“That bad, huh,” he said.
I knew that the most efficient way to lie and get away with it required maintaining a kind of wounded reticence, another thing I learned from Dad. “What’s with the patchouli-smelling cologne in your glove compartment, punk?” I heard Mom ask once, almost flirting. She couldn’t even accuse him of something without trying to be cute, trying to convince him to like her. She’s less like that with Roger. Marlena’s manner with Ryder reminded me of how my mom danced around my father. And she’s cool, I promise. Her jumpy, too-quick smile, her lips cracked from the cold, flaky skin glued in place with hot pink gloss. Mom had forced a giggle and turned her focus to the chicken, flicking on the oven light and staring through the glass as if it’d asked her a question. Dad took his beer into the TV room where he sat in silence, all huffy and something else, almost disgusted, like she’d just spat on him. I heard the whole exchange, standing in the refrigerator’s blank light, This is fine, just getting a drink, nothing odd going on here.
“Oh, c’mon,” Jimmy said, trying, and I shot him a look without looking, casting my eyes to the side, to gauge if he was suspicious. He fiddled with the heat, turning it down and then up to blasting, so that the blower filled the car with noise. There was no way I smelled normal. A chemical sharpness clung to the edges of every breath I took. Plus the backpack slumped against my feet was so deflated for a girl supposedly enrolled in two AP classes that I kept trying to nudge it under the dashboard to keep Jimmy from noticing.
“What do you want me to tell you,” I said, making eye contact with a child in a car opposite ours, stalled, too, at the light. “It was a regular day.” Snowflakes like sequins on Marlena’s shoulders. Ryder, shoulder bones elbowing through his T-shirt, his powdery smell, a few wiry strands emerging painfully from his cheek. All that trash on the table, what it added up to.
“It gets better, you know, this high school bullshit. I swear to you.” He was trying to be nice, but I felt myself getting pissed off. He’d been on Homecoming court. Plus, he was a boy. It was different. In high school, girls did the liking; boys got to pick. He had no idea what I felt like.
China King Buffet was between a women-only fitness center and a Hallmark store, in the strip mall that segregated Silver Lake from Kewaunee. We only had Chinese food twice a year—after the first day of school, and after the last. A family tradition started by Dad, I told myself, but it was probably Jimmy, the one who still puts soy sauce on everything. Mom was waiting at a table in the corner, drinking a smudgy glass of wine. “I sent Jimmy to get you so I could hold a table,” she said, getting up as if to hug me. “It was on the way!”
Mom could identify what you’d had for lunch hours after you’d eaten. “Pepperoni pizza today,” she’d say, kissing me on the cheek after I traipsed off the bus. I twirled into my chair, trying to avoid her, and lifted a water glass, sloshing half of it onto the neck of my shirt.
“Look at those suckers,” she said, glancing at the people waiting for a table. I hated how she loved to pretend like the dumbest, most obvious things were minor miracles.
When the waiter came, Jimmy ordered what we always did; veggie fried rice, sweet-and-sour chicken, chow mein, but three eggrolls instead of four for the table. This time, no beef broccoli. As the waiter marked down our orders, I reopened the menu and scanned the options.
“And an order of Peking Duck, please.” It was the most expensive thing listed, by at least ten dollars. The waiter’s pen hovered over the pad. He looked at Mom, like, Huh?
“You don’t like duck,” Mom said, her voice remote and teacherly, as if she were talking to someone else’s child.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s twenty-seven dollars,” Jimmy hissed. “You’ve never even had it.”
“I had it at a friend’s.”
“What friend?” Jimmy asked.
“Haesung.” I could almost remember eating duck at Haesung’s. Dark, greasy meat, sugary sauce in a tiny ceramic bowl, Haesung’s kitchen table, made of easily dirtied glass. “Her parents made it all the time.”
“Okay,” Mom said. And then, to the waiter, “We’ll have the duck, but no eggrolls please. And no chow mein.” The waiter nodded and disappeared, relieved.
“Great,” said Jimmy. “Thanks for taking off the one thing I like.”
“You didn’t have to go to school.”
“You’re right,” Jimmy said. “I just had to work for eight hours.”
“Enough,” said Mom, and we all fell quiet.
Jimmy started telling me I needed to scrape the beads of dried paint out of the carpet in my room. I told him he wasn’t my father so he could shove the paint beads up his ass. Then Mom told me to knock it off, and Jimmy told her to stop butting in, and I said that they were both ruining my life and Jimmy called me a fucking maniac and Mom rolled her eyes and finished her wine and ordered another glass and all three of us went silent for a little bit before the waiter brought the fried rice.
The duck arrived a couple beats after the rest of the food, floating through the dining room on a huge platter, drawing the gazes of every table. There were a dozen pieces of meat on the plate, all covered with golden skin. The spectacle made me blush, which Jimmy noticed with something like triumph, leaning back in his chair.
“Yum,” Jimmy said. Under the skin, the meat was sort of purple.