Nothing But the Truth (13 page)

The grating sound of a buzzer goes off in my head. Wrong answer, Patty. And Brian pushes away my problem set.

“You’re obviously gifted in math,” he says like it’s a known fact. Here we go, folks. The model minority theorem. You are Asian. Hence, you work hard, you are a credit to your race, and you are a math genius. But what’s the corollary for
hapas? You are only half-Asian so you must be only half-good at math. Half-witted. Half-hearted. Half-assed.

“Why? Just because I’ve got squinty little eyes?” I ask even though I know perfectly well that I don’t. The bitterness of my words startles even me, as if they’ve been brewing for a lifetime in Mama’s Tonic Soup.

Brian actually looks offended, rearing back in his seat. “Whoa, hold on. That’s like saying I’m blond so I should be a surfer airhead dude who can’t add two and two, right?”

A smile sneaks onto my lips. Honestly, I can’t help it. Brian considers his feet in his well-worn flip-flops and then gives me a rueful smile in return.

“What I meant was that you’re as gifted in math as anyone here. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gotten in. God, your answer to the polynomial question on the application was…” He struggles for a word. “Elegant.”

I’m so surprised, I lose the ability to build a sentence out of simple words. “Me? Math? Elegant?”

Brian nods, running a tanned hand through his bleached blond hair. He changes tactics, now the star of the buddy-ol’-pal-I’m-one-of-you show: “Look, when I was in high school, kids picked on me for being the math geek. But you’re not in high school anymore, Dorothy.”

Brian smiles winningly at me, but I feel like a loser. Even if I were Dorothy and followed the yellow brick road and clicked my ruby shoes three times, there
was
someplace better than home.

This mansion, for one.

The thought of returning to House Ho while Janie and Laura are still off on their adventures, the thought of being
laughed at as the Summer School Dropout, of listening to Mama’s endless tirades about wasting more than three thousand dollars only to get booted out of camp after a week, is less than appealing. So I promise Brian, “I’ll try harder.”

Ding, ding. Right answer.

Brian glows and nods his head approvingly, my loyal Toto. “Good. It’s why we’re here, right?”

I nod my head even if he is so wrong.

I’m here not because of any great love affair with math like Anne and half of the guys. Nor am I here because I want to pad my college applications like Jasmine and the other half of the campers. I’m here because I don’t want to be up in the Pacific Northwest where it’s always overcast with disappointment and showering anger.

“Incidentally,” Brian calls to me as I shoot out the door, “you don’t have squinty little eyes.”

I’m flooded with adrenaline
and practically sprint from the tutorial all the way up to the Dish. My feet drum an angry rhythm on the paved trail wending up the foothills. I’m so focused on their one-two beat that I barely see or smell the eucalyptus trees as I pass joggers and walkers moseying along, nothing better to do on another perfect day in Northern Cal i fornia.

Two miles into the run, my body is shedding sweat tears. Jasmine pants, “Yo, daddy longlegs, slow the hell down.”

Honestly, I forgot about her, a couple of paces behind me since the start of the run. She might as well have been lost in the drying, knee-high grass and weeds.

Even if I want to, I can’t slow down. My daddy longlegs surge ahead. The Dish, an enormous, fifteen-story-tall telescope, is just ahead of me, on top of the hill. A guard on a golf cart hums by on my right, shoots a wicked look of challenge at me and steps on the gas. I speed up, panting hard, but he’s had a head start. Ten feet later, my lungs feel like they’re being crushed.

I’m doing the best I can,
I tell myself. Or am I?

Faster than I’ve ever sprinted, chased by every expectation I’ve failed to deliver on for Mrs. Meyers, Brian, my mom, I surprise myself with how much energy I have left in my reservoir. I pass the golf cart. The guard waves at me, a cheerful loser, but I don’t stop to wave back at him. I reach the Dish first. So how come I feel like the sore winner?

At the top of the foothill, catching my breath as I wait for Jasmine, the irony of the whole situation sinks in. I, the giant, have been coming up short. I start laughing, and a side ache cramps me. I can’t even walk, not one step. I clutch my left ribs, just under my heart. It hurts to laugh, but I can’t stop.

