Starfish

by Akemi Dawn Bowman

  To Ross—the first one was always going to be for you

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mom doesn’t show up.

  I shouldn’t be surprised—she never shows up—but I can’t get rid of the empty, twisted feeling in my stomach. Emery always says that being alone isn’t the same thing as being lonely, but sometimes it feels like they’re exactly the same thing.

  My mermaid teapot is sitting on the shelf in front of me. I flick my finger against the purple ribbon dangling from its spout. When I made it in ceramics class two months ago, it looked vibrant and smooth. Now all I can think about is how the blue glaze looks more gray than cerulean, how the torso is so unrealistically long, and how bad of an idea it was to make a mermaid teapot at all.

  It doesn’t matter that the ribbon says “Honorable Mention.” All I see is “Not good enough to get into Prism.” All Mom would see is “Not good enough.”

  Maybe I should be happy she isn’t here.

  I pull the ribbon from the spout and shove it into my bag, burying it beneath a graveyard of almost-used-up pencils, a sketchbook, and a pack of cinnamon chewing gum.

  When I hear laughter, I look up to see Susan Chang—the only other half-Asian girl in our school—clutching a blue and gold ribbon like she’s afraid she might lose it. Her mother’s hand is wrapped around her shoulder, and her father is pointing at her acrylic painting—an image of a house on a lake, with several geese dipping their toes into the water. It’s a sensible piece. It has mass appeal.

  Not like my stupid mermaid teapot.

  If I could feel anything other than sorry for myself right now, I’d feel happy for her. I’ve always felt a weird connection to Susan, even though we aren’t friends and even though the only things we have in common are our part Asian-ness and a love of art. I guess I always thought we could be friends, if either of us had bothered to try.

  It’s not that I’m desperate for friends or anything. I mean, I do have friends. I have Emery Webber, who rescued me from having to eat lunch by myself on the first day of freshman year. And there’s Gemma and Cassidy, who are technically Emery’s friends, but we all sit at the same lunch table so I think they count.

  I had a best friend once too. The kind you see in movies or read about in books. We lived in a different world than everyone else—a world that always made sense, even when everything around us didn’t.

  We were like two halves of a snowflake—we matched.

  But he moved away, and I’ve been half of a snowflake ever since.

  The truth is I’m not really good at talking to new people. I’m not really good at talking to people, period.

  And anyway, it isn’t a friend that I need. Not right now, when I prefer painting to trying to fit in. I need a mom who doesn’t look at me like I’m a worn-out piece of furniture that doesn’t match the rest of her house. I need a fresh start. I need a real life.

  I need Prism.

  But a purple ribbon isn’t going to get me admission to Prism Art School in New York. And it’s certainly not going to make my mother proud.

  My chest feels heavy, and I try to think of what I’m going to say to her when I get home.

  • • •

  Mom is sitting on the couch painting her nails bright red with a gossip magazine propped against her knees. She isn’t looking at me, and she definitely isn’t looking at the teapot in my hands.

  “How was school?” Mom asks from a thousand miles away.

  “Fine,” I say. I tighten my bag over my shoulder. Maybe she forgot about my art show, even if I did remind her this morning. And yesterday. And every day before that for three weeks. But maybe she was busy and it slipped her mind. Maybe something came up.

  She brushes another layer of candy-apple red over her toenail.

  I feel my stomach knot over and over and over again.

  My older brother, Taro, steps into the kitchen. He’s wearing a gray and red shirt with a University of Nebraska logo printed on the front and oversized glasses, even though the lenses aren’t prescription. There’s half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich wedged in his left hand.

  “Mom, there’s nothing to eat in this house.” His voice is gruff because he doesn’t know any other way to speak.

  Mom wipes a blond curl away with the back of her hand, her eyes narrowed with amusement. “There’s a grocery store around the corner. You know how to drive.”

  Taro makes a noise like a disgruntled cow, and then he looks at me. “Where have you been?”

  Mom turns away. I feel like it’s on purpose.

