My Summer of Love and Misfortune

by Lindsay Wong

  I swear, this dress is cursed to the exponential of ten thousand.

  How am I supposed to wash pee-colored beer off white Swarovski crystals?

  How am I supposed to even wear it to prom next month?

  Swearing loudly, I stomp back to my bedroom to change. Beer has trickled down the front of my dress. I’m worried that my night (like this gown) will be a stained, nonrefundable disaster.

  Pathetic sophomore, I think angrily. Pathetic dress. Pathetic party.

  That’s when I hear nonstop giggling, and a familiar girl’s voice is saying, “Not here, not here, not here!”

  Positively giddy and almost feeling better immediately, especially with the prospect of having juicy gossip to tell-text Samira, I throw open my bedroom door dramatically, expecting to be half-annoyed, half-amused at the couple making out on my bed.

  “Surprise!” I say.

  Like in a bad romantic comedy, my best friend sits up, looking dazed. Samira is practically half out of the slinky black dress I gave her; her bra is showing. Peter, practically pantless, jumps off her. Samira and Peter are in my bed.

  Peter at least has the decency to look ashamed.

  What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On.

  “Um, Iris! Hi!” he says, choking on his words. Samira has turned a hideous hue of rose-pink and is letting out a series of very undignified shrieks. Finally, she charges past me out of my bedroom. I’m stunned. I don’t know exactly what to say.

  Meanwhile, my right eye starts to wink uncontrollably at Peter, followed by the left one. This can’t be happening right now.

  Eye twitching has got to be the most annoying nervous tic on the planet.

  “Iris,” Peter says, as if I’ve forgotten my own name.

  “I know my name,” I say. “Thank you for reminding me, Peter.”

  “Iris—”

  “How long has this thing been going on?” I manage to sputter. “Please tell me that this THING, whatever it is, just randomly happened.”

  He looks rather taken aback.

  “Last month … when you were in the city with your parents.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “We … I … I … I … just couldn’t. Samira wanted to.”

  I can’t breathe. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

  “Um, is your eye okay?”

  “What?” I say. Is he joking?

  “Your eye is …”

  I touch my right eye and I can feel the eyeball spasm, like a pulsing monster, underneath my palm. Like it’s a living organ, suddenly alive and determined to embarrass me.

  “It’s fine,” I lie.

  “Iris, you know how I feel about you, but …”

  Peter pauses, like he’s choking on a burrito. His face reddens into the shade of ungainly salsa. He fidgets.

  “I’m … what?” I yell-ask. “Spit it out, Peter.”

  He blinks.

  “You’re … really boring,” he finally says, looking deeply uncomfortable. “You’re superficial, self-absorbed, and you kind of think the world revolves around you.”

  He’s staring at me. My left eye has begun to twitch violently.

  “You’re narcissistic, Iris. And vapid. You just try too hard.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I say, not understanding. How can I be all these things? I’m just one person.

  He pauses, then says, “I just don’t think you ever really liked me as a human being. Do you even know my actual birthday?”

  “Yes! It’s June twenty-fourth. I got us plane tickets to Paris right after our graduation ceremony.” I accidentally blurt out the surprise, devastated. Why does it feel as if my heart and stomach and brain are strangling each other?

  “Iris, my birthday is in January! I’ve told you a million times. And why would you think we were going to Paris after graduation? I told you that I was going camping with my brother.”

  I pause. How did I not know that he was going camping with his brother?

  “But I thought you said you wanted to go to Paris!” I protest.

  And how can I be self-absorbed? What is Peter even talking about? I’m the most selfless person on the planet, after Gandhi and my parents.

  Peter stares at me with the utmost disbelief.

  “But I was taking you to Paris!” I shout at him again, spotting the Nordstrom shopping bag hiding the flowers and card and tickets. I grab the bag and then wave the bouquet in his face.

  He backs away.

  “Do you even know Samira’s birthday?” he says. “Do you even know anything real about the people around you?”

