Girl Overboard (7 page)

“Next Tuesday,” he intones with such unusual decisiveness that everyone shakes out of their pre-Valentine-winter-break haze. “Bring in at least one viable, somewhat creative, out-of-the-box idea to turn this paper around.”

A few minutes after
the final school bell rings, it’s down to a couple of stragglers outside in the bus circle. All the buses have already left. So have the private vans and the cars of those few parents who bother to drive rather than delegate that job to the hired help. A red Mercedes rounds the circle, nearly dousing me with dirty puddle water, and I watch enviously as a sullen sophomore, mortified that his dad has picked him up, slouches down low, becoming a human iceberg. Only the top of his head is visible through the window. That kid has no idea how lucky he is that his dad showed up.

Obviously, Mama isn’t picking me up the way the daily schedule left on the breakfast table informed me she would. She must have found some new store in San Francisco that she just had to scope out, and in her state of shopping nirvana extended her trip. The clouds release a rain shower, and I pull my hood over my head as if that’ll hide me from the truth: the van is long gone, and I’m stuck at school.

Oh, joy, The Six-Pack are descending the staircase, two-by-two, Noah’s representatives of the Proud Crowd, chosen to be saved from this great deluge. One problem: their ark is nowhere to be seen.

“You sure your dad’s picking us up?” Chelsea asks Lillian, frowning because she has to (gasp!) wait in the rain.

“He’s coming,” says Lillian, sounding anything but sure. She bites her lower lip uncertainly and repeats, as if she needs to hear her own reassurance, “He’s coming.”

“Good, ’cause my hair’s going to get all frizzy out here.” Chelsea pats her brown curls, comforting them.

Adults-in-training, Lillian flips on her phone, and I return to my own high-tech appendage, pretending to everyone on the sidewalk that I have calls to return, messages to check. Why, this snippet of free time is a veritable godsend in my busy, important life, except that I get a direct dial to Mama and Baba’s voicemail. My own is empty—just checked and still not a peep from Age.

“When does that party start again?” asks Chelsea, not caring that, one, I haven’t been invited to said party, and, two, I can hear perfectly fine since she’s standing no more than two feet away from me.

“At five. We’ve got an hour and a half,” says Lillian, checking her watch. “No worries.”

“So, I’ve been wondering, how does it feel to have”—Chelsea points a finger at Lillian—“your dad work for”—the finger aims at me now—“her dad?”

Sorry, but according to The Syrah Cheng Way, business hierarchy doesn’t translate into a social one, especially not the high school variety. Even though I keep my voice mild when I tell Chelsea, “They all work for someone. My dad’s accountable to all the investors,” I raise one eyebrow a la Wayne when he wants to make it painfully clear to me how stupid I am. Surprise, it works on Chelsea, too. She shuts up.

The rain pounds so hard now that it bounces off the cement sidewalk to douse our feet a second time on its way down. Nice. So it’s a mass girl exodus to the overhang, as we all huddle in our jackets. Seattle gets thirty-six inches of rain a year on average, but no one carries an umbrella at school ever. I suppose you get used to drizzle the same way people on the waterfront stop hearing the Argosy ships with the tour guides commentating over loudspeakers: “And if you look through those windows, you’ll see a real T-rex skeleton that the Microsoft exec who lives here personally excavated. And just across the lake over there is the home of the man you can thank every time you turn on your cell phone: Ethan Cheng.”

Lillian’s dad swerves into the parking lot. So what if he’s too busy talking on
his
cell phone to acknowledge the daughter waving at him? He showed up and that says everything.

Trying to look busy is hard to do when rain is dumping, and I have nowhere to go, and no way to get there. Just as the rest of The Six-Pack hightails it to the dryer ground of the minivan, Lillian turns around to ask, “I don’t suppose you’d want to go to Children’s Hospital to help with a party?”

“Children’s Hospital?” It’s ridiculous but I feel relieved that what everybody’s been talking about isn’t another Viewridge party I learned of after the fact, or worse, been invited just to foot the bill, kegs and all.

“It’s going to be a zoo today, which I guess will be good since it’s our party. So yeah, you’re probably too busy, have other plans for Groundhog Day,” Lillian rambles nervously, as she hurdles over guardrails that are surrounding me for good reason. Quickly, she backtracks to the safety of being virtual strangers when I don’t answer right away. “Okay, so I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

“Come on, Lillian!” hollers Chelsea out the open door.