  “My art show,” I say, loud enough for Mom to hear. I could lie. I could tell her I won first place—I could make my award sound a lot better than it is. Maybe she’d pay attention. Maybe she’d listen. “I won something.”

  Taro looks at Mom, then at me, then back at Mom. He looks as awkward as I feel. “That’s cool,” he mumbles, chewing his sandwich and moving toward the refrigerator.

  I think of my ribbon, buried at the bottom of my bag. She’d never see it. She’d never even ask to see it. Why not just tell her it’s blue and gold?

  I sigh. I can’t lie to her, even if I desperately want her to care. It wouldn’t work anyway. Mom doesn’t look at me the way Susan Chang’s parents look at her—she looks at me like I don’t belong. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I look nothing like her. I have dark hair and a wide jaw and stumpy legs; Mom has loose blond curls, a narrow chin, and legs like a supermodel. We’re just different, like we exist on different spectrums. If I lived on an iceberg, Mom would live inside a volcano. That kind of thing.

  But most of the time she looks at me like she doesn’t want me to belong.

  Maybe it’s because of what happened with Dad. I think I’ll always feel guilty about that part, even if Mom should’ve listened to me.

  Why, after seventeen years, do I still crave her approval so much? I have no idea. It’s stupid, but I can’t help it. Whoever programmed my personality made me overly accommodating. Whoever programmed Mom made her—well, I haven’t figured that part out yet.

  And then, because Taro can’t help himself, he says from over his shoulder, “Mom, did you see Kiko’s teapot?” Sometimes I don’t know if he thinks confrontation is hilarious, or if he thinks he’s helping in his own pushy way.

  He’s not helping. Mom hates being called out.

  She looks up and flashes her peroxide-infused teeth. “Well, what did you win?” She didn’t forget about my art show, but she’s also not going to acknowledge that she didn’t want to go. She’s going to pretend like it isn’t a big deal, even though to me it’s a huge deal.

  Heat radiates across my face. “Just a ribbon,” I say.

  A crack appears in her glass smile. “What, like a participation ribbon? You know that’s not a real award, right?” She doesn’t ask to see it; she laughs like it’s a harmless joke—like I’m supposed to be in on the joke. Except Mom doesn’t laugh like a normal person. She laughs like she’s secretly mocking the entire world. That’s her “tell.” It’s how I know she means everything she’s saying.

  I tighten my mouth. Maybe I should’ve listened to Mr. Miller and entered one of my paintings in the art show. Maybe then I’d have won first place instead of Susan Chang.

  I swallow the lump in my throat. I could never enter a painting into a school competition for everyone to see. They’re too precious to me. I consider them actual, physical pieces of my soul.

  Taro closes the refrigerator door and groans. “Seriously, is anyone going to make anything for dinner? I’m starving.”

  “You’re graduating from college next year; why don’t you cook a meal for a change?” she points out, twisting the cap back onto her bottle of nail polish. “It would be nice if someone would cook for me once in a while.”


  WHAT I WANT TO SAY:

  “I’ve literally been cooking dinner at least twice a week every week for the last year. How can that possibly go unnoticed?”

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAY:

  “I just made spaghetti a few days ago.”

  She laughs. “I hardly call boiling some noodles in a pot ‘cooking.’ ” She makes a face at Taro as if to ask if he agrees with her.

  Uninterested in Mom, me, and the teapot he’s all but forgotten about, Taro stuffs the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, swallows the lump of bread, and says, “Forget it. I’m not hungry.”

  “You guys are so lazy.” Mom rolls her eyes. Mine feel like someone has thrown salt in them.

  It doesn’t matter that I’ve had straight A’s since the seventh grade, a nearly full-time job at the bookstore, or the fact that I’ve been actively building an art portfolio to help me get into Prism. I’m never doing enough to keep Mom happy. She never notices how hard I try, how much I care, or that maybe I just need to be noticed every now and then. And not just when it’s convenient for her.

  “I’m going upstairs. I’ve got work in an hour.” I mutter the last part under my breath.

