The Epic Crush of Genie Lo

by F. C. Yee

  Her session had run to the end and might have gone over had someone not graciously noticed the clock. That’s how much raw material Anna had to work with. My sessions were always punctuated by five minutes of awkward chitchat.

  “Hi,” the girl offered, blushing cutely. She swung her backpack over her shoulder, revealing patches from both Habitat for Humanity and Amnesty International. I was severely outclassed. What kind of scrub game had I been playing?

  “Man, talking with Anna’s fun but terrifying,” she said, trying to start a conversation. She didn’t even have the decency to be catty with me. I just wanted her to tuck her charmingly wispy curls under her beret and go, before I had to get out of my chair.

  “Genie,” Anna said as she bustled into the room. “So sorry, dear. Come in, come in, we’re not late yet.”

  I sighed and stood up. The decor in the room always made me look more like a skyscraper than usual. I glanced down at the other girl. She made a cowed squeak, waved politely to Anna, and then scurried away.

  Anna Barinov had never reacted that way to me, not even the first day we met. She was a certain kind of unflappable, a scion of old money who had forged a successful small business of her own. Insured against disaster at either end of the economic spectrum. I envied that.

  I chose her from the kajillions of admissions consultants in the area because out of the ones I could afford, she had the best background. Lengthy stints as an admissions officer for several top-tier universities decorated her resume. She knew better than anyone what colleges looked for in applicants, because she had done the looking herself. Anna would provide valuable feedback as to how I could present myself as a better candidate.

  That’s what my Western sensibilities believed. The Chinese running through my veins said come on. COME ONNNN.

  All those years working for the Ivy League had to have meant she’d stockpiled a nuclear arsenal of inside connections. Friends back in Cambridge and New Haven. People she could drop hints to over lunch about this one really impressive young lady she’d crossed paths with.

  If that idea sounded corrupt, it was. It was guanxi—exerting social influence to get the outcome you needed. The grease in the gears of Asian culture. The need for networking was why so many overseas students crashed like waves against the doors of American universities in the first place—so they could make powerful, long-lasting connections.

  Granted, I had little reason to believe Anna operated in this manner. But she had the power to. I told myself that maybe once I impressed her enough, she’d pull out a big red phone that went straight to Princeton.

  Anna settled into her chair behind her desk, and then settled again like a falcon adjusting its wings.

  “Practice essays,” she said. “I believe we were looking at first revisions.”

  “Right,” I said. I fumbled with my bag trying to get at the papers I should have already been holding. I handed them over with only a few extra creases.

  Anna began scanning the first of my essays, and already I was starting to get uncomfortable with how fast her eyes were moving. Was she even reading the sentences? Couldn’t she at least pretend not to skim?

  And then she was done. A month’s worth of work consumed in thirty seconds. Maybe that was what the supposed time difference between Heaven and Earth felt like.

  “Well, given that your initial draft was you listing your statistical performance at various activities, I’d be lying if I said this version wasn’t an improvement.”

  “But it’s still not good enough,” I said.

  “Genie, we talked about this. You only have one chance to tell the admissions board who you really are.”

  “I didn’t do that? I thought I did that.”

  “What you’ve done is address the prompts directly, word for word,” she said. “But there has to be an underlying current of your personality. A cohesive story of who you are.”

  These conversations always left me frustrated. I didn’t know how to do this kind of doublespeak in real life, and I sure as hell didn’t understand how to do it in six hundred fifty words or fewer.

  It didn’t help that this portion of the application infuriated me on a fundamental level. The message that I got from these drills was that I wasn’t a real person. Not by default. My humanity had to be proved with a vague test where “getting it” meant everything and hard work meant nothing. It was the Way, and I couldn’t see past the tortoises and snakes to grasp it.

  “I could write about the time I fought a demon,” I said out of sheer frustration.

  “A personal demon?” said Anna.

  “No, a Chinese demon. An actual monster. Yaoguai, they call them.”

  Anna pursed her lips. “I didn’t know those still existed.”

  “They do, and they’re back in a big way. The first one I saw was this big ugly SOB who tried to eat me alive. I kicked his ass pretty bad.”

  “Hmmm. There could be some traction there.”

  This was the first hint of excitement I’d gotten out of Anna. I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on her desk, buoyed by my newfound confidence.

  “I’ve fought other demons, too,” I boasted. “Just recently I beat up a bunch of shape-shifting lions. It was easy once I started using my magic powers.”

  Anna was so pleased with me she began grinning like a maniac. “Well, there’s your angle. In fact, I’m pretty sure Brown offers a guaranteed full scholarship for their new demon-slaying track.”

  “Pfft. We can do better than Brown.” I picked a tropical umbrella drink off her bar cart and sipped it through the crazy straw. “That’s like the caboose of the Ivy train.”

  “You’re right, Genie. What you deserve is some kind of joint program along with some merit fellowship grant money to do with as you please. All the grant money in fact. You deserve it all.”

  “Aw, let’s leave a few bucks on the table for the other meritorious fellows.”

  “You’re so kind, Genie. Genie? Genie?”

  “Genie?” Anna said. “Are you okay?”

