Nothing But the Truth (9 page)

The smile on the old lady’s face fades, sealing in any goodwill behind now-tight lips. Say hello to the unfriendly skies, not that Mama notices.

Is it any big surprise that the check-in lady shakes her head after I heave my suitcase on the scale? With some satisfaction, she tells Mama, “That’ll be an extra seventy-five dollars.”

Two dull circles of outrage blotch Mama’s cheeks. If the check-in lady knew any better, she would have gotten on the loudspeaker to announce, “Code red. Prepare for a public display of anger.” I cringe, look away and pretend that I’m with the tall, Asian guy at the next station. But he doesn’t notice me. Typical.

With muscles I didn’t know Mama has, she hauls the suitcase off the scale and onto the floor, and wrenches the latches open. My man-magnet outfits, Janie-chosen and Laura-approved, fling out. Sure enough, they attract attention, but not in the way any of us imagined.

“Mommy, what is that lady doing?” asks the toddler loudly, no longer crying now that he’s watching Mama, the yellow Teletubby in a live per for mance.

That lady, I could have told the kid, is yanking out clothes
without any clear plan except to put my suitcase on an immediate Slim-Fast diet.

“Ummm, excuse me, ma’am?” The check-in lady is hesitant now. She’s probably afraid that Mama will karate chop her and stuff her headfirst into the rapidly thinning suitcase.

She doesn’t have to worry. Mama ignores her to pick on me: “Why you pack so much?”

I reenter my reality just as my pink panties flutter to the ground. I pluck them off the carpet, and then stand there, The Statue of Lunacy with my underwear in one hand. Fortunately, Anne grabs the panties out of my paralyzed hands and crams them and whatever else she can stuff into her nearly empty duffel bag. Saved by the Geek Scout. I would say thanks, except my lips are so swollen with shame that I can’t get a sound out of them.

Which is a good thing, otherwise who knows what I would have gargled out when the guy at the next station asked in startled disbelief, “Anne?”

I watch, openmouthed, as the Asian Adonis hugs Anne. He’s one of the few boys my age who’s actually taller than I am. Long bangs hang down into his eyes. In an unwrinkled, fitted white T-shirt and knee-length khaki shorts, he’s more chic than any boy at my high school.

Mama’s sex-dar is on high-alert, too. She demands, just as if Anne is her daughter, not me, “Who that?”

“This is Stu.” Anne introduces us casually like we’re all at a civilized English afternoon tea instead of at the airport with my luggage open for all to see. “We went to the Spring Fling together.”

Strategic information so that Mama doesn’t drive straight
to Mrs. Shang’s house to share a cup of jasmine tea and the juicy gossip that
(aiyo!)
Anne’s been hugging a boy!

I can’t take my eyes off Stu, but I tell myself it’s because I’m trying to decode their hug, and figure out how a hunk like him could possibly go to a dance with a nerd like her. Was it a friendly-good-to-see-you platonic kind of embrace or a friendly-I-want-to-feel-all-of-you one?

Unperturbed, Anne continues, “This is Patty. She’s going to math camp, too.”

“Nice to meet you,” I say, shaking Stu’s hand, hoping that my palm doesn’t feel clammy. Inside, I’m screaming, I’m going to SUMaC! After insisting to Janie and her mom that Asian guys don’t do anything for me, I am now officially eating my words as a hearty mid-morning snack.

I’ve almost forgotten all about my baggage claim to idiot fame until Stu brushes his bangs out of his eyes to see me better. His face is all angular
yang
with stark cheekbones and a strong nose. He asks me, “You need some more room for your stuff?”

“No, no,” I manage to say, channeling confidence, poise and sophistication. An image that gets blown the second the snotty-nosed, sticky-handed toddler pokes the stuffed cups of my bra that’s lying by my feet.

The truth is, I realize while my face grows hotter and Mama
hunhs
behind me, that no amount of extra room can hold all my excess baggage.

11
Turbulence

T
here are three truly
awful seats on an airplane, ones to be avoided at all costs—right over the wing (if you get sucked out, the turbofan will mangle you), wedged next to a size XXXXL person (who inevitably commandeers your space), and behind a screaming child (who will throw up, if not on you then within your smelling distance).

Oh, lucky me. I am officially in plane purgatory with the bra-poking kid now barfing out his entire system in front of my seat. Not that I blame him. The plane jolts and lurches hard. My short life flashes before my almond eyes, and I grip one armrest, the other one taken by my aisle mate, Mr. Big Man on Airbus. I tug upward, as if I could personally keep the entire plane aloft in the air.

“Please fasten your seat belts,” says the flight attendant as if anyone would be crazy enough to be a human Ping-Pong ball inside this plane. Her smooth voice is cut off by the pilot, who sounds like a cowboy enjoying this hell of a ride. He crows, “All righty, folks! I’m going to fly just a wee bit higher to see if we can catch some smoother air.”

Yee-haw, the plane is a bucking bronco in the Not-So-OK Corral.

“Do you mind?” Anne sighs heavily, not like she’s resigned to sure doom with me, but because I’m encroaching on her personal airspace.

Of course, I mind. Can’t she tell that I’m focusing all my energy into keeping us alive? Obviously not, because Anne nudges my elbow away from her side, gently at first, but when I don’t budge, with more force.

“It’s just turbulence,” says Anne, who looks annoyingly like she’s not at all bothered that the plane shudders with an uncontrollable fever.

She couldn’t be more wrong.