Lillian sighs so softly I bet she’s not even aware she’s making a sound. But I hear that release of breath as if it’s been broadcast around me. I know that sigh, that sound of resignation and frustration. It’s the way I feel when Mama and Baba drag me to one of their black tie events to socialize with people I “ought to know.” I study Lillian curiously. Maybe she isn’t just another Chelsea girl-bot, but a Six-Packer who wants to break free of the plastic ties binding her to that group. I throw her a lifeline that I’ve always wished someone, say, Grace or Wayne, would toss to me: “So, a Groundhog Day party?”

She smiles sheepishly. “Another guild already had dibs on Valentine’s Day.”

“I’d love to help,” I tell her.

“Really?” Lillian’s voice climbs up a high-pitched scale, reaching disbelief but not the upper climes of girlfriend shriek. Still, it’s close enough.

I nod. “Really.”

F
rankly, hospitals freak me
out. The last time I was in one, I awoke from my knee surgery to learn that (big surprise) my dearly departing parents had left the hospital for some conference in Paris, assured that all went well. And the time before that, I was with Age, the day his mom slipped into a coma. So despite the two lilac-spotted giraffe statues posed outside like greeters at an exotic boutique hotel, Children’s Hospital is still a place for the sick, injured, and scared.

Apparently, Lillian isn’t afflicted with my hospital-phobia, because she marches as though she were a regular through the double glass doors and past the mural of elephants and giraffes drinking at a watering hole. A man and a woman, both in shapeless function-before-fashion scrubs, overtake us. The Six-Pack are nowhere to be seen.

I ask Lillian, “So how often do you volunteer here?”

“Volunteer? Not all that often,” Lillian answers without breaking her stride. Even at the elevator, she’s all impatient movement, jabbing the up button and tapping her foot until the doors open. Even before I’m all the way inside, she’s pressed the button for the fifth floor. “My mom started a new guild with a bunch of the other moms at school. So I got dragged in to co-chair this party with her.” Lillian quickly appends, “Not that I mind. This has knocked off my entire service learning requirement for the year.”

Blame my own zero community service hours on watching one too many fashion parades at black-tie charity events where helping the poor, the hungry, and the weary takes a backseat to showing off brand-new designer outfits that could feed a village for a year.

“Here we go,” says Lillian, a tour guide when the elevator opens. Down the long hall we charge—until I spot the large charcoal Plexiglas plaque commemorating the Cheng Foundation. I stand, transfixed, not by my parents’ names, but mine sharing the same line as Wayne’s and Grace’s.

“The Founders’ Circle,” says Lillian, gesturing at the sign that explains that these are the donors who’ve given more than a million dollars to the hospital. “You guys do so much.”

I nod as if I know all about how involved my family is in the community, but feel like the ultimate imposter, especially when down the radiology wing I can’t look at the young boy locked in a wheelchair, his head lolling to the side. Not Lillian. She calls like he’s any other kid, “You coming to the party at five?”

“Yeah,” he says, his little voice all excited.

The only time Lillian actually stops moving is at the column of orcas fronting the Sound Café, where she takes a deep breath, girding herself, but for what? Suddenly, she lets it out in a hurricane rush at the sight of her mother and her bulging pregnant stomach standing on a chair, an oversized cake topper.

“Oh, geez, what is she doing?” mutters Lillian, hurrying to her mother. “Mom! Get down from there.”

“Lillian, you’re here,” Mrs. Fujimoro says, relieved. The streamers behind her are already wilting, a tired bouquet. Whatever glow pregnant women are supposed to have, it’s not emanating from Mrs. Fujimoro, whose skin is more green than white. Still, she manages a wan smile. “Syrah, what a pleasant surprise. Maybe we’ll get your mother to join our guild yet.”

Lillian casts me an uncomfortable, apologetic look, like she wants me to know that I’m not a stepping stone to Mama, and then she grabs the spool of crepe streamers from her mom.

“We’ll finish setting up,” Lillian assures her mom, as she helps her off the chair.

“Definitely,” I say. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“Resting…” Mrs. Fujimoro sighs at that unknown concept. For a moment, she clenches her jaw as though she’s going to throw up, but then peers at Lillian. “If you can handle this…”

“Go, Mom. I got it under control.”