  I blinked. Someone calling me kind was too much to believe, even for a daydream.

  “The story of me,” I parroted.

  “Try this exercise,” Anna said. “Completely ignore the essay prompts and word limits for now. Write about yourself however you can, with your thoughts, your feelings, some personal anecdotes. Get something down on paper first, and then we’ll refine it from there.

  “Who is Genie Lo?” she said, wiggling her fingers. “That’s what the admissions board wants to know.”

  There is no Genie Lo, I wanted to shout. Not the kind that lived prettily in air-quotes. There was a sixteen-year-old girl from the Bay who answered to that name, but there wasn’t some sparkling magic nugget underneath that I could dig up, polish, and put on display.

  I swallowed my pride and smiled.

  “I think I get it,” I said. “I’ll have a better draft next time.”

  I left Anna’s completely fried, but that wasn’t anything new. I bought two coffees from the café next door that was too fancy to sell a “large” and chugged one immediately. The other I took into the cab with me.

  The taxi was a waste of money, but in my current state I couldn’t handle getting back on a bus. The driver took a different route downtown through the financial district, which was mostly empty on the weekend. We pulled up to a building that only looked like a bank. The second half of today’s trip.

  I opened the door to the gym and was immediately greeted by the latest remix of the latest EDM hit. The girl behind the counter who tagged members’ badges with a bar code reader smiled and waved me on by.

  It wasn’t crowded, not on a weekend afternoon. The gym was gigantic—an orchard of pulleys and benches—but I found him in the corner wiping chalk off the barbell grips. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  My father beamed and gave me a big hug.

  Then, without so much as a word, he held up his hand
s. I grabbed them and we began trying to twist each other’s arms off, laughing the whole time.

  I don’t know when playing Mercy became our standard greeting, but I did know that he hadn’t won in a very long time. Dad wasn’t much bigger than Mom.

  As soon as I’d bent his wrists beyond ninety degrees, he squawked, “I give, I give!” I let go and he shook his hands out. “I don’t remember you being that strong last month.”

  “Coach Daniels has us doing grip training now,” I said. “We squeeze tennis balls.”

  “They’ve got a class here like that for the rock climbers. You should see the new wall they’re planning. Shhoop. Goes all the way to the top.”

  I listened to him enthusiastically describe the various improvements going on at the gym as if he were an owner and not part of the cleaning staff. Business must have surged again recently, the energy rubbing off on him. It was good to see him like this.

  My father was born the same year as my mother, but you wouldn’t have known it from looking at him. He was the portrait of Dorian Gray that took all the slings and arrows of Time bouncing off Mom’s youthful skin. Only his still-dark hair kept his weathered face from looking painfully old for his age.

  Dad was a specimen that not many people saw out in the open, or at least admitted to seeing. He was a failure. An abysmal, no-bones-about-it failure. One of the worst things you could be in this era.

  My family used to be slightly more prosperous. That’s not saying much, but it was a meaningful difference, a trip to Disneyland’s worth, perhaps. Dad used to work at an insurance company when I was very little. He had a modest, nondescript career, but a career nonetheless.

  Until one day, to hear Mom tell the story, he decided he was too good to work for someone else. He quit his job, took out a loan, and opened a furniture store, like an idiot.

  In Dad’s version it was a calculated risk, an attempt to get the better life that his wife had always passive-aggressively demanded. He’d carry cheap inventory in parts and assemble it with the help of cheap employees and sell it to cheap customers. A foolproof plan.

  I have memories of the store. The desks that smelled like dust no matter how much they’d been spritzed with lemon. A whole series of glass coffee tables that only came in octagons. I used to run between the aisles of the showroom, before I learned not to by way of a splinter the size of a toothpick buried in my cheek.

  There’s nothing worse than just enough success. The store was a slow death that took years to metastasize, sucking in more and more of Dad’s money and soul. He tried everything, including going upscale in a brief, costly branding experiment. All he learned was that reinventing yourself was not something people allowed you to do very often.

  Once the writing was on the wall, Mom refused to work the register anymore. She had to get a job somewhere else to make ends meet, or so she said. Dad thought it was a betrayal. They grew heated and icy with each other in ways that didn’t cancel out.

  After the store was liquidated at great loss—after we were thoroughly ruined—he left the house. Or was kicked out. It didn’t matter. His ability to interact with other people in a professional environment had deteriorated to the point where it was even worse than Mom’s. He wasn’t getting any kind of old job back.

  Especially given that he had no higher education. My father had never gone to college.

  When Mom told me he was living in the city on his own, I’d imagined the worst. A squalid apartment in a bad neighborhood. Unable to make ends meet. Drinking.

  When I finally saw him after the split, he told me that I’d been spot-on. But only for the first few months or so of his exile.

  At his lowest point, after he’d given up all hope for his continued existence, he’d taken a walk that brought him past this gym. The door had been open, blaring untz-untz beats into the sidewalk. He’d peered inside, confused by the sculpted bodies and clanging iron.

  The one thing he understood was the NOW HIRING sign. On impulse he asked about it. Perhaps also on impulse, the young things on duty at the time took him onboard as the newest member of the CleanUp PowerDown Crew.

