by Remy Lai
Pear tarte tatin.
On these Sunday afternoons, Yanghao sometimes joined in, but he always ended up abandoning us for a storybook. Mama popped into the kitchen from time to time to clean up the mess Papa and I made. Ah-po and Ah-gong peeked in to watch us, too. Mango had to be chased out of the kitchen often. Mostly it was just Papa and me. Papa and me making cakes. Papa and me with big smiles on our faces, the smiles he said cakes always bring.
But.
Papa, you and I.
We’ll never have our Pie in the Sky, will we?
It was one year and eleven months ago, wasn’t it?
A car smashed into your car, didn’t it?
You died, didn’t you?
8
Every time my memories about Papa come, I welcome them. And every time they hurt me, even after so many times, I’m still surprised. Like a clown in a circus who keeps stepping on a rake and getting whacked in the face by the handle.
I rub my nose and cover my ears to block out the sounds of the happy students in the courtyard. Soon the end-of-recess bell rings, and my classmates come running back in, including Joe and Max.
I should be thankful they didn’t mean for me to hear all those things. But it’s very hard to tell myself optimistic mumbo jumbo when the reality is crap.
I can’t escape this crap either because here comes Mr. Fart marching in to start his science class. His real name is Mr. Hart. I don’t know what I’m more upset about, the s l o w, or that I’m so upset about the s l o w I can’t even secretly congratulate myself again for coming up with that nickname.
Without even greeting the class, Mr. Fart clops down the rows of desks, sounding like a horse in a hurry, and passes out papers from a stack in his hands. He does it so quickly he looks like a ninja throwing deadly stars. He might as well have been, because the papers turn out to be the homework we handed in yesterday, the one that was only ten multiple-choice questions but had taken me three hours to translate. I’m hoping for a pass.
I scored three out of ten.
“Jingwen,” Mr. Fart says, “read question six.”
He hates me. Why else would he keep calling on me? My reading slows down his class to slower than a snail going uphill carrying a pebble on its back. Surely he can tell by my sweatiness and my twitchiness that I’d choose death by a thousand cat scratches over reading aloud.
I try to read Mr. Fart’s deadpan face for clues about whether I was saying the words right or wrong, but I get nothing. Only his fingers furiously tapping on his thigh tell me to hurry up. Then I get a whole other kind of message from someone else. Max, who sits a few rows ahead and to my right, is looking at me.
Time.
Stops.
He quickly looks away. Just like that girl on the bus.
I whip my gaze back down to my textbook so fast I probably need one of those protection-from-vampire-bite neck braces.
Whenever Mr. Fart makes me read, a couple of classmates steal glances my way. Which I think is reasonable since they must all be confused. I don’t even know what I’m blathering; how could they? Most of my classmates are kind enough not to openly gawk at me.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re all like that girl on the bus. They all think I’m an alien. Maybe they’re all like Joe and Max. They all think I’m s l o w. I’m stupid. I’m a joke.
I can’t see what everyone else is doing, but I feel hot like a fireball. Must be everyone’s eyes burning holes into me. So that I don’t drown everyone with my sweat, I concentrate on the words on my textbook.
Suddenly, all the Martian words on the page morph into words I know.
I close my eyes, but the hundreds of s l o w s are now in my head.
Come on, Jingwen. Think of something else. A cake. Sponge cake. Two layers. With Nutella filling. Slathered in Nutella cream.
In my mind, this cake drops from above. When it lands in the middle of my mind, it doesn’t smash into bits. Instead, the hundreds of s l o w s are scattered away. So I think about carrot cake with cream cheese topping. And chocolate raspberry torte. And blueberry cheesecake. Until all the s l o w s are replaced by cakes.
9
Before the s l o w incident, before I found out I was the alien, the dismissal bell was like the song of a bird. It signaled the end of six hours of prison, and that was when all my classmates were happiest and most generous with their smiles and byes. They said bye and see you to everyone and anyone, including me.
