The Wangs vs. the World (20 page)

二十一
El Paso, TX

1,038 Miles

GRACE POINTED her foot and dipped a toe in the acid-green pool. The water was hot. The night air smelled like gasoline and burnt sagebrush. All around them the flat desert streets lay still; just out of reach, a cicada spun itself in circles, drowning.

“We should rescue it,” said Andrew, not moving.

“It’ll just die later.”

“Still.”

“‘Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.’”

“What?”

“It’s Virginia Woolf.” She tipped the little airplane bottle of Jack Daniel’s to her lips, waiting for the last drops to drain out as she stared at the striped roof of the Whataburger across the street. The layered
W
s of the sign looked like a Missoni-ish chevron pattern. Maybe she could start a website that found fashion influences in fast food places. She’d name it Couture Road Trip. Or Couture by Car. And then some designer would call her his muse and make a pattern out of Whataburger signs and then she’d be famous and could do a shoe collaboration and wouldn’t need to inherit any money anyway.

Because she probably wasn’t going to. Somewhere between driving away from Kathy’s house in Ama’s car like a family of thieves—her stolen laptop banging against her knees in the backseat, the U-Haul filled with lifted merchandise rumbling along behind them—and walking in on Andrew playing with himself, Grace had admitted that she was lying to herself. There was no show, no party. Instead, this was the end. It couldn’t be, but maybe it was.

Checking into this crappy Texas motel had somehow clinched it. They had gone up to the room, the four of them, standing still as the hollow door creaked shut. Barbra had taken out a handkerchief and used it to pull aside the plastic-backed drapes and then their father had looked at the two queen beds, and said, “One for boys, one for girls?” She and Andrew had been horrified. What did he think would happen if they shared a bed? Grace had looked at Andrew, who nodded at her, and said, “You guys take your own bed. We’re going to go out to the pool.” Andrew grabbed his backpack and one of the key cards, and they ran out, leaving the grown-ups to figure it out for themselves. A narrow escape.

“Gracie, do you think they’re asleep yet?”

“What if they’re having sex?”

“Oh god, why would you say that? Brain! Burning!”

“Does it really gross you out that much? It’s just sex.”

“Yeah, but it’s
Dad
and
Babs!
I don’t want to picture them all naked and saggy on a motel bed!”

“I don’t know . . . it kind of doesn’t gross me out. I can picture pretty much anyone doing it without getting grossed out.”

“But your own father!”

“I know! Logically, it’s gross, but when I picture it, it’s like picturing someone eating or something. You know, just like a normal, everyday thing.”

“That you do with someone else. Naked.”

“Yeah . . .”

“And sweaty.”

“Eew! Okay, now it’s gross!”

“Thank god, I was starting to think you were some kind of perv.”

Grace waggled her eyebrows at him. “I could picture you and some lovely young coed.”

“Grace, stop it! Seriously! Maybe I’m too innocent to share a bed with you after all!”

“Oh, I blur out all the private parts in my mind.”

“God,
I
can’t even picture me having sex.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just can’t. I mean I can, I do picture it, but then I kind of can’t, you know?”

“Wait, have you not?”

“You have?”

“Well, yeah. But what about you and Eunice? I just thought for sure . . .”

“You know how religious she was.”

Grace shrugged. “I haven’t seen that matter much with other people.”

“Wait, you’re kind of skipping over the more important revelation here.”

“Andrew, I’m sixteen! It’s not a big deal. You just think it’s a big deal because I’m your little sister.”

Andrew looked at her for a second the way some other guy might. She was pretty, of course. When she was a kid, she’d looked like a doll, with her pink cheeks and rosy little lips. But now, though Andrew hated to even think it, little Gracie was kind of sexy.
Oh god. She was.
He knew that guys liked Saina, but that was different. She was his older sister, which meant that she was always part of a vague, adult world that swirled just slightly above his head, alluring and unreachable. Even when he’d hit sixteen, and then eighteen, and now twenty-one, all the ages that had seemed so wise and
fun
when Saina occupied them, it felt as if he were failing to tap into all the adventure those years promised. Road trips! Cigarettes! Drunken adventures! Saina had done all that with abandon, and now Grace seemed to be following her easy lead in a way he’d somehow talked himself out of doing.

“Hey, big brother,” Grace singsonged, “are you ruined forever? Have I blown your mind by admitting that I’ve blown other things?”

“Oh my god, Grace! Stop it!”

“Okay, okay! I’m sorry, that was too much—I just kind of couldn’t resist. C’mon, it was a good joke, right? Like, from a professional standpoint?”

“It was a terrible, terrible thing to say from any standpoint.”

Grace kicked at his submerged leg, splashing the chemically charged water up onto the tile, which was still hot even though the sun had been down for hours. “Do you think I’m a slut now?”

“No! Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“If I’m a slut?”

“Oh no, no. It’s just this girl that I was involved with. I really liked her but she—” Andrew paused and looked at his sister.
Well, why not?
“She wanted to sleep with me, but I just wasn’t sure.”

“Was she hot?”

“Grace, is that really all you think it’s about? Was she
hot?
Is that what you do? Just fuck anyone you think is
hot?
”

She looked up from braiding a strand of hair, shocked. Behind her winged eyeliner and baby hipster layers of necklaces and bracelets, his little sister was still so young. A pinprick of anger broke through his heat-heavy torpor.

“Have you fucked a lot of guys?”

“I’m not telling you!”

Okay.
Andrew would have to change tack. The important thing now was to save her from becoming one of those girls that everyone wanted to sleep with and no one wanted to take out to dinner. “Grace, look, I’m not trying to shame you. It’s your choice, right? I mean, it should always be your choice. But you don’t have to choose . . . to, uh, do it with a lot of people.”

“You are so condescending.”

“You don’t know what guys are like—”

“No,
you
don’t know what guys are like because you’re deciding that you have to be a
virgin
for some reason. Dude, why is it such a big deal? Are you a Republican or something?”

“I don’t care what other people do, I just . . . I just think that things like sex matter. It’s your connection with another person. It should mean something.” He looked at her, underlit by the glow of the pool. Should he tell her about their father and his unfaithfulness? He hesitated. “Just . . . just don’t be stupid, Grace.”

Grace scraped back on the concrete and jumped up, kicking a spray of pool water in his face. She stood, looming above him, furious now. “Why are you being like this, Andrew?”

“Like what?”

“All judgy, like you’re my dad or something. Are you going to try to send me off to boarding school, too?”

Contrite, Andrew leaned over and grabbed at her ankle. “No! Hey. No. Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

“Well, you did.”

“Don’t be Gracie mad! Be my friend again.” He held up the empty minibottle of Jack. “Say hello to my little friend?”

“It’s not going to work, Andrew. Guys can just quote things from movies and everything’s cool, but it’s not going to work with me.”

It was always like that,
thought Andrew. Any time Grace felt like someone was disapproving of her, even the slightest bit, it became an all-out battle. Youngest child syndrome. That had made so much sense when he first read about it. He was always in the middle, bringing Grace and Saina together, giving in to their dad, being nice to Barbra. He felt like Rodney King sometimes, arms outstretched, asking for everybody to just get along.

“So is this all real?” asked Grace.

“You being mad at me for no reason? I hope not.”
God.
Andrew. He should be a stupid comedian—he always tried to make everything a joke. Grace briefly considered the possibility of both of her siblings being famous. If that happened, then she’d have to be famous, too, which she was planning on anyway. It wouldn’t be fair if she was the only one who wasn’t.

“No, asshole. All of this. Us staying in this piece of shit place, Dad not having money for our tuitions, our house being gone. Is that all real?”

For a minute, Grace still expected the answer to be no. She looked for a flicker in Andrew’s face, a hidden smile, a creased eye, something that would congratulate her for stumbling on the secret. And then a hail of balloons would fall out of nowhere and all her friends would run out from behind the Dumpsters and the whole place would erupt like an episode of
My Super Sweet 16,
but instead of giving her a car, her father would give her a giant check and tell her that no one ever expected her to pass all the tests as quickly as she did.

“Grace—”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, gently. “What did you think it was?”

