A Glasshouse of Stars Page 5

  You stare long and hard at the blue coloring pencil. Seizing and gripping it as if you had to hold on for dear life, you draw an endless field of blue flowers and an endless blue sky and a girl who is completely blue. You collapse all of this into the little pages you have cut from one piece of white paper. The wall behind you creaks and moans, and you put a hand behind you and touch Big Scary. You feel a warmth against your palm and turn to see the pink glow that just as soon disappears when you pull away. You look at the adults, but they don’t seem to notice.

  It is getting much later than anyone, even someone trying to shake off an argument, would stay out. Mrs. Huynh rings home in case Ba Ba is there, but you all know that he isn’t. She doesn’t ring anyone after that because there isn’t anyone else to ring. Eventually, she has to go back to her own family even though she is torn about leaving you and Ma Ma. What a fragile, useless lot you both are.

  Then, midnight. And you are still wide awake. And Ba Ba is still not home.

  Ma Ma has fallen asleep with her arms folded on the kitchen table. For a moment you think you must have become invisible, as you haven’t been told to go to bed and it’s been hours since your mother has even acknowledged you.

  The picture book is finished, and for some reason you feel you need to hide it, so into the ziplock bag you use as a pencil case it goes. Back into the burlap bag you carry in place of a backpack.

  There is a knock on the door, very soft. You look at Ma Ma. She is fast asleep, a bit of drool dripping out of her open mouth and onto the kitchen table. The knock comes again and you reassure yourself that it’s Ba Ba come home.

  In your heart you know it’s not. He would just let himself in.

  It’s okay to open the front door, you tell yourself, because there is a locked screen door between you and any stranger you should find on the other side. The sandy tiles underneath your feet shift faster than ever.

  Standing on the front step are two police officers, and the first thing you think is that you are going to jail. You’re not sure why. Your parents have said that you are all welcome to come to this New Land, and First Uncle had said before he died that you were all welcome to stay at his house. After he died, he even gave you the house. Yet you’re still scared you’ve done something wrong.

  Maybe there has been a mistake. Maybe someone has changed their mind—First Uncle is still alive and he doesn’t want in his house people who are so unhappy about being there; or the New Land has decided you are not good enough to be here. You cannot speak the language, you don’t have any money, you don’t fit in, you need to go back to where you came from for everyone’s sake.

  On the inside you know that you wouldn’t be able to hide your relief if it was all a mistake, if you were all sent packing back to your island.

  “Is there an adult we can talk to?” the policewoman says gently, but your fears switch to the fact that you might be in trouble because you’re still awake on a school night. Why has your mother let you stay up so late? She must be a bad mother. Maybe they will take her away and lock her up. You turn hot and cold and hot again.

  “Hello?” says the tired voice of Ma Ma behind you, but it doesn’t make it any better. In fact, it’s much worse when the four of you are around the kitchen table. Three hot mugs of instant coffee sit untouched. Ma Ma has her arm around you and it makes you feel a little safer. But at the same time it also breaks your heart because she is leaning on you. She knows less of the New Language than you do, and she needs you to tell her what the police have to say. It is too much of a burden to bear.

  “Can you please tell your mother that there has been an accident.”

  You are so relieved that you understand this sentence that you quickly translate it to Ma Ma without taking in what it means. Ma Ma goes stiff and pale. You feel her dread spreading from her to yourself; the icy touch of her hand passes straight through your skin and freezes you deeply on the inside, as if you’ll never be warm again.

  “I’m afraid that your father was involved in a car accident.”

  “I’m sorry, but it was fatal.”

  You don’t need to translate anything to Ma Ma for her to start crying. She cradles her stomach and looks down. Cries. You start crying too. The police eventually leave, but the crying goes on. You try to reach out for Ma Ma, but she doesn’t see you; she goes straight to her room and closes the door. She is shutting herself in. But she is also shutting you out.

