Rent a Boyfriend Page 16

  With a sly grin she returned my thank-you, and we both chuckled.

  Then we looked down at the sink. She groaned out loud. I groaned inwardly.

  “Soap ’em and soak?” I suggested.

  She nodded, looking as if everything from today was catching up to her. “I’m pooped. I may not even make it upstairs.”

  I hurried to soak the dishes, then turned my back to her and bent my knees. “Your midnight chariot awaits, m’lady,” I joked. “To your evening chambers, I presume?”

  She made a delighted noise, then hopped on my back.

  And then she fell right off. Because her father had just come downstairs.

  Chloe

  The second my father came in, I just let go. Without thinking.

  Because Drew was clutching my legs tightly, I toppled backward and hit the floor with a thud.

  “Fuck, are you okay?” Drew burst out. He was so concerned, he didn’t even notice he’d just sworn, which was probably breaking Rule 53 or whatever—which he likely wasn’t thinking about since he hadn’t been Andrew for the last hour.

  He released my legs and dropped to the floor beside me.

  Once he knew I was okay, embarrassment crossed his face. “Sorry, Shǔshú, I didn’t mean to swear. I was concerned.”

  My father just continued staring blankly at us, like he had floated out of his body and neither he nor his ghost could figure out what the hell we were doing.

  “I just wanted some water,” he said. Then he turned abruptly and left without getting any.

  “Did that just happen?” I said after my dad was gone.

  Drew gathered me in his arms gently. “Are you sure you’re okay? Do you need some frozen wontons?”

  I shook my head, more dazed from my instinctive reaction to my dad than the physical impact.

  “At least he didn’t walk in a little sooner,” I joked. “What would I have done then? Flung myself through the window?”

  Drew laughed, then hugged me closer.

  * * *

  When I went upstairs, a glass of water in hand, my parents’ bedroom door was locked. I knocked, but exaggerated snores came from the other side. I considered leaving the glass on the floor but worried someone would trip over it, so I retreated to my room, drinking the water myself to calm down.

  That night, I couldn’t stop licking my lips, touching them with my fingertips. Drew was still there in the heightened sensitivity. In the tingle that seemed to travel through my entire body.

  I wanted to tiptoe downstairs and slip beneath his covers, but the threat of my father walking in on us kept me firmly in my own bed. Who could’ve guessed the no hanky-panky rule would ever be an issue for me?

  Chloe CHAPTER 38

  NONWHITE CHRISTMAS

  December 25

  Christmas in the Wang household was never a white Christmas—and when I say “white,” I don’t mean snow—but this year was especially cold (again, nothing to do with the weather).

  It was early afternoon, but my father was still asleep—was he okay?—so my mother, my not-real-but-not-completely-fake boyfriend, and I were sitting in front of the luminous tree on throw pillows scattered across the floor. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over those little sheep ornaments, my favorite of which was the antigravity-boots one, which I’d named Cháng’é. Even though I was pretty sure Drew would approve—his text from a couple of weeks ago had inspired the name—I was too embarrassed to tell him. Maybe because the Chinese still felt weird to me? Or maybe because it was just so dorky.

  The three of us—quite the odd trio—were exchanging gifts, the stress of which was making my mother’s leg jiggle uncharacteristically. Ladies sit still, Jing-Jing, she always liked to say.

  “Sorry this is it,” she apologized to Drew. “We don’t do much for Christmas. In fact, I never celebrated it growing up, and we started doing the tree just for Jing-Jing, when she was a child. But come back at Chinese New Year and we’ll show you how we party.”

  “Mǎmá,” I warned.

  “Or… I guess if you celebrate with your family, that makes sense, since you joined us now and Thanksgiving. Though if I’d known we’d have to choose, I’d of course have picked Chinese New Year.”

  “I have exams then, anyway,” I told her, which was true, though I usually still found a weekend to come home so we could eat Chinese food until we burst.

  My mother huffed. “It’s so ridiculous—in Taiwan, we get weeks off for Chinese New Year.”

  She handed Drew a soft gift wrapped in old Chinese newspapers. He was so cute, his eyes lighting up in spite of the sloppy wrapping.

  He tore through the paper, leaving strips of half-destroyed Mandarin characters strewn on the floor, to reveal a Stanford Medical School sweatshirt. “It’s lovely—thank you so much!” he said with sincere enthusiasm just as I burst out laughing.

  “Not a very subtle hint,” I said to my mother.

  Drew pulled the sweatshirt on. Except he couldn’t quite fit his long torso into the too-tight fabric. He paused when he got stuck, not quite sure what to do. I had to stifle a giggle as I yanked it off him. Then I saw it was a women’s medium.

  “You got this for me?” I blurted to my mother.

  “No,” she said while also shaking her head, the double insistence displaying her guilt.

  “You didn’t get him anything?” I said.

  “I got him that!”

  “When did you buy this?”

  “Aiyah, I don’t remember. But it’s for Andrew,” she asserted. “You should be thrilled, Jing-Jing! It shows how much I support this relationship, wanting you two to be close to home in the future.” Then, beneath her breath, she mumbled, “Just be happy it isn’t pink.”

