Girl Giant and the Monkey King

by Van Hoang

  “Why did we move here?” Thom asked, the lump in her throat burning.

  Mom tsked. “I told you already. I got good job.”

  “Not any better than your old job.”

  Ma now worked at Troy University Library, which wasn’t much different than West City College Library, was it?

  “This job better and pay more.” Ma waved a hand dismissively and picked up her chopsticks. But she still didn’t eat.

  “How much more?” Thom asked.

  Chopsticks clattered onto the table. “Why you talking back so much, hah? You didn’t get into enough trouble today?”

  The frustration Thom felt flushed away, shoved aside by the fear of Ma’s wrath. Thom slumped in her seat, but try as she might, she couldn’t completely push her anger down. She hadn’t been talking back. That was just the term Ma used when she didn’t want to answer Thom’s questions. And Thom wasn’t ready to let it go.

  “You’re not happy, either,” she said quietly, as if speaking softly might keep Ma from getting angrier. “Are you?”

  Ma covered her face with one hand. She couldn’t be crying, though—she never cried. She took in a deep shuddering breath. “It’s not about being happy or unhappy.”

  “Then why? Why did we move here? Why do we stay? We both hate it.”

  “To keep you safe!” Ma practically shouted. Then she sighed, placing both palms down on the surface of the table. “It’s safer here. Schools are smaller. Teachers can pay more attention to you.”

  “Safe from what? There wasn’t anything dangerous at home.” And even if there was, Thom was pretty sure nothing could hurt her now that she was superstrong.

  “How you know? You’re just a kid. What if … what if someone…” Ma waved a hand, searching for the right words, or maybe making something up. “Someone try to take you away from me? Hah?”

  “Who?” It was one of those paranoid Ma things. The dishes were never clean enough, the rooms too dusty; the carpet needed to be vacuumed every day because of the bacteria. Her daughter was never truly safe.

  Except. Except maybe this was a real fear. Maybe someone could take Thom away. “Is it Ba?” she said.

  “What?” Ma asked, too loud, too fast. Too scared. “Who say anything about your ba?”

  “Does Ba want to take me away? Is that why we moved? Did he come looking for me?” Elation lifted the heaviness that had settled over her since the car ride home. Her dad had tried to find her! He still loved her, wanted her, wanted to be in her life.

  Thom usually avoided asking questions about her father. She used to, but Ma would get annoyed every time she asked about him—and not just annoyed for a moment, but for the whole day, like any mention of him was a curse. Then, Ma always got a migraine afterward and had to lie in bed, grumpy and sullen.

  Thom had learned to stop asking about him, and then to stop thinking about him completely. But now, all her questions, wondering about what it would be like if he had been in their life, flooded her. She wanted to know. Why couldn’t Ma just tell her? Thom was old enough to understand now.

  Would Ba have cooked for them? Would they be eating microwaved meals and frozen dinners if he were there?

  “No! No.” Ma stood, hands braced on the table. “That’s nonsense. Your ba is not … He can’t—” She stopped talking abruptly, her face full of horror.

  “What do you mean, he can’t?” Thom stood, too. If her father couldn’t … whatever it was Ma had almost said, then did that mean he had always wanted to? That maybe he did want to be in Thom’s life, but something was stopping him?

  But what? He was a grown-up. They could do whatever they wanted. So why couldn’t he be with Thom and Ma?

  “Enough, Thom. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Did you make him leave?”

  “No—why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. You never talk about him.” They were both breathing fast. Thom pressed her lips together. “Did you love him?”

  “Who you think I am? You think I have baby with a man I don’t love?” Ma started cleaning, picked up her chopsticks and bowl.

  “So what happened? Did you kick him out?”

  “You think I kick out your father and make it so you grow up without one?”

  “I don’t know!” Thom gripped the sides of her head. “I don’t know what you would do!”

  Ma stepped back, surprised by Thom’s outburst. “I would never have done that,” she said. “Not if it meant you wouldn’t have a ba.”

