“Why does he keep making thosesi-ge si-gesounds?” she demands after about three seconds. “Does he have something stuck in his throat?”
I choke on a laugh.
“It’s just how music sounds nowadays,” Ba says in Mandarin, ever the diplomat.
“I think it’s kind of nice,” I volunteer, bobbing my head to the beat.
Ma glances back at me with a half-hearted scowl. “Don’t bounce your head like that, Ai-Ai. You look like a chicken.”
“You mean like this?” I bob my head harder.
Ba hides a smile with the back of his hand while Ma clucks her tongue, and Emily, who I’m convinced is really an eighty-year-old grandma trapped inside a nine-year-old’s tiny body, lets out a long, dramatic sigh. “Teenagers,” she mutters.
I elbow her in the ribs, which makes her elbow me back, which sets off a whole new round of bickering that only ends when Ma threatens to feed us nothing but plain rice for dinner.
If I’m honest, though, it’s in these moments—with the music filling the car and the wind whipping past the windows, the late-afternoon sun flashing gold through the trees and my family close beside me—that I feel … lucky. Really, truly lucky, despite all the moving and leaving and adjusting. Despite everything.
The mood doesn’t last.
As soon as we pull up beside the Westbridge school buildings, I realize my mistake.
Everyone is dressed in casual clothes. Cute summer dresses. Crop tops and jean shorts. The teachers didn’t specify what to wear this evening, and I naively assumed it’d be standard uniform, because that’s what the expectations were at my previous school.
My family starts getting out of the car, and I push down a swell of panic. It’s not like I’ll getin troublefor wearing what I’m wearing—I just know I’ll look dumb and stand out. I’ll look like the Clueless New Kid, which is exactly what I am, but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear.
“Ai-Ai.” Ma taps the window. “Kuaidian.”Hurry.
I say a quick thanks to the driver and step outside. At least the weather’s nice; the wind’s quieted down to more of a gentle, silky breeze, a welcome reprieve from the heat. And the sky. The sky is beautiful, a blend of pastel blues and muted pinks.
I inhale. Exhale.
This is fine,I tell myself.Totally fine.
“Come on, Baba,” Emily is saying, already pulling Ba toward the primary school section of the campus, where all the walls are painted bright colors. Obnoxiously bright colors, if you ask me. “Youhaveto talk to Ms. Chloe. I told her how you were a poet, and you do signings and stuff at big bookstores, and she was soooo impressed. She didn’t believe me at first, I don’t think, but then I made her search your name, and then …”
Emily looksactuallyfine, because she is. No matter where we go, my little sister never has any trouble fitting or settling in. We could probably ship her off to Antarctica and find her just chilling with the penguins two weeks later.
Ma and I walk in the opposite direction, where the senior classrooms are. The wide gray corridors are already pretty crowded with parents and students, some heading in, some weaving their way out. Just as I expected, a few people’s eyes slide to my stiff skirt and too-big blazer, a mixture of pity and amusement flickering over their faces before they avert their gazes.
I lift my chin high. Walk faster.
This is fine.
We couldn’t reach my homeroom fast enough.
It’s loud inside. Classmates everywhere, teachers waiting behind rows of desks. None of them say hi to me, and I don’t say hi to them either.
Even though school started almost a month ago, I haven’t really gotten to know anyone. All the names and faces and classes kind of just blur together. The way I see it, we’ll be graduating in less than a year anyway. There’s no reason toput myself out there,as my past teachers all loved to recommend, and get attached to people only to grow apart months later. With Ma’s job moving us around all the time, it’s already happened too many times for me to keep track: that slow, painful, far-too-predictable transition from strangers to acquaintances to friends back to strangers the second I leave the school behind me.
I’d be a masochist to put myself through it again.
Besides, there are fewer than thirty kids in my whole year level, and everyone’s clearly formed their own cliques already. To my right, a group of girls are squealing and embracing like it’s been years since they last saw one another, not hours. And somewhere behind me, another group is deep in conversation, switching between three languages—English, Korean, and something else—within every sentence as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Pretty on-brand for an international school, I guess.
“Ah! Look who it is!”
My English and homeroom teacher, Mr. Lee, waves me over, his eyes bright behind his thick, oversized glasses. He’s been cursed with this round baby face and unruly gray-streaked hair, which has the combined, disorienting effect of making him look like he could either be in his early thirties or late fifties.
