I’m trying to tiptoe my way down the hall when my mom calls my name.
“Sadie? What are you still doing up?”
I spin around, and the room spins too. The alcohol is still sloshing around in my stomach, my bloodstream, rendering everything blurry and surreal. I have to squint hard to focus.
My mom’s removing her coat, setting her car keys down on the counter; they’re easily recognizable because she refuses to throw out the bright ribbons from chocolate boxes and insists instead on wrapping them around the key ring. There should be five ribbons in total, but when I blink, they duplicate into a mess of squiggly pink and blue lines.
God, I’m so drunk.
“I’m not drunk,” I announce loudly. This seems like the normal, not- guilty thing to say, but I can tell from the way Mom stares at me that I’ve slipped up somehow. It’s okay, I attempt to calm myself, biting my tongue so hard I taste the sharp tang of blood. At least she hasn’t found out about the party. You’ve cleaned up most of the evidence. There’s absolutely no way—
“Did you . . . host a party while we were gone?” Mom asks, frowning. Before I can reply, she strides into the living room and starts inspecting all the furniture. I want to disappear. “The dining table is askew. The books on the shelf aren’t in alphabetical order. The left cabinet drawer is open. And is that—” She wipes a finger over something so minuscule on the wall that I can’t even see what it is until she holds it right up to my face, under the lights. “That’s a piece of glitter, isn’t it?”
She’s being very accurate. It is, indeed, a singular, dust- sized speck of glitter.
“We don’t own anything with glitter in this house,” she says, switching to Mandarin now. She always speaks in rapid Mandarin when she’s agitated, as if all the words in the English language aren’t enough to contain her rage. “Glitter is, without a doubt, the worst thing humanity has ever invented.”
For reasons that escape me, I decide that the best response to this is: “What about weapons of war?”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” I backpedal. I’m having trouble standing up and talking at the same time. Or maybe just standing up without support. Or maybe being a human in general.
“What’s going on with you?” she asks, her gaze heavy on me.
Everything is too heavy: the air around me, the clothes on my body, the skin on my bones, the invisible force pressing against my chest. The effort of a single, shaky breath. I can feel my palms sweating, the truth rising up like bile. “ I—”
“Did you miss us?” Max comes strolling into the room from the other side of the house, grinning wide. He’s holding up a packet of Wang Wang soft gummy candies— the lychee- flavored ones I love the most— which he waves around before me like a victory flag before dropping it into my palms. “Dude, you should have been there. Da Ma invited a bunch of her friends over and I absolutely thrashed them at mahjong. They ran out of money and had to start paying up in candy— you like this flavor, right?
Anyway, it was hilarious. Mom forced us to leave before I could take everything, but I swear, if given the chance—”
“I’m talking to your sister,” Mom says irritably. “Go wash up.”
“Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second.” My brother stares at me. “Are you— drunk? Dude, I can’t believe this. What the hell happened?”
I open my mouth to deny it—
And break down into tears instead.
I’m completely, utterly horrified. I never act this way. I’m only meant to absorb what others feel, present the best side of myself, sit still and swallow my own emotions. But it’s like I’ve lost control over my own body, like I’m watching myself from the ceiling as I stand here in the middle of the living room, crying and clutching the gummy candy. I’m inconsolable. Hysterical. I’m sobbing ten years’ worth of tears, choking as if there’s something sick and poisonous inside me, something painful, and I need to force it out of my system. But it’s stuck. It’s festered beneath my flesh for so long now that it’s a part of me, the deep ache like a thumb on a tender bruise.
“Hold up.” Alarm flashes over Max’s face. I’ve witnessed him having a mental breakdown over an ad about a lost squirrel before, but he hasn’t seen me cry in years. “Bro, you’re scaring me—”
“Max,” Mom says quietly. “Go.”
He doesn’t protest this time, but he keeps shooting me worried glances over his shoulder as he hurries down the corridor.
Then my mom gently grabs my arm. Sits me down on the couch next to her.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. If Mandarin is her language for anger, it’s also her language for softness. It’s her voice coaxing us to sleep when we were younger, her humming under her breath as she sewed the buttons back into our jackets so they were good as new again, her telling us it was time for dinner, her whispering goodnight as she turned off the big lights, her calling to let us know she would be there soon, just wait.
“I regret it,” I manage to say on a stuttering breath. I weep like I haven’t in ages, not since I was an infant.
“Regret what?”
Everything.
I regret writing the emails, I regret throwing the party, I regret kissing Julius in a moment of impulsivity and giving him the power to humiliate me. I regret it so much it feels like my liver is bleeding dry. I regret it so much it feels more like hatred, a knife turned inward, nails squeezing into flesh. I hate myself for everything that’s happened, because every mistake is my own to bear. And it feels like fear too. Like pure, animal terror, the stomach- curdling moment in the horror film when you realize you made the wrong move, you unlocked the doors too soon, and the masked man with the chain saw is standing right behind you.