Now that bell is ringing, and it sounds like the hissing noise Mango makes when I pat her a second too long. I keep my head down and pack my bag, shielding myself from my classmates’ smiles and byes and see yous as they step out of the classroom. Once I leave, they’ll probably make jokes about me behind my back, just like Joe. They’re not my classmates. They’re my classmates-not-friends.
I don’t want to have to come back to a classroom where I spend thirty hours a week knowing it’s the scene of a horrible crime.
I rearrange the contents of my backpack like I’m completing a ten-thousand-piece puzzle of the desert. The last boy to leave before me is Ben. As he turns to leave, his eyes catch mine. I’m frozen, like the time Mama caught Yanghao and me with our grubby fingers deep inside a tin of chocolate malt powder. I could look away, and everything would be just like it is now, or I could say bye and risk being made fun of, maybe even called s l o w, but there could also be a miracle and we could end up as best friends. This is a very, very big and important decision!
Ben smiles. And walks out.
All that’s left in the room is silly, silly me. The only sound is my sad, sad sigh.
I wait a few more seconds before putting on the most organized backpack owned by an almost-twelve-year-old ever. But at the door, I run into Miss Scrappell.
By the way her tone goes up at the end of her sentence, I can tell it’s a question. Plus, she’s still looking at me as if expecting an answer. But what’s the question? Should I reply yes? Or no? What if it isn’t a yes/no question?
She talks some more, and my head’s whirling with so much confusion I’m about to spin away into space. But then, as if she realizes what’s going on in my brain, she puts a hand on my shoulder, gentle like Ah-po’s kisses on my forehead yet firm enough to put my feet back on the ground. I catch the last bit she says: “All right?”
I know all right. I nod.
She gives me two thumbs-up. “Good.”
Whatever the question was, I must’ve answered it correctly. I zoom off before she can ask me any more mystery questions.
In the hallway, English-that-sounds-like-Martian words echo off the walls and swirl round and round, hammering on my brain like techno music.
Mama promised everything would be all right …
I recite the nine-times table in my head to stop thinking about anything else. Nine. Eighteen. Twenty-seven …
Ninety-nine. One hundred and eight … I burst through the main door. Across the courtyard, standing at the gates, is Yanghao. As other students swarm past him, he shuffles his feet, his lips curled tight as if he’s trying not to cry. He’s swimming in his uniform, and his backpack looks like an oversized turtle shell. He looks so tiny and sad I want to put him in my pocket.
Whatever brotherly kindness I feel toward Yanghao is smashed and replaced by a brotherly desire to punch him. I rummage in my bag for my bus card as I hurry toward the stop. I hear the roar of the engine.
And … we miss the bus.
Yanghao stomps his feet. “Now we have to wait for the next one—”
“No talking.”
“What—”
“Just be quiet.” I pretend that Jim’s Laundry across the road has a very interesting rack of coats, but I’m actually trying to spy from the reflection of Jim’s big window if those students still at the stop are gawking at Yanghao and me. Or worse, using their phones to take a video of us speaking what to them is gibberish. To make matters worse, I won’t even know if Yanghao and I have gone viral for the worst possible thing ever, since we don
’t have a computer—the one back at our old home was too heavy to lug all the way here, and we still can’t afford a new one. As for cell phones, Mama says I’m too young for one. Funny how I’m suddenly too young when according to Mama, I’ve always been old enough to know better. By funny, I mean annoying.
“You’re a booger, Jingwen.” Yanghao pouts.
I say in a low voice, “You could have taken that bus. I didn’t ask you to wait for me.”
“Of course I can’t. Mama doesn’t let me go anywhere by myself. I’m only nine.”
The truth is, he’s almost ten and doesn’t dare go anywhere by himself. “The next one is in fifteen minutes. It’s not a long wait,” I say, even though I wish I could teleport right back to our apartment. Or even better, our old home. But if I’m wishing for impossible things, I might as well wish for a time machine, too. I wish to be beamed back to Sundays at our old home when Papa was still around.