  “So he just left then? He didn’t want … to stay?” He hadn’t wanted Thom.

  “Oh, Thommy.” But even though she used Thom’s nickname, her words came out in a furious huff. Ma closed her eyes briefly. “We can’t always do what we want. Sometimes, we have to do what’s right. But he loves you. He loved both of us. He couldn’t stay. That’s all.”

  But that couldn’t be all. It wasn’t that simple. Why didn’t Ma want to tell her? She was usually so honest, even brutally blunt at times. Thom’s friends’ moms had always sugarcoated everything, but Ma had always answered Thom’s questions with frightening directness. It was probably the librarian in her, the need to give Thom all the information she had. Except when it had anything to do with Ba, of course.

  Thom was drained. She sat down. Ma hesitated, then set her bowl and chopsticks on the table and walked around to Thom’s chair. She placed a hand on Thom’s shoulder.

  “When I was pregnant with you, you know what I crave more than anything?” Ma asked.

  Thom exhaled and shook her head.

  “Lemon. Anything with lemon. Or sour. Cookies, star fruit, unripe mango. And you know what your ba did?”

  Again, Thom shook her head, biting back the bitterness, the unfairness, because she could not know. Because her father wasn’t here, and there was something Ma wasn’t telling her.

  “He would make me tea. Not just tea, but he set up elaborate tea servings with the little cup and the teapot and saucer. He bake lemon cookies. He was always baking new things, trying new recipes, coming up with his own creations.”

  Thom looked up at her, absorbing the new information, tucking the details somewhere safe so she could replay them later. Ma had never spoken so much about Ba before.

  “He loved to make me lemon cookies. He cut up star fruit for me. He even bought peaches, giant peaches the size of cantaloupe.”

  “Peaches?” So random. They never kept peaches in the house.

  “Oh, yes, he loved peaches. Always smelled like it, too.” Ma sighed, squeezing Thom’s shoulder. “If he was here, he’d make you tea and bake you cookies, too. He just … can’t be.”

  Thom wanted more. It was like a sip of milk tea and boba. She couldn’t stop with just one taste—she needed the whole cup.

  But Ma was done. Her hand left Thom’s shoulder, and Thom could hear her footsteps padding softly out of the dining room. Thom could only keep wondering at what life with her father might have been, why he had left, and what made Ma so scared that she’d moved them to the other side of the country.

  13

  AT LUNCH A FEW DAYS later, someone set a tray in front of her—right in front of her, even though the entire table was empty, and they could have sat at the end. Thom looked up. Kha, her neighbor. They had classes together, but Thom still hadn’t really talked to him. Mostly because she still felt weird about what people might think if they hung out: that just because they were both Asians, by default they had to be friends. The cafeteria quieted down, like everyone had turned to watch them, as if Thom and Kha were performing in some stage play.

  “Ham sandwich, huh?” he asked.

  Thom nodded.

  “Rice and beef,” he said, indicating the packed lunch on his tray. “I keep telling Grandma to stop cooking with fish sauce, but she says fish sauce is the backbone of our culture.” He opened the paper bag and wrinkled his nose. “No wonder no one wants to eat with me.”

  Thom’s mouth was glued shut. Seconds tic
ked by, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say, even though she knew he was being extra nice. She had seen Kha in the cafeteria before, sitting with the more popular kids, like he had been their friends for years. So why was he here now, talking to her, lying about not having anyone to sit with?

  “You can just nod,” he said, as if reading her mind. He smiled. “Or go ‘hmm.’ So I know you heard me.”

  She nodded.

  “Ugh.” He popped the lid of his Tupperware, and the smell of fish sauce wafted out. “How come your mom doesn’t make you bring Vietnamese food?”

  Because Thom had asked her not to, because Thom thought that not eating rice dishes would make her more normal, because she’d wanted one less thing to be made fun of about. But she didn’t want to explain that.