  My heart thump thump thumps. I stop listening. If my heart could be an actual living flower, it feels like it has been killed with weed killer.

  Peter Hayes, loving boyfriend of two years, is dead to me.

  Grabbing my purse, I run out of my bedroom and barely manage to make my way down the spiral staircase before I start heaving into the kitchen sink. I retch for what feels like the length of three movies until someone mockingly calls out, “You’re a lightweight, Iris! Asian red-face!”

  “Shut up!” I yell-slur miserably.

  It’s my kitchen sink and I can be sick if I want. My vision flickers in and out, like I’m having multiple seizures.

  Being dumped would have to happen, tonight of all nights. At my own party.

  But betrayal hurts more than being dumped. I mean, Samira, of all people? The last time I felt this shitty was when I was hungover and then I had to take a three-hour SAT.

  The garage is the safest place, the most private place I can think of. I grab the car keys and sit in the driver’s seat of my parents’ two-month-old white Mercedes-Benz. It was a gift from my mom to my dad for his fifty-fifth birthday. I put my hands over my flaming cheeks. I squeeze my eyes shut.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic. Everything will be all right, I think hopelessly. It always is?

  I just need air. Lots of cool, fresh air. I just need to think.

  Anywhere, I think, but here.

  But why does the car seem so claustrophobic all of a sudden? It’s like being trapped inside a tiny balloon of hot air. I inhale. Exhale. Inhale. I tell myself that things will get better.

  They don’t.

  My heart hurts, and so does my reeling head.

  I can’t decide which one is worse.

  Heartbreak or indulging in too much weed and alcohol.

  Sobbing uncontrollably, I somehow accidentally rev the engine on. It’s like my entire body is on autopilot, and I’m too distressed to notice that I’ve put the Mercedes in reverse. All I can think about is Samira and Peter. Samira in my favorite black dress and Peter in my bed. Samira and Peter. The world must be ending. In what horrible, clichéd universe would my best friend and boyfriend be cheating on me? And why didn’t I even notice? Am I honestly that self-absorbed?

  Denial combined with spurts of anger hit me like little fireworks. Maybe I imagined the whole episode. This is all a nightmare, right? A drunken hallucination?

  At first I don’t understand what happens next and I think that I am seriously dreaming. The CRASH is so loud and frightening that it doesn’t seem real. A sharp, metal clanging noise roars in my eardrums. Like a special-effects sound in an action movie that gets closer and louder in volume and speed. I don’t understand what on earth is happening. I didn’t even notice that the car was moving. I don’t understand the strangeness of it all. And that’s when I decide to glance in the rearview mirror. And I gasp. All the feelings of surprise, shock, and horror fall out of my mouth, like a supersize Gobstopper. My dad’s Mercedes has just rolled backward into the garage door. The car has rammed into one of our three newly painted garages and plowed an entire door off its hinges. I glance in the rearview mirror to check again. I’m not imagining things. I was never the best driver, but this is the worst car accident in all my life.

  Holy shit.

  This can’t be happening.

  I’ve just knocked the entire garage door off an
d smashed the trunk of my parents’ $50,000 luxury car.

  I wail loudly. What choice do I have? It’s not like I can make any other sound. And it’s not like I can pretend that nothing happened to the car or to our missing garage door. It’s not even like I wrecked the backyard fence or broke a small window. A garage door is a very important focal feature of a house. It’s always the first thing that you notice on a real-estate brochure.

  A bunch of kids come running out at the sound and look super confused. A few of them point and take photographs with their cell phones.

  “Oh my god!” someone exclaims.

  I think I see Samira, but then her shell-shocked face disappears into a frightening gray-black blur.

  “Is that Iris?” someone else is yelling.

  My stomach churns again. No more puking! I think. My vision flickers in and out. Please don’t let me puke again.

  Instead of vomiting this time, I gratefully pass out.

