I looked up at Victor. Who looked down at me, like, What else did you expect? I’m rich, bitch. Then he waved me forward, extending a hand toward the car.
The Bentley’s back cabin was larger than large. I mean, old-school, with two rows of elegant leather seats facing each other.
I tentatively slid into the seat next to Byron. And Victor dropped down into the one directly across from me like he owned the place—which I guess he technically did.
“This is how you roll, V?” Byron asked-signed after Donny closed the door behind us. Then he hit Victor with his totally made-up sign for “Noice!”
Victor merely nodded in a way that conveyed, I'm used to this, and you need to calm down.
It was a quiet ride over to our side of town. I don't think any of us knew what to say after all of that.
The adrenaline drop must have hit Byron hard, though. After a few more thank yous to Victor, he nodded off beside me, his head lolling until it ended up on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” I signed to Victor silently to keep from waking up my brother.
Victor wasn’t nearly as gracious about accepting my extra thank you as he’d been with my brother.
“You already thanked me in ASL,” he signed back with a smug smirk. “You should practice your CSL.”
“Thank you?” I made the CSL version of the THANK YOU sign with a questioning grimace.
He reached across the space and replaced the index finger I was pumping with my thumb. Then he sat back to sign, “You did not practice over the break.”
I confessed the truth with a shy mix of ASL and CSL. “I didn't think you would be coming back. You and Han made it seem like you two were definitely going to be staying in Hong Kong.”
He paused, clamped his lips. Then he signed, “Han remained behind to assist my father in Hong Kong. Not me.”
“Why didn’t you stay too?”
It was a simple question, but he didn't reply right away. “I told my father I wanted to try going to a normal school. I never have before.”
I guess that was a reasonable answer. Made sense. But he was looking off to the side like he couldn't quite meet my eyes.
“You wanted to go to a normal school, even though you never did before? What changed?” I signed.
He raised his hands, collapsed them in his lap. Then raised them again.
His next sign was universal. The kind anyone anywhere could understand. Even if you were a foreigner. Even if you were an alien.
He simply pointed at me. “You.”
Me? So many emotions rushed to my head, making me feel dizzy and confused.
I waited for him to sign something more, but that was it. He dropped his hands into his lap. And a few seconds later, the car stopped in front of our apartment building as if he had commanded it to end our conversation.
This was the part where I should have woken up my brother, thanked Victor again as any polite girl would have, and left.
But I didn’t.
I couldn't leave it there. I had to raise my hands again to say, “I don't understand. Why did you come to my school? Why did you fight Jake for us? Why did you do all of this for me? Why did you—?"
I stopped signing when he abruptly looked away from me—the signing equivalent of cutting someone off.
So many silent moments passed after that. I wasn't sure if he would ever raise his gaze. Even to say goodbye.
But eventually, he reached into the inside pocket of his school blazer and pulled out a pad. It was a mini-version of the blank scratchpad he had used during our tutoring sessions, and he wrote something down on it.
But instead of showing me what he’d written like he usually did, he tore off the piece of notebook paper and carefully folded it in a pattern.
The final product wasn’t what I would call origami, but it was beautiful. A much more precisely folded version of what Byron and I used to call ninja stars before we actually moved to Japan.
“Like you, I have a secret, too,” he signed. “Put this secret in your pocket. And do not open it until you are ready to know.”
With that, he offered the folded paper to me in the Japanese way. Both hands extended.
I took it from him, confused for the umpteenth time that day. But I did as he told me. I slipped it into my left blazer pocket.
“Thank you,” I signed again. This time in much better CSL.
A smile flitted across his lips, like an animal too reluctant to come out.
“You're welcome,” he signed, also in CSL.
We both lowered our eyes after that. But neither of us moved.
We were one of those cheap anime scenes where the camera scans over the same still picture to simulate motion. It felt like so much was happening, but neither of us was moving at all.
Byron woke up with a jerk.
“Did I fall asleep?” he asked, lifting his head from my shoulder.
“Yeah, we’re here,” I answered, speaking out loud for the first time since we'd climbed into the car.
My voice sounded new somehow. Older and less innocent.
The door opened. And I looked up to see Donny standing on the other side, waiting for us to get out.
Climbing out of the Bentley felt like emerging from a fairytale. But I still wasn’t clear on the moral of the story.
I turned to see if one last look at Victor over my shoulder would reveal any answers. But Donny closed the door before I could get a final glimpse.
11
I’d spent a lot of time over the break trying not to think about Victor. But that was all over now. His secret pulsed in my pocket as I entered our apartment behind my brother.
“What took you so long to get home?” Mom demanded as soon as we walked through the door.
We were less than fifteen minutes late, thanks to the unexpected ride home from Victor. But instead of defending ourselves, we lied to her about basketball practice running late.
Mom muttered in Korean. The complicated version we didn't understand. She'd only taught us the most basic words in her mother tongue, insisting we’d never need it. I guess she was right. Here we were in Japan, speaking in English as we all signed in ASL.