She curled up her toes, scratching them against the concrete, breathing in the throat-searing chlorine, closing her eyes to the harsh fluorescents that cut through the hazy moonlight. She licked her lips. They were salty with sweat. How could she have been so completely, utterly, nonsensically, next-level idiotic? Of course it wasn’t like
The Game.
Her father would never have gone to so much trouble for something that wouldn’t make money. Her stepmother would never have agreed to drive with all of them to Saina’s house just to teach her some sort of lesson. Grace looked down at her brother’s face. Open. Concerned. Andrew was so fucking sweet. He would have done it. He would always do anything for her.

“What did you think it was?” he asked again. So worried.

“Nothing,” she said, dully. And then she kicked him in the chest, hard, her bare foot leaving a wet imprint in the middle of his T-shirt, and took off, running back towards the room.

Behind her, she could hear his
oof
and then a scrabble on the concrete as he struggled up after her.

He reached the door a step behind her and waved the beige key card in her face.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Are you just upset about things?”

“Don’t talk to me.” She snatched at the key. He pulled it away. She reached again and he did the same thing. This dance. She hated it. “Don’t make me do this now, Andrew. Please.”

Andrew relented and slid the card into the door. The adults lay huddled in one bed, two soft lumps, breathing too lightly to really be asleep. He headed towards the empty bed, tired now, and slipped in without bothering to change clothes or brush his teeth.

Andrew closed his eyes. He could hear Grace unzipping her suitcase, banging the lid against wall, storming into the bathroom and turning up the water. It was freezing in the room, the air conditioner anchored next to the door fanned gusts of cold air back and forth. Andrew burrowed himself into the pillows and pulled the scratchy coverlet up to his neck. He was just starting to drift off into sleep when Grace swiped a pillow out from the pile and tossed it onto the foot of the bed. She yanked the sheets out from under the mattress and got in, kicking her feet towards Andrew’s face.

He was disappointed. Andrew realized that he’d been looking forward to the familiar comfort of sharing physical space with someone who wasn’t going to drive him crazy with repressed desire, but Grace made it into a war instead. Her dirty feet were tucked under his pillow now, one grimy heel, blackened by running up to the room barefoot, inches away from his nose. He could smell them. They didn’t smell bad, really, just like a sweaty T-shirt left too long in the backseat of a car. Sharing a bed should have been like watching movies with his sisters when they were kids, before Saina left, before Grace was sent away, when they would all just pile together like puppies, Grace’s legs kicked across his lap, his head resting on Saina’s shoulder, Saina doling out snacks from their father’s stash: roasted melon seeds, walnut-studded date cakes wrapped in edible rice paper, little rolls of coin-shaped haw flakes, sticks of dried squid sandwiching a thin layer of black sesame. Andrew reached over and squeezed one of Grace’s toes, trying to be friendly. She thrashed out at the touch.
Fine then.
Andrew turned and pushed himself all the way to the very edge of the bed, pulling the sheets with him, making an empty tent between their two bodies.

二十二
I-10 East

JUST THREE DAYS on the road and already her powder-blue exterior was covered in a thin veil of drab dust that made her look grimy and uncared for. Across her windshield, a smattering of bugs. Squished into the tread of her tires: gravel, garbage, gum. On her roof, an avian bomb site with white splatters ringing shrapnel turds. And hitched to her lovely chrome bumper, a horrible box on wheels, so heavy that it pulled at her screws, loosening them thread by thread.

Gone were the days of May Lee and her neat, gloved hands steering the two of them through the palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills. Gone, even, were the days of conveying Ama, who drove as if she were in a wrestling match, all the way to the San Gabriel Valley via an interminable series of surface streets. Gone was the gardener’s son, who had washed and polished her along with all the other cars, and never mind that she wasn’t used nearly as often.

Inside, things were even worse.

Charles, knees akimbo, farting constantly into the upholstery, was always in her driver’s seat. He had stuffed her door pocket full of ancient maps that must trace their way across some forgotten America and was constantly jamming his giant sunglasses into her visor, where they’d fall and hit him on the head over and over again.