Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

“When our neighbors hid us so that I would not be taken away and tortured, too, you were not practicing Falun Gong.”


I shake my head. I was six. I remember almost nothing—nothing except a thick blanket of guilt, a dark wave of feeling that this was all somehow my fault.

“Falun Gong practitioners raised the money to bribe the authorities, smuggle us out of China, and fly us to America. You don’t practice Falun Gong. You don’t need to; they just saved your life, that’s all. But it’s okay if it’s not so convenient for you to remember that any more.”

“You said you wouldn’t guilt trip me,” I manage to choke out.

“That,” my mother says quietly, “was only the truth. Any guilt comes from you, not me.”

I don’t know how to answer. So far, I’ve managed to get everything right, even working as much as I do. This year, though, my classes have reached a new level of hard. I thought Organic was hard, but physical chemistry is that much worse. And if I thought introductory programming classes were difficult, now I’m drowning. Instead of turning in assignments that search and sort lists of numbers, we’re designing our own programming languages. There aren’t enough minutes in the day, and I’m not sure I can maintain the grades I need to make everything come together.

I can feel my entire future slipping from my fingers.

I don’t know Jack Sheng, but right now, I hate him. I hate him so much for needing my money. I hate him because I’ve heard his story a hundred times before—tortured because he practiced Falun Gong in China, escaped to the US, and is now being sent back home.

This is what Blake Reynolds will never understand: that when he and his father give money to charities, it never hurts them. To them, it’s just a check. It makes them feel good. It’s a pat on the back. He will never understand what it means to hate someone over thirty dollars. He probably spends more than thirty dollars on his jeans. Fuck. I don’t know what rich people spend on jeans. He would probably scoff at the idea that you could get a pair of jeans for thirty bucks.

“Mom,” I say. “You have to get Mabel her medication.”

“Next month, maybe.”

“No.” I swallow. “It’s not fair to her to skip around like that.” When you have as little as I do, you know it to the last dollar. I had thought about splurging, about getting my sweater dry-cleaned. But this is it; I can’t afford my superstition any longer.

“I can send you a little more,” I say. “But you have to promise you’ll get her meds. Okay?”

I can manage twenty dollars. That should be enough. It’ll leave me with twenty-three bucks for nine days. That’s not that bad. I still have most of a twenty-five pound bag of rice. I’m practically rich, as long as nothing comes up.

There’s a long pause. From that, I gather that Mom didn’t just sign over my check to Jack Sheng’s appeal account. She’s given more than my parents can really afford. I’m not going to be the only one figuring out how to eat on dollars a day.

“Please,” I say. “It’s really important.”

People say that money doesn’t buy love, and maybe they’re right. I don’t need money to love my parents or my sister. I love them so fiercely and so much that it hurts sometimes. I love them so much that I think of them every time I want to give up, which is practically every day. If I play my cards right, if I don’t mess everything up, by the time Mabel is in college I can make sure that she never has to feel like this. I won’t have to worry about my parents’ nonexistent savings. I won’t lie awake at night wondering if they accidentally forgot to pay their health insurance premiums this month. I’ll just be able to take care of it all.

Money may not buy love, but it buys something like it. Not having any money makes love complicated. No matter how much I love Mabel, I can’t quash the part of me that resents her existence. Part of me remembers that in China, she wouldn’t even have been born. And while I would never want that—while I would take on anyone who tried to hurt my little sister—sometimes I think of a world without anyone who needed me. I imagine being able to breathe, being able to rest. I imagine being able to get pizza with my friends after class instead of making polite excuses. I imagine getting coffee with Blake Reynolds.

I don’t want a lot out of life. I just want enough money to love without being tangled up about it.

“Okay,” my mom finally says. “I promise.”

“Thank you.”

“And you… You are taking care of yourself? You are eating enough? Getting enough sleep? I hear about college students, and the…” She pauses. “The all-nighters. You aren’t having all-nighters, are you?”

“No,” I lie. “I sleep well, Ma. I have to take care of myself, right?”

“Good,” Mom says. “And maybe, you’ll meet a rich boyfriend.”