In-N-Out and uses any small celebration as an excuse to go.
“You’ll get that milkshake, the weird one you like, with all three flavors.”
“Dad’s busy talking to—”
“Ay, never mind, he has to eat also. Rom!” she calls upstairs.
He doesn’t answer, so we go upstairs. He’s sitting at the desk in their bedroom, still in his work polo, covered in splashes of plaster and paint.
Usually Papa’s wide brown face splits into a smile as soon as he sees us. But he looks serious and startled when we enter. His eyes dart from us to the screen and back to us, like he’s balancing and about to fall if he doesn’t watch out. My mom doesn’t seem to notice. “Look, oh, your daughter got one hundred on a test!”
“It’s just a quiz,” I mumble, but finally my dad smiles. “Ay, ang galing naman!” His eyes jitter back toward the screen. “Show your kuya Jun.”
I see the dark-haired guy onscreen, pixelated, wearing glasses. Jun, the faraway half brother I’ve never met in person before. I’ve seen him about once a week onscreen, though, since I was a kid.
I’m a little annoyed that I have to talk to a screen, instead of just my parents, now, when my mom is having such a rare moment of pride in me.
I’ve always been a little annoyed at these moments. Living my life with my family, then being forced to share something with near-strangers my parents insist are close to me.
“Hi, Kuya Jun,” I say.
There’s a pause. Maybe there’s a delay. But he’s not smiling. Maybe he’s annoyed too. “Hey, congrats,” the pixelated face finally says. “Can I talk to our dad again?”
Now I’m fully annoyed. But I don’t say anything.
“I’m just a few more minutes with your brother, anak,” our dad says in his low voice. “A few more minutes?” Jun protests from thousands of miles away. “Talaga, Tay?” He sounds more than annoyed.
“Come,” my mom says, and pulls me back downstairs, away from their conversation. Behind us, I hear the voice on the computer rise, and I wish my dad would just turn off the screen.
In our dad’s rattling Tacoma, we pass the big, uniform tract developments my parents always mutter about in Tagalog. Some of them are abandoned, the building stopped months ago. We maneuver around SUVs and convertibles and pass strip malls and chain restaurants and gas stations. Then we come to In-N-Out and park near a BMW.