  4

  Broken House

  My mom always said it was best to avoid beautiful movie-star boys, much like avoiding ice cream and cheddar cheese if you’re severely lactose intolerant. She always said good-looking boys would stomp on my fragile flower-heart. But I never listen. I always insist on eating my delicious ice-cream cake from Dairy Queen, and then I have to elbow whoever is in front of me to use the bathroom.

  Lactose intolerance is no joke.

  “Choose someone uglier than you to romance,” my mom would always say, before heading to work at her firm, where she is both the CEO and senior electrical engineer.

  But she wasn’t right: it wasn’t a beautiful boy who stomped on my fragile flower-heart, but just Peter Hayes. Freckled, messy-haired Peter, who played the drums completely off-beat, liked food and pot as much as me, and was average in intelligence, height, and weight. If you asked me to describe Peter Hayes, I’d say he was pretty much unremarkable. We definitely had a lot of fun, fooling around in his dad’s old Toyota when we were both supposed to be at school. On weekends, when I was supposed to be in ACT and SAT class, he’d pick me up and we’d drive around the suburbs, smoking and listening to indie rock bands on repeat.

  “Iris, he’s not right for you,” my mother would always say whenever Peter came over to pick me up. “He doesn’t love you. Why do you always pay with your allowance money when he invites you to dinner?”

  Despite the fact that Peter always smiled and made polite small talk with my mom and dad, my parents just didn’t like him.

  But I would continue to defend him. “You just don’t like Peter because he’s American! You want me to date a geeky, boring Chinese dude!”

  “Your dad is not boring!” my mom would say.

  “I’m not boring,” my dad would echo, joining the conversation. “In fact, I’m very exciting!”

  Peter Hayes was the source of many ongoing screaming fights. We’d fight about Peter after school and on weekends. He was the most popular topic in our household besides college applications and the FIFA Cup.

  I hear a voice calling me gently.

  When I open my eyes, a concerned face is asking me if I can hear her.

  “Can you tell me your name?” a woman says, and checks my wrist for a pulse. “I’m a paramedic.”

  At first, I don’t understand, but then I remember.

  Someone must have called 911. An ambulance and a police car are here. A broken house and a broken sports car. Underage drinking. This does not look good.

  There’s nothing to be done about the garage.

  “Honey,” the female paramedic says. “We’re taking you to the hospital.”

  I try to slur out something rational, a word that sounds suspiciously like “garage.”

  “Shhhhh,” she says reassuringly. “You’ve had a bad accident and you’re in shock.”

  I start crying nonstop.

  5

  Loser

  My parents come back ASAP on the first flight from Honolulu. They pick me up from Hackensack Meridian Health Emergency Room, frantic with worry. Even after I reassure them that I’m totally fine, except for my headache and bad hangover, they insist on one more checkup and my mom and dad yell that they love me over and over again.

  “You could have been killed and wouldn’t be able to go to college!” my mom and dad take turns screaming after the emergency room physician and the nurse confirm that I’m definitely going to live.

  My mom’s eyes can’t stop tearing up as she hugs me tightly. “Iris! Do you understand what you just did? One bad decision and it could have been game over! No reset button!”

  “We would never see you again!” my dad says. “How can you be so selfish?”

  “I love you guys,” I sniffle, and then I start crying from intense guilt. My dad is right. Not even realizing that the car engine was on was probably one of my most terrible, riskiest life mistakes. More careless than when I accidentally shaved off an eyebrow, and way more dangerous than when Samira and I didn’t have any cab fare after a two a.m. party. Instead of calling our parents, we decided to hitchhike on the side of a near-empty highway. Luckily, no one picked us up and we found our way to the bus station.

  My parents are so worried about me that I dread driving home with them. I won’t even know how to apologize for the destruction and mess. I’ll see the extreme disappointment and I’ll feel like a bad daughter.

  The drive home from the hospital is uncomfortably silent; normally, I’d ask them about their trip, and they’d tell me about the hotel and their waterskiing excursions and describe their meals in Food Network detail. They might even ask me about Samira and Peter. My mom has always liked Samira as much as she’s liked Peter. “She’s not a nice girl,” my mom would always criticize when Samira came over to hang out with me. But she always tolerated her because Samira’s parents went to the same country club as her and my dad.

