“You . . . knew about the party?” I said.
“Of course I did,” Mom said, her upset-meter beeping a little at the insult to her intelligence. “I’m not an idiot. You’re a teenager at a college.”
“And you’re our daughter,” Dad said. “We know plenty that you don’t tell us about.”
The one upside of what had happened to my family was that I could no longer receive double-parent dressing downs like these. But now the hydra had regenerated and was going to attack me from both sides. I thought about lying my way out of the situation. Or protesting that I didn’t drink or have fun.
But that risked ruining my mother’s relative tranquility. She wanted guilt, so I would have to give it to her. I sighed.
“Yes,” I said, steeling myself for the inevitable scolding. “I drank too much and partied a little too hard. I got slightly sick.”
“Good,” she said. “Not good that you got sick, but good that you had a lot of fun and drank and tried something new.”
The car kept going, but in my head the brakes had slammed to the floor. My brain came screeching to a halt. I wanted to roll down the windows and scream for help. An alien had kidnapped my mother and replaced her with a malfunctioning duplicate. I was equipped for demons, not aliens. This was a government situation.
“You’re glad I went to a drinking party?” I said incredulously.
In the glimpse I caught of her in the windshield reflection, my mother swallowed a lump in her throat. “Genie, I was hoping you would have the time of your life this weekend,” she said. “I was hoping you would fa
ll in love with that school. I know you want to go somewhere farther away. But I thought if you truly loved that place, then maybe you would stay in the Bay, closer to us, where we could see you more often.”
Subtlety. Recognition of my choices. Hoping instead of screaming. I wanted to grab my mother and shout Are you even Asian anymore?
“That place is hella expensive,” I said. “There’s no good way to pay for it.”
“There’s no good way, but there’s ways,” Mom said. “We can always take out more loans, work more jobs. It’s worth it if you love it.”
She was saying that we should double down on our past mistakes. Lean into the jaws of the shark. “Do you know what would happen to us with more debt?” I said.
“No,” she said. “But that’s not the point. You worry too much about things being clear and certain. Who knows? Sometimes things work out.”
Dad saw that I had extreme difficulty responding. So he changed the subject to a nice, easy, soothing topic of conversation. “Your mother and I are getting back together.”
I choked on my own saliva. My heart couldn’t take this. It was going to explode long before Mom’s did.
“For the health insurance,” he explained while I tried to self-Heimlich. “It turns out that the policy I get from the gym is really, really good. It’ll cover medication, specialists, regular checkups.”
He thought of a joke that he really liked and sent it through the Dad-filter until it came out covered in lint. “It’s what they give us instead of money!” he said.
I didn’t laugh. This wasn’t a fairy-tale ending. This was a slow-rolling disaster in the making. My parents were not good for each other. They were going to make each other miserable. They were going to trap each other in French Existentialist hell.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said, when I should have been painting warnings on the windshield in my own blood.
“No,” Mom said. “What did I tell you about being certain? We don’t know. But we’re doing it, and that’s that. I don’t want to hear any lip from you about it.”
Knowing what they’d done to each other in the past, this was a sacrifice. And they were making it for me. To free up some resources for my education, my continuing improvement as a human being. They were willing to get back on the Wheel of Suffering right where they’d left, in order to give me the push I needed to break free.
I didn’t like it one bit. I owed it to them to mention the alternative I’d passed up. If they thought quitting school for the money was a better idea, maybe I could go crawling back to Ax and beg him for a second chance. I told them about his offer.
“That sounds like a terrible idea,” Mom said. “College kid nonsense. They think they know everything at that age.”
“I’m glad you told him no,” Dad said. “It feels like it would have turned you into a different kind of person than you are.”
“You’re too smart to work for a dumb boy like that,” Mom said. “Go into business for yourself if you want. You’d be good at it.”
Oh the ever-loving irony, hearing them of all people extoll the virtues of entrepreneurship. I was thankful they weren’t yelling at me for rejecting the easy money. But my father’s words stung a little.
Becoming a different kind of person than I was was the point. Growth meant change. Adapting to the circumstances of the Universe.