“No, Dad, no one else is here.”
Oh. He couldn’t hug them like this, hand still slick with ketchup and sweat, dick barely tucked back into his jeans.
“I have to go to the bathroom—it’ll just take a second.” He put a hand over his stomach. “Bad food.”
Backing into the hallway, he narrowly avoided bumping into the RA, spun around, and ran to the coed bathroom, praying that no one would be in there.
Coast clear. Andrew splashed water on a stack of brown paper towels and ducked into a stall. The ketchup was starting to burn. Nervous, quick, he scrubbed at himself roughly until the damp wodge of barky smelling towel started to shred down his pants. He plunked it in the toilet and flushed, but the mass wouldn’t go down. Whatever. He was leaving. He’d never use this toilet again. Let it be someone else’s problem.
Slam. Soap. A blast of hot water, a blast of hot air, and he was back out the door, ready to be a son, a brother, a stepson, a middle child.
“Andrew!” Grace barreled down the hallway and threw her arms around him, squeezing him so tight that he felt sharply aware of how much he was loved. It was enough to make tears pool in his eyes, which he tried to flick away by picking her up and whirling her around.
“Gracie! How’s the road trip been going?”
“Terrible. Terrible! We dropped Ama off at her daughter’s weird place in the desert and the kids were cute but she fed us hot dogs, Andrew, and the whole place was so weird and creepy and I know you’re going to say that I have no sense of adventure but that’s just not the kind of adventure I want to have and I don’t care. Stop laughing at me!”
Andrew tugged on her ponytail. “It’ll be better now. I’ll be with you guys.”
Grace smirked at him. “So, what were you doing when we got here?”
“I told you! I was just eating! Anyways, listen. I have an idea—this is going to be my first comedy tour!”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a set. We’re going on the road. So I figured I could, you know, take my act on the road!”
“Did you book things?”
“No, I’m thinking open mics. I talked to Dad about the route that we were taking—”
“What? When?”
“A couple days ago.”
“But I didn’t even know that we were leaving until a couple of days ago! No one tells me anything.”
“It was all one conversation—we’re leaving, your car is being repossessed, I’m not paying your tuition, I’m going to get back all the land the Communists took, oh, and by the way, what’s the best way to get out of Tempe?”
“Well, I don’t understand why he tells you everything.”
Andrew’s father stepped out of the dorm room just then, carrying Andrew’s giant duffel bag.
“Okay, we ready? You say hello to auntie?”
Andrew leaned over and gave Babs a kiss, and then, at the last minute, he reached his arms around her in an embrace. It would have been nice to have a mom right now, if they were going to go somewhere as a whole family. But he didn’t. He had a dad and an auntie, a Baba and a Babs, and that was better than nothing.
The last time Andrew had ridden in this station wagon he’d been strapped to a car seat and his mom had been behind the steering wheel, wearing a giant pair of sunglasses, hands encased in white gloves. She’d hated the sun. She would have hated Tempe, where every sun-bleached building was the same dusty pueblo color and the city felt bright even after dark. Andrew had spent most of his college career in sunglasses, terra-cotta roofs and palm trees mirrored across his shielded eyes.
He had them on now, hiding another well of wholly unexpected tears. Andrew opened his lids wide, trying to will the tears back inside their ducts, but that just made his eyes sting so that he had to blink, sending a tiny salt waterfall spilling down his cheeks. He didn’t even really know why he was crying. He didn’t think that he felt all that sad to be leaving school. Maybe he was just a pussy. They were driving by Grady Gammage Auditorium now, its weird circle of curtained arches reflecting in the pond. See ya later, Tempe. Was there a GED for college that he could take? Or maybe it wouldn’t matter once he was on the road.
“Baba,” called Andrew up to the front.
“Hmm?”
“So, you know how I want to be a comedian?”
Andrew’s father glanced back at him in the rearview mirror and didn’t say anything. Sometimes Andrew felt like his father didn’t understand anything he said, like Charles Wang wished that he had a different son altogether.
Maybe if he said it in Chinese. “Shuo xiao hua?”
His father nodded.
“So, I have to practice. A lot. With, like, different audiences.” Andrew pulled out his phone. “So we’re going to be in some cities with open mic nights. I thought I could sign up and, you know, do my set.”
“Are you funny?” asked Grace.
“You know I am! Remember I told you about the thing at school? We put on that show? People loved it.”