As expected, Suzie Randling and her gaggle of loyal lieutenants kept a watchful eye on Lilly as she sat at the other table with her back to the girls.
Lilly delayed taking out her lunch as long as she could, hoping that the girls would be distracted by their gossip and ignore her. She drank her juice and nibbled on the grapes that she brought for dessert, taking as long as she could, peeling the skin off each grape and carefully chewing on the sweet, juicy flesh inside.
But eventually, Lilly finished all the grapes. She willed her hands not to tremble as she took out the rice balls. She unwrapped the banana leaves from the first rice ball and bit into it. The sweet smell of sesame oil and chicken wafted across to the other table, and Suzie perked up right away.
“I smell Chinaman slops again,” Suzie said. She sniffed the air exaggeratedly. The corners of her mouth turned up in a nasty grin. She loved the way Lilly seemed to shrink and cower at her voice. She took pleasure in it.
Suzie and the flock of girls around her took up the chant from yesterday again. Laughter was in their voices, the laughter of girls drunk on power. There was desire in their eyes, a lust for blood, a craving to see Lilly cry.
Well, it won’t hurt to try, Lilly thought.
She turned around to face the girls, and in her raised right hand was the mirror that Mr. Kan had given her. She turned the mirror to Suzie.
“What’s that in your hand?” Suzie laughed, thinking that Lilly was offering something as tribute, a peace offering. Silly girl. What could she offer besides her tears?
Suzie looked into the mirror.
Instead of her beautiful face, she saw a pair of bloodred lips, grinning like a clown, and instead of a tongue, an ugly, wormy mess of tentacles writhed inside the mouth. She saw a pair of blue eyes, opened wide as teacups, filled half with hatred and half with surprise. It was easily the most ugly and frightening sight she had ever seen. She saw a monster.
Suzie screamed and covered her mouth with her hands. The monster in the mirror lifted a pair of hairy paws in front of its bloody lips, and the long, daggerlike claws seemed to reach out of the mirror.
Suzie turned around and ran, and the chant stopped abruptly, replaced by the screams of the other girls as they, too, saw the monster inside the mirror.
Later, Mrs. Wyle had to send a hysterical Suzie home. Suzie had insisted that Mrs. Wyle take the mirror from Lilly, but after a minute of careful examination, Mrs. Wyle concluded that the mirror was perfectly ordinary and handed it back to Lilly. She sighed as she tried to pen a note to Suzie’s parents. She suspected that Suzie had made up the whole episode as a way to get out of school, but the girl was a good actress.
Lilly fingered the mirror in her pocket and smiled to herself as she sat through the afternoon’s lessons.
? ? ?
“You are really good at baseball,” Lilly said from her perch on top of Ah Huang.
Teddy shrugged. He was walking ahead of Ah Huang, leading him by the nose and carrying a baseball bat over this shoulder. He walked slowly, so that Lilly’s ride was smooth.
Teddy was quiet, and Lilly was getting used to that. At first Lilly thought it was because his English wasn’t as good as Mr. Kan’s. But then she found that he spoke just as little to the other Chinese children.
Teddy had introduced her to the other kids from the village, some of whom had thrown mud at Lilly the day before. The boys nodded at Lilly, but then looked away, embarrassed.
They played a game of baseball. Only Teddy and Lilly knew all the rules, but all the children were familiar with it from watching the American soldiers at the Base nearby. Lilly loved baseball, and one of the things she missed the most about home was playing baseball with Dad and watching games together on TV. But since they moved to Taiwan, there were no more games on TV, and he no longer seemed to be able to find the time.
When it was Lilly’s turn to bat, the pitcher, one of the boys from yesterday, lobbed her a soft and slow pitch that Lilly turned into a gentle groundball that rolled into right field. The outfielders ran over and suddenly all of them seemed to have trouble locating the ball in the grass. Lilly easily circled the bases.
Lilly understood that that was the way the boys apologized. She smiled at them and bowed, showing that all was forgiven. The boys grinned back at her.
“Grandpa would say, ‘pu ta pu hsiang shih.’ It means that sometimes you can’t become friends until you’ve fought each other.”
Lilly thought that was a very good philosophy, but she doubted that it worked among girls.
Teddy was by far the best player among all the children. He was a good pitcher, but he was a great hitter. Every time he came up to bat, the opposing team fanned out, knowing that he would hit it way out.
“Someday, when I’m older, I’m going to move to America, and I’ll play for the Red Sox,” ?Teddy suddenly said, without looking back at Lilly on the water buffalo.
Lilly found the notion of a Chinese boy from Taiwan playing baseball for the Red Sox pretty ridiculous, but she kept herself from laughing because Teddy didn’t seem to be joking. She was partial to the Yankees because her mother’s family was from New York. “Why Boston?”
“Grandpa went to school in Boston,” ?Teddy said.
“Oh.” ?That must be how Mr. Kan learned English, Lilly thought.
“I wish I were older. Then I could have gotten to play with Ted Williams. Now I will never get to see him play in person. He retired last year.”
There was such sadness in his voice that neither spoke for a few minutes. Only Ah Huang’s loud, even breathing accompanied their silent walk.
Lilly suddenly understood something. “Is that why you call yourself ??Teddy?”
Teddy didn’t answer, but Lilly could see that his face was red. She tried to distract him from his embarrassment. “Maybe he’ll come back to coach someday.”
“Williams was the best hitter ever. He’ll definitely show me how to improve my swing. But the guy they replaced him with, Carl Yaz, is really good too. Me and ?Yaz, someday we’ll beat the Yankees and take the Sox to the World Series.”
Well, it is called the World Series, Lilly thought. Maybe a Chinese boy will really make it.
“That’s a really grand dream,” Lilly said. “I hope it happens.”
“Thanks,” ?Teddy said. “When I’m successful in America, I’ll buy the biggest house in Boston, and Grandpa and I will live there. And I’ll marry an American girl, because American girls are the best and prettiest.”
“What’s she going to look like?”
“Blonde.” ?Teddy looked back at Lilly, riding on Ah Huang, with her loose red curls and hazel eyes. “Or red-haired,” he added quickly, and turned his face away, flushed.
Lilly smiled.
As they walked past the other houses in the village, Lilly noticed that many of the houses had slogans painted on their walls and doors. “What do those signs say?”
“That one says, ‘Beware of Communist bandit spies. It is everyone’s responsibility to keep secrets.’ That one over there says, ‘Even if we by mistake kill three thousand, we can’t let a single Communist spy slip through our fingers.’ And that one over there says, ‘Study hard and work hard, we must rescue our mainland brothers from the Red bandits.’?”
“That’s frightening.”
“The Communists are scary,” ?Teddy agreed. “Hey, that’s my house down there. You want to come in?”
“Am I going to meet your parents?”
Teddy suddenly slumped his shoulders. “It’s just Grandpa and me. He’s not my real grandpa, you know. My parents died when I was just a baby, and Grandpa took me in as an orphan.”
Lilly didn’t know what to say. “How . . . how did your parents die?”
Teddy looked around them to make sure that no one was nearby. “They tried to leave a wreath on an empty lot on February 28, 1952. My uncle and aunt had died there back in 1947.” He seemed to think that was all that needed to be said.
Lilly had no idea what he was talking about, but she couldn’t probe any further. They had arrived at Teddy’s home.