Trade Me (Cyclone 1)

“Lay on, Macduff,” Blake says.

Mabel stops and turns to him. “Hey. Only Tina can call me M-words other than Mabel.”

“Sorry.”

“Tina and her boyfriend,” she corrects. “So you’re okay. I guess.”

“Mabel.”

My sister grins and clambers up the stairs.

14.

TINA

Mabel wasn’t kidding when she said my mother was cooking. Most of the time, my dad cooks. He’s actually pretty good, so that’s not a problem. My mother only cooks on special occasions, and this, apparently, is a special occasion.

Her cooking style can best be described as eclectic. If I were being generous, I’d call her style “Asian fusion.” But that usually evokes the marriage of delicate Asian-inspired flavors with classical French technique. Mom’s food is more like…Asian Frankenstein: Chinese peasant food stitched together into a meal with boxes of random crap from the 99-cent store.

As an example, there’s a dish of lion’s head meatballs, huge round hunks of ground meat bigger than my fist. But instead of serving it in a traditional broth with thinly sliced vegetables, Mom has paired it with Hamburger Helper stroganoff and chopped-up celery. There’s a casserole of canned green beans, oyster sauce, and crisped rice noodles. And there’s a dish of stir-fried vegetables, toasted almonds, and tater tots.

“It only looks horrifying,” I whisper to Blake. “It’s actually really good.”

My mom takes one look at Blake, shakes her head, and heaps food on his plate. “You,” she tells him, before they’ve even been introduced, “need to eat more.”

She doesn’t—thank God—tease him about being my boyfriend. Yet.

“So, Blake,” my father asks as we sit around the table on an eclectic mixture of chairs and stools. “What are you studying?”

Of my parents, my dad is better at small talk, at putting people at ease.

“Economics,” Blake says.

“What do you plan to do after school? Go into business?”

Before Blake can answer, my mother interrupts. “Business school is a waste of money. Do you know how much it is now? Fifty thousand a year. At least. And not so many jobs anymore.”

Blake’s eyes dance. “Funny. My dad says the exact same thing.”

“He must be a smart man. What does your dad do? Tina never told me.”

Blake glances at me. “Computer repair.”

Luckily, nobody asks further questions. “And your mom?”

Blake clears his throat. “She’s not with us.”

I remember the conversation Blake and I had on the way down and tense. I can only imagine what my mother will say.

But my mother just smiles brilliantly. “That’s good! Too many boys your age get spoiled by their mothers. They don’t know how to cook, how to do laundry. Tina is going to be a busy doctor. She’ll need someone to do all that for her. Better if you’re not used to having someone else take care of you.”

I slink down in my seat. Blake is trying not to smile, but he’s not quite successful. “That’s probably true, Mrs. Chen, but Tina and I are just friends.”

It is obvious from the glances my parents exchange that nobody at this table believes that. Not my dad, who smiles beatifically, the way he does whenever he traps someone into a corner. Not my mom, who’s shaking her head. And definitely not Mabel, who snickers.

Possibly not even me.

“Eat more,” my mom advises Blake. “You’re too skinny.”

“Mom.”

“What?” She turns to me.

“Be polite. Please?”

“How is that rude? It’s just the truth. He has eyes; he knows he’s too skinny. And he’s not eating anything at all.” She tsks.

Blake, obligingly, takes a bite of Hamburger Helper. I’m not sure if he’s ever had Hamburger Helper in his life. Well, tough. Too bad. He has now.

“Better,” my mom says. “Good thing he’s not your boyfriend, though, Tina. He’s so skinny, I think a condom would pop right off.”

Oh my God. She did not say that. My whole body flushes in a wave of heat.

“Mom,” I mutter in a low voice. “Please.”

“Better make him wear two,” she continues merrily. “Just in case.”

I hide my face in my hands. “Gah.” It’s the only word I can manage.

I want to crawl under the table and take up permanent residence. If I did, at least it would distract my mom.