  So you go to your room too, but it feels as though you are floating off to another universe. You are upstairs and in your bed, and there is crying coming from you and crying rising up from the bottom floor. For a moment you become so light-headed that you forget what you are crying for, just that you can’t stop.

  In the absence of something warm and human you try holding on to your rag doll, but the scratchy and ugly thing reminds you of how poor your old life was and how you are not supposed to be poor anymore. You put her away under the bed, but that leaves you with nothing.

  You think about Ba Ba and how he wanted to order you the fried chicken like the one on TV and how Ma Ma got angry and made you all leave. You stop crying and lie down on your pillow, exhausted.

  A warmth appears on your shoulder that is touching the wall. You don’t turn around to acknowledge it. In fact, you shift forward on the bed away from the wall. Big Scary opens your closet door, and that neon pink glow comes out.

  Getting up out of bed, you slam the door shut. It stays shut. You feel the house cower in surprise and shrink a little. The bedroom door becomes closer; your bed takes up more space. But you don’t care.

  All of a sudden your head is filled with Ma Ma’s voice, nagging you to change into your pajamas. What if you refuse? If she were a good mother, she would not have started that argument in the chicken shop; she should have sacrificed herself for you and put on a happy smile. If she were a good mother, you wouldn’t be wearing old rags to bed, you’d be wearing a fluffy robe like Kevin’s, except it would be pink and have a girl cartoon on it. A princess of power raising her glittering magic sword high into the air.

  As suddenly as it comes, the voice goes. You search your heart and remember that Ma Ma only stormed out of the chicken place because she said she’d rather buy you new clothes than have a chicken meal for herself. You know if Ma Ma had money, you would have a pink fluffy robe. This makes you start weeping, and you hold on to the thought until it fades and contracts into a tiny pinpoint of light inside your head.

  Drifting in and out of sleep that night, every time you find yourself awake, you hear crying. Sometimes it is coming from you; other times you are aware of being silent, but the crying is still there.

  You don’t want to face the wall, but you are forced to turn over when one whole side of your body becomes numb. You try to keep your eyes shut and to not look at Big Scary. But you awake at one point to find she has drawn you a picture in pink light. It is a crude, lopsided heart.

  CHAPTER NINE Rolls

  When you wake the next day and go down the stairs, Ma Ma is not up and about like the days before. It is completely silent. There is no sound of the car down below, backfiring away before it decides it can finally go; there is no bustling in the kitchen and no cheap instant coffee. All the birds that sing in the morning, the magpies and the mudlarks of the world, might as well be dead.

  You peep in the bedroom, and the first thing that hits you is that Ba Ba is not there on his side of the bed. And for a moment of alarm you think Ma Ma is gone too, but she’s under the covers and not moving.

  In your panic you shake her a little too hard, and a hand comes out and then a sharp voice asking you to leave her alone. You keep patting her through the sheet because you want her to say that she’s still there, and there for you. Angrily, Ma Ma tosses the blanket aside and stands up on Big Scary’s shaggy fur.

  Ma Ma’s face is red, her eyes almost glued shut, and you reel from this monster you don’t recognize. You turn to run away, and it is only that familiar voice commanding
you to stop that makes you do so. She says you need to get ready for school and to be a big girl today and do it without her help.

  You want to stay home with her. She tells you not to disobey her and that you are going to school, realizing too late how loudly she is shouting at you before she bursts into tears. You flee from your parents’ room. Except it is no longer your parents’ room. Your mother stays and cries.

  In the fridge you find a small polystyrene tray with a sticky label that reads HUYNH’S HAPPY BAKERY. You recognize what is inside as spring rolls, but instead of being brown from deep-frying, they are white and translucent; you can see straight through them to the beautiful rainbow-colored vegetables inside. As you unwrap the plastic and arrange them on a plate for your breakfast, you wonder if you have permission to grieve today or if you have to keep it all inside. Tears flow so fast, they hit the rainbow rolls, and you are in such a hurry to wipe them away from your face that you answer your own question. You convince yourself it’s because you don’t want a damp breakfast. The spring rolls taste fresh and delicious—as good as rainbows—and they cheer you up a little on the inside. You finish the whole lot off and go back upstairs to get dressed.