Byron and I hovered near the front door, expecting a lecture of some kind about coming home too late and worrying our poor mother. But in the end, she just told us to go to our rooms and do our homework.
“Be quiet in the hallway,” she warned us. “Your father’s still sleeping.”
With my dad's hours, dinner was often breakfast for him, and we knew better than to wake him up. But that didn’t stop Byron from starting a conversation when we made it to our doors, which were located directly across from each other.
“Sorry about what happened before winter break with Jake,” he signed.
“It’s okay,” I immediately signed back.
“No, it’s not okay,” Byron answered just as fast. “I wanted to defend you, but I didn’t know how. I feel bad that your tutoring client had to come in to do my job.”
A new pang of sympathy resonated in my chest. I’d been so busy feeling guilty about not being able to help Byron. It never occurred to me that he was feeling the same way about not being able to help me.
“I’m not Dad.” I pointed out. “I don’t expect you, my little brother, to defend me or protect me just because you’re a boy and I’m a girl.”
“You should expect that,” Byron insisted. “I should have done better. If Jake’s grandfather wasn’t Dad’s boss…”
“Seriously, it’s okay,” I signed, cutting him off. “Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t be a Jake.”
We both let out a quiet snicker at my joke. But then he sobered to ask, “Are you and V…”
He dropped his hands abruptly, his head snapping to the right like a meerkat that had sensed something dangerous.
I followed the direction of his gaze to the end of the hallway. And sure enough, there was our tiger Mom at the other end of the hallway, glaring at us for not doing exactly as she said.<
br />
Gossip interrupted. After casting me a “talk more later” look, Byron tucked his head and disappeared into his room. And I did the same, changing out of my uniform into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.
To be fair, I did try to do my homework after that. I had an essay about the Edo period due Monday for my history class, and writing in Japanese wasn't one of my strong suits. The teacher had warned us that we would need to truly research it. With actual books—not a historical manga or a J-Drama from the video store like I’d been hoping.
She even warned us that most of the Edo-era shows were wildly inaccurate. I was pretty sure she’d been burned by foreign students before, so I needed to take this assignment super seriously.
And I did a first. I pulled out the one English language history book I’d been able to find in the school library, and I totally tried to read it. But I couldn’t concentrate, and the words swam together.
I'd hung my blazer on the back of my bedroom door when I changed. And try as I did to keep my eyes glued on my book, I couldn’t ignore Victor’s secret, ticking inside of its bottom left pocket. So loud, it became a pulse between my ears
What had his instructions meant anyway? How was I supposed to just know when I was ready to read his big secret?
My mind rewound to the fall, to the one request my father made before dropping me off at the home of “the Chinese boy.”
To tell him if Victor said something he should know.
My eyes wandered from the book to my uniform jacket. Was whatever Victor wrote in that note something I should tell my dad?
He said he had a secret like me. Maybe the note was a confession of something illegal he’d done. Or maybe he wanted to go to art school too. Or maybe he was finally ready to tell me his last name.
Or maybe I was overthinking it.
Maybe the secret was that he no longer wanted ASL tutoring. Bye-bye. That would make sense now that he was going to Tokyo Progressive. And if it was something as simple as that, I should just go over and open the note.
But I sat frozen at my desk. I could hear myself think over the secret’s noisy ticking, but I wasn't…
I wasn't ready. Not yet.
“What's this I hear about you two getting dropped off in a Bentley?” Dad demanded at dinner that night, just as we were about to tuck into mom’s dak galbi, a spicy chicken stir fry.
Byron and I exchanged looks. Well, that explained Mom’s strange lack of a tirade earlier. We should have known it was too good to be true.
She must have seen us getting out of Victor’s car from the window. And instead of asking us about it herself, she’d reported it straight to Dad when he woke up. My mom could be stubborn and fierce about our grades and getting into the right colleges. But when she got confused, she morphed into a total 50s housewife.
Byron came up with a partial-truth for both of us. “The guy Dawn's been tutoring enrolled at our school. He joined the basketball team, and he offered us a ride home.”
Mom's face crinkled with delicate confusion, and Dad went completely still.
“Victor Zhang?” Dad set down his chopsticks even though he hadn’t taken a bite of food yet. “Victor Zhang is going to Tokyo Progressive now?”
Zhang… So that was his last name. I guessed it wasn’t the huge secret I thought it was. Dad was dropping Victor’s government details like it was common knowledge.
“Yeah, he's cool,” Byron answered. “He's in my deaf studies track. Even though I guess he's not exactly deaf. Or maybe he just reads lips really, really good. I'm still not sure.”
Dad swiped his gaze to me. His expression was angry and accusatory. “I thought you said he went back to Hong Kong for good.”
I stayed calm on the outside, but on the inside, I was looking at Dad all kinds of sideways. The thing was, I hadn't said anything at all about Victor to my father after our last tutoring session. Not even about him leaving for Hong Kong for the winter break. How had Dad known Victor had left? And why was he acting like I gave him bad intel or something?
