Page 5 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

“I’m Jane.”

“I love that name.”

I roll my eyes and instantly regret it. Why am I so thorny?

But Thalia smiles, seemingly unperturbed by my bitchiness. “No, really. You knowJane the Virgin? I love that show. Ever since season one, I’ve loved the name Jane.”

“Never saw it.” A small lie. My mom watched it religiously with my aunt, and I’d sometimes catch snippets of it. It enraged me—the saccharine-sweet, fairy tale–perfect relationship between Jane, her mother, and her grandmother. And the fact thatmy mother, the woman who couldn’t give a tiny rat’s ass about me, loved the show made me even angrier. I wanted to put my hands around that fucking show and crush it.

“Yeah? What shows do you watch?”

The mention ofJane the Virginhas angered me enough to let my guard down a little, so I look Thalia straight in the eye. “I like dark shows. Shows that aren’t afraid to kill main characters. Shows that have a healthy body count.Breaking Bad.The Walking Dead. Those kinds of shows.”

I fully expectedJane the Virgin–loving Thalia to stop talking to me then and there, but instead, she laughs and says, “I think you and I are going to have a lot of fun together, Jane.”

It’s meant to be. We were meant to meet this way, with her rescuing me from the London–Oxford bus driver. Meant to sit next to each other for over one hundred minutes, our elbows a mere hair’s breadth away from touching. With each bump the bus takes, my elbow kisses hers, and I am dying a sweet, slow death.

I steal glances at her as the miles are eaten up beneath us. While men lust after the soft, bulging parts of the female anatomy—the breasts, the ass—we women notice the hardness. The places that signify control. Discipline. The clavicle, the shoulder blades, the cheekbones. Thalia’s collarbone is defined in a way that makes me swallow. I imagine myself running a finger along its hard length, from the bottom of her neck all the way to her shoulder, where it juts out into a single knifepoint. I want to press on it with my index finger and feel the solidity of it pushing up against me. I want her lovely bones to cut into my skin.

I don’t understand it myself; I’m quite sure I’m not sexually attracted to women, but there’s just something about Thaliathat captures my attention, clutching it tight in a sweaty grip that refuses to let go. I’m ashamed of my inability to cast my eye away, as though I were a creepy man breathing heavily into the mouthpiece of a phone. Maybe it’s the fact that somehow, the mixed ethnicities have rewarded her and punished me. My nose has a bump on the end, rodent-like, my lips chapped, with a slight overbite. Though we’re about the same height, Thalia seems taller because she carries herself straight-backed, while I slouch and try to hide from the light. Maybe, if I’d had a more loving mom, a present dad instead of a dead one, I could’ve been more like Thalia. Mom’s voice floats up to the surface, a bubble popping in toxic waste, releasing noxious fumes.Still rejecting the Asian side of you? Still worshipping white people, wishing you were them?

“I can feel you staring.”

My breath catches in a painful rush, and I practically plaster my entire back against the seat. Fuck shit fuck. “Uh.” Half a second to catch my breath, compose myself.Don’t get caught being a creep, Jane.“I was just looking at the scenery.”

Fortunately for me, the scenery outside is somewhat decent. Definitely worth looking at as opposed to the inside of a crowded bus. We’re going past a bucolic setting of rolling hills, complete with flocks of sheep grazing lazily, their movements so slow it’s like we caught them in a portrait as we rush past on the freeway—no, sorry, the motorway.

Thalia laughs under her breath. “I’m just messing with you. Sorry. I’ve been told I have a terrible sense of humor.” She looks out the window before I can reply, which is a relief because I have no idea what to say to that. A second later, she glances back at me. “So, Jane. What brings you to Oxford?”

I have an answer to that, at least. “I’m here to attend the master’s program at Pemberton College.”

The Oxbridge universities operate like no other that I know of. They’re each divided into various colleges, instead of operating as a single university, a fact that had been a source of confusion as I navigated my way through the complicated applications. But whatever, it doesn’t matter which college I attend, as long as my final diploma says Oxford bloody University.

“Oh my gosh,” Thalia breathes, her clavicles rising and falling. Mesmerizing. “Wait, don’t tell me. The Creative Writing program?”

Again, that painful rush of breath. I’m going to develop asthma if I’m not careful. “Uh. Yeah.”

Her entire face lights up. “No way! That’s what I’m doing too.” Her mouth stretches into the most beautiful smile. “Holy shit, Jane. We’re going to be classmates.”

I don’t really know what to say to that. Part of me wants to crawl into a hole, but a small part of me is writhing with joy. I don’t realize I’m biting my lip until I taste the salty tang of blood.

“What do you write?”

I lick my lips before I answer, wondering if there’s blood visible on my mouth, if I’ve given myself away. But Thalia is still smiling a smile so innocent it physically hurts me to look at it.

I can’t help but get a flashback of Mom, tilting her head down in the way that she does to show anyone watching that she’s had a long day’s work. I never know how she’s able to convey exhaustion and put-upon-ness with just a turn of the head, but there’s my mother. I pretend not to see her; most of the time, we pretend the other person doesn’t exist. Then the sighcomes.Still doing that writing thing, are you? When will you learn, Jane? Those things are for rich white folk. Not people like us. People like us, Jane, we do honest work.

By “honest work” she means menial labor—work that breaks our bodies apart bit by bit. I often thought of how, throughout history, the bodies of people of color have been destroyed and fed in little pieces to rich white people to swallow, and they won’t stop, not even when there’s nothing left of us to give.

Mrs. Crawford’s niece is due to give birth in September. She asked about you again, asked if you’d be available.

You know I won’t be, I bite out.I’m going to school.A mistake. I should’ve stayed silent.

Mom has been working her whole life for people like Mrs. Crawford; people who have children and then decide they don’t actually like kids that much, so enter my mother. She does everything for those kids—feeds them, bathes them, hugs them tight when they cry. The kids reward her by forgetting her name as soon as they become old enough to not need a nanny and she moves on to the next family. Over the years, I’ve watched my mother scurry around at the beck and call of the rich—“Can you work this weekend? We’ve been invited to the Robertsons’ lake house for the weekend, for an adults-only hunting session, and Bella is so sensitive, we couldn’t bring her anyway—you know how it is.” The kids are always “sensitive” or “precocious,” never “needy as fuck” and “spoiled as shit,” which is really what they are. She gives and gives, her back becoming more hunched as she bends to pick up carelessly strewn shoes, bends to carry tantrum-throwing toddlers, and bends to kiss the feet of the Crawfords and Robertsons of the world. Good, honest work.

School, she snorts.School for writing, who ever heard of that? Throwing good money away to learn how to dream your life away.It’s not our way, Jane. If you insist on spending money on higher education, then go for proper subjects. Accounting. Medicine. Things you can make an actual living from.

And I type extra loudly so she’ll know I’m ignoring her, that unlike her, I haven’t given up dreaming of a better life. That I’ll write a thousand different novels if that’s what it takes to save me from my mother’s life. That there is no such thing as “our way.” It’s always grated at me, the way that my mother assumes that I am just like her. I’m not all Chinese like my mom. I’m half-white, and just because my father’s gone, it doesn’t mean that part of me is magically erased.

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