  My jaw dropped and I turned to her, but she had already moved on, telling Drew, “If you don’t like it, I’ll mail you something else, okay? Just give me your address.”

  “It’s fine, Mǎmá,” I said quickly just as Drew responded, “I love this. Thank you.”

  To change the topic, I handed my mother her gift, a spark of excitement stirring inside before my defense mechanisms kicked in and extinguished it. She might hate it. Depends on her mood, which doesn’t bode well for me. That pessimistic gatekeeper was honed from experience, and it knew better than my silly, hopeful side.

  Turned out, both sides were right—or wrong, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person.

  My mother tore into the red-glitter wrapping paper I’d specially chosen in an attempt to meld customs (red is both a Christmas color and the Chinese celebratory color). When she saw the mahogany Chinese-and-English Bible with gold-foil trim—the gold extending to where her Chinese and English names were engraved—she gasped in delight, her hand flying up to daintily cover her open mouth, which, ugh, reminded me how many times she had instructed me to do the same whenever I gasped, yawned, or laughed.

  “Do you like it?” I fished.

  She didn’t answer, and as she stared, her face, shoulders, spirit gradually slumped.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Drew jumped in.

  We shared a look, and I gave him a small shrug, not knowing what my mother was thinking.

  “It’s trimmed with gold because you’re the golden duck,” I said as lightheartedly as I could. “Everyone else in Bible study wants to catch you because you fly so high.” It was a lot, but I was that desperate.

  She didn’t laugh. Or smile. She only continued to stare.

  “Thank you,” she said finally—quietly, with no exuberance at all.

  I tried not to sound as defeated as I felt when I said, “If it’s the color or the design”—I gestured to the embellishments around the edge—“we can see if they’ll let us exchange it.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”

  I waited, not sure if she was actually going to tell me.

  “Kuo Ǎyí called this morning and told me not to come to Bible study anymore.”

  And then I wished s
he hadn’t told me.

  The Bible study group—held at the Kuo mansion once a week, on Thursday afternoons—was my mother’s version of women’s tea, brunch, book club, or whatever else it was that middle-aged women did. It was so important to her that she worked on Saturdays so she could have Thursday afternoons free.

  She’d been going for as long as I could remember, bringing me when I was young to play with the other toddlers while the maids watched us. It had been my first introduction to the sharky community, not to mention Hongbo, and my Thursdays as a child were spent listening to other kids practice violin while I defended my marker drawings from getting eaten by Hongbo. Apparently, he had figured out at a young age that having marker ink near your face felt good, but he hadn’t fully connected the dots to his nose yet.

  My mother had tried to get me to join Bible study when I turned eighteen, and on that Thursday afternoon before I’d left for UChicago, I had never been more grateful to be attending school halfway across the country.

  First, all the women had pawed at my hair, then pinched my sides and told me I’d better watch the freshman fifteen, to which my mother nodded. Then we’d gossiped for thirty minutes about the latest community scandal: Jessica’s mother was absent today because she was staking out the high school to see if her daughter was dating behind her back.

  Each whisper had been worse than the last.

  I bet she’ll find Jessica with someone and smoking.

  I’d put my money on Jessica suddenly needing to go visit the grandparents in about eight months. Or being absent out of the blue for—how long does it take to recover from an abortion?

  Unless she’s with another girl, which is what I’d bet on—haven’t you seen her latest outfits?

  I had been ashamed that I hadn’t said anything, and even more ashamed that my mother was regularly a part of this.

  But I had rationalized it away with the fact that my mother hadn’t been as complicit, adding the more benign smoking comment and not encouraging the homophobic one.

  Mrs. Kuo had then read one Bible passage as everyone mm-hmmed and amened, and after a very shallow, five-minute discussion of what it meant—“God is good”—the maids served expensive oolong tea from the highest mountain in Taiwan and flakey turnip-strip cakes.

  The turnip cakes had been the only good part—you can’t get those most places because they’re too labor-intensive, and Mrs. Kuo’s chef had been selected solely for her ability to make them as delicious as at a fancy restaurant on the top floor of a Taiwan department store.

  Bible study was terrible and ridiculous, but it was my mother’s version of cosmopolitans with Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda, and I had taken it away from her.

  With one last look at the gold-trimmed Bible, my mother whispered, “Please excuse me,” to Drew and me, then retreated to her bedroom.

  I couldn’t look at Drew; it hurt too much to be reminded of everything I’d done.

  To distract myself, I shook the gift from my mother, the rectangular eight-by-five-by-four box making only a few muffled shifting noises, tissue paper rubbing back and forth against cardboard.

  I unwrapped it, the skiing-penguins wrapping paper making a satisfying rip to fill the quiet.

  “She usually gets me a new dress or makeup or jewelry,” I blabbered, even though he already knew those details from the application.

  I froze when I opened the box and saw what was buried beneath crumpled Chinese newspaper. “Oh my God,” I whispered, my hand actually flying to cover my mouth for once.

  It was a slip of paper, so easily destroyed or lost, but it held the weight of the world.

  “She wrapped it that way as a joke?” Drew said with a laugh, not close enough to see what I was holding. “I didn’t realize she was so funny.”