  “Do you want a piece of cake before you go? I bought a pound cake from the grocery store. Isn’t that your favorite?” Mom’s voice drips with something sickly sweet.

  I flinch, pausing before I reach the first step. Something tugs inside my chest, like there’s a hook pierced into my heart and Mom’s words are reeling me back to her. “I’m not hungry. But thanks.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll save a slice for you and you can have it when you get home.” She smiles so naturally, as if she’s like this all the time.

  She’s not, but sometimes she makes it so hard to remember.

  • • •

  I paint a girl with white hair, blending into a forest of white trees, with stars exploding in the sky above them like shattering glass. If you don’t know where to look for her, you might not see her at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The yearbook cover is half velvet and half textured. It feels soft and scratchy beneath my fingertips. The inside is filled with glossy pictures of after-school classes, smiling faces, and sports events. Pictures of all the people I’ve known since kindergarten, who look so obviously different from me that sometimes I feel like I’m a pencil in a box of crayons.

  Because I’m the thing that doesn’t belong.

  I find the only picture of me—my senior picture—and wish it weren’t there at all.

  But even if I had the ability to erase it, I wouldn’t, because Mom would kill me. She loves school yearbooks in a way that I don’t understand. Her favorite thing to do when I bring them home is to look at every student in the entire school and decide who is the prettiest girl and the best-looking guy. Then she likes to look at who the school voted “Best-Looking” on the award pages and see if she’s right.

  Sometimes it feels like she belongs in high school more than I do.

  Mr. Miller lets our ceramics class pass around yearbooks to sign because it’s Friday and there’s only one more week until graduation. I feel too weird asking anyone to sign mine, so I flip through the pages by myself and play my mother’s game. Not because I enjoy it, but because if I can imagine who she will pick, I can stop imagining that she’ll ever think to pick me.

  But I don’t need to play the game, really. I already know Lauren Finch and Henry Hawkins are the best-looking people in our class. I don’t think anybody in the entire school would disagree.

  In the fifth grade I thought I was in love with Henry. Later I realized I was just emotionally rebounding because Jamie Merrick had moved to California. Jamie and I were best friends, and although we never even held hands, I think we had a mutual unspoken agreement that one day we’d get married.

  Except long-distance relationships are doomed to fail, especially when you’re in elementary school.

  Beyond being occasionally paired up for class projects, Henry and I had very little interaction. But I liked him anyway because he was cute and because I missed Jamie.

  On Valentine’s Day in elementary school, everyone was supposed to pass out cards to every other student in their class, to make sure nobody was left out. I gave Henry Hawkins a different card than I gave all the other kids—it was bigger than the others, and it had a drawing of a character from his favorite cartoon. Inside it I wrote, To Henry Hawkins, From Kiko Himura.

  By the end of the day, everyone was talking about my stupid drawing and how Henry was going to have to get a restraining order before I started showing up outside his window in the middle of the night.

  It was embarrassing. I wanted to melt into the floor just to stop people from looking at me.

  I guess Henry was embarrassed too, because he made his friend Anthony pull me aside to tell me that Henry wasn’t into girls who looked like me.

  I remember not understanding it. Girls who looked like me. Did he mean girls with dark hair? Girls who wore jeans instead of skirts? Girls who didn’t have their ears pierced? Or did he mean something else?

  For years I watched him hold hands with girls who didn’t look anything like me. And some of them had dark hair. Some of them wore jeans. Plenty of them didn’t have their ears pierced.

  But they all had one thing in common: None of them were Asian.

  Now when I have a crush on someone, I don’t wonder if they like the same music as me, or if they watch the same kind of movies, or if we’ll get along the way Jamie and I did. I wonder if they like Asian girls.

  I stare at Henry’s and Lauren’s pictures. They’re both posing like they’re on a modeling reality TV show, and above their heads is the caption: BEST-LOOKING.

  Lauren Finch is pretty. Not just because she has good skin and the right clothes. She has the right everything. She’s universally appealing. Her nose is tiny, her eyebrows are close to her eyes, and everything about her is bright and brilliant, like someone turned up the highlights on her real-life filter.

