The Wangs vs. the World (9 page)

“Are you going to let me download my stuff, or does that belong to the school, too?”

“Of course you can download any personal information. I know you probably have quite a lot of photographs of, well, of yourself.”

“Yeah. So?”

Brownie sighed. “Grace, just go ahead and do whatever you need to do.”

Weird. She was acting weird, like
she
was the one who deserved to be upset or something. Maybe she just didn’t understand style blogs.

Grace powered the laptop on and plugged in her backup drive.

Finder > Grace Home > Photos > Morning > September.

Select All.

3,212 photos.

She dragged the folder over to the icon for her drive and dropped it in. A progress bar popped up. Two percent. Three.

Grace looked up at Brownie, who was tapping at her phone, probably trying to figure out text messaging or something. “You don’t have to wait out here. I’ll bring it over to the office when I’m done.”

Brownie hesitated. “It’s alright. I’m sure you’d rather not be on your own at the moment.”

Ha.
“Um, I don’t mind being on my own. And it might take half an hour to copy everything over.”

“Then that’s what it takes.”

“Hi, Gracie, Daddy here now!”

A car door slammed, and Grace looked up from the screen to see her father climbing the brick steps towards her, arms outstretched, shouting loud enough for the whole school to hear.

No!
She wasn’t done yet. There were still five more folders of self-portraits, plus a bunch of street style shots that she took of kids at school. Maybe it would go faster if she copied a few batches at a time. Quickly, before her dad could get all the way up the steps, Grace dragged two more of the folders in the Morning file over and tensed as she waited for another progress bar to pop up.

“
Xiao bao!
What’s wrong, heh?” Charles put a hand on Grace’s head and then slowly crouched down next to her, using her shoulder for balance. He was out of breath from the sprint up the stairs but, Grace knew, he didn’t want to get his linen pants dirty. “Hey, don’t sit like that, Meimei,” said Charles, pointing at her outstretched legs. “Always cross knees, okay?”

Suddenly, Grace felt deeply embarrassed. She didn’t want her father to know what she was doing, didn’t want him to know that he hadn’t paid for the computer. He must know, of course, but he didn’t have to know that
she
knew that he knew.

“Welcome, Mr. Wang.” Brownie rose from the bench across the entryway, where she’d been sitting for the past twenty minutes. Grace felt her father wobble and kept her head down, willing the computer to go faster. Half a moment later, he had sprung up and was heading towards Brownie, hands outstretched.

“Ah! Headmistress Brown! It is lovely to see you again, though the circumstances are quite unfortunate! Is Grace giving you any trouble?”

“Dad! How is any of this my fault?”

“No, not your fault,” said her father quickly.

“Oh no, Mr. Wang, Grace has been handling herself in a way that befits her name.”

Still spinning. The little Mac wheel of death. The files were never going to finish copying over and her father probably wouldn’t wait. She could see Babs in the station wagon—why the station wagon?—staring straight ahead.

“
That’s
the car that you kept? Why, Dad?”

Her father shrugged. “Ama gave back to us.”

“Are we going to switch to Andrew’s car?” It was a Range Rover. That probably made more sense.

“No, no. Ama give this back, we give that back.”

“Dad, what do you mean? Give it back to who? Isn’t it his?”

“Gracie.
Bu yao zai shuo le,
okay? We talk later.”

Rebellion burned in Grace’s chest. Her father wanted her to be on his side, to smile and wave and skip in front of Brownie so it would look like nothing was wrong, but he was the one who sold her out first with his “Is Grace giving you any trouble?” Of course she wasn’t. He was the one who was giving them all trouble, all the trouble was always about him. He was the one who’d freaked out and packed her off to boarding school two years ago just because she’d fallen for a boy. Diva Daddy, Saina sometimes called him—she and Andrew had a whole song about it, complete with jazz hands. Babs should have been the diva, but instead it was her father.

The laptop burned through her jeans, making her legs feel itchy and constrained. Both of the adults looked at her, not talking to each other.

“Gracie, what are you doing? Time to go now, okay?” Again, accusing.

Fine.

Then she wasn’t on his side at all; everything was his fault.

“Dad, is it true that we didn’t pay for this?” She jutted her chin towards the computer. “They’re making me give it back to them, but I have so much stuff on here, it’s going to take forever to copy it all over and I didn’t know that I couldn’t keep it.”