  I hugged the tuition check to my chest. The amount was enough that I wouldn’t need student loans the next academic year.

  The massive wave of guilt hit me head-on.

  “I lied to my parents about my college applications,” I whispered, referencing a secret I had never told anyone before. “I had to get away from here—it was my only option.”

  The tears spilled over my cheeks and splashed onto my thighs. I hugged the check closer, keeping it safe from the moisture, but simultaneously feeling like it was searing into my skin, burning me as punishment for what I’d done.

  Drew put a hand on my knee, and the sudden contact made me flinch.

  “I don’t deserve your sympathy,” I said, not meeting his eye. I looked down at the gift from my mom, wondering if she would’ve given it to me had she known the truth. “I never applied to Stanford,” I admitted. “I lied and told my parents I was rejected. I couldn’t go there. Even if they didn’t make me live at home—an unlikely scenario—they would’ve shown up every week, unannounced, and I just… I couldn’t.”

  “Hey,” he said gently. “You were protecting yourself. Making the best decision for you isn’t something you ever have to apologize for.”

  “If they knew, they’d be so angry. And hurt.”

  “They wouldn’t understand, and they wouldn’t think about it from your perspective because not many people are like you, Chloe.”

  He was staring at me so intently I couldn’t look away. Surprisingly, I didn’t want to, because in his fervor, I saw his admiration for me, and maybe it was finally starting to reflect back.

  “I used to think I was weak for feeling so much,” I said. “The whole community, my parents, my classmates—they all but told me so every day. It’s why I hid my real self from them, why Jing-Jing exists.”

  “And yet you held on to who you are despite that.”

  “You make it sound like I’ve known who I am all along, but I still don’t know. What kind of confident, strong-willed person would find herself in this mess?” I gestured to him—Drew and Andrew—in a vague circle.

  “Someone who cares more about her parents’ feelings than her own.”

  I sighed.

  Then I noticed he was trying not to look at the check, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t told him what it was.

  “It’s tuition money—a whole year’s worth.” I put it on my lap and smoothed it out, over and over. “I can’t even imagine how many extra hours she had to work for this.” I looked up at him. “This money feels tainted.”

  “It’s not. If anything, you earned that by always putting them first.”

  “I still lied.”

  He tilted his head at me and his voice lowered, heavy with experience. “It’s never that straightforward, lies being wrong and truth being right. Or at least that’s what I tell myself before every job.”

  “Does it get easier?”

  “Some days.”

  I stored the check in a safe place to deposit as soon as possible. The guilt clawed my stomach lining raw.

  * * *

  I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door quietly. After my third rap, my mother flung the door open and said, “Shh!” much louder than my gentle knocking.

  “He’s sleeping!” she hissed, jerking her head toward the bed.

  She stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

  Then she folded her arms across her chest. “What is it?”

  “Thank you so much for the gift. I can’t even… I appreciate it so—”

  “It was nothing,” she said, waving a hand.

  Why couldn’t either of us communicate?

  “No really, it means—” I tried again, but she cut me off.

  “It’s fine.”

  Silence.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry about what happened. With Hongbo’s parents, with Bible study, everything. I… I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.” Although you hurt me more, I didn’t say.

  She pursed her lips to the side and said nothing.

  “Please, Mǎmá.”

  She sighed. “Give us some space, okay? You threw a bomb at us. Maybe… maybe you and Andrew shoul
d do your own thing tonight. Somewhere else. Okay? Chinese restaurants will be open—on me and Bǎbá.”

  But I only see you a few times a year.

  But it’s Christmas.

  But it was self-defense for me. Like always.

  Aren’t I the victim here, not you?

  “Okay,” I said instead.

  She started to leave, but then she stopped and turned back to me. “At least you have Andrew. If you didn’t, you’d be in a lot more trouble. You better hang on to him, okay? Make this all worth it by showing me you were right about him, that he’ll be rich and successful and by your side. Do you think there’s a ring coming?”

  “My God, Mǎmá. I haven’t even graduated college yet.”

  “Yes, but when they have money, you have to lock them down sooner. You don’t have to get married tomorrow, but getting the ring is good.”

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I blurted. “How serious is Bǎbá’s whatever-it-is? Should I be taking some time off school to spend at home?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. If the University of Chicago is as good as you say it is, you wouldn’t make such stupid conclusions.”

  “Please. Just tell me if there’s something,” I begged. If they were trying to spare me from stressing, not knowing was much worse, because my mind had already spiraled to the darkest conclusions. But I couldn’t tell her that—she hated how I worried, told me it was my least attractive feature.

  Instead of answering my question, she said, “Bring a jacket when you go out tonight.” Then she slipped back into the bedroom.

  Drew CHAPTER 39

  FOR REALS

  But it’s Christmas was the first thought I had when Chloe relayed that her parents didn’t want to see us the rest of the day. For obvious reasons, I kept it to myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What would you like to do? What do you need?”

  “What are my options?” she said with a (very) forced laugh.

  “Well, we could wait a little and see if they change their minds. Or we could just plan something and hope they’ll join us? What do you guys usually do?”