And that’s when Blake starts laughing. Not just chuckling, but full-on belly-laughing. He’s laughing so hard he starts to choke; my dad thumps him on the back, and he coughs.

“I’m sorry,” he finally gasps. “It’s just—on the way down, Tina gave me this huge lecture about how she refused to be embarrassed by you guys. There was this whole spiel about how there were cultural differences and just because you said things that were unusual by American standards didn’t make it wrong. She said that she refused to feel badly about it, so I was just going to have to adjust.”

“Rub it in, why don’t you?” I mutter.

“Sorry, Tina.” Blake pats my shoulder. “But—this one is all you.”

“That’s not a cultural difference,” my dad interjects. “Everyone thought Hongmei was inappropriate in China, too.”

“Yeah,” Mabel chimes in. “Dad embarrasses me in front of my friends at school. But Mom embarrasses me everywhere. It’s not a Chinese thing.”

“It is one of my many talents,” my mother says with a modest smile. “I put sand in everyone’s oysters.”

“That’s what Tina says,” Blake says. “So tell me about Jimmy Ma. What’s he up for?”

The appeal we’ve come down to see is the perfect topic of conversation. My mom loves talking about her…work? Her hobby? I don’t know how to think of it. She jumps right in. Blake listens and nods.

And me? Once I get over that flushed, heated embarrassment, I realize that things are worse now, not better. Blake is kind of perfect—drawing my mother out into the most animated version of herself, bringing my father into the conversation, even getting Mabel to talk about music and how she wishes she had her own saxophone. This, I remind myself, is media training in action.

I have to stop lying to myself. It’s more than media training. Blake’s always been easygoing. Hell, I’ve seen his comments on scripts going back a full decade now. He was like this at eleven: complimentary, interested, kind without being weak. He’s probably been serving as his father’s foil his entire life. His father growls about manufacturing and secrecy; Blake learns Mandarin and compliments the factory owner on the side. His father says that an idea is shit; Blake comes back and points out the good in it. This is what he does: he smoothes things over. He’s so good that Mom doesn’t even notice that he’s eating only a fraction of the food on his plate. I wonder if it’s always like this for him, if he?

?s always fixing things while nobody notices him.

He passes on the day-old Wal-Mart cupcakes that Mom has brought home for dessert, and offers to do the dishes afterward.

I help him. We work in silence—mostly. But at the end, when he’s drying glasses, when my parents are watching TV in the other room, he leans toward me.

“For the record,” he says, “you should stop worrying. Your parents are awesome.”

I didn’t want to be embarrassed by my parents…but maybe I did. I wanted to watch him not fit in so that I could remember that he doesn’t fit in. But it’s becoming harder and harder to remember that.

There’s just one reason to keep him at arms’ length now: He’s leaving. We’re over before we ever started.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Also for the record,” he says, “no, I wouldn’t need two condoms.”

I flush all over again, but this time it’s in heated memory. I’ve felt him, after all. I’ve been on top of him. I know precisely how thick he is, how long his erection is.

“I remember.” My mouth is dry. I don’t want to look at him.

But he brushes a strand of hair away from my face, and involuntarily, I look up. I don’t know what I’m seeing in his eyes now. Something raw and hungry.

Or maybe I’m just seeing a reflection of my own want.

“Good,” he says. “Keep on remembering.”

BLAKE

The Chens’ apartment is small: two bedrooms, a dining/living room, and a kitchen just off it. It’s cozy, and it feels lived in. By the various decorations on the wall, lined deep, and the layered bric-a-brac covering the shelves, it feels like they’ve lived here at least a decade.

It’s Friday morning. Tina has gone off with her mother to the hearing. Her father, pleading knee pain, has stayed behind. And because I suspect that Tina wants time to talk with her mother without me around, I claim that I have homework to finish.

After about an hour of playing around with a textbook, however, I stop pretending to work. And when Mr. Chen invites me to join him on the couch in front of the television, I do.