Mondays to Saturdays, sometimes he’d be on the road in our CR-V to deliver goods, but most of the time, he’d be at our cake shop, bent in front of the oven pumping out cakes, stuck on the phone taking orders, hunched at his desk doing some kids-should-stay-out-of-this paperwork. But come Sunday, whenever there wasn't businessman stuff left over, he was Papa.
He’d take the whole family to the pool, the bookstore, or a restaurant. But the Sundays I liked best, not counting when Papa and I baked Pie in the Sky cakes together, were the ones when he drove the family all the way to the beach. Those several hours in the car, everyone all together in one place, our CR-V chug-chugging along as if everything would stay like that forever …
10
Why am I being forced to play this alien-morphing game? What are those students staring at? Yanghao being his usual booger self? Or Yanghao and me being aliens?
If those students are staring because Yanghao is a booger, there’s nothing I can do about it. You can’t choose your siblings. And it’s been almost ten years, so I’m immune. If they’re staring for the other reason, we can fix that. I’ll tell Mama we should go back to our old home. We can make everything all right.
Or as all right as it can be without Papa. Sunday beach trips won’t be the same without him, but at least I could collect seashells like I used to.
Mama’s pockets would be so full and heavy that her skirt no longer fluttered in the wind. Only the hem of her skirt flapped meekly. When she wore jeans, her pockets would be so tight with seashells she waddled instead of walked.
Now I’m the one waddling from carrying too many seashells in my pockets, thanks to the extra heavy s l o w seashell. I can’t wait to get back to our apartment and complain to Mama about my nemesis, Joe. I won’t say a word about Papa and Pie in the Sky, because she’ll get upset. The last time I mentioned him, she hardly talked for a whole day. It was a weekend, and she spent it cleaning the whole apartment, including Yanghao and me; if you had run a finger along us, we’d have squeaked like a Palmolive plate. But I can tell her all about my Yanghao-and-I-are-the-aliens theory. Her face will screw up with concern, which is similar to the look she makes when she smells something stinky, and in an instant I’ll feel lighter, as if my troubles are seashells she can carry for me.
Yanghao finally stops swinging around the pole, but now he’s stumbling about because he’s dizzy. The eyes of the other students are on him. When he finally finds his footing, he says, “Jingwen, can we stop by—”
“No talking.”
His lips remain jutted out like a duck’s bill all through the bus ride, which is good because that way he can’t spout gibberish. No one on the bus stares at us.
After the bus pulls into the station and we’ve hopped off, I lean into him and say, “Your face is going to get stuck that way.” My voice is drowned out by the ruckus of the crowd at the station. “Ugly monkey-duck face.”
He points to the opposite direction from home. “Can we go to the grocery store? Please, Jingwen?”
“Mama said to go straight home.”
“Just really quickly. I won’t tell her you let me stop by the store. I won’t tell her you made us late. We’ll say the bus was late or something. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.”
“I don’t trust you. You’re a tattletale.”
“I’m not.” He grabs my arm and swings it like we’re best friends merrily, merrily, merrily skipping down a lane. “Please, let’s go to the grocery store. I want to get gummy snakes. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.”
Two policemen in dark blue uniforms pass by, each carrying a paper cup of what must be coffee.
“Yanghao, if you don’t do as I say, I’ll ask those policemen to catch you and throw you into jail.”
Yanghao grins. “You’re lying. You don’t know how to say that in English.”
He’s got me there. “I’m going home. Bye.” I stalk off.
As expected, two seconds later …
It’s a fifteen-minute walk from the station to our apartment. On rainy days, Yanghao and I take the connecting bus, but most days we walk because we want to pass by Barker Bakes. We won’t see Mama there since she’s home at this time of the day, and even if she’s at work, she’ll be hidden in the kitchen. Still, we like to peer into the window. Inside, there’s a long display case filled with rows and rows of cakes. Black Forest cake, Oreo cheesecake, red velvet cake, mud cake …
Yanghao presses his forehead against the window. “Mama said one day she’ll have a cake in that display case.”
