Girl Overboard (8 page)

Still crying, the boy hides behind his mom, a frowsy woman whose thick legs are made thicker in shapeless fleece sweatpants. Unfortunately, the kid’s tears start a downward spiraling trend. A little girl emits a full-throttle shriek.

“Oh, my God,” says Lillian, who’s now at my side, wearing what Age calls my
ay-dios-mio
look of mingled stress and despair. “What do I do?”

“I said, stop it,” the boy’s mom repeats sharply, impatiently shaking him off her leg.

Years of being Mama’s hostess sidekick has trained me on the finer details of party crisis management. I tell Lillian to man my station and hurry over to extract the distraction, not a moment too soon.

“Over there,” I order the clowns, who slowly back up in the face of this toddler terror and veer off to a group of pro-clown children.

The kid with the eyelashes sucks down a huge gulp of air, like he’s suffering from post-traumatic clown syndrome, and his mom’s eyes narrow as she gears up for her second eruption. My approach doesn’t stop her from snipping, “Big boys don’t cry.”

Ignoring her, I bend down to look straight into the boy’s eyes and confess, “I’m afraid of clowns, too, and look how big I am.”

Our mutual clown phobia wins the boy’s confidence. After he wipes his nose with his hand, he slips it in mine. My first instinct is to pull my hand away, rub it on my pants, and sanitize my skin with hot, sudsy water, but there’s nothing but trust in his big hazel eyes. I forget about the germs transferring to my skin.

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Frank.”

“Well, Frank, come with me.”

A father and his sniffling daughter are steps away from leaving the cafeteria. Not on my watch.

“Wait!” I call. The man stops, looks at me questioningly, as I gaze around, desperate. To the side, The Six-Pack are spectators in my fiasco, showing no intention of leaving their gossip to help me. And this is how they define “community service”?

The dining rooms to the side of the cafeteria are empty, and I commandeer one. Heading into the private room, I tell them, “We’re going to have our own party here.”

Announcing an impromptu party is easy compared to figuring out what to do with two kids, a mother, and a father who are now staring at me around the conference table. I have an awful déjà vu feeling of being back in Mr. Delbene’s classroom without a plan or an inkling of an idea. I glance around for inspiration, but come up only with a TV monitor mounted to the corner of the room, a whiteboard, and a wheeled computer rack.

According to Mama, the host is supposed to please her guests’ senses, entertain them, create an unforgettable party. It is unforgettable, but not in the way Mama has ever imagined. I wipe the sweat off my nose. The two kids begin to sniffle; the adults shuffle uncomfortably.

Frank’s mother raises an eyebrow at me and then slings her body against the back of her chair, challenging me to get myself out of this one. Plaintively, as if she’s personally footing the party bill, she demands, “Well?” But she doesn’t wait for my answer, apparently writing me off as a dud, and instead hefts herself from her chair, which releases a sigh, relieved of her load. Halfway out the door, she remembers Frank and asks, “You want a cookie?”

Yeah, load him up with sugar,
I want to throw back at her.
That’ll make him less scared. Right.
No matter how much I stuff or starve myself, it doesn’t change my fear of failing or make me feel like I’m enough.

Outside, in the main dining room, the rest of the party crowd are laughing, probably at some clown antics. Thinking fast, I ask, “Do you know what I do when I’m scared of something?”

The kids shake their heads.

“I draw. Wait here for a sec,” I tell them, and retrieve my backpack from under the treat table, which The Six-Pack are now visiting, giggling while slathering on thick, half-inch layers of frosting under Lillian’s disgusted gaze.

“Doing okay?” asks Lillian, as I run past her.

“Great,” I say over my shoulder. The truth is, I’m more worried about her being caught in the eye of The Six-Pack hurricane than about me.

When I return to the private dining room, a tall bald boy whose lanky build mirrors his IV pole has joined our anti-clown crowd.

“This is Derek from the
third floor,
” says Frank, looking awed.

“What’s the
third floor
?” I ask, mimicking Frank.

“CCA,” says Derek, his mouth set hard like a man’s rather than a boy who’d look at home at my high school.

“CCA?”

“Cancer Care Alliance.” Derek looks at me defiantly, his glare daring me to utter one “sorry” or think “you poor kid.”

