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—”