  She doesn’t have to wonder if guys will like her because of her race. Nobody will tell her she’s “pretty, for a white girl.” She’s just pretty, period.

  I don’t stand a chance.

  Because I will never be bright and brilliant like Lauren. I have pale skin and dark hair, and my eyes are too small. She’s colors and candy; I’m pencils and smudges.

  I close the yearbook, tired of wishing I were someone else and tired of feeling like everyone expects me to be someone else.

  “I know you aren’t putting that away without asking me to sign it.” Emery plops onto the metal stool next to me. Her shoulder bag drops to the floor like it weighs fifty pounds.

  “I thought you’d ditched class after lunch or something,” I say with a grin.

  “And ruin four years of perfect attendance? Never.” Emery scrunches her nose and pats the table. “Come on, hand it over.”

  I slide the yearbook toward her and laugh. “You might struggle to find any free space.”

  Emery tucks a curl of auburn hair behind her ear. “Kiko.” She frowns. “You haven’t asked anyone else to sign this?”

  I roll my eyes like it’s only a stupid yearbook and why would I care?

  It doesn’t fool Emery, who sighs like I’m a little puppy who just won’t learn. “You can act like you don’t care now, but in ten years, when you look back through this, you’re going to wish you had made more of an effort.”

  Sometimes I can’t tell whether Emery knows she’s the only person I talk to, or if she just talks to so many people that she never really notices. “Okay.” I shrug dismissively. “I’ll ask Mr. Miller to sign it after you.”

  Emery snorts and scratches her pen hurriedly against the inside cover. A small tattoo of an arrow sits below her wrist. When she’s finished, she slides the yearbook back toward me.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  She taps her taxicab-yellow fingernails against the wooden table. “Are you going to Lauren’s party tonight?�
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  My body freezes. “Lauren Finch?”

  “Yeah, here,” Emery says, pulling out an orange card from her bag and placing it on top of my yearbook. “They’ve been passing them around to the seniors on the down-low.”

  I look back down, reading the rest of the text.

  Pre-Graduation Party at Lauren Finch’s House

  TONIGHT at 7pm

  362 Arlington Road

  I’ve never been invited to a party before. Not one without chaperones and sleeping bags, anyway. I don’t know why, but it feels intimidating.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” Emery interrupts my thoughts. “You hate parties and people and loud music. But literally everyone is going. You can’t honestly miss the last real high school party of our lives.”

  “I don’t hate those things,” I correct. I mean, I don’t think I do. I’ve never had the opportunity to find out.

  And then I think of Mom. I think of her going through my yearbook, inadvertently reminding me how I’ll never be as pretty as the other girls at school, how pretty she was when she was my age, how I’ll never be as pretty as her, and I suddenly want to be anywhere other than my own house.

  I read the card again. It’s tonight. I don’t have to work.

  I shake my head, deflated. “I can’t. My mom doesn’t even let me wear makeup—in what alternate universe would she ever be okay with me going to a party?”

  “Stop letting your mom control your entire life,” Emery says in her pretend-robot voice, which always makes me laugh.

  “You might be brave enough for parties and tattoos and doing whatever you want, but I’m not,” I point out.

  Emery lights up and claps her hands together. “That reminds me, I’m getting a new one done next weekend. Do you want to come with me? You can meet Francis. She’s amazing. Honestly, if I didn’t already have this set plan for medical school, I would totally be a tattoo artist. Her shop is incredible.”

  She lifts her bag up, sticking out her tongue like it really does weigh fifty pounds, and rummages inside for her sketchbook. Unlike mine, which is completely black on the outside, Emery’s is covered in stickers, concert tickets, and tape. When she splits the book open, I watch her flip through sketches of cartoonish women, all dressed like futuristic gangsters and armed with some kind of weapon or another. She stops at a black-and-white image of a girl with pigtails and a giant bubble between her lips. She’s holding two pistols—one has LOVE written on the barrel, and the other reads HATE.