Nothing But the Truth (15 page)

So I do what I always do: I run away.

The return trip to
the dorm is a lot longer and lonelier by myself. I stay close to the Art Building, hugging its thick shadows as I shoot anxious glances over my shoulder. After the security guy’s first warning shout, I haven’t heard him since, but I still expect him to spring out of nowhere like we’re in a spy movie, with me, double-oh-Ho. One big difference, James Bond wouldn’t be so worried about getting caught that he nearly face-plants himself on the library steps. But I am stressed about getting caught, about Jasmine wherever she is. I wonder, does the Farm have a holding pen for students?

I skulk by Green Library, dark and desolate without any lights on. Another look around, but no overweight security guy, so I dodge in front of Meyer Library, the playground of Anne Wong and her new brain twister, Harry, since it stays open until nine at night. Anne! I groan, and add one more
item on my mental list of things to do to erase this evening from Patty Ho’s history of flubs. Anne cannot find out that Jasmine went buildering and I went blundering. Gossip is efficient in our potluck circle. One word from Anne to her mother and I might as well be homeward bound, both sent home and under permanent house arrest. If The Gossip Lady caught wind of this, well, let’s just say that every night will be prom night for the China Dolls, who will be celebrating until they are dead.

Thanking my runs around the campus, I easily navigate past the concrete bunkers of Stern Hall and cut up along Campus Drive. Just one more sprint up a butt-burning hill, and I’m home free, not house bound. Never before has a closed door looked more welcoming than it does now. My hand is on the handle, key in the lock. I’m inside Synergy, and scaling the stairs to safety when a door on the first floor opens.

“Not so fast,” says a guy.

I whirl around so quickly that I flirt with whiplash.

It’s not the beefy security guard; it’s beefcake Brian. He may be blond, blue-eyed and a babe, but he looks like he’s channeling Mama. His eyes are narrowed and I can tell he’s the guest speaker in the Mama Lecture Series.

21
Great Wall

C
halk it up to
me verging on a ner vous breakdown, but I start laughing. True, Brian’s hair is half sticking up, and the other half flattened down like a porcupine who doesn’t know whether he should be on the offensive or defensive. But I’m laughing so hard that I lose my grip on both the rail and reality, and slip down the last two stairs. Brian catches me, and I notice that he’s looking at me like my brain has busted into a billion pieces.

He shoots a ner vous glance up the stairs before steering me to his room, which makes me laugh harder because he looks like my bumbling partner in spying, double-oh-caught-in-limbo. As Janie and Laura know back home, once I get started on a good fit of laughing, I can hardly stop. Only Brian doesn’t know that I’m just cracking up, the crazy kind of laughing until you pee, not the totally-whacked-out-hysterical kind.

Quietly, Brian closes his door and puts both hands on my shoulders. For half a second, I think he’s going to kiss me when he leans toward my mouth, and I don’t know what to
do. Should I kiss him back? No, wait, what about Stu? Should I kick him? But no, the guy is sniffing my breath. Like a dog. Honestly, I’m a little weirded out until it dawns on slow-witted me that he thinks that I, Patty Ho, the girl whose craziest party antic was singing karaoke with the potluck group, am wasted. More like I’ve wasted my youth. Until now.

“I’m not drunk,” I say, although I feel it. At least, I think I feel it. But I am drunk with the thought that Brian, the man that Jasmine’s wanted to builder since she spotted him at the airport, is standing in front of me with nothing on except his boxer shorts.

“OK, so where’ve you been?” Brian folds his arms across his chest, looking like a dad who’s caught his kid sneaking back home. That’s when I’m struck with the pathetic realization that this is the closest to a father figure I’ve ever had in my life. “What’ve you been up to?”

Correction,
I’m tempted to say,
Jasmine’s the one who was
up
something tonight. I stayed on the ground.
I can’t stop the giggles that spill out of my mouth.

With one eyebrow quirked up, Brian inspects me like I’m falling apart. “Look, is this camp too much for you?”