“Really? I didn’t know she wants to make such cakes.”
“What’s wrong with those cakes? They look yummy, even though they look small from here.”
“The cakes at Barker Bakes are very different from the ones she made back at our shop,” I say.
CAKES SOLD IN MY FAMILY’S CAKE SHOP BACK IN OUR OLD HOME
Yanghao drools, and I pull him away from Barker Bakes. He skips ahead of me. There’s another reason he prefers the walk. He always thinks there’s a chance I might one day, by some miracle, let us stop at the playground. He’s 0 percent realist and 200 percent optimist. Mama says Yanghao’s persistent; I say pigheaded.
At the playground, there are many kids wearing Northbridge Primary School uniforms. I recognize only one of them—Ben. He sits on the swing reading a book, paying zero attention to the other kids screaming and running around like monkeys who ate too much candy. Yanghao's like them, bouncing on the spot next to me and whining, “Justfiveminutes.”
But something else catches my attention. Two kids on the airplane-shaped tower are staring at us. I grab hold of Yanghao’s backpack and pull him away from the playground.
“I want to plaaaaaaay…”
What do those two kids watching us think Yanghao just said? I am an alieeeen? I am a giant turd? “Mama said to go straight home.”
I don’t loosen my grip until we reach our apartment building. If he runs now, at least I can honestly tell Mama I did bring him home. But he doesn’t run off, because he wants to do something that he still finds exciting after two months: he rummages in his pocket for his key fob, which he holds up to the black box by the glass main door. The box beeps, and the door unlocks with a loud clack. He sprints inside. “Last one in is a slow turtle!”
I take my time to check the mail. Next to the building door, built into the wall, is a big metal box that’s made up of rows and rows of small metal boxes. Ten mailboxes for the ten apartments in our five-story building. We get a heap of flyers and brochures for restaurants, plumbers, and real estate agents, but my friend Xirong’s reply hasn’t arrived yet. Snail mail is annoyingly s l o w—there’s that word again. Handwritten letters should be illegal unless you’re six or younger and writing to fairies or Santa Claus, or unless you’re over sixty. Which I probably will be by the time Mama gets me a computer.
I use my key fob to enter the building and find Yanghao hopping up the steps one at a time with his feet together. Hop! Hop! Hop! I’m curious if he can keep this up all the way to the fourth floor.
From upstairs c
omes a loud creak, like a cat’s wail, followed by a loud bang. I curse. That’s our next-door neighbor Anna’s door, which Mama told me has a spring so it automatically shuts. The story is: One time, Anna forgot to close the door, and her cat escaped from her apartment, and then, when someone opened the lobby door, it slipped out. It was many weeks before Anna got a call from the pound, and she had to pay hundreds of dollars to break her cat out of there. No one in the apartment building complains about the noise because Anna doesn’t leave her house that often, she’s old, and old people can get away with anything, and because of the cat story.
I really, really don’t feel like dealing with Anna today.
11
“Good afternoon, Anna,” Yanghao wheezes.
“It is warm today, isn’t it?” Anna talks like a robot, each English word pronounced clearly, with a pause between words, and every word that ends with a “t” is uttered with an exaggerated sound like the farting noise buses make when they pull in and out of stops.
Yanghao glances at me. I shrug. “It warm today,” he says.
“It is warm today,” Anna corrects.
“It is warm today,” Yanghao repeats.
I wish the sun would burn out right now and bring the Earth back to the Ice Age just so we can skip this conversation.
Anna looks at me. I smile like a clown, then squeeze past her up the narrow stairway. She smells flowery, unlike most grown-ups I know. Mama, Papa, Ah-po, and Ah-gong smelled like cake.
“Wait! Jingwen!” Yanghao scurries after me, his footsteps sounding like a round of applause.
When I open the door of our apartment, Mama has her head in the fridge. Unlike our old house, this apartment is so tiny that from where I stand, I can see most of it. Which isn’t much.
Mama straightens up, and her glasses turn foggy. “How was school, boys?”
