Girl Overboard (9 page)

Bao-mu perches on the edge of my bed, closes her eyes, and breathes out, releasing all the air in her lungs the way she taught me to do when I was little and missing my parents. At her next breath, she studies me solemnly.

“Syrah, your daddy said he retiring,” she says, reverting to English, wanting me to understand her perfectly. To make sure I’m paying attention, she tugs the journal out of my hands. “Life going be different now. Business different. You need know what going on or Wayne and Grace take it all.”

But that’s just it. Part of me wants them to take it, maybe not all of it, but a big chunk would be just fine. Then, I’d be a regular kid who wants to be a Snowboard Girl. Not a rich kid-poseur whose custom-designed Prada snowboard, a gift from one of Mama’s favorite designers, would get me laughed off the mountain if I ever used it.

Bao-mu waves one wrinkled hand around my room. “You not want this. But money let you do whatever you want later.” She taps my manga-journal. “Draw. Travel. Start your own business like Grace.”

“I know.”

“Even snowboard.”

“Hmmm,” I murmur doubtfully.

Bao-mu nods, not as though she believes my parents will let me snowboard again, or that she’s satisfied that I finally understand the importance of what she’s talking about. But like she knows something she doesn’t want to tell me. Her eyes drop to my journal before she returns it to me.

“No,” Bao-mu says softly. “This wrong.” She shakes her head at the page, smooth and white against her age-spotted hands. “Life not daring adventure, Syrah. Life is survival.” Heavily, Bao-mu gets to her feet, back bent until she can straighten painfully. “If you want something, you have to take it.” Her hand balls into a fist and she yanks it toward her waist, hard, fast. “I not always here to make sure you get what yours.”

O
nce Bao-mu leaves me
with a final admonishing look, I try to return to my manga-journal, but it’s no use. The clock on my wall ticks away, a metronome that doesn’t slow down Age and Bao-mu’s duet of advice playing in my head:
Just show them your video. If you want something, take it.

I flip back to the page where I sketched Natalia doing just that. She faced her fear of heights and took back Age’s heart. So what do I want? More than anything, I used to want to go pro. Now, all I want is to reclaim myself. As if I really need to check that I’m alone, I glance at the door before printing in letters so tiny a mouse would need a magnifying glass to read them:
I want to ride hard again.
Then I draw a snowboard around the words, place Shiraz on top of it, she of the self-confident stance.

I swing my feet over the edge of my bed and stand. “You’ll get your balance back soon,” Liza, my physical therapist, promised me after the ankle-to-hip brace finally came off about six weeks post-op, but three weeks later, I was still limping. “Muscle memory. It’ll come back.”

Once I stash my journal back in its hideout spot in my closet, I feel safe from any potential prying eyes, including the housekeeper’s. After having my accident dragged all over the press, I figure, the less fodder the better. But as I shove the journal onto the top shelf, it snags on the plastic shrink-wrap covering one of my snowboarding magazines. After my accident, I couldn’t bear to read any of them, since the pictures made me so homesick for snowboarding.

Easing the magazine out, the face I can’t hide from, not even in my sleep, grins at me from the back cover, standing just behind his big brother. Jared’s grey-green eyes may be covered by the goggles he and Erik are hawking, but I’d know that bad-ass grin anywhere, that heart-shaped freckle a star over the skyline of his upper lip.
Stop the B.S.,
I tell myself. He’s the real reason why I haven’t kept up with the snowboarding magazines, much less the videos.

See, after all these months, I still need a rehab program, because thanks to muscle memory and a weird codependent relationship with my memory, my heart swells at the thought of Jared. What I remember now is how Jared would always take the street side of any sidewalk when we were walking together, as if he were protecting me. And how he’d lean down to me, not wanting to miss a single expression on my face, which made me feel witty and wanted and just a little bit wicked.

“There’s a wild side to you that no one knows about,” Jared told me after I tore after him on a slope that wiped out the rest of the girls in my summer camp. “I like it.” He held my gaze so steadily, so piercingly, that I swore, my entire body prickled as if I had been asleep, gone numb, and his words prodded me awake—sharp, sudden, and somewhat painful. Painful, because I so wanted to shed my Heir Cheng reputation that I didn’t even think twice about slipping into the ready-made bad girl image that Jared had conjured for me.