That sobers me up almost as fast as if he had just said that he was going to call Mama. Almost. “What?”

“You’ve never been away from home. You didn’t want to be here in the first place.” As if Brian notices for the first time that he’s just one piece of clothing away from being naked, he turns around from me and grabs some jeans off his desk chair. While he’s tugging them on, I see his pecs and think that maybe Jasmine had a point putting Brian on her tick list of men to climb. “And the camp is a lot of pressure.”

Brian, Mr. All-American White Guy, has no concept of what pressure is. Stanford is Club Pre-Med with its own climbing gym of a campus and foothills and sculpture garden. My home is a pressure cooker with me locked inside. I’m trying to figure out something reasonable to say when Brian continues, “And you’ve probably coasted through school, so I can’t blame you for not knowing how to work.”

Coasted? Abe is the one who’s going to go down as the Brainiac in the Ho family annals, not Incomplete Truth Statement me. I’m literally so blown away that I bump back into his side table, knocking something over.

“Sorry,” I mumble and right the picture. It’s of Brian and some gorgeous Chinese babe in a bikini, a woman who makes the China Dolls look like ugly stepsisters.

“You know, I’m going to have to report this,” says Brian.

Funny, weeks ago, I would have welcomed this very scenario because it would have meant, bye-bye Math Camp. “Oh, you can’t!” I say. “I know I wasn’t supposed to go out tonight—”

“
Any
night.”

“Right, any night. But sometimes I can’t sleep.” I bend my head down and tell as much of the truth as I can without busting Jasmine. “I had a nightmare, OK? The same one I’ve had since I can remember, and I couldn’t breathe.”

Maybe it’s that Brian isn’t saying anything, that he’s listening without passing any judgment, but I admit for the first time, “It was my dad, chasing me, and I didn’t know why, only that I had to get away. Isn’t that weird since I’ve never met him?” I sigh, and start shivering. Now that my sweat is drying, I’m cold again. “I had to go outside.”

I expect him to make a joke the way Janie would have. Or rationalize my nightmare away the way Janie’s mom would have. Or give me some psychobabble the way Laura would have. Or make a sound of exasperation like Mama would have.

But Brian nods like he understands how things can haunt a person and hands a sweatshirt to me.

“Consider this a warning,” he says finally. “Your final one, kiddo.”

The last thing I should do now is engage Brian in conversation and possibly give him a reason to rethink his decision. Just grab this free pass from punishment and go. Yawn, tell him I’ll catch him in class tomorrow. That would be the smart thing to do. The prudent thing to do.

Instead, I slip on Brian’s oversized sweatshirt and ask him, “So why are you being so nice to me?”

“I’m nice to all you kids,” he says, but his eyes stray over to the photograph of the China Doll. God, I hope that woman knows how lucky she is to have a guy looking at her picture with such a sweet combination of loving and longing. Brian smiles sheepishly when he catches me watching him and straddles his desk chair, propping his arms on its back. “So your dad’s Chinese?”

“White,” I correct him. “My mom’s Taiwanese.”

He looks at me like he wants to ask me something but thinks better of it.
Let it go,
I think to myself. But I’m curious. “What?”

“Was that tough for them?”

I realize that I don’t know. Forever, it seems, I’ve sketched out scenarios for how Mama drove my father away, how she harped on him until he couldn’t stand it anymore. But honestly, I have no idea what really ended them, just as I don’t
know what brought them together. All I know is that life in the scorched aftermath has made me parched for love.

“Mama never talks about him.” And neither do I. I seldom let people into my heart, barricading them from really knowing who I am. But there’s a reason for Brian’s question and I can’t believe that I dare to ask, “Is it tough for you guys?”

“Denise wouldn’t tell her parents about me for two years.”

If Janie and Laura were here, their eyes would widen in disbelief; they would screech, “No way!” But could I blame Brian’s girlfriend for keeping him secret? I nod sympathetically and say, shyly, hoping that it won’t offend him, “If I brought home a made-in-America souvenir, even one from Stanford, I might as well buy a lifetime pass for all my mom’s lectures.”

