Page 46 of Something in Between

“Over here,” she says from the kitchen. She’s putting out lunch—chicken salad sandwiches and potato chips. She turns away from the counter and gives me a big hug before sitting at the table. “How was your trip?” She’s smiling but her eyes are sad.

“Fun,” I say. I tell her about seeing the Capitol, about how someone thought God had been painted on the rotunda. I almost tell her about Royce, but I get nervous since it would mean confessing I was hanging out with a boy, which I’m not allowed to do.

“I’m glad you went. It’s scary to take risks, Jas,” Mom says. “I can’t even tell you how afraid I was to relocate our whole family to the United States. Your father and I had no idea how you kids were going to handle the move, but we wanted to give you opportunities that neither of us had in the Philippines.”

Speaking of opportunities. I tell her my new resolve. “I’m not giving up on being able to go to college. I did some research while I was in D.C. Meeting the president reminded me that I want to do great things with my life. I can’t give up on my dreams.”

Taking a big sigh, she leans back in her chair and rubs her eyes. I know she’s worried about money, worried about everything.

“There are special programs,” I explain. “I can use our low-income status to get tuition fee waivers. There may be a few colleges that can afford to give scholarships for people like me, who grew up in the United States but don’t have citizenship. We might have to pay for a couple of applications, but I won’t know what’s possible if I never try. Most of the state schools are out, because they’re funded by the government, but I could try for a some of the private ones, like Stanford.” I can’t give up on Stanford, I have to keep trying, and if I don’t apply, I’ll lose a whole year.

“Are you sure? I don’t want you to have any false hope. I feel bad for never telling you the truth.” She sounds disappointed in herself. It’s heartbreaking to hear my mother, who has always been so strong and such a go-getter, to feel like a failure. “What about the reform bill? Will that help?”

“Even if it passes, it could take forever before it becomes law. There are deadlines coming up,” I say. “I can’t miss them or I might miss out on some of the schools. You don’t have to feel bad, Mom. Everything you did—how hard you made me work—wouldn’t be worth anything if I didn’t keep trying.”

I read somewhere that a lot of kids of immigrants grow up quickly and are given more responsibility than other kids. Their parents tend to depend on them, mostly because the kids can speak the language better and can act as a conduit to mainstream American society. The child becomes the parent, and the parent, the child. I feel a little like that now, like I’m older and wiser than my mom.

If I do go to college, my life will become even more different from hers. If I don’t go, I know I’ll never live up to her dreams for me. It seems like any path I take will lead us further apart. Maybe that’s part of what being a daughter means. Maybe that’s how the children of all immigrants feel.

Still, I’m determined and happy to have a goal. I like goals. I tend to meet them.

Dad comes in from the living room. He stares at my face, squinting his eyes. “There’s something about you I didn’t notice earlier,” he says.

My little brothers brush past us. “Her face,” they both say in unison. “It stinks!”

“You both stink!” I say, stretching out my arms.

Both of them come to hug me. I love my brothers so much I think I’m going to cry as I squeeze them as tight as I can.

Isko pinches his nose. “No, you stink!”

Dad actually comes to my defense. “Your sister does not stink!”

“Thanks, Daddy,” I say.

“Well, something stinks,” Danny says, twisting away from my embrace.

“Can you please just turn into a cat or something useful?” I say to him.

Dad laughs. “If he were a cat, I’d throw him out. I may throw him out anyway!”

Danny has already disappeared from the room. He’ll be buried in his manga in a minute.

“I’m serious,” Dad adds.

“I know, Daddy.”

He’s still looking at me funny. “I’m serious that something is different about you. You keep smiling. What happened in Washington? Were you responsible? Did you meet a boy?”

Eeek! How’d he know? Do my parents have some kind of guy radar? Am I really smiling that much? I kissed Royce a total of one, two—okay, maybe a few more—times. I already know what my dad is thinking. He’s so overprotective. “Daddy, I go to Washington, D.C., as an honored guest, and you want to give me a sex talk?”

“I don’t trust those people,” he says. His voice is getting louder. “You see them in the movies. They’re worse than those sleazy Wall Street stockbrokers who hire ladies of the evening every night and snort God-knows-what into their tiny brains.”

Oh my God, my parents and the way they talk! It’s too much. Ladies of the evening? Who says that? My Filipino parents, I guess.

My parents have always had weird rules about dating. Filipinos are all about family. If you’re eventhinkingabout dating a boy, they want to meet him. They’ve always threatened to send me on dates with a chaperone, like they had to have when they were teenagers, but I don’t think they would actually go through with it. Although, if they knew I’d been with Roycealoneduring the weekend, they’d probably have to start taking medicine for their blood pressure.

“It was a weekend for high school honorees,” I say.

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