The note was ticking even louder now. I could hear it, even though it was back in my bedroom behind a closed door.
“I guess he changed his mind,” I mumbled to my dad.
A few minutes passed. Silent but loud.
Then Dad said, “Your mom wants you to focus on your studies. It's a crucial time with your college applications. Tell Victor Zhang that you don't have time to tutor him anymore.”
My heart didn't just sink. It plummeted.
“But I need that job…” I scrambled for a plausible reason and could only come up with “to pay for my art supplies.”
“We’ll pay for your art crap,” Dad answered quickly. “You focus on your studies.”
I went quiet. Even mom, whose cardinal rule was that I had to pay for all my silly art stuff with my own money, didn’t say anything.
Dad had that tone in his voice, the one you didn't argue with unless you wanted an even worse punishment.
And that was what his decree felt like. A punishment.
Who was Victor Zhang?
And why was my dad suddenly so eager for me to stay away from him?
The note was ticking even louder when I returned to my room after dinner.
But I pulled it out of my blazer pocket anyway, curiosity overpowering my fear. The paper from Victor's notepad might have been of a higher quality than I thought. The star felt heavier than I expected in my hand. Or maybe that was the secret.
Be careful with that.
Dad’s vague warning rang in my ears as I looked down at the perfectly folded note. And no, maybe I wasn’t ready. But reading the Chinese boy’s secret might be the only way to find out why my dad was suddenly super anti-Victor…
I felt like I was sitting across from Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. Red pill or blue pill? One would allow your life to go on as it had before. The other would change it irrevocably.
I thought of another one of my classes then. English.
First term, my teacher had used The Matrix as an example of a modern allusion. Its blue pill or red pill scene was a call back to a much older story, she’d told us. The devil offering Eve the apple. Do you want this knowledge, young lady, or don't you?
I did not get the best grade in that class. But suddenly I understood everything.
This piece of paper was new and ancient all at once.
A choice. Victor had given me a choice.
And now, like Eve and Neo, I had to decide how much I liked my life as I knew it. I had to decide if I wanted to stay innocent.
I hesitated.
I could…
I could tear it up.
I could stuff the pieces in my mouth. Swallow them down, poop them out tomorrow and never, ever have to know what the note said.
But come on, who was I kidding? A hot guy who came to my brother’s rescue gave me a note with a secret inside when I asked him about his sudden hero turn. There was no such thing as a seventeen-year-old girl who would choose the not opening it option.
Without any further waffling, I unfolded the note.
I read it. Then I gasped, covering my mouth with my hand.
The secret…
It wasn’t what I’d expected. I had to go over the words, again and again, just to make sure I’d read them right.
But no, the second and third times, they read exactly as they had the first.
Dawn, I like you. This is the secret I didn't know how to tell you.
12
VICTOR
Three hours after giving Dawn his secret, Victor was still cursing himself.
He had defied his father’s decision. Raymond had wanted him to remain in Hong Kong and begin his training to take his place. But he’d asked Han to stand in for him and returned to Tokyo instead. Victor had enrolled in a school for the first time in his entire life. He’d threatened the grandson of the Nakamura-gumi oyabun.
And now…nothing. It was well into the evening, and he hadn’t heard from her.
>
Victor could only blame himself. When Dawn had asked him point-blank why he had done all of this, had he told her the truth face-to-face? No! He'd given her a note.
A note!
Dawn, I like you. This is the secret I do not know how to tell you.
Those words—those stupid, childish words had been swarming around his head since she got out of his car. He thought he would only be playing the part of a mere schoolboy when he enrolled at Tokyo Progressive. Ha! That note proved otherwise.
“Come on, man. We fighting or standing around all day?”
Phantom’s voice pulled Victor out of his miserable contemplation. They were supposed to be engaged in a spontaneous late-night sparring session.
Hand-to-hand, not with sticks or practice weapons as Han preferred. His chosen brother needed extraneous tools to keep up in a fight against Victor, given their different weight classes. But Phantom had refused all of the practice instruments hanging on the gym wall.
How had his American cousin so charmingly put it? "Fuck that pussy shit. Only weapons I believe in are my guns and my fists."
Phantom was nothing like Han. In fact, it was sometimes difficult for Victor to believe that, unlike his chosen brother, Phantom was actually a blood relation.
Their fathers had grown up together in the same household. But Phantom was an ABC, American-born Chinese. So he and Victor had little in common.
Regardless, Victor liked and appreciated his plain-spoken family member. From the age of twelve, Phantom’s father had sent him to Hong Kong every summer, so he and Han considered him much like an older brother.
Phantom tended to rub the Hong Kong side of the Red Diamond the wrong way, though. His rough American-accented Cantonese and his general lack of respect for those higher up in their triad’s chain weren’t regarded favorably. But anyone looking at him could tell he was a valuable asset. He was even taller and larger than Victor. A born enforcer, the sight of him alone often intimidated enemies from attacking Phantom’s father at in-person meetings.
Victor: Her Ruthless Crush Page 8
