Quentin rolled his eyes and turned to Rutsuo, who’d been curled up in his chair the whole time. He whispered something in the quiet boy’s ear and then punched him jovially in the arm. It was way too hard and nearly knocked him off his seat, but Rutsuo just blushed and smiled.
Yunie eyed Quentin, and then me.
“You two are a lot alike,” she said.
“Don’t even.”
“I’m going over there,” she said.
“I said don’t even!”
Very little could prevent Yunie from doing what she wanted to. She marched right up to Quentin and tapped him on the shoulder.
“That was very good of you,” she said.
Quentin shrugged. “I have always hated people like that.”
“Yeah, Mike and his friends are assholes.”
“No,” said Quentin. “I mean the big one with curly hair.”
“Huh? Androu?”
“Yes.” Quentin’s face darkened. “Bai chi like him care only for order, not justice. They’ll let banditry run free right under their nose so long as no one raises a fuss.”
Even Yunie had a hard time keeping a straight face at that. Calling our school douchebags a pack of bandits seemed like an upgrade they didn’t deserve. She fought back a giggle and glanced across the room at me.
“Good thing we have one more fuss-maker around now,” she said.
I gave her both middle fingers.
6
Waking up this early on Saturday would have sucked any time of the year, but today was a high-pollen-count day. My eyes burned at the beautiful weather outside, even though the window was shut tight. Lush green foliage, crisp breezes, chirping birds: Allergy apocalypse.
I sat up and rubbed my face until my room came into focus. It had been tiny for a very long time. Even though I kept it clean, it was covered in a thick layer of grade-school knickknacks that I never bothered to clear out—art projects that were mostly glue, dolls with bad haircuts, works of fiction that spanned from Dick and Jane to Great Expectations.
You could have dug a glacial core in my room and pinpointed the exact moment I stopped caring about anything but escaping it. That was where the textbooks and extra study materials and supplementary lessons took over the fossil record. That was when the comet had struck my family. My personal Chicxulub.
The news from the shower radio promised no
respite from the assault on my eyes. The wildfires raging unchecked in the hills on the other side of the Bay could be sending us a welcoming embrace of particulate at any time. The governor was calling for a state of emergency due to drought conditions. California! What a paradise.
After I dressed, I made myself a pot of coffee and downed the whole thing while packing my lunch. I knew some of my classmates didn’t drink it, but I could replace my blood with the stuff. It wasn’t like it was going to stunt my growth at this point. Plus any magical liquid that makes you study harder was A-OK by my mom.
As lame as it sounds, this was no different from my weekday routine. I just left my house in a different direction, for the center of town instead of toward school.
It wouldn’t have made a difference in the scenery. The houses in this part of the neighborhood had a chronic case of sameface. Garage-less brick boxes with lawns too small to make snow angels. And this was the “more livable” part of town. The rest of Santa Firenza by the office parks was a prairie of concrete and asphalt that grilled your optic nerves from reflected glare. Sure there were a few trees, but they didn’t commit. This was a land that was hot, flat, and almost entirely without shade.
A far cry from the glorious playground of gleaming aluminum and primary colors that everyone thinks of when they imagine Silicon Valley. That image only holds up in the campuses of the two or three truly giant tech companies, the lone islands drifting in a sea of reality. The rest of the Bay Area is, unfortunately, the Bay Area.
The one thing we do have down here, more so than green spaces or the changing of the seasons, is education. We gobble up as much of it as we can, in forms both cheap and expensive, from bank-breaking Montessori preschools to flannel-wearing college kids paid under the table for tutoring. Whatever each of us can afford, really. Call it a side effect of our Asian-ness, whether genetic or absorbed through proximity.
Today I was doing my part to perpetuate the cycle of violence to the next generation. Every so often the library closes to the general public and holds an all-day event for children where older students read aloud to them. The kids get points for how long they last and how many books they sit through, with the winner at the end of the year receiving I don’t remember what. A trip to Great United amusement park maybe.
The readers, on the other hand, get a big ol’ badge of VOLUNTEERS and GIVES BACK TO THE COMMUNITY.
Yunie and I have been doing the Read-a-Thon ever since Ketki Pathpati graduated and unofficially passed the torch to us. Technically anyone can help, but it’s sort of our thing now. I only wish we had invented it ourselves—the colleges would have given us a lot more points.