No matter how fun my reverse Cinderella transformation had been, it ended badly, and my knee twinges now in reproach. So I jam the journal and Jared back onto the shelf.

My hand comes away, shaking and empty, and I realize that since my accident, everyone’s moved on to a better place: Natalia who mastered more than snowboarding. Mama and Baba who are venturing to a new phase of life together. Jared and his skyrocketing career that didn’t need the boost he hoped the Cheng name could provide. Even Shiraz is about to land in a better place in that last panel I drew, safely out of reach of Grace’s and Wayne’s velvet-covered taunts.

I start to close the closet door, glimpsing as I do the picture of me and Age at Snoqualmie after our very first snowboarding run seven years ago. As third graders, we looked so sure of ourselves, me with my hands on my hips and Age holding his above his head. A petty part of me wants to point out that once upon a time, long before my knee injury, I used to be better than Age. What did Jared say? “God, you’ve got a lot of guts, for a girl.”

Jared. I block out what he said once he realized he wasn’t going to get what he really wanted, not my trust but my trust fund: “Look, I do what it takes. Not everybody gets everything handed to them.”

I’m tired of being a Qué Syrah Syrah girl, the one who’s left behind in the cold snowdrift of memories and pretends that’s okay. The girl who’s too afraid to read about someone else’s adventures because it magnifies how distant her own dreams have become. On my stepstool, I reach for the topmost shelf where I’ve stashed my video résumé. The CD case in my hands feels too slight to contain the best minute and fourteen seconds of my snowboarding tricks. Too slight to be the compilation of two years’ worth of bruises and falls before sticking perfect tricks.

Not wanting to chicken out, I hastily slip on an oversized black sweater and my fat, size four jeans, because I feel bloated just looking at the tiny new skirt Mama brought home yesterday from San Francisco, draped on the slipper chair next to the full-length mirror. Clutching my CD, I head past my bookshelf, backtracking to grab a stack of manga and sandwich them protectively around my résumé in case I can’t bare myself to my family. Armed, I rush out to crash my first family meeting and take what I want from the executive committee of the Cheng clan.

Ancient East meets Modern West,
at least that’s how Mama described our estate in
Architectural Digest.
Whatever it is, our estate is made up of many separate buildings scattered over two acres, sequestered from the rest of the world by the Great Wall of Cheng that runs along the perimeter. Our main house is a modest three thousand square feet, minuscule by billionaire standards. Baba’s refuge, The Pavilion of the Next Big Idea, lies immediately beyond the first courtyard, closest to the house in case inspiration hits when he’s home. It’s in his
zhai,
office-studio, where the quarterly Cheng family meetings take place.

Even though it’s raining lightly, I take the scenic detour all the way around the property—past the tang, Mama’s bonsai house, my art studio. Before I know it, I’m outside Baba’s door, my hand on his prized scholar’s rock made of
lingbi,
the sandy-colored stone pocked and twisted into a large question mark.

For hundreds of years, scholars in China contemplated these misshapen rocks, signs of how unpredictable our world is. Like now, when the drizzle turns to snow so wet, it more resembles raindrops than snowflakes. But it is snow, a good sign. At least that’s what Bao-mu would say if she were here and about to shove me into Baba’s office. Anointed, as though I have every right to be here, I open the door and step inside.

From his seat at the head of the table where he always sits, regardless of whether he’s in a dining room, boardroom, or tearoom, Baba nods at me, pleased.

“Syrah,” Mama says, smiling because I’ve finally expressed some interest in the business of family.

Not smiling is Wayne who’s to Baba’s left, nor Grace who turns in her seat, Mochi to her cheek. She arches one plucked eyebrow at her brother.

“If I had known Syrah was attending,” Wayne says stiffly, “I would have insisted that Cindy and Jack come, too.”

“Last-minute decision,” I say airily.

“Have some breakfast first.” Baba nods to the antique table loaded down with dim sum, little morsels of food that are supposed to touch your heart. “The
law bock
is especially creamy this morning. Grace, anything else you want to add to the agenda?”

The review of Cheng family holdings continues behind me as I place the manga and CD on an empty spot on the food table. I’m not hungry, too keyed up about my announcement. Still, I scoop a tablespoon of rice and place a sliver of
law bock,
fried turnip cake, its scent pungent and comforting, onto my plate. When I return to the conference table, I realize I’ve made my first tactical error. Mama’s plate is clean of everything except for her five daily vitamins, lined up in a neat, soldierly row. Before Grace are three uneaten orange segments, artfully arranged and meticulously peeled of white membrane.