“Just turbulence” is how I feel when I think about Mark (which I try not to do). “Just turbulence” is knowing that the only Asian guy who’s made my palms sweat is sitting somewhere behind us on the plane, knows I wear a bra so padded it could double as protective gear for linebackers, and has an undefined relationship with Geek Girl next to me. “Just turbulence” is catching Mama’s eyes fill with tears before she barked one last order at me and then walked side-by-side with Abe away from me. “Just turbulence” is half-wanting to follow them back home.

Let’s be clear. “Just turbulence” is
not
speeding toward Mother Earth’s hard embrace.

I wait for Anne to whip out some fabulous fact about gravitational pull, wind drag and the expected time of impact. Instead, she asks, “Do you want a barf bag?” and reaches to the seat pocket in front of her. “You look pale.”

“So?” I say, too sharply.

“O-kayyy.” Anne drags out the last syllable as if it’s a hoe,
raking through the intractable soil of my rudeness. While I’m starting to regret snapping at her, she bends her turtle-thick neck back down to her lap and opens her book, a romance with a cover of cascading hair (his) and buffed biceps (hers).

Anne Wong, star student of Lincoln High, is engrossed in smut. Seeing Anne’s nose poked in something other than a literary masterpiece is enough for me to ignore the plane’s last angry bounce. Since I’m short on space with Mr. Big Man bulging into my seat, I lean over and read the words “hardened manhood” and “erect nipples.” Anne’s finger holds her place right above “thrust” and she lifts her eyes. “Do you mind?”

“Well, I, uh… You read this stuff?”

“It’s just sex, Patty.”

Laughter, the kind that makes you cringe because you’re the butt of a joke, slaps me in the face. Anne is shaking like she’s an airplane caught in turbulence. “God, you should see your face,” she says, not bothering to muffle her snorts. She’s so loud, the toddler in front of me peers through the gap between the seats. Anne waves at him and says, “It’s research, OK?”

“Research? For what?”

Anne’s hands twitch on her closed book like confiding in me is a risk. “You have to promise that you won’t tell my mom or dad.” She twists her body until she can study my face full-on. “Promise.”

“All right, all right.” Sheesh, reading a romance novel isn’t a matter of national security, but I could see how it would put a damper on potluck bragging. The only literary T & A worth dropping into conversation was how at just eight, Anne read Tolstoy and Austen.

Anne breathes in like she’s at the end of a diving board, and then mutters so fast her words slide into each other in their haste to get out of her mouth: “Mrs. Meyers challenged me to write a romance novel. A literary epic, for teens.”

“What? Why?”

“College,” she says as if I’m denser than Mrs. Shang’s hard turnip cake. “I’ve always wanted to write one, and she thought it’d make me stand out in the applications.”

I have to write a Truth Statement, and Anne gets to write True Fiction. The only Truth I see is that this sucks.

“Well… aren’t you supposed to write what you know?” I ask.

“Well… how do you know that I don’t know?”

The shock jock of the wild blue yonder grins just as our cowboy-pilot gets back on the speaker and drawls, “All righty, folks. I’ve found us some smoother air. You can unfasten your seat belts and walk about the cabin.” Buckles release around me, but mine stays firmly in place, strapping me to the relative safety of my seat as my head orbits into outer space:
Could the classroom dominatrix be a bedroom one, too?

But before I can find out, all six foot three inches of Stu are leaning against the seat in front of us. Stu, Anne’s gorgeous dance date with forearms corded with muscles I didn’t know boys could have. Stu, her partner in math and mashing? Hot gusts of envy buffet me. I am jealous of Anne Wong, head geek at Lincoln High, closet romance writer and object of Stu’s attention.

“All righty,” he says, tipping his imaginary cowboy hat. “That was interesting, folks.”

What’s
really
interesting is how fast Anne hides her romance novel, the core textbook for her advanced MBA program,
Master of Boobs and Asses. But as they compare notes on their last math competition, I realize just how wrong I was.

“Just turbulence” is realizing that Anne is being true to what she loves, even if it’s smarmy romance. Me, I’m still searching for love.

12
Amber-Colored Glasses

M
ama would have been
tripping all over her size five feet, shoving me forward, if she had seen all the Asian boys clustered around the SUMaC sign at the San Francisco airport like it was a cattle call for every Taiwanese mother’s dream game show:
Who Wants to Be the Asian Bill Gates?
I may not be able to date casually, but according to Mama, it’s husband assessment time. So Mama, in her true accountant’s efficiency, would have screened all these guys in less than thirty seconds apiece, and then presented me with her choice. “You marry this Good One after you go to college, get good job,” she’d order, never mind that her own track record in marriage leaves a lot to be desired. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, not ulcerating his stomach with nightly lectures.

I am waiting by myself in baggage claim. A few minutes ago, Anne dragged Stu away from the carousel with their compact luggage, drawn by an irresistible math homing instinct to the camp counselor, a man in his twenties with spiky blond porcupine hair. In his tank top and flip-flops, he
looks like he should be teaching surfing instead of SUMaC, even though the group gathered around him would be more at home surfing the man-made waves of the Internet.

If I were Janie, I’d be singing, “Aloha,” right about now as I boy-watched on the beach. But I’m Ho-Hum Patty Ho, watching for my behemoth baggage. It’s the last suitcase spit out onto the carousel, as if it’s reluctant to go to math camp, too, having already suffered the indignity of Mama’s strip search. When it does finally show up, I’m tempted to hop on the conveyor belt myself and spin around in an endless loop rather than huff and puff my way to the group of math misfits.

On my way to the SUMaC circle, a petite Asian girl slips effortlessly past me with her backpack and ergonomically correct roll-on luggage. She would have been a top contender for the China Dolls Club, except her ears are pierced in at least five places and she’s got a black-and-white tattoo of the yin-yang symbol on her shoulder. Even though we’re indoors, she’s wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses.