“Siblings too.”
“God,” he says. “That is the truth. I feel like Korean families are extra fucked up though. Because of Han. Because we’ve been invaded and occupied and split up without retribution.”
“We’re so repressed.”
“So repressed.” Patrick crosses him arms, lost in thought. “Did you ever have that thing where, like, staying out late, drinking forties, breaking shit, or making out with people in public was, like, white-kid shit.”
“Totally!” I think about my friends with ripped-up jeans, face piercings, and dyed hair. “Bad-kid shit was always white-kid shit.”
“I’m sure being an Asian woman is its own thing, but being an Asian dude in America is such a head trip. College was weird; Texas was weird. Especially with those Asia years in between. Even at international school in Seoul, Asian guys were the jocks, the bullies, the stoners, the hot guys, all of it. We didn’t think about it. There wasn’t the ambient trauma of not being taken seriously as a man that I’ve seen Asian-American dudes carry around, where they have to be ripped and mad alpha or else they’re a nerd. But then again, my dad’s a professor. My mom lived in Europe. I lived in Korea, but kids in Southern California act like I’m not Asian enough because me and my sister didn’t have the whole signing up for Kumon and living with our grandmother deal. I’m not a restaurant kid or a store kid. My parents actually encouraged me to go into the arts…”
“You call your dad frickin’ pops,” I offer, grinning.
“I call my dad frickin’ pops.”
“Wait a minute,” I ask him. “Were you allowed to go to sleepovers?”
“Not you, too,” he says, reeling in mock injury.
“Well?”
“Not, like, every weekend, but…”
Patrick might be salty to have his Asianness tested, but to me he’s a unicorn. “Wow.” I reach over and touch his cheek. “We look the same and yet…” I touch my own cheek with my other hand. “So different.”
He shrugs me off. “I don’t know what to tell you, fam. I went to sleepovers. Had sleepovers. I had PB&Js in my lunch and brought kimbap and didn’t fucking think nothing of it.”
Patrick leans over to drink his water, which reminds me to do the same, and then he stacks our bowls.
I follow him into the kitchen.
“Oh, wait,” he says, turning to face me. “I know something that’s real Korean. Deeply Korean.”
“What?”
“My dad had bypass surgery when I was in college,” he says, running the water for the dishes. “And they didn’t tell me because I had finals.”
Again my sister flashes into my head.
“That,” I tell him, nodding, “is deep Korean. And also deeply messed up that you’re so vindicated by his coronary issues.”
I feel better that Patrick doesn’t have a dishwasher. He’s only out of my league by a factor of thirty-nine, not seventy-three.
I grab the first bowl from him and dry with the kitchen towel on the oven door. “Did they wait until the holidays to tell you while they were gossiping about someone else’s health?”
“No,” he says, eyeing me. “They FaceTimed and bought me a plane ticket to see him the day finals wrapped.”
“Yeah.” I frown a little. “I don’t know. Feels like you might need an asterisk on that achievement. Feels emotionally stable and transparent now.” His parents sound positively Scandinavian.
“Great,” he says, walking over to the bathroom. “I’m going to spend all night tallying traumas.”
“Do your worst,” I tell him. Even with his head start, I’m pretty sure I’ve got him beat. Being an Asian woman really is its own thing.
Patrick returns with a brand-new toothbrush with the name of his dentist printed on the handle. Plus a tiny wheel of floss.
“Whoa.” I take both from him. “Thank you. I’m beyond grateful to you, for your hospitality, your company, and your sofa.” I lay my palm against the leather and slide onto my side. It feels so good against my cheek.
He laughs and yawns.
“No, you get the bed.” He yawns again. “It’s super comfy. You can’t sleep here. My mother would murder me.”
“How would she know?”
He scoffs. “She’d know.”
Guess he really is Korean.
chapter 24
I brush my teeth, body listing forward I’m so tired. Patrick’s bedroom is spare with heavy blue curtains blotting out the streetlights and a big, broad bed with enough room on either side to walk completely around it. I struggle to keep my eyes open but when I slip into his striped sheets, burying my face in his cold pillow, smelling dryer sheets and a scent I imagine the back of his neck to carry, I’m haunted by the image of the two, wet-haired girls in the window of the restaurant.
The picturesque sweetness of a matching set is never experienced by either of the people in it. I’d get so sick of being tethered to June. How we were always displayed as a pair. The way customers would address us as if we were one person. Or even more disembodying, the way they’d talk to us as if we weren’t there. As if we canceled each other out. Sometimes June would pipe up, once snapping at a baby-talking white lady, “Take a picture, it lasts longer,” and laughing straight in her face. I was thrilled. It was exactly what I would have said if I were brave enough.
June never held her tongue. I seethed. My thoughts festered and it was a tailor-made hell that I couldn’t hide anything from her. I’d sit there at family meal, eyes downcast, cheeks ablaze, next to our parents, the cooks, the busboys, and the dishwashers, pretending I wasn’t there. Pretending I didn’t know them. June would crack on me in front of everyone the way I’d jolt when the door opened, scared that someone from school might see. “You think you’re so cool,” she’d remark, shaking her head, munching on all the broken fortune cookies, piling up the paper ribbons of fate without bothering to read them. “It’s so embarrassing.”
Her taunts stung, staying with me for days the way Mom’s did, cutting over and over. The funny thing about having an older sibling play babysitter is that you’re only vaguely aware that they’re also a child. I remember once when June had turned eleven. I was still eight and we were in the rare months where she became especially intolerable since she was three years older instead of two. Eleven was properly in the double digits. “I’m basically an adult,” she’d announce. Back then we’d walk home after dinner at the restaurant to put ourselves to bed. The worst, scariest part of the trip was the stretch of road under a patch of the Loop 410 highway, past the middle school and an enormous H-E-B grocery store. That’s where you felt most exposed to the whoosh of cars at your back. I always walked as fast as I could. Taking shallow, vigilant breaths.
June knew how much I hated that walk. The solemnity with which Mom instructed her to hold my hand. It all went straight to June’s giant melon head. She acted as if I owed her my life. At the critical expanse, she’d purposely slacken her grip on my sweaty palm. “Uh-oh,” she’d say, eyes widening dramatically.