  It is easier to wear those ugly boys’ shoes the second time.

  It is also easier to cross the street as you hide behind a bush and wait for a crowd to walk with. So far it feels that all you have learned in this New Land is how to be invisible and how to lose yourself. It is so cold outside. But it is nothing compared to how cold it is inside yourself.

  The girl who used to be your friend is already in the classroom. Only when you get close enough do you realize that she is wearing your grandmother’s ring. The girl stole the ring from you, made you cry, and now she is showing up to school wearing it like a trophy.

  She watches you watching her hand, and she says, “Do you like it? My mother bought it for me.”

  You want to say something, you really do, but then you realize that it is not worth the fight. What does it matter anymore? Your father is gone. You don’t have the energy to find the right words and then put them in the right order.

  She’s no longer interested in being your friend because she has from you what she wanted. She turns away, giving you the cold shoulder. You are once again left rubbing the empty flesh around your middle finger. You know that from this point forward, you are no longer welcome to sit with her in class or join her group for lunch.

  Miss Cicely decides to start the day with show-and-tell. The girl who used to be your friend puts her hand excitedly in the air and marches confidently to the front of the room. She explains that she’s a model now and holds up the catalogue of a local gardening center where she poses with her family, pretending to buy potted plants.

  Your teacher asks you to go next, and you bring out the little stapled-together picture book from your ziplock bag. Page by page you show the class the pictures inside—Big Scary viewed from the front, the giant eye in the mystery Room on the Roof, the neon pink lights at the bottom of the wardrobe, the pink serpent and the glasshouse in the backyard where you planted a seed and turned everything blue.

  You think of the name of the activity itself—show-and-tell—and you wish you could tell everyone the shock, the pain, and the unbelievability of your father being gone. Momentarily, you stall and hang your head. The class mistakes this for shyness.

  You continue and show them the second-to-last page, where you have drawn First Uncle, smiling and waving among his orange orchard. Then the last page, a girl turned completely blue.

  Miss Cicely watches and doesn’t say a word. Maybe she thought that you were some amazing person—the Amazing Meixing of Ma Ma’s dreams—from a faraway place who had exotic tales of culture and wonder to tell. Instead, all you can offer are your weird drawings. You can’t even open your mouth to say hi, let alone anything remotely exotic or wonderful. You are not amazing. You sit back down.

  The results from yesterday’s activity are handed back out, and out of a possible fifteen check marks, you have scored fifteen red crosses. You are mortified. Your guessing is so bad that you couldn’t even get one answer right by chance. You think of your mother and feel a little sick. She’s going to think you are dumb, useless, not their great hope. Not even close to being close. Ba Ba will hit you with the bamboo handle of the chicken feather duster, you think automatically. Then in an instant the realization jams itself up into a lump of sorrow in your throat. You would happily hold out your hand and feel the blow if it meant the blow was real.

  From the back somewhere comes a commotion. You turn, grateful and relieved for any distraction.

  “This is the most stupid test ever! I hate it! I hate this class! I hate everyone!”

  Kevin has stood up, scrunched up his worksheet, and thrown it across the room. The paper ball comes to a rolling stop by your ankle.

  “Kevin! Please go to the principal’s office. How many times do I have to tell you about your behavior?” Miss Cicely looks beaten, ill-equipped to deal with this.

  Kevin marches straight out the door without saying a thing, his shoulders hunched and his thumbs in his pockets. You have a vague recollection of a shy boy in his cartoon-character robe, which does not fit in with this angry boy in front of you. Some of your classmates snicker and whisper to one another. A certain girl and her friends shake their heads.

  You pick up the paper ball and unwrap it. You find that he has three answers right and twelve answers wrong.

  Well, at least he did much better than you.

