by Vanessa Hua
Flipping open my binder, I found a flyer urging Stanford cadets to apply for the ROTC honor roll with the attached form and an unofficial transcript. A reminder I didn’t have grades, and wasn’t enrolled, a reminder I should give up and go home. Surviving day-to-day brought me no closer to becoming an official student. I imagined my father’s disappointment, my father’s words: ignominious, mendacious.
After re-applying, I was waiting for my acceptance from Stanford. Sometimes in lecture hall, biking through White Plaza, shuffling through the dining hall, and at my café job, I sank into the illusion that I belonged here. No different, common among the uncommon. My fingers moved over the keyboard, typing out my classes from first quarter and a grade for each. Three A-s, and a B+ and a B: I wasn’t greedy. If only I’d been given the chance, it would have been my transcript. If—no. The problem sets were impossible and I probably would have flunked out of pre-med. I hurled the binder across the room, hitting Julia’s dresser, knocking over a corkboard plastered with photos of her friends and family. Propping it up, I tried to straighten the crooked picture of us goofing around, wearing sunglasses and singing into hairbrushes.
Julia burst into the room, back from crew practice. With her broad teeth, broad smile, and glossy chestnut hair, she’d make a good show horse. She swept past me, grabbing her birth control pills. As she broke the foil and tipped one into her mouth, I shoved fallen photos under the futon with my foot. When she reached for her laptop, I slid it away, snapping the lid shut. She reached again.
“Sorry.” I didn’t hand it over. I said her mother called, hoping Julia might thank me for covering for her. She didn’t. She hovered as I restarted her laptop, its hard drive whirring and hanging.
“Never mind.” She grabbed her dining hall pass and left.
The day had barely begun, and I’d pissed off the one person who cared about me here. The laptop woke up, and the file popped open to my fantasy list of grades. If only those could be my marks. That’s when it hit me: an unofficial transcript was easy to fake, without requiring a watermark or school seal, Courier font in Microsoft Word. With it, I’d apply for the ROTC honor roll. I’d never become Dr. Park, but with a resume listing my honors and awards, I’d get an internship, and later on, a job to support my parents. Weren’t tech startups full of dropouts? I hit delete and dropped my A to a B+ in Hum Bio. It didn’t seem fair to give myself an F for a class I wasn’t enrolled in. I decided the grades should reflect my efforts and no one, knowing the lengths I’d gone to, could question mine.
~~~
Over the next few weeks, my luck turned. With my faked transcript, I made the ROTC honor roll, received a ribbon for my uniform, and sent the newsletter listing my award to my parents. It wouldn’t be long until I received my acceptance from Admissions, I told myself. Scott was coming around more often, too. Flirting, when he brushed a leaf out of my hair or when he helped himself to dry cereal from a bowl in my lap. His casual touching, as if I were a prized possession. Nothing could happen between us, not if I wanted a roof over my head, and yet I found myself hoping that each knock at the door meant him.
When Julia tried to tell him she loved him, he’d acted weird and left in a hurry, she’d confided. Just before I left for weekend field training, I found the futon folded up into a couch, heaped with dirty laundry, sweat-stained athletic bras and balled-up panties, a move territorial as a dog pissing on a fire hydrant, potent as a radiation symbol not to touch. Julia stood in the doorway, Scott behind her. She drew herself up, and told me I had to be out by next Friday, when their families were visiting for Parents’ Weekend.
What if I spent those nights away and returned after the weekend? “From now on, I’ll stay out one night a week,” I pleaded. She bit her lip. “Two nights. Please. I’ll keep out of Tina’s way.”
Mentioning our roommate seemed to remind her of their arguments against me. Julia straightened. “It’s Housing’s responsibility. Not ours.”
I tried to catch Scott’s eye—she’d listen to him—but he was suddenly intent on his texts. Had I imagined his attraction? For him, a game, a reflex.
“I could pay.” I had a couple hundred dollars saved from my job at the café. Although their room and board had been covered at the beginning of the quarter, I could give them spending money.
“I have no choice,” she said.
“You have more choices than me.” I shouldered my ruck and left.
On the drive to field training, my head ached, tender as an overinflated balloon. I stumbled through the mission, to clear an abandoned house on the training course. First the squad leader forced us into a ditch. Soaked, our BDUs clung and chafed, then stiffened in the rising heat of the day.
“Cover me while I’m moving!”
“You got covered!”
“Moving!” I ran flat out for three seconds, my heart pounding in my ears. I cleared my head of everything but the task ahead, hurled myself into the dirt, into the rocks and burrs, a hard landing that stole my breath. When I swiveled my dummy rifle, scanning for enemies, Julia appeared beneath a tree. I aimed. I’d never felt so bright, like ten thousand flashbulbs going off, and then she vanished, quicker than I could have pulled a trigger.
~~~
When I returned to campus late Sunday afternoon, red-and-white balloons had sprouted, along with vinyl banners, temporary stages, and areas cordoned off for Parents’ Weekend. The window to our room was locked, the shades down. I jogged to the dorm entrance and waited for someone to let me in. I fidgeted in my muddy boots. If I were a cartoon, a grey cloud of stink would have trailed me. At our room, I reached for the doorknob and then dropped my hand. From now on, I had to knock first. Julia told me to come in.
I discovered the futon folded up and my belongings missing. I sank to the floor, everything I’d been carrying these past months crushing me. Julia rushed towards me, her arms out, with the same concern that had welcomed me to campus, a concern that I’d have to kindle if I wanted to remain her charity case. I lied. “There’s been a fire.” The cleaners burnt down earlier this month, I added. I could almost smell the burnt remnants of the shop, see the collapsed roof and charred timbers and smashed glass, and the melted plastic bags. Taste the sickly-sweet ash floating in the sunshine. My parents were out of work, and sticking them for the bill for room and board would bankrupt them. She hugged me, enveloping me with the scent of laundry detergent and clean-living. I felt guilty for aiming at Julia’s mirage during field training, even if I hadn’t meant to, even if near heat-stroke had put me in a trance.
I became aware of my stench, its density, crowding out the air in the room. Julia said she would take up a collection around the dorm to help my family get back on our feet. Tina hadn’t budged from her bunk. Bullshit, her expression said.
“We can talk to the RA in your new dorm, too,” Julia said. How easily she thought she could get rid of me, how little I mattered. She’d showered me with goodwill until she lost interest in me, as if I were an Easter chick sprouting scraggly feathers.
Stiffening, I drew away from her. She was wearing an over-sized Stanford crew sweatshirt—Scott’s. The song ended and in the silence, Julia added that my sister had friended her online. “She wanted directions to our dorm.”
My sister and I had never been close. Umma had promised me a baby brother and when Angela arrived sickly and translucent as a tadpole, I had been disappointed.
I jumped up. “What did you tell her? Did you tell her I was moving?”
“For Parents’ Weekend,” Julia said.
Tina opened the window, breathing through her mouth, making no effort to hide her disgust at my reek. Both their sisters were going to spend the night here, she said. “We’ll be on top of each other. But we’re used to that.”
“I didn’t think you’d be psyched to see Tina’s family,” I said. “Doesn’t she get whiny around them?”
Julia opened her mouth, but said nothing, speechless. The secrets she’d whispered to me in the dark were on
fire, sticky and searing as napalm. Fighting back, I felt as exhilarated and terrified as I had been on the training mission. As Tina lit into her, I fled outside. My weekly calls home had dwindled to once or twice a month, from a half hour to a few minutes. My sister answered on the first ring.
“Don’t do this to them,” I said.
“To them?” Angela asked. “You think I want to spend all weekend in the car with them?”
Bedsprings creaked, and I pictured my sister on her back, her narrow feet propped on the wall. “They bragged at church about the honor roll and Jack’s parents asked if they were going to Parents’ Weekend. Got them excited about visiting their No. 1 daughter.”
