One of the reasons I didn’t have friends over for meals very often was because of how seriously my mother took the occasions. Eating at our table was like some kind of blood pact for her. If the get-together went well, you were in. For life. You could sleep in our cupboard if you wanted to and she wouldn’t bat an eye.
If you did not hold up your end of the bargain in terms of being good company, or if, god forbid, you flaked, then you were cast into the lake of fire for eternity. Quentin, who must have picked up on Mom’s peculiarities in this regard, was right in that we were locked in for one last dance. The Apocalypse couldn’t have prevented this dinner.
I could smell food even before entering our driveway—a deep, savory promise of good things to come. My mother must have been at the stove all day. For someone who gives me such a hard time about my weight, you’d think she wouldn’t cook so goddamn much.
“Remember,” Quentin said as we went inside. “This was your idea.”
His parents were already there, sitting at our table. “Pei-Yi,” Mom said. “Come and meet the Suns.”
Mr. Sun was tall and reedy with wiry hair, most of the resemblance to his son coming from the mischief in his eyes that his banker’s suit failed to tamp down. Mrs. Sun was the picture-perfect image of a young taitai. She was a straight-backed beauty resplendent in tasteful fashions, the kind of woman Yunie would turn out to be in a decade or two if she dropped the punk-rock look in favor of European couture.
“Eugenia,” said Mr. Sun. “We’ve heard so much about you.”
To their credit, they didn’t flinch at my height. Quentin must have warned them that I was a kaiju.
“We’re forever in your debt,” Mrs. Sun said. “Our boy can be so careless. It was a miracle you were there to save him.”
Having seen what I’d seen, I seriously doubted Quentin was in any sort of trouble when I’d first run into him at the park. I wondered if his parents were in on his weirdness. They had to have been aware of his extra limb at least.
“You two are just in time,” Mom said. “Dinner’s ready.”
The table was decked out with more food than my entire volleyball team could have eaten in two sittings. Red wine chicken. Steamed white radish with conpoy. Misua swimming in broth.
“Wait a sec,” I said, tilting my head at Quentin. “He’s a vegetarian.”
“It’s all mock meat,” my mother said proudly. “It took me a few tries.”
Of course she would kill herself over an attempt to impress. The Suns were everything she wanted our family to be. Rich. Refined. Whole. Quentin’s parents even had British accents when they spoke in English, like they’d learned in an overseas grammar school or owned property in London. If there was one group of people my mother idolized more than the wealthy, it was the British.
“This looks absolutely delicious,” said Mr. Sun.
He was not wrong. Mom was a spectacular cook. But I already knew that very little of this dinner was going to be touched. Mr. and Mrs. Sun were too genteel to finish the massive quantities that had been prepared, and if I had anything more than a “ladylike” serving in front of guests, my mother would have lasered me to death with her eyes.
Quentin alone had license to eat. He began chowing down with delight, scarfing the mouthwatering grub as fast as he could.
Over the course of the conversation I learned that his dad worked in international shipping and logistics, coming up with new route calculations based on incidents like storms and pirates. And his mom ran her family’s charitable foundation, which spread basic technology like flashlights and cell phones to undeveloped areas around the world.
Now both of those jobs were actually really, really cool. I’d gone into this dinner eager to harness my class resentment and write Quentin’s parents off as useless gentry, but both of them were genuinely interesting. I could have coasted on them talking shop all night.
Instead of going on about themselves, though, his parents kept turning the conversation back to me. I hated talking about myself to other people. It was why I had such a difficult time with my application essays.
But what really caused my gears to lock up was the way, whether through prior research or on-the-fly Holmesian deduction, they continually managed to avoid bringing up my dad. Not even a question about where I got my height from, since it clearly wasn’t maternal. Their collective inquiries left a father-shaped hole in the conversation, like snow falling around a hot spot. I would have felt less on edge and defensive had they not been going out of their way to be tactful.
“So Genie,” said Mr. Sun. “What are your plans for the future? What do you want to do with your life?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said, with what I hoped was a demure smile. “I guess one of the reasons why I study as much as I do is to keep my options open.”
There. A better answer than screaming I just wanna be somebody! like a chorus member from a forties musical.
“Do you have a favorite subject?” Mrs. Sun asked. “Sometimes that can be a big life hint.”
Jeez, let it go already. “I like them all about the same.”
“Really?” said Quentin. “Rutsuo told me you once got pretty excited about computer science.”
“That was an elective that didn’t count for credit,” I said. “And I only jumped on the table to celebrate because my code for a binomial heap finally compiled after fifteen tries.”
“Passion’s passion,” said Mr. Sun. “Ever thought about being a programmer?”
I had. And no.
We lived in the epicenter of the tech industry. I’d paid enough attention to the news to know that all the good programming careers were concentrated right here in the Bay Area, not even fifty miles from where we were sitting. I wasn’t going to work my ass off only to end up right back where I started in life, within shouting distance of my mother.
I racked my brain for a more polite way of saying that I felt zero obligations to the place where I grew up. Santa Firenza wasn’t a quaint bucolic suburb where happy families were grown from the rich earth. Santa Firenza was a blacktopped hellscape of bubble tea shops and strip-mall nail salons, where feral children worshipped professional video-game streamers. The major cultural contribution of this part of the country was recording yourself dancing alongside your car while it rolled forward with no one driving it.
“Well, I’m sure that once you decide what you want, you’ll get it,” Mrs. Sun said in response to my silence. “You have so much determination for someone so young.”