  In that case, since you did much worse, you should be screaming and overturning desks and flipping over chairs. This you imagine in your mind, and to your surprise, you find it satisfying. But your real body sits there obedient and small. As always.

  “Put that in the trash,” Miss Cicely snaps. You hastily scrunch the paper ball back up and drop it in the basket by your teacher’s desk.

  “I don’t know why it’s so hard,” you overhear your former friend say. “He must have rocks in his head.”

  You have no idea what that term means, except that it sounds very painful and you feel ignorant once again.

  During lunchtime Kevin Huynh, a ball of nervous and angry energy, decides to push a kid over for seemingly no reason. The saddest thing is that the kid is just a quiet bespectacled boy reading a comic on a bench, trying to keep to himself. You can see in Kevin’s face that he regrets it as soon as he does it, but the teacher on lunch duty shakes him by the arm and off to the principal’s office he goes again.

  Part of his punishment is to stand against the painted wall that faces the grass quadrangle with the flagpole in the middle. He will stand there, forfeiting his playtime, until the bell rings for class to begin again. Then the principal will see him. Maybe on other days the painted wall fills up with the worst offenders the school has to offer, but today Kevin is the only one there. Hands behind his back, his legs kicking at the concrete in front of him.

  You try to think about what the principal is like, but all you imagine is something faceless and horrible and cruel.

  At first you stand on the other side of the quadrangle staring at Kevin. Then you move closer by standing underneath the covered assembly area. Then you are almost within touching distance of the wall. In an effort to brighten up the old school the wall has been absurdly painted with slogans in big bubble writing—HIP TO BE A SQUARE, THE RAD 80S! and PHONE HOME—none of which makes sense to you, so the wall actually seems more threatening.

  Why you have slowly inched this far and pretended you have been standing still on the spot all this time is a question with an answer that eludes you. You suspect you are trying to make friends with a bad boy. A boy Ma Ma would never agree for you to be friends with if she saw how he behaved, even if he is Mrs. Huynh’s son. Maybe that is exactly why you are doing it. Maybe you are hoping some of his attitude will rub off on you.

  “I really think the problems started when they banned using the cane at this school,” says an adult voi
ce.

  The two teachers coming out of the faculty lounge see you and Kevin and quickly say no more. You don’t think you were supposed to hear their conversation. You find yourself pressed next to Kevin’s side, even though you are not even in trouble. You are hoping to melt into the wall. You look guilty of something.

  “What language are you two speaking?” one of the teachers says, even though neither of you is talking.

  “You need to speak the language that everyone speaks in this country,” the teacher continues, as if saying this only because the other teacher is there.

  You want to tell the teacher that you can’t understand Kevin’s language anyway and he doesn’t understand yours, but you feel you have to keep your mouth shut.

  “We’ve said nothing,” Kevin replies. “We were reading each other’s minds, and since that’s silent, who cares what language we do it in?”

  The teacher frowns at Kevin, looks at the punishment wall that this mouthy kid is already standing at, and then shakes his head. The teachers leave without saying anything more to either of you, their heads pressed together in adult whispers. Kevin kicks the wall and makes a black shoe mark there.

  “Have you come to laugh at me?” Kevin says loudly. “I saw you watching me all this time, you know.”

  You are not laughing. You have been doing your best not to cry.

  “I don’t care if the principal is allowed to use the cane on me or not,” he says defiantly. “My father will beat me with the stick end of his plastic flyswatter when he gets home! Or maybe he won’t because I’ve stashed it away. By the time he grabs a flip-flop instead, I will have found a good place to hide.”

  Kevin laughs in a scary fashion. You still don’t laugh.

  “Hello. It’s a nice day to be out in the winter sun, isn’t it?”

  You both turn toward the voice and then instinctively step away, even though you shouldn’t have to be scared of teachers.

  This teacher, though, is the nicest-looking human you have ever seen. She has eyes that are blue like the sky and a half-moon of a pink smile. She has the permed hair of a princess. On her collar is pinned a brooch of a human heart, studded with rubies and bloodred stones.