“I have midterms,” I said. Gas prices. The expense. The drive. The hassle of registration.
Each excuse sounded flimsier than the last.
“I get it now,” she said. “Why I couldn’t find you in the school directory.”
I had nothing to negotiate with, nothing but the threat of what would happen if the lies came to an end. “If I move home, you’d be back on the fold-out,” I said.
Silence. “Maybe they’ll stick you there. Or kick you out.” She paused. “It’s time they stopped thinking you’ll save them.”
Time I stopped thinking it too.
~~~
At the dorm, I found my stuff in the lobby. I wouldn’t have a chance to apologize. It took a couple hours, dozens of trips with an overstuffed backpack to the library—carrying all my books and clothes at once would make the clerk at the front desk suspicious—but I managed to hide everything deep within the stacks. I was a mess, drenched in sweat, and my hair matted against my scalp, and still filthy from field training. In the restroom, I splashed water onto my face and into my armpits. My shirt was soaked, and after I leaned against the sink, the crotch of my pants too, as though I’d peed myself. When the door swung open, I hid in a stall, trembling. Opprobrium.
My sister had relented and promised to keep quiet, but I had to find another place to live within a few days, before Parents’ Weekend started on Friday. When I canvassed dorms in search of roommates, people weren’t as friendly to strangers, not like the beginning of the year. Cliques had formed. Eventually, I might find a way in, though not before my family arrived.
My routine saved me. Although I could have stopped going to class and ROTC , I would have had too much time to think about Julia, and how she’d turned her back on me. Blessed with so much, she’d accomplish everything she set out to do. I’d slip into insignificance, a footnote, if anyone remembered me at all.
I saw her once, by an ATM at Tresidder, and debated whether if I should confront her, or convince her to take me back in. When Scott showed up with smoothies, we locked eyes. After he kissed the top of her head, I bolted. Her—his—their rejection felt like Stanford rejecting me all over again. Everything here was sunnier and brighter, with an ease that blinded people, that made them forget about imperfection and turned them heartless.
The day before Parents’ Weekend began, the notification arrived from Admissions. I logged onto the portal, feeling as though no time had passed, as if I were again a high school senior on the cusp. The screen flashed. “It is with great regret that we are unable to offer you admission… you are a fine student… want to thank you for your interest…”
Denied. Everything, everything, for nothing. I didn’t belong at Stanford, never did and never would, in limbo, not here or anywhere, not of the present and lacking a future. Denied. I must have logged off, must have exited the library but what I remembered next was Jack, my classmate from high school, calling my name. He rolled up on his bike. I hadn’t seen him much, except in big pre-med classes, and by mutual unspoken agreement we never sat together. He’d gone preppy, with floppy bangs, khakis and untucked button-downs after joining an Asian frat. He mentioned that our parents were driving up together and would take us to lunch tomorrow at a Korean restaurant
The news of my deceit would spread through the church, among the only people my parents trusted.
“You can wait a day, can’t you?” He grinned.
“I haven’t had Korean food since winter break,” I said weakly.
After we parted, I narrowly avoided a collision with another cyclist and a wooden bollard. No one loved me like my parents, and I’d returned their love with lies. I collapsed in the grass, watching students and professors zooming by on their bikes, and joggers in sunglasses in tight, shiny workout gear pounding past.
I couldn’t stop my parents. But I could stop Parents’ Weekend.
Though people here pretended to be laid-back, they couldn’t, wouldn’t be stopped from reaching their destination. Calling in a bomb threat wouldn’t be enough. The situation called for something bigger, something louder, a credible threat, of the kind we’d been studying in ROTC : insurgency.
~~~
Everything fell into place, except for one detail, one that had nothing to do with what I planned but explained everything I’d been driven to do. Minutes before dawn, I crept outside my old dorm, where I found the window cracked open and the room empty. After crawling inside, I searched for the picture on the corkboard of me and Julia lip-syncing, the only hard evidence of my months here.
Gone. Trashed, like she’d trashed me.