Mrs. Fujimoro blows out a grateful breath and swallows hard, convulsively. “All this sugar. Who would’ve known that morning sickness would rear its ugly head with just a month to go?”

By the way Lillian watches her mother waddle out the cafeteria, I can tell that she wishes she could leave, too. I know the feeling, that desperate need to escape, and would have relieved her here, but a screech of laughter erupts from the table where The Six-Pack are parked, chugging lattes like they’re at a coffeehouse with nothing more important to do than gossip.

“He is so just using her for sex,” cries Chelsea, digging into a 500-calorie scone.

“Honestly,” huffs Lillian who, like a Bao-mu in training, marches to The Six-Pack. Heedless of what this will do to her social status, she hisses, “There are kids here. So do you mind?” Not waiting for an answer, Lillian flips around, but there’s no chance she can miss the girls’ cackles, their mock “Ooooh, we’re so scared.” Concerned because I can feel Lillian’s bravado faltering, I hurry to meet her halfway.

“My mom’s going to throw a fit because I did that,” mutters Lillian, rolling her eyes, as The Six-Pack cracks up again at their table.

“Why?” I glance over my shoulder, meet Chelsea’s eyes and stare her down, wondering what kind of hold this girl has over Lillian. “They were being totally inappropriate.
I
should have said something.”

Looking troubled, Lillian shrugs my question away. So I steer her to the dining room and say, “Come on, don’t worry about them, Warrior Girl. We’ve got a party to host.”

Most of the women
in the guild have that lethal leanness of second wives who run in Mama’s circle. They come to pay respects to me, the visiting dignitary at this party.

“Why, hello, Syrah!” says Chelsea’s mom, smiling with such intensity she could be a model for teeth brightening systems. “Will we be seeing you at the Evergreen Children’s Fund dinner next week?”

“I’m afraid that’s not on my calendar,” I tell her.

“Really?” Her eyebrows lift and she steps closer to me, a telltale sign that she’s preparing for The Ask, the moment when she’ll request that I put in a good word to my parents. See, this is why I stopped going to the gym. Strangers would approach me while I was trapped on the treadmill, downright pleading that my parents donate a couple of thousand here, a couple of thousand there.

Luckily for me, Lillian’s grim announcement—“We’ve got forty-five minutes before the kids descend”—saves me from making party chitchat. The next half hour passes in a flurry of flinging streamers, table rearranging, and “fluffing” the dining room until the national colors appear to have been changed to red, white, and pink. Apparently, the guild hasn’t gotten over being bumped from hosting the Valentine’s Day party.

How ironic that I, the girl with the most backward fashion sense, get assigned displaying duties for the cookie-decorating tables, as if genetics have conferred me with Mama’s primping skills. As Mama points out in her pre-party conferences with her event planner and their post-party critiques, presentation is everything. You simply would not throw down food in—
quelle horreur!
—plastic platters and call that a display, would you? Which is why I’m artfully “merchandising” individually wrapped and pink-ribboned cookies that look vaguely like groundhogs.

“You’re great at this!” Lillian says on her third inspection round before groaning when a woman saunters in, clutching a bouquet of balloons. “No latex allowed! How’d she get past security?”

As I finish stocking the workspace with more frosting and hundreds of plastic knives (pink, of course) so that the kids don’t double dip and create a watering hole of communal germs in these canisters, the sound of children—loud, excited, and boisterous—echoes in the cafeteria. They spill into the dining room on crutches, in wheelchairs, and with IV poles.

Demonstrating innate party skills that would make Mama proud, Lillian jumps into action, directing a few to the beanbag toss and pointing others to my station.

“You can take a cookie and decorate it over here,” I explain to three kids. As I help them unsheathe the cookies from their cellophane wrappers, the telltale yelp of a scared kid pierces through the cafeteria hubbub. Glancing up, I spot a little boy with outrageously long eyelashes burst into tears, fear at first sight of the clowns. The red-wigged wonders duck-walk toward him. He cowers. The clowns freeze. It’d almost be a comical standoff except the boy’s mother snaps at him—“Stop it!”—which infuriates me, because, clearly, he can’t stop whimpering. And I don’t blame him. In my book of horrors, clowns rank right up there with hairy spiders and hairless dogs.