  “She doesn’t cook,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t have a husband.”

  Kha snorted through a mouthful of rice. “What?”

  Thom shrugged. “It’s just something she said. Her mom always told her that to catch a good husband, she had to learn how to cook—and she hates cooking. So she decided she didn’t want a husband and had me instead.”

  He paused. “What do you know about your father?”

  “I don’t have one,” Thom said.

  “You mean you don’t know who he is.”

  “I mean I don’t have one.” Thom was usually eager to talk about her father, but that was only with Ma. For some reason, talking about it with Kha was agonizing, especially after the last conversation she’d had with her mom about Ba.

  “Everyone has a father,” he said, peering at her.

  “I don’t,” Thom said, clenching her jaw. “Do you?”

  She immediately felt guilty. She was pretty sure he lived with his grandparents. She had seen them out exercising a lot, swinging their arms while speed walking up and down the street. They were spritely for people who looked like they had lived through the Vietnam War, but they were definitely too old to be his parents.

  Kha nodded, but he was stuffing his face, so he couldn’t answer. Where were his parents? Working? Thom knew a few kids in West City whose parents still lived and worked in Vietnam while their kids grew up in America without them. Something about being better for their future. Which was probably true, but she doubted Ma would send her to live in a country alone, even if that meant Thom would get better grades.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, breaking the awkward silence, “do you have a partner yet, for Culture Day?”

  She’d completely forgotten about Culture Day, and now her skin was all tingly from the dread of presenting in front of her classmates. The teacher who came up with this idea must have hated kids and loved seeing them suffer. “No, not yet,” she admitted.

  “Me neither!” Dimples poked in on his plump cheeks. Of course on top of being confident and stylish, he also had to have adorable dimples. His canines were sharper than normal, giving him the scary but cool appearance of a wolf, or a vampire. “Want to be partners?”

  A multitude of feelings rushed through Thom. Relief—she wouldn’t be that loser who had to be assigned a partner— but then, suspicion. Why would someone like Kha want to partner with someone like her? The loner sitting at an empty lunch table?

  She looked down at the few grains of rice that had spilled out of his bento box, and it clicked. He wanted to partner for Culture Day because they were from the same culture. Duh. She was surprised at how disappointed she felt.

  “Okay.” Her voice was small.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I mean, sure, let’s be partners,” she said. It would be an easy A at least.

  “Oh, great! I have lots of ideas. We could perform a play or a dance. Or maybe recite a poem?”

  She sat up straighter. “Um, I thought it was supposed to be an art project?”

  “Those are forms of art,” he said, laughing.

  “Can’t we just do a poster? Or a diorama?”

  His smile faded. “But … I mean, sure, but everyone else will be doing the same thing.”

  She exhaled. “Good!”

  “Can we dress up at least?” he asked with an eyebrow raised. He grinned.

  Thom wanted to groan. “Um.”

  “Just think about the extra credit!”

  Thom didn’t need the extra credit with her grades, but she couldn’t resist the allure of it, either, like salted-caramel chocolate-fudge cake even when she was already full.

  He popped open a box of green-tea panda cookies. “Want one?”

  She hesitated. He smiled, his dimples deepening. He held out a panda cookie, its eye-crinkling smile matching his.

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  Maybe the Monkey King was gone for good.

  Thom had waited at her window every night, hoping for a sign of him. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how he’d taught her to use her strength, how she’d been able to toss him a bit higher each time, how maybe, just maybe, she could learn more about her power—how to control it, use it. Maybe her superstrength wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe she could learn to live with it, with his help.

  Things at home weren’t too great, what with Ma still angry about the calculator. Thom had to do all the dishes, and Ma was serious about all of them. Usually, Thom only had to load the dishwasher after dinner, but now she also had to put the clean dishes away, rescrub the ones that weren’t clean enough, and reorganize the utensil drawer.