  Maybe my mom was right all along about Samira. A blister of worry bubbles in my gut and I accidentally belch from nervousness. Thinking too much about life is bad for the digestive system.

  When we turn into our cul-de-sac, I see my mom stiffen like a zombie, and my dad actually looks horrified. His mouth plops open and closed like a dying fish. Their new car is still parked askew, the trunk completely wrecked, and our beautiful house is missing a garage door.

  “What happened?” my dad yell-asks. I can see his face transform into the color of morgue gray. “We thought you had a car accident! Not a house accident!”

  “It was a mistake,” I say in a hushed voice.

  We go inside. And then there’s more shock and disappointment to fill the entire state of New Jersey.

  Normally, Samira and Peter help me clean up the bottles and crumbs of crunched-up potato chips and dirty plastic cups. Inside my parents’ house, though, is really a mess. A dumpyard in our typically pristine living room and marble-countertop kitchen. Mounds of garbage and shards of broken glass everywhere.

  Someone has even left a pile of orange-gray vomit in our stainless steel sink.

  Oh wait, that was me.

  “You had … a party?” my mom asks, incredulous. “We said you could have friends over, but what is this mess?”

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I say miserably.

  “We trusted you!” my mom shouts. “How could you do this?”

  “What happened?” my dad says, looking stunned. He sits down on the floor and touches an empty bottle. He sniffs his fingers, almost disbelievingly. Like he doesn’t want to admit that his seventeen-year-old daughter had a party in his house. “Is this … beer!? Alcohol? You drink alcohol, Iris?”

  “Of course she drinks!” my mom snaps. “Our daughter is obviously a deviant. Iris, go to your room this instant. The damage is coming out of your allowance!”

  Slinking to my bedroom, I spend the rest of the day crying until my eyes are red and puffy and swell to the size of golf balls. For once, I don’t care that I resemble a monster. I hear my parents arguing downstairs; my mom is on the phone no
nstop with the insurance company.

  I spend all of Saturday and Sunday in my room. Except to scold me endlessly about my life choices, my parents don’t really bother me until early Sunday afternoon.

  I keep waiting for an attack of stress-induced facial hair.

  Nothing comes.

  Just a bulbous Rudolph-size nose zit.

  It makes me hopeful that I’ve outgrown my childhood affliction.

  * * *

  Later, I don’t know what time, but my mom doesn’t even knock when she interrupts my sad-girl crying. Despite still being furious and disappointed at me, she seems to not be able to help it when she prances in like she’s Samira with some hot gossip about a first date or some random boy that she’s been crushing on. She’s holding a giant pile of envelopes. Her mouth twitches, like she’s not sure whether to scream in anger or with roller-coaster excitement. I hope it’s the latter.

  “Iris?” my mom finally yell-asks. “Have you checked the mail? College letters have arrived! Mrs. Chu at the country club was just asking me last week about what colleges you got into. I said I was sure that you got into all of them! You know her son only got into Harvard and three other Ivies?”

  For a moment, she seems genuinely pleased and expectant. It’s almost as if she’s completely forgotten about the wrecked car and house. She’s still clutching the envelopes like they’re a winning lottery ticket for a brand-new house and luxury SUV.

  Oh.

  “I don’t feel well enough to be opening letters,” I lie. My voice is small and sounds funny.

  And here I thought that by ignoring emails sent from colleges, I could actually pretend that I never received any of them.

  I mean, who actually uses the United States Postal Service anymore?

  I thought snail mail was practically an urban legend. An American myth.

  My mom calls my dad to come upstairs.

  “Iris has some very big news!” she shouts.

  My dad actually looks excited when he hurries into my bedroom. “I have been waiting for this moment for seventeen years!” he announces, clapping his hands. He looks like I’m about to perform some well-rehearsed magic trick.