There’s nothing I want more than for time to be a physical thing, something I can split into two with my own hands, so I can turn it around, shatter it, undo all the consequences.
“Is this about the party?” Mom asks. “Because I’m not mad.
I wish you had told me, and I don’t condone the alcohol, but I’m actually quite happy. It’s about time you did things like a normal teenager.”
This is so shocking my tears freeze in my eyes. “You’ re— not?”
She smiles at my surprise. Smiles. I wonder if I’ve been trans-ported into an alternate universe. In the correct version, she would be lecturing me or chasing me around the house with her plastic slippers. She would be mad that I keep ruining everything, and she would have every right to be. I don’t deserve to be forgiven so easily. “Of course. When I was a teenager, I threw parties every few weeks. They were very popular.”
“ I— what?” A dull throbbing sensation has started behind my eyes, but I can’t tell if it’s from the liquor or the crying or the strain of fitting this bizarre information into my brain. “Since when? I thought you said . . . I thought you said you herded the goats around the mountains when you were a teenager.”
“Just because we had goats doesn’t mean we didn’t have parties.”
I blink. The room is spinning again, faster than before.
“But . . . I’m not allowed to. I shouldn’t be having fun and throwing parties and— and doing the wrong things. I’m not supposed to cause any trouble.”
“Who told you that?” she asks. “Who said you weren’t allowed?”
Nobody, I realize. But nobody ever had to tell me. It was enough for me to cower behind the wall as my parents fought, enough to watch my father leave, to feel the doors trembling in his wake. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for me. That’s the truth I always crawl back to, the bone that’s set wrong in my body all these years. My dad had been at work, Max had been out playing basketball with his friends, and my mom needed to go buy groceries, so she’d asked me to steam the pork buns for dinner. I’d been so eager to prove that I was reliable, but then I’d gotten distracted by the show I was watching.
I only remembered the boiling pot again when I smelled the smoke. The sharp, bitter odor of something burning.
I had slammed my laptop down and sprinted into the kitchen to check, but it was too late: The fire had burned a hole straight through the bottom, the metal scorched so severely it was coal black. It had been my mom’s favorite pot, the one she had bought with her savings and shipped all the way from a store in Shanghai. I didn’t try to hide it when she walked in an hour later. I just stood there guiltily, my head bowed, the damage on open display behind me.
“How can you be so irresponsible?” she’d demanded, rubbing her face like she hoped to scrub away her exhaustion. “I only asked you to do this one thing while I was gone. You’re not a baby anymore, Sadie; I expect more from you.”
I’d apologized, over and over and over. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Mom. Please don’t be angry with me. I’m so sorry.”
But then my father had come home, and he’d been angry too— not at me, but at my mom. “She’s still a child,” he’d insisted, dumping his briefcase on the couch. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always make a big deal out of nothing? It’s just a pot.”
My mom had whirled on him with alarming speed, her eyes flashing. “You say that because you never cook. You go to work and come back and expect dinner to be all ready and waiting on the table for you. You’re no better than a child yourself.”
“It’s my fault,” I’d put in. My parents so rarely argued that I didn’t know what to do, only that I hated it and needed to make it stop. “I’ll fix it, I promise. I-I’ll find a new pot, the same brand as the old one. I won’t do it again—”
But they were no longer even looking at me.
“I never cook because you don’t let me,” my father was saying. “You lose patience within minutes; look at you, you’re losing patience now—”
“Don’t be such a hundan,” Mom had snapped, and that’s how I knew she was really furious: She was swearing in Mandarin.
And just like that, my father had exploded. He’d slammed his hand down on the table so hard I expected him to break something, his features twisted with rage. The melted pot lay forgotten on the stove. They glared at each other from opposite ends of the room, and then it was like some kind of invisible barrier had broken, and they were flinging accusations at each other, complaints, curse words.
“Do you enjoy making other people miserable?” my dad had accused, and I couldn’t help it anymore. I was caught between two sides of a war, and by pure protective instinct, I stepped out in front of my mom. Chose my alliances without thinking.
“Don’t talk to my mom like that,” I’d said. Quietly, at first, then louder. “You’re upsetting her. Just— just go away.” I hadn’t meant it. I was only sick and scared of their fighting. I only wanted the argument to stop.
Hurt had flickered over his face, and I got the sense I’d committed some terrible act of betrayal, before his thick brows drew together, his hands balled into fists. “You all want me to go?
Fine,” he spat. “I will.”