“What you need to copy?”

“Stuff for my blog, my photos, important stuff.”

Expansive, proud, her father beamed. “Gracie! You have the blog? Why you don’t tell Daddy? Good, good, now you can be Internet millionaire! No problem!”

Nice try, Daddy
. “Well, maybe, but it’s a style blog. I didn’t invent Facebook or anything. But it does get a lot of hits, and people link to my stuff a lot.”

“That’s okay, you become Internet star! So you need this computer?” Charles turned to the headmistress. “Dr. Brown, we can pay you for this now and then take it with us? How much does this cost?”

“Well, I don’t know if that will work, Mr. Wang. It really remains the property of the school and—”

“This Apple Mac Pro laptop, right? You buy in the summer, I think it probably $1,100 new?” As he spoke, her father turned towards her and gave her just the slightest smile, really more a wrinkle of the eye and a tug of the lip. Grace felt her heart leap and swell so that it stopped being a tiny heart-attack heart and filled up to its proper size. Brownie was the enemy, after all! Grace rushed to cancel the file transfer and started to shut down her computer. “But you get school discount, about 10 percent, so that make it $990—”

“I suppose $1,000 would be an acceptable compromise, Mr. Wang. We will, of course, still have to send you a bill for the time that Grace has boarded so far this year—”

He cut in. “But this not possible to sell for $1,000, and there are no other students who need one, right? You can’t give old one to a new student even if someone transfer. All you do with this is donate to the shelter, which give school tax write-off of $990, which mean you pay a little bit less taxes. Maybe $75 less? So this computer now worth almost nothing to you—just $75. Maybe not even.” He hauled up Grace’s suitcase, then pulled a roll of cash out of his pocket. “Here, I give you $300, it almost like the school make money.” He peeled off three bills and thrust them towards Brownie, who took them hesitantly. They were old, Grace noticed, like they’d come from the ’80s. Grace jumped up, laptop and backup drive already shoved back into their satchel home, and grabbed the rest of her bags.

“Bye, Brownie! Thanks for everything!” In a giddy rush, Grace ran down the steps, waving a hand backwards as her father bumped along behind her, the suitcase wheels banging against each step. She looked back and he was grinning wildly, the sun glinting off his reflective lenses, knees akimbo as he charged forward. She wanted to say something else, something that would just make the headmistress fall over with fury, something that the other kids would hear and repeat to one another until it became legendary, but she was almost at the bottom of the steps and her mind was a pure, pulsating blank. Leaping off the last two steps and onto the driveway, she turned and shouted: “Tell Rachel I killed myself!”

Laughing at her own stupid bravado, Grace raced herself to the car and stopped by the back, not even out of breath. Half a minute later, her father slammed into her with a hug and pulled open the back door.

“Back full,” he said, tossing her bags in as Ama shook her head and arranged them on the floor in front of her. “Say hi to your auntie, Grace.” She leaned in the open window of the front passenger seat and gave Barbra their usual quick, no-pucker kiss on the cheek and then stood on her knees in the backseat so she could reach Ama over the pile of luggage.

“Eh, wo men ba
Andrew
fang zai na li ya?”
asked Ama.

Charles started up the car.

Uh-oh
. Brownie was heading down the stairs towards them, clipping along in her pointy brown boots. If Grace’s last name was Brown, she would never, ever wear the color; same with Green or Gold, though it would be hard never to wear Black. Grace leaned over the front seat, the wheel of her suitcase jamming into her hip as she pointed up at Brownie, and urged, “Daddy, go, go, go!”

“Daddy pretty good, right Gracie?”

“
Ah bao,
what did you do?” asked Babs.

“Oh, he did good. Really good.” Feeling daring, Grace patted her father on the head. “Who needs money! Right, Daddy?” She giggled, and said, quick, “He stole a computer!”

“No, no, no,” protested Charles, putting a hand on Babs’s arm, “I buy it! Just for very good price.”

“Dad, you have to go! Faster!” He shifted his hand back on the wheel and swerved towards the gates.

Grace turned as her father sped out of the lot so that she could see Brownie out of the rear window. She almost expected the headmistress to wave her fist in the air like a vanquished supervillain, then drop to her knees and raise both arms to the sky as balled-up hundred-dollar bills tumbled from her hands.

Well, three of them, anyway.

Really, this was all starting to feel like a movie or something, like a scenario that Saina and Andrew would come up with and make her act out under their direction until it all ended in tears. Hers, mostly, but sometimes Andrew’s, too. Like it could all be some elaborate practical joke. The possibility spun itself together in Grace’s mind, a cotton candy cloud that sweetened the embarrassment of the past day.

Maybe!
She turned around and sat down with a bounce, feeling encouraged as she fastened her seat belt. Maybe this was why her siblings had been reluctant to tell her about the inheritance, why she didn’t even know that there was a Talk and a Lunch. And, after all, didn’t this make so much more sense than the cover story? That her father had lost everything?

Ridiculous. Impossible.

Maybe Brownie was actually in on it. Actually, Brownie probably resented her. No one who had money would ever be stuck working at some boarding school in Santa Barbara, not even teaching, just . . .
administrating.
If Brownie knew, then that meant she’d been keeping the secret during the whole computer exchange; it all just made Grace feel more conspiratorial glee at the way her father had come out on top.

They were flying down the hill now, speeding past middle-aged cyclists in ridiculous spandex outfits, and Grace knew, just knew, that Andrew and Saina were both headed back to L.A. for some sort of party at the house. That was probably why they’d kept not calling her back, and why they didn’t even seem all that upset about everything. They’d never been very good actors.

Or maybe everyone was going to keep up the charade for a few days. In fact, maybe it wasn’t so much a joke as a test, something to teach Grace the value of money by making her think that it was all being taken away from her. Like that movie with Michael Douglas—was it called
The Game
?—where his whole life is ruined and then he ends up jumping off a building but there’s a net at the bottom for him and then a whole party. Her birthday wasn’t for a few more months, but she was a New Year’s Eve baby so it probably would have been too complicated to pull off the whole thing over the holidays.

Seven million dollars!

Well, she’d be good and earn it all. There would probably be tasks, like on
The Amazing Race,
challenges to solve, places to prove that she wasn’t a snob, even if her dad totally was. She wouldn’t complain, she wouldn’t whine, she’d just play along. What if someone was actually filming the whole thing? Though her dad probably wouldn’t let that happen—he hated reality TV.

“Xiao bao, ni you zhang da le,”
said Ama, reaching over to squeeze Grace’s hand.

Maybe this was all Ama’s idea. Grace was pretty sure that she was Ama’s favorite, and she couldn’t remember anything like this happening when Saina or Andrew turned seventeen. Of course, she had only been a kid when Saina was seventeen, so it might have all been hidden from her—since everyone was so good at keeping secrets from her—but this definitely hadn’t happened back when Andrew turned seventeen and sprouted eleven proud hairs on his chest. It was kind of gross, but they’d counted them.

“Hi, Ama,” said Grace, bringing their clasped hands up to her cheek. The older woman’s hand was soft, like the underbelly of some baby animal, and Grace rubbed it absentmindedly against her face. “Oh, I haven’t really grown up all that much, I’m not even seventeen yet.”
Was that a smile from Ama? A conspiratorial wink?

Ama took her hand back and settled it in her lap. “
Da yie shi
big,
bu zhi shi
old.”

“Oh, I know. I grew another inch.” She marked the distance with her fingers and Ama nodded, satisfied.

Grace slouched down, driving her knees into the back of Barbra’s seat. This had been her mother’s car when she was still alive. Her mother, who Grace didn’t have any actual memories of because she’d died just eight weeks after Grace was born. All she had were borrowed ones, taken from Andrew’s own barely there memories and Saina’s infrequent stories. Or made-up ones that she thought up herself as she flipped through albums of old photographs and scrapbooks of her mother’s modeling shots.

Their mother, cutting open oranges and feeding them into the industrial-looking juicer that still lived in the kitchen, hidden deep in some closet or cabinet. Their mother, scooping out the seeds from a maw of pulp and teaching Saina and even Andrew to spit them using some sort of tongue-funnel technique that they’d never been able to successfully explain to her. Their mother, dressed to go out for the evening in a scarlet-pink gown with flowing skirts—probably Oscar de la Renta, Saina had added—whispering stories to baby Andrew while Daddy shouted for her downstairs.