Feeling every bit the fat pig, I set my plate next to Wayne’s spot at the conference table.

“Anyone want anything else?” I ask as I start back for a cup of tea.

“No, no,” Baba demurs, but when Wayne comes over to help himself to a Coke, I think I overhear his “Your butt is getting big.” Ever since I can remember, Wayne has had no compunction about providing me with “feedback” in the “spirit of improvement,” whether it’s about my future or my figure. But today, his stoic expression doesn’t betray whether he’s insulted me. Not that it matters, really. My usual insecurities, the ones pecking around my head, sound like Wayne, too.

Either way, I’m self-conscious now and return to the table with a glass of zero-calorie water—instead of ten-calorie tea—and my manga.

“Comic books,” says Grace flatly.

“Manga,” I correct her. “Otherwise known as graphic novels.”

Grace looks decidedly unimpressed. Truly, with her tiny animal
chibi
sidekick, Mr. Yippy Dog Mochi, perpetually slung over her shoulder, the two of them could be characters straight out of girls’ manga,
shonin.

“Whatever you call them,” says Wayne, his lips drawn back with distaste, “you’re not getting into Princeton by reading pabulum. At your age, Cindy and Jack were reading Greek classics.”

“Five hundred million manga are sold in Japan alone every year,” I counter softly.

“That doesn’t mean it’s literature,” he snaps back.

“
Maus
won the Pulitzer.” Honestly, anyone else and I’d inform him that I’d rather be in good company reading so-called trash than be a pompous ass, but I simply sit down. Pathetic, I know. It’s just that I’ve talked myself into thinking that if I play the adoring little sister long enough, then maybe, just maybe, Wayne will adore me back.

As usual, he has no qualms about dispensing with his role as nurturing big brother. Wayne glowers at me. “You’re so intellectually lazy. When Jack and Cindy were your age, they had already earned enough college credit to skip freshman year.”

God, the way he talks about his kids, you’d think they were years older and infinitely more Chengian than I could ever aspire to be. Reality is, the last time we all got together for an unhappy family reunion, let’s just say I discovered how much Cindy and Jack enjoy dabbling in mind-altering substances. I would, too, if I had Wayne for a dad.

Just as Wayne gears up to further the distinction between his kids’ classics-enhanced brain cells and my comic-diminished ones, Mama murmurs, “I just read in the
Wall Street Journal
that manga is the fastest growing segment in the book industry.”

“That’s right, and manga is picking up traction with cell phone distribution in Japan,” says Baba. He points to the display case of old cell phones, a retrospective starting with the toy Dick Tracy wrist phone, the one that started Baba’s fascination with cellular technology. “Sometimes the best ideas come from unexpected sources. You should learn that.”

Flushing but chastened, Wayne falls silent. I can practically hear him and Grace busily calculating their profit and loss statement, deducting all the wrongs done to them because of me and Mama. Thanks to Baba’s support, I’ve just earned myself another enormous loss. When Mama catches my eye, it’s not to wink at me, her conspirator, but to make sure I know that she doesn’t appreciate how I’ve nearly shamed her.

“Any other announcements?” Baba asks, looking around the table.

My mouth feels too dry to talk so I lift my glass. In the space of a sip, I lose my opportunity.

“All right, then, on to the financial review,” says Baba, making a neat tick next to the agenda item. “We know how Wayne did.” And by the telltale dip in Baba’s voice, if we didn’t, we do now. Wayne must have logged another deficit. “So Grace, tell us how you increased revenues way over budget in Q1?”

“Wait,” I say softly, but my plea is as weightless as a single snowflake. Baba’s peering down his glasses at his notes and no one pays attention to me. So louder, I say, “I’ve got an announcement.”

Baba smiles indulgently at me. “Well, what is it?”

Just tell them what you want,
I hear Bao-mu. Uncomfortably aware of Wayne and Grace smirking, I’m about to blurt out,
I want to be a professional snowboarder.
But Wayne breathes impatiently, and beats me to the punch: “You’re not about to talk about your snowboarding career, are you?”