  Ma checked her homework every night and made her turn over all her graded quizzes. She got one wrong on a spelling test, and Ma added an extra hour to her study time, which meant she had about five minutes of freedom before bed every night.

  Life was exhausting.

  To make matters worse, soccer wasn’t getting any better. At practice that afternoon, they formed two lines for a drill where two players passed the ball back and forth, ending with the player on the left taking the scoring goal.

  At her old school, Thom and her friends always lined up so they would partner with one another, but here, there was no point. Thom didn’t bother checking the line to see who she would come up against. The scent of freshly mown grass had filled Thom’s nostrils, the wind blowing through her hair and transporting her to a different time.

  She’d imagined herself back on the field in West City. Her team’s uniforms were red and black instead of blue, white, and gold, and older than the ones they had at Troy. The West City jerseys didn’t have their names printed on the back, just the number so that the school could reuse them next year. But she didn’t need to see TRAN printed on the back of Thuy’s jersey to know when her best friend was running in front of her.

  “Ball!” Thuy would call, and Thom passed to her without hesitating, weaving through the opposing players and emerging with no one blocking her.

  “Ball!” she’d call to Thuy, who passed to her at lightning speed. Thom dribbled down the field, her own name in her ears as other players and the moms sitting in the bleachers cheered her on. She knew Thuy was right behind as she pulled her foot back and shot the winning goal.

  Thom couldn’t stop grinning, turning, jumping, hugging all her teammates, high-fiving her best friend, waving at Ma in the crowd.

  She was so lost in the memory that she didn’t realize it was her turn for the drill, didn’t see Sarah until it was too late, didn’t see the ball until it loomed in her vision, too big, too fast for her to dodge. It smacked her in the nose.

  She was more shocked than hurt, stumbling. Her foot slipped on a wet patch of grass, where that one broken sprinkler never shut off, and she fell, landing on her back in something squishy and wet.

  Clumps of mud dripped off her neck and arms, and water soaked into her T-shirt. She touched her hair to inspect the damage.

  Snickers started behind her, small at first, then louder, stronger. Soon, the entire team was laughing. Sarah pinched her nose like Thom had fallen into poop and not mud, and ran back to the others.

  Thom f
roze. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn’t finish the drill without Sarah, and the other girls had given up altogether, clutching their middles like they were trying not to pee. Coach Pendergrass’s mouth was all pinched, but she kept her composure. Finally, she cleared her throat loudly.

  “No, do you have something else you can change into?”

  Thom nodded.

  “Okay, get cleaned up. But,” she added as Thom turned stiffly toward the lockers, “if you don’t … Why don’t we call it a day, yeah? You can have your mom pick you up early if you want.”

  Thom took a deep breath. Going home early would show that Sarah had finally gotten to her, but the idea of coming back to the field made her mouth dry.

  “Just…” Coach seemed to run out of words. She waved at Thom to leave, shaking her head.

  * * *

  Thom ran fully clothed into the showers and turned the heat up full blast, gritting her teeth to fight back the lump in her throat. Even though the locker room was empty, she kept hearing laughter, echoing off the walls and hitting her in the gut until she was gasping for breath, water barely drowning out the sound of her sobs.

  “Thom?” a voice called from outside the shower curtain. She bit her lip and wiped at her eyes. “Thom?” She huddled against the faucet and didn’t answer. “It’s Kathy.”

  Somehow, that didn’t make her feel better. Kathy might not have joined in with Bethany and Sarah in tormenting Thom, but she’d done nothing to stop them. None of her teammates did, but Kathy would have been the one Bethany and Sarah listened to.

  “I brought you a towel,” Kathy said, her voice hesitant. “I noticed you didn’t have one on the hook.”

  Thom wiped the hair off her face and down her back, wringing it out, her movements robotic and numb. She reached for the faucet and twisted it off. Water dripped, the only sound for miles. And Kathy’s breathing. Her eagerness to get out of there as palpable as rain. What was she doing here? Coming to pick on Thom some more, to finish what her friends had started?