“Who are you? Zebra-woman?” asks Jasmine, breathlessly. But her sweaty face shifts to concern when she sees me. She offers me a drink of water through the long, flexible tube connected to her Camelpak pouch, a plastic umbilical cord. But I shake my head, still breathing and gasping and giggling too hard to drink anything.

“You OK?” she asks.

Nearly tripping over a rock jars the giggles out of me. I lose my balance and only manage to right myself just as I’m about to go skidding face first down into an oak chaparral tree with peeling, sunburned bark. I kick the rock out of my
way, knowing that I may be kicked out of camp if I don’t get my brain in gear.

“I always thought that being short would be so great,” I say. “It’s not.”

Jasmine looks confused. “What are you talking about?”

I tell her about Brian and how he thinks I’ve been shortchanging myself. Unexpectedly, Jasmine bonks me on the head with her tube of water. “God, you big doofus-brain. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That being smart is sexy. And any guy who doesn’t think so is too stupid to waste a single brain cell on… unless all you want to do is sleep with him. Then, you know…” Jasmine pulls off her ponytail holder and shakes her long mane free, “no thinking required.”

“Jasmine!” I say, pushing her. “Geez Louise.”

“Come on, I dare you to do this.” She whips her shirt off so that she’s standing in the Stanford sunshine with only her jog bra on top and yells, “Say it. Say, ‘I am one hip, hot hapa mama!’ ”

I blush and mumble, “I am a hip, hot hapa mama.”

“Pathetic.” Jasmine rolls her eyes.

As I stand on top of that foothill, overlooking the red-roofed Stanford campus and Silicon Valley and San Francisco, I have no idea if Jasmine is right, but I know Brian is. I’ve been shortsighted. Under the Dish that scans planets and distant galaxies, I know that the world—the universe—is bigger than high school and Mark Scranton and Steve Kosanko and their edamame-bean brains. That it’s bigger than Mama and math camp. That maybe I am Zebra-woman, trapped behind black-and-white bars of my own making.

I may not be able to claim loud and proud that I’m a hip, hot, hapa mama. Those are Jasmine’s words, not mine.

Instead, I cup my hands around my mouth and shout down this foothill of browning grass: “I am hapa haole!” I click my blue sneakers three times for good mea sure.

“You’re weird,” pronounces Jasmine, but she doesn’t look bothered.

We ran the Dish
so fast that we’ve still got forty-five minutes before our “or ga nized outing” with the rest of the campers. So we cut through White Plaza and head over to Tresidder, where we each pick up a Gatorade, having both drained Jasmine’s water supply. I’m so thirsty that I chug mine before we’ve made it past all the grad students, the lifers at Stanford, clustered on the patio.

“Ready for more math?” asks Jasmine.

“Yeah,” I say and mean it.

Just beyond the bookstore, a young black woman is stapling a flyer onto a kiosk that’s papered in so many layers it looks dressed for a ragtag ball. Her pink flyer is tacked on top of old ones for parties, jobs, diet pills. I backtrack when I see “HAPA” out of the corner of my eye, and brush away leaflets until I can read the one I want.

“No way.” The flyer is for The Hapa Issues Forum, announcing the last meeting of the school year on “Crossing the Hapa Line.” I can’t believe that there’s an entire or ga ni za tion for kids like me.

“Hate to break it to you, but you hapas are a dime a dozen here.” Jasmine rips the flyer off the kiosk and hands it to me. “Proof in case you ever forget.”

You hapas. I could get used to the sound of that, I think, as we head back toward the house in silence. I fold the flyer in half, holding it tightly in my hand.

A bunch of guys
are playing basketball on the court in back of FloMo. My eyes are on Stu patrol, easily spying him in the middle of the court. A ball gets away from the game, and Stu chases after it as it rolls toward me and Jasmine.

“Talk about model minority. There’s one coming our way,” says Jasmine.

“Shh.”

As if I play basketball all the time, I bend down, pick up the ball and toss it his way.