Then he was leaving because I’d all but asked him to, and my mom was right there, watching him, witnessing our lives collapse in on themselves. “Don’t come back,” she yelled, and he never did.
Once the dust had settled, she told me it had nothing to do with me. It had been her choice. They were grown adults; they made decisions for themselves. All the expected, hollow excuses.
But I didn’t believe her. Couldn’t. Every time I played the scene back, I saw myself poised at both the starting and end point. I had been the trigger, and all that came after had happened for what? Because I hadn’t listened to her. Because I hadn’t been well- behaved. Because I’d been impulsive.
Because some mistakes were irreversible, like glitter in the carpet, a wine stain on a favorite dress.
“What’s really going on, Sadie?” my mom asks, peering at my face.
I can’t bring myself to tell her about the emails, so I settle for the closest answer I can find. “Everyone hates me,” I whisper.
“I did something to make them all hate me, and I thought . . . I thought I could change their minds.”
She absorbs this for a moment. “Well, I doubt that’s true. And even if it is, it’s not the end of the world.”
I let out a shaky laugh. Adults are always saying that. Other than If someone asked you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
(which simply doesn’t strike me as a realistic scenario; who would benefit from making somebody else hurl themselves off a cliff?)
and You’ll understand when you have children of your own (even though I don’t plan on ever having children), this seems to be their favorite line. It’s not the end of the world. And maybe there’s some tiny grain of truth in it. Maybe I’ll grow up and change my mind a decade later. Except for now, this is my whole world. The people I sit next to in class, the faces I have to see at school every single day, the teachers who determine the grades that get sent to the university that determines the trajectory of the rest of my life.
“Why don’t you just give it some time?” she suggests. “The more you force something, the less it works. Haven’t you heard the saying? A melon picked too soon is seldom sweet.”
I stare. “You mean . . . do nothing?” It’s an absurd notion. It’s the route people who turn their essays in two days late would choose. But all of a sudden I’m aware of how exhausted I am.
“Yes, do nothing,” she says firmly. “Live your life and see what happens. Of course, I don’t mean around the house,” she adds. “I expect you to clean up all the rooms and return everything back to its original place.”
“ I— Okay.” I start to stand up but she yanks me back down onto the couch.
“Tomorrow,” she says. “Tonight, all you need to do is drink the chicken soup I’m about to make you and go to bed, okay?”
“Okay,” I repeat again, stunned. I must still be very drunk, because I can’t help the next words that tumble out of my mouth:
“I’m really sorry.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t have to apologize for the party—”
“Not about the party,” I say. “ About— about my father.”
Silence.
It’s the one topic in the house we never bring up. It’s like a rash you’re told not to scratch, even when it pains you, for fear of making it worse. I already regret it, already want to take the words back, but my mom’s gaze is calm.
“Sadie. It’s not your fault.”
“ But—”
“It happened,” she says, “and it was inevitable, and now we have the rest of our lives to live.”
“Inevitable? How? You never fought. You were both so happy up until that night,” I whisper.
“Oh, no, we weren’t happy. We weren’t in love with each other. We were simply polite,” she says, looking over my shoulder now, as if she can see her past projected onto the bare walls. “I almost wish that we had fought more, that we’d cared enough to challenge each other and bicker over the little things. Better that than just swallowing our resentment and staying quiet until we couldn’t take it anymore.”
I feel like somebody has knocked me upside down. Like I might throw up at any moment. “That’s not possible,” I tell her.
“I should have sensed it. I would have known—”
“You were so young,” she says. “You’re still so young. And we didn’t want you to know.” She squeezes my wrist lightly.
“But then . . . you’re not happy now,” I say, scanning her face, noting the familiar signs of fatigue in the faint purple around her eyes, the downward turn of her lips. “It’s because he’s gone, isn’t it?”
She shakes her head. “If there’s any reason why I’d be unhappy, it’s because you’re not happy.”
I am. I’m fine, I try to say, except the lie won’t even make its way past my lips.
“All you do is work and study and live for other people,” she goes on, gesturing to the stacks of textbooks on the floor, the shiny awards and sports trophies on the bookshelf. “Yes, you help out a lot, and I’m very grateful for it; the bakery wouldn’t be running without you. But I’d much rather see you enjoying your teen years while you can. I worry that you’re going to look back when you’re twenty or forty and all you’ll remember is your desk and the dishes. Really, it would ease my guilt if you did.” Her smile is sad. “I never wanted you to have to grow up this fast.”
My head buzzes. I can’t believe it. It’s like spending years of your life training for a game only to realize you understood the rules all wrong.
“I’m going to make that soup now.” Mom stands up. “Stay here.”
And then she heads into the kitchen, leaving me to reassemble all the pieces of my life I was once so certain of.