Luckily, Frank points at my backpack on the table. “What’s in there?”

Glad for a subject change, I draw out my notebook, the one I’ve never shown to anyone. Not even Age. I tell them, “My journal.”

“Hey, that’s manga,” says Derek, leaning across the table to get a closer look at my journal. I fight the urge to slam it shut and cast a cautious glance out the door at The Six-Pack, who I definitely don’t want nosing into my private world, but they’re too busy devouring their cookies. “Did you draw that?”

I nod and flip forward to more panels of Shiraz riding the mountain, her private snow park. “See, that’s me snowboarding,” I say. “Or at least, the me I was before I tore up my knee and had to have surgery.”

Derek nods solemnly, not only understanding but approving how I’ve made a glorified version of my old self. He points to the frame where Shiraz launched into big air over Grace and Wayne back at Baba’s party.

“Can you draw the me before I got sick?” he asks.

“Me, too,” says Frank, his eyelashes still spiky with tears.

“Do him first,” says Derek, nodding over to Frank, volunteering him as the human guinea pig in this test procedure.

So I study the little boy for a moment and then turn to a fresh page, sketching out a three-paneled frame, two little boxes offset within a larger one. As I draw, Frank sidles up to me, so close I can feel his warm breath on my hand. A lion takes shape under my pen.

“See? You read manga from right to left,” I tell him.

“Instead of this way,” Frank says, tapping the left hand page.

“Smart boy.”

He beams at me as if I’m some kind of angel-hero, and I have to force myself back to his manga. In the leftmost panel, I zoom up to the lion, snoring in a hospital bed. In the one below that, his eyes bordered with lashes the exact length and curl of Frank’s, crack open. I draw a clown’s bulbous nose poking into a thin frame running the length of the paper on the next page. And then beside that, the lion roars loudly. All that can be seen in the very last panel are the undersides of the clown’s big shoes as he runs away, afraid.

“Cool,” Frank whispers.

“My teacher says we’re not supposed to write with curlicues,” the little girl tells me solemnly as I add swirls to the letters in Frank’s name.

“We’re all allowed to break rules every once in a while,” I say. Meeting Derek’s gaze—one that’s hungry for attention but too cool to ask for it, too insecure to risk possible rejection—I ask, “So what should I draw for you?”

Before long, a choir
of munchkins, all singing “draw me,” are clustered around the conference table. There’s almost nothing left of my manga-journal when the party winds down, half the population at Children’s, it seems, are skipping back to their hospital rooms, clutching drawings of themselves as dinosaurs, giraffes, elephants, monkeys.

Derek holds his, a baseball dude, gently, as though he doesn’t want to wrinkle this image of himself. “So, thanks,” he says awkwardly.

“Any time,” I tell him before he leaves, dragging the IV pole behind him like it’s the shadow of his old self. I don’t hear Lillian come up behind me until she says, “So the clowns are grousing that you ruined their party. But you saved mine.” She holds out a tray of cookies to me. “You must be hungry.”

“No, thanks. I can’t afford it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, right?”

As much as I appreciate her vote of confidence about my body, I shake my head and flex the fingers on my left hand. “If your party had lasted three minutes longer, you would’ve had a mutiny on your hands. I exhausted my repertoire of animals. What the heck is a chiru?”

Lillian laughs, shrugs, and places the cookies down to look at my now-depleted journal.

“You’re a great artist,” she says seriously. “I had no idea.”

I toss my pens into my backpack, pleased at her compliment. “This was fun.”

From the cafeteria, laughter follows after a woman swats her friend with a wad of crepe paper.

“Do they need help cleaning up?” I ask.

“Nah, they’re the clean-up committee.”

As I zip up my backpack, I think about the times I sneak into the kitchen late at night, eating when no one is watching, and mindlessly I murmur, “They can snack on the leftovers with no one knowing.” Lillian looks at me funny, so I change the subject by asking, “Where’s The Six-Pack? I mean, your friends.”

Confused for a moment, Lillian starts laughing. “You mean Chelsea’s crowd? Didn’t you see them leaving halfway into the party?”

“I guess I was too busy drawing poison dart frogs. And a chiru, whatever that is.”