The room phone rang and rang, but I didn’t answer. Julia’s cell phone buzzed, forgotten and left charging on the floor, and when I noticed the caller ID indicating her mother, I answered. I’d been making excuses for Julia for so long, I couldn’t stop. Mrs. Ramirez said they were starting their drive and wanted to know if Julia needed anything. For a second, I almost said she was at Scott’s. Mrs. Ramirez didn’t know her daughter was hooking up with Scott, who Scott was, or that he wasn’t much for relationships, but I said Julia was on the water, and promised to leave a note.
I stared at the background photo on the phone, her and Tina, their heads tilted together, eyes crossed, sticking out their tongues. Friends, best friends. Julia was certain of her love, and her family’s, certain about everything, everyone but Scott. The tighter she clung, the more he pulled away, and if she lost him, then she might feel as abandoned as I did.
From her phone, I texted Scott: “I love you.” Now we were even.
~~~
The sky was lightening. In the center of campus, nothing stirred but squirrels. At the base of a palm tree outside the Registrar’s, I planted a liter bottle of gasoline stuffed with strips of a tee shirt. The golden gasoline sloshed back and forth, a storm in a bottle. Back home, palm trees were common, but not like the ones on campus, which were rumored to cost a year’s tuition. The fronds were lush, a country club’s, and fallen ones whisked away before they hit the ground.
I heard the whine of an electric cart, I ducked behind a post, and a groundskeeper went by. I’d have to hurry. I set down the letter, sealed in a clear plastic bag and held in place with a brick. Though I’d written it at end of a very long night, the words had rushed out, with the inspiration I wished for in my college entrance essays. I ranted against rich kids and the parents who spoiled them, acting like they owned the world. Like they were the world itself. I taunted them, implying I’d scattered booby traps and bombs around campus.
Dousing the tree with gasoline, I lit the wick, which sputtered with the delicious hiss of a lawn sprinkler. The syrupy fumes made me giddy with the happiness I once thought I might achieve here. In White Plaza, I left another copy of the letter and lit a second firebomb.
I might have predicted the investigation, news stories, the online fan pages—“Elaine Park rocks!” At the jail, my mother in near-collapse, propped up by my sister. Her face, awful and old, marked by grief as all her hard years had never marked her. My father asking why, not in Korean, not in SAT words, but in the plain English he reserved for customers. For strangers. His hope—his hope in me—would do me in. “I can’t,” I would say, my voice breaking. “I can’t lie anymore.”
His caved-in expression. “You have to tell everyone the tru
th. Telling me won’t help.”
Yet if I had been thinking clearly and stopped, if I had retreated, I would have missed the moment when I became mighty and billowing. The smoke drifted into the stratosphere with the crackle and roar of a wildfire. The dizzying smell of gasoline, of charcoal, of ash come alive. The flaming palm tree the most spectacular of all. An enormous Fourth of July sparkler, a gold-orange celebration burning on and on, a monument, a memory that would far outlast my time here.
THE SHOT
With the whistle of mortar fire, the golf ball strafed their heads and landed with a thunk on the green. Sam ducked, along with the two players in his group. He stared at the foursome behind them, resisting the impulse to hurl the ball into the creek that trickled through Hidden Valley.
“Fore!” the asshole shouted belatedly, and shrugged his shoulders. The first time, Sam had given the man the benefit of the doubt. The man might not realize how far the ball would go, or maybe the trees had hidden their group from view. Now Sam knew that the man was hurrying them along. He looked familiar, but that was impossible. Sam had picked this course for its cheap greens fees and its distance far from anyone he knew.
He squared his shoulders, preparing to putt. He’d leave the man’s ball alone. He didn’t know the other two players—a grandfather and teenage grandson—and he didn’t want to alarm them. They had met early that morning in the tee box, a pair looking for singles, and so far, Sam found them friendly, if quiet. He preferred quiet to buddy-buddy, to the men who shared their marital problems, tried to sell him car insurance, or offered him a toke of marijuana in between holes.