  It probably saved his life. He was a middle-aged person doing an entry-level job, sure, but no one asked questions, no one wondered how it came to this for him. Perhaps that was due to condescension, everyone assuming that a minority sweeping up was the natural state of affairs.

  But the trainers and therapists treated him with kindness, and he found he’d missed that very much. He had a wage and people to talk to. The elements of sanity.

  And thus it was, up to this day. I liked visiting him here, where he was happy. And truthfully, he looked better each time. The employees had a good health plan and were allowed to use the equipment during off hours. He’d put on a little muscle for his age.

  “How’s Mom?” he asked.

  “Same.” I couldn’t think of a whole lot of news. About her, at least. “She entertained for some school friends. Got really into it, too.”

  “Good. No better medicine when it comes to your mother.”

  That reminded me that I had to have Quentin and his “parents” over again sometime. For Mom’s sake. I could stomach the embarrassment to see her cheered again.

  “And how about you?” he asked.

  “Honestly? Not good. I feel very . . . put upon these days. You ever get people telling you to do things you don’t want to do? Ordering you around?”

  I realized that was a dumb question right after I asked it. I’d forgotten where we were, and thought I’d set him up to complain about the downsides of his current job. But he surprised me.

  “I remember back at the insurance company I had a chain of bosses who were pretty awful,” Dad said. “They wouldn’t give you a reason for their decisions, and everything that went wrong was your fault, not theirs. It’s hard to work for those kinds of folks.”

  “I know you’re capable of handling anything life throws at you,” he went on. “But you shouldn’t feel forced into a situation. Nothing good will come of it.”

  He didn’t press me on who or what was bothering me, which was exactly what I was counting on.

  I never had to get into specifics with Dad. He and I could have whole conversations without proper nouns. I mean, sure, his disregard for details probably contributed heavily to the shattering of our household, but for the moment I was grateful to not have to go deeper than I needed about gods. Or college.

  “In this case, I should probably go along with it,” I said. “It’s actually pretty important that I do.”

  “Then it’s an easy decision, right?” Dad said. “You have to pick and choose your battles. Fight too much and you’ll wear yourself out.”

  Dad smiled at me. “You take everything so seriously. You’re still young, you know? I feel like I have to remind you every so often or you’d forget. Your future’s not going to be set in stone because of what happens today.”

  His certainty, the same certainty that had gotten him into so much trouble, flowed out to me like a balm. He couldn’t conceive of my failure, of my unhappiness. All my faults lay buried deep within his mile-wide blind spots, where I could pretend they didn’t exist.

  I didn’t love my dad more than my mom. But it was hard not to think of him as my favorite person in the world sometimes.

  “Is that who I think it is?” said a booming voice behind us.

  I turned to see two of the gym’s trainers—Brian and K-Song—quickstep over.

  “Miss Loooo!” Brian hooted. “Whaddup whaddup?”

  I traded high fives with the two bros like we were three bros. They knew me from previous visits.

  “Hot damn, girl, you’re even taller than I remember!” K-Song said.

  “She’s a beanpole!” Brian roared. “We got to get you in the cage! Strong is the new skinny! A lady with your length could be putting up two plates!”

  I laughed. Brian always said the same thing every time I visited. He was a great proponent of women lifting heavy, bu
t he had a hard time convincing the clientele. His biker beard and tattooed cannonball shoulders probably scared them off. Sleek, hairless K-Song was more trusted by the ladies.

  These two random coworkers of my dad’s were oddly the only people I didn’t get pissed at for commenting on my body. They were meatheads, sure, but they were the most well-meaning, least snarky meatheads I knew. They thought of my flesh purely in terms of its output and potential.

  “I got your pops pulling one-thirty,” K-Song bragged. He slapped Dad on the shoulder. “New PR.”

  “Pfft. One-thirty sumo,” Brian said, rolling his eyes.

  “IPF legal, dickbag!” K-Song shouted back. “Get with the times!”

  The two started arguing viciously about the merits of different deadlift techniques. It would be resolved around the same time as the heat death of the universe.

  I turned to my dad. “I’m gonna go.”

  “Give my best to Mom,” he said, his eyes shining at me.

  I rushed forward and gave my father one last hug. I would see him again soon. In the meantime, it would be back to trying my hardest not to turn out anything like him.

  23

  I left the gym and went around the corner to where Quentin was waiting. It wasn’t him stalking me—in a moment of weakness, I’d called him during the cab ride after leaving Anna’s and he promised he could meet me soon, regardless of the distance. Better to think about demons than my future.

  I laughed as I walked up to him. He’d taken some of my advice to heart. He was still wearing his school uniform, but with a gigantic chunky candy-cane-striped scarf around his neck and shoulders.

  “What?” he said. “It was cold.”

  The look actually worked, in a Tokyo-street-fashion sort of way. Another instance of beautiful people looking beautiful, no matter what.

  “I was waiting at Viscount and Second,” Quentin groused. “You told me the wrong address.”

  “This is New Viscount and Second, and no I didn’t. Anyway, I’ve been thinking. I have a theory about you and where you come from.”