As we leave the private room, Lillian says, “Thank you. Really, thanks for helping.”

“It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing. The Six-Pack ate and ran.”

“You mean, they ate, traded sex tips, and ran.”

“Well, yeah. And you didn’t just show up. You stayed and helped. That’s everything.”

“No way,” I tell her. “I should be thanking you.”

“Why? For subjecting you to clowns?”

“Okay, not the clowns.” I lift one shoulder, a half-shrug. “For letting me help.”

“We make a good team.” Lillian grins at me. “When you took on that mom and those clowns… God, who would have thought someone as tiny as you could be that ferocious.”

“What about you? Lecturing The Sex-Pack…”

“The Sex-Pack!” Lillian convulses with laughter. “That’s good.” She casts me a sidelong look. “You know, you’re not exactly what I thought you’d be.”

“Right back at you. And, for the record, this isn’t how I envisioned spending my Groundhog Day.”

“What? You didn’t picture yourself celebrating at the hospital with me as a date?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Have a consolation cookie,” she says.

So I do, trying not to calculate all the calories I’ll need to work off tomorrow after school. But for the record, I don’t need a single speck of sugar to feel good, not right now.

A
iya!
” Bao-mu’s anxious,
exasperated voice erupts so suddenly in my bedroom a few mornings later that I mar my near-perfect page with a dark, jagged line.

“Oh, hey, Bao-mu.” Sighing to myself, I erase the mark, blowing the rubber dandruff off my journal where I’ve been drawing Lillian telling The Six-Pack to take their advanced birds-and-the-bees lesson elsewhere. It’s either illustrate that or dwell on how I snuck out after school to go snowboarding with Age, his brothers, and Natalia yesterday. Wouldn’t you know it? I wiped out on my shoulder again—on the easiest green run—to Natalia’s “Wow, graceful” commentary.

“You know what today is,” Bao-mu demands, eyes glittering above dark circles, advancing on me like Fa Mulan, the warrior woman, grown old.

“It’s Saturday, your day off.” I swear, sometimes Bao-mu forgets that as a senior citizen, she’s earned the right to take it easy. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“How I rest when you still in bed?” The sheet of paper she waves at me isn’t a white flag of surrender, but a matador’s cape that should have me vaulting out of bed. “Don’t look at me like that.” Bao-mu imitates my wide-opened look of innocence. I laugh because it’s like watching the most brilliant person on Earth playing dumb. Bao-mu is as canny as they come. She doesn’t smile back but scolds, “You want Grace and Wayne take everything?”

Bao-mu holds the paper a scant two inches from my nose. If I didn’t already know what was on it, I’d have gone cross-eyed trying to read the blurred words. But it’s the same as all the other memos I’ve received every fiscal quarter since I was ten:

Please find below the agenda for the Saturday meeting in the teahouse. Be prepared to provide your investment recommendations and the status of your respective business concerns.

“I’m not even on the ‘to’ line,” I tell Bao-mu, and that, as far as I’m concerned, means my presence is requested, not required. So I plan to no-show yet another family meeting to go over all the Cheng holdings: the cellular business in which Baba still holds a controlling interest, the family investment arm that Wayne runs, and the foundation, which funds philanthropic work.

“Anyway,” I say, shading in Shiraz’s hair, “I don’t have to go to one of those until I’m eighteen.”

Wrong answer. Plucking the pencil out of my hand, Bao-mu switches to Mandarin, hot and sharp, the language of her lectures:
“Ni shi Cheng jia ren.”
Her nose flares wide in her insistence that I’m part of the Cheng clan. Back in English, she snaps, “Just like Wayne. Like Grace.” In other words, I am just as much Baba’s rightful heir as Wayne and Grace, his other children. Not on the same lower-rank cc line as his grandchildren.

Trust me, if there’s one person who should never be angered, it’s Bao-mu. Let’s just say that Bao-mu was put on probation from my kindergarten classroom after she saw a boy whose name I’ve forgotten snatch a crayon out of my hand. It’s been, what, ten years, but I’m fairly confident that Bao-mu remembers his name, the color of his eyes, and his height. “You not take from Syrah!” she had snapped and yanked the crayon out of his trembling fingers.