“That just about sums up what Denise thought, too.”

“Do they know about you now?”

“Yeah, now they do,” he says wryly. “I figured, if we’re getting married, we got to come out at some point. I think I scored at least a tenth of a brownie point when I asked her dad if I could marry her. In Mandarin.”

“You did?”

“It took me a good month to get the pronunciation right.”

“It took me a good month to learn how to say, ‘No, I’m not hungry anymore.’”

Brian breaks into a wicked laugh and we smile at each other in understanding.

“God, I could have used that during my last visit to see Denise. Talk about gorging myself,” he says, puffing out his cheeks like he’s gained fifteen pounds. “Every time I thought we were done with a meal, her mom came at me with something else to eat.”

“That was just her way of saying she liked you,” I translate for him.

Brian grins hopefully. “Yeah? Denise told me I better eat it all, otherwise I’d offend her mom.”

“Definitely.”

“I swear to God, I didn’t think I could move for three days after I flew back home.” His smile fades a little. “You know what’s weird though? Being in Hawaii was the only time I felt blinding white. I mean, almost everyone I met there was Asian. You know what I mean?”

I laugh out loud, thinking about how I feel back home, an alien in my high school. “Oh, my God,” I say and perch on the edge of his bed. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Really,” he says. Not a question, so much as an open door, an invitation for me to tell the truth.

“Really.” At last, I emerge from behind my Great Wall of Chinese Silence and tell Brian what I’ve locked inside myself: Steve Kosanko, being othered, Mama’s no-dating mandate.

“I finally feel like I’m at home,” I admit. “Weird, and at math camp.”

“Sometimes you just need to expand your Set,” Brian says.

“You are such a math geek.”

“Takes one to know one.” At that, Brian yawns and scratches the side of his face, bristly with whiskers. “OK, kiddo, I need my beauty sleep. Unlike some people, I’m not fifteen anymore.” He looks meaningfully at me as he stands. “Next time you have a nightmare—or anything—just get me. Don’t go outside.”

As I’m slipping out his door with a “thanks,” Brian pulls me into his arms and hugs me tight, the kind of hug that says welcome. Welcome in, welcome home, you are always
welcome. When he lets me go, Brian hesitates and then says, “When I first saw you, I thought…” He shrugs like he’s embarrassed. “Well, when Denise and I have kids, they’ll probably look like you. The best of both worlds, that’s what she always says.”

I think about that as I tread lightly up the stairs. The best of both worlds. Usually, I consider myself a greater than or less than statement. My Asian-ness is greater in Twin Harbor. My hips are less than Janie’s. I round the corner and pause at the bay window where the sky is growing lighter, sunlight bumping up against darkness. Who would have known that I should view my world as one big, interlocking Venn diagram, which, when you think about it, is like a mathematical version of the yin-yang sign. The real me, the one I’ve stashed away, is the sliver where the best of my selves—Asian, white, closet math geek, runner, friend, daughter, girl-in-lust-with-Stu—intersect.

The sleeves of Brian’s sweatshirt, two sizes too big for me, fall past my fingers, and as I push them up to free my hands, I get a good look at the slash of fiery pink cutting across the sky. It dawns on me that Mama has it all wrong. There are some people—even (gasp!) men—you
can
trust without knowing them your entire life.

By the time I
slip back to my room, it’s almost six. Jasmine is in bed, awake and waiting for me. “Oh, my God, where were you?”

Where was I? Chased by a fat guard, hit by a laugh attack and nearly thrown out of Stanford University Math Camp, never to see the light of the campus ever again, and certainly
not as a future student. All of a sudden what was so funny in Brian’s room is no laughing matter. Before this moment, I had no idea how much I would have given up.

“We shouldn’t have gone tonight,” I say, dropping her backpack next to her bed.

“How can you say that?” Jasmine blinks. “Tonight was amazing.”

Maybe for her, but not for me. I wonder if I’m allergic to adventure, because as I recount my ordeal, Jasmine alternately gasps and giggles.