Page 45 of I Hope This Doesn't Find
And break down into tears instead.
I’m completely, utterly horrified. I never act this way. I’m only meant to absorb what others feel, present the best side of myself, sit still and swallow my own emotions. But it’s like I’ve lost control over my own body, like I’m watching myself from the ceiling as I stand here in the middle of the living room, crying and clutching the gummy candy. I’m inconsolable. Hysterical. I’m sobbing ten years’ worth of tears, choking as if there’s something sick and poisonous inside me, something painful, and I need to force it out of my system. But it’s stuck. It’s festered beneath my flesh for so long now that it’s a part of me, the deep ache like a thumb on a tender bruise.
“Hold up.” Alarm flashes over Max’s face. I’ve witnessed him having a mental breakdown over an ad about a lost squirrel before, but he hasn’t seen me cry in years. “Bro, you’re scaring me—”
“Max,” Mom says quietly. “Go.”
He doesn’t protest this time, but he keeps shooting me worried glances over his shoulder as he hurries down the corridor.
Then my mom gently grabs my arm. Sits me down on the couch next to her.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. If Mandarin is her language for anger, it’s also her language for softness. It’s her voice coaxing us to sleep when we were younger, her humming under her breath as she sewed the buttons back into our jackets so they were good as new again, her telling us it was time for dinner, her whispering goodnight as she turned off the big lights, her calling to let us know she would be there soon, just wait.
“I regret it,” I manage to say on a stuttering breath. I weep like I haven’t in ages, not since I was an infant.
“Regret what?”
Everything.
I regret writing the emails, I regret throwing the party, I regret kissing Julius in a moment of impulsivity and giving him the power to humiliate me. I regret it so much it feels like my liver is bleeding dry. I regret it so much it feels more like hatred, a knife turned inward, nails squeezing into flesh. I hate myself for everything that’s happened, because every mistake is my own to bear. And it feels like fear too. Like pure, animal terror, the stomach-curdling moment in the horror film when you realize you made the wrong move, you unlocked the doors too soon, and the masked man with the chain saw is standing right behind you.
There’s nothing I want more than for time to be a physical thing, something I can split into two with my own hands, so I can turn it around, shatter it, undo all the consequences.
“Is this about the party?” Mom asks. “Because I’m not mad. I wish you hadtoldme, and I don’t condone the alcohol, but I’m actually quite happy. It’s about time you did things like a normal teenager.”
This is so shocking my tears freeze in my eyes. “You’re—not?”
She smiles at my surprise.Smiles.I wonder if I’ve been transported into an alternate universe. In the correct version, she would be lecturing me or chasing me around the house with her plastic slippers. She would be mad that I keep ruining everything, and she would have every right to be. I don’t deserve to be forgiven so easily. “Of course. When I was a teenager, I threw parties every few weeks. They were very popular.”
“I— What?” A dull throbbing sensation has started behind my eyes, but I can’t tell if it’s from the liquor or the crying or the strain of fitting this bizarre information into my brain. “Since when? I thought you said . . . I thought you said you herded the goats around the mountains when you were a teenager.”
“Just because we had goats doesn’t mean we didn’t have parties.”
I blink. The room is spinning again, faster than before. “But . . . I’m not allowed to. I shouldn’t be having fun and throwing parties and—and doing the wrong things. I’m not supposed to cause any trouble.”
“Who told you that?” she asks. “Who said you weren’t allowed?”
Nobody, I realize. But nobody everhadto tell me. It was enough for me to cower behind the wall as my parents fought, enough to watch my father leave, to feel the doors trembling in his wake. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for me. That’s the truth I always crawl back to, the bone that set wrong in my body all those years ago. My dad had been at work, Max had been out playing basketball with his friends, and my mom needed to go buy groceries, so she’d asked me to steam the pork buns for dinner. I’d been so eager to prove that I was reliable, but then I’d gotten distracted by the show I was watching. I only remembered the boiling pot again when I smelled the smoke. The sharp, bitter odor of something burning.
I had slammed my laptop down and sprinted into the kitchen to check, but it was too late: The fire had burned a hole straight through the bottom, the metal scorched so severely it was coal black. It had been my mom’s favorite pot, the one she had bought with her savings and shipped all the way from a store in Shanghai. I didn’t try to hide it when she walked in an hour later. I just stood there guiltily, my head bowed, the damage on open display behind me.
“How can you be so irresponsible?” she’d demanded, rubbing her face like she hoped to scrub away her exhaustion. “I only asked you to do thisonething while I was gone. You’re not a baby anymore, Sadie; I expect more from you.”
I’d apologized, over and over and over. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Mom. Please don’t be angry with me. I’m so sorry.”
But then my father had come home, and he’d been angry too—not at me, but at my mom. “She’s still a child,” he’d insisted, dumping his briefcase on the couch. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always make a big deal out of nothing? It’s just a pot.”
My mom had whirled on him with alarming speed, her eyes flashing. “You say that because younevercook. You go to work and come back and expect dinner to be all ready and waiting on the table for you. You’re no better than a child yourself.”
“It’s my fault,” I’d put in. My parents so rarely argued that I didn’t know what to do, only that I hated it and needed to make it stop. “I’ll fix it, I promise. I-I’ll find a new pot, the same brand as the old one. I won’t do it again—”
But they were no longer even looking at me.
“I never cook because you don’t let me,” my father was saying. “You lose patience within minutes; look at you, you’re losing patience now—”
“Don’t be such a hundan,” Mom had snapped, and that’s how I knew she was really furious: She was swearing in Mandarin.
And just like that, my father had exploded. He’d slammed his hand down on the table so hard I expected him to break something, his features twisted with rage. The melted pot lay forgotten on the stove. They glared at each other from opposite ends of the room, and then it was like some kind of invisible barrier had broken, and they were flinging accusations at each other, complaints, curse words.