“Thanks,” says Stu, smiling at me, and then he pauses. “Wanna work on the problem set tonight—after dinner?”

“Yeah, sure,” I answer calmly, even though my pulse is racing like I’ve just run the Dish five times in a row. My eyes follow him back to the court, where he slam-dunks the basketball and shoots me a smile that says he knows that I’m watching him. And he likes it.

Jasmine nudges me. “Like I said, you hapas are so lucky.”

Stu hasn’t exactly asked me to a prom, but homework tonight certainly shows a lot of prom-ise. Who knew that late-night problem sets could shimmer with so many probabilities?

18
Equating

A
fter swimming, showering and
dining, Stu and I are finally studying in the Coffee House, or CoHo in Stanford speak. I should say, Stu is studying math, and, technically, I’m studying him. For a while, there’s nothing but the sounds of people talking, plates clinking, pencils scratching and my heart thumping because Stu is sitting just a touch away.

Stu’s pencil darts all over the equation we’re supposed to be solving together. My XX chromosomes are getting all hot and bothered just watching Stu’s XY action. Jasmine is so right. Brains + brawn = lots of yummy.

I steal a glance at Stu. He’s blowing a strand of hair out of his face, all concentration.

All I can concentrate on is whether Stu really thinks I’m cute. If so, his pencil moves a lot faster than he does, because he’s acting like we’re just problem set buddies.

Instead of dating, we’re equating.

Still, equating is threatening to one-fifteenth of the female population at SUMaC. Jasmine let it drop over dinner to Katie that Stu and I were studying tonight, and all Malibu
Barbie was able to muster was a weak verbal swipe at me: “What a perfect ho-hum first date.” I just laughed and told her that I had heard worse from third graders, ho ho ho. Anyway, if Katie thinks she can fluster me, she obviously doesn’t know that I’m an honors student in Mama’s Insidious Insulting Academy.

A couple of scraggly guys start setting up in the corner of the CoHo, pulling out guitars and microphones.

“This isn’t working out,” Stu says, tapping his eraser on an errant X.

Before I think about what I’m doing, I take my pencil, reach over to his notebook and jot down the answer. He woos me with a compliment; I with a math answer? Even as I lift my pencil, I wish I could scribble out the past few seconds.

I’ve blown it. Kiss “girlfriend” goodbye. No matter what Jasmine says, geekiness is the wedge that drives a space between “girl” and “friend.”

But Stu doesn’t gawk at me like I belong to a different at mo sphere. He blows out a whistle, long and loud with admiration, and looks at me like there’s nothing sexier than a smart girl.

I have to remind myself, I’m not at Lincoln High. I’m hundreds of miles away, in a world where brains may not necessarily trump beauty, but at least having a brain is a variable in the dating equation.

“Girl, you know your math,” Stu says loudly, and holds his hand up in the air, waiting for me to high-five him.

As soon as my hand slaps his, I know deep in my gut, where I’ve always felt the truth, that I am really and truly in the throes of my first bona fide case of Yellow Fever.

The way his hand lingers on mine tells me that Stu hasn’t been inoculated either.

“Favorite book,” he says.

My synapses are so focused on feeling his hand on top of mine that I watch his lips move and listen to his voice, but his words don’t make it up to my stewing brain:
What’s going on here?
He squeezes my hand and repeats, “Favorite book.”

“Possession,”
I tell him even though it feels like I’m giving him a piece of my soul when I do.

“Romance.”

“God, it’s so much more than a romance. It won the Booker Prize.” I spring to my book’s defense like I’m a potluck parent, parading its accomplishments, and then stop. “Wait, you read it?”

Stu laughs at my surprise. “Well, yeah, my mom lugs it on every vacation.” He has to lean toward me now that the jazz band is warming up in the corner, a lone trumpet crooning. “She said it’s the travel guide to every smart woman’s heart.”

She’s right, I think to myself. Only I’ve never needed a guidebook to my own heart, until possibly now.
Can my heart trust Stu?
I wonder. After all, I trusted Mark and he just about spit on my heart.

“How about you?” I ask. “Favorite book?”