Waking up this early on Saturday would have sucked any time of the year, but today was a high-pollen-count day. My eyes burned at the beautiful weather outside, even though the window was shut tight. Lush green foliage, crisp breezes, chirping birds: Allergy apocalypse.
I sat up and rubbed my face until my room came into focus. It had been tiny for a very long time. Even though I kept it clean, it was covered in a thick layer of grade-school knickknacks that I never bothered to clear out—art projects that were mostly glue, dolls with bad haircuts, works of fiction that spanned from Dick and Jane to Great Expectations.
You could have dug a glacial core in my room and pinpointed the exact moment I stopped caring about anything but escaping it. That was where the textbooks and extra study materials and supplementary lessons took over the fossil record. That was when the comet had struck my family. My personal Chicxulub.
The news from the shower radio promised no respite from the assault on my eyes. The wildfires raging unchecked in the hills on the other side of the Bay could be sending us a welcoming embrace of particulate at any time. The governor was calling for a state of emergency due to drought conditions. California! What a paradise.
After I dressed, I made myself a pot of coffee and downed the whole thing while packing my lunch. I knew some of my classmates didn't drink it, but I could replace my blood with the stuff. It wasn't like it was going to stunt my growth at this point. Plus any magical liquid that makes you study harder was A-OK by my mom.
As lame as it sounds, this was no different from my weekday routine. I just left my house in a different direction, for the center of town instead of toward school.
It wouldn't have made a difference in the scenery. The houses in this part of the neighborhood had a chronic case of sameface. Garage-less brick boxes with lawns too small to make snow angels. And this was the "more livable" part of town. The rest of Santa Firenza by the office parks was a prairie of concrete and asphalt that grilled your optic nerves from reflected glare. Sure there were a few trees, but they didn't commit. This was a land that was hot, flat, and almost entirely without shade.
A far cry from the glorious playground of gleaming aluminum and primary colors that everyone thinks of when they imagine Silicon Valley. That image only holds up in the campuses of the two or three truly giant tech companies, the lone islands drifting in a sea of reality. The rest of the Bay Area is, unfortunately, the Bay Area.
The one thing we do have down here, more so than green spaces or the changing of the seasons, is education. We gobble up as much of it as we can, in forms both cheap and expensive, from bank-breaking Montessori preschools to flannel-wearing college kids paid under the table for tutoring. Whatever each of us can afford, really. Call it a side effect of our Asian-ness, whether genetic or absorbed through proximity.
Today I was doing my part to perpetuate the cycle of violence to the next generation. Every so often the library closes to the general public and holds an all-day event for children where older students read aloud to them. The kids get points for how long they last and how many books they sit through, with the winner at the end of the year receiving I don't remember what. A trip to Great United amusement park maybe.
The readers, on the other hand, get a big ol' badge of VOLUNTEERS and GIVES BACK TO THE COMMUNITY.
Yunie and I have been doing the Read-a-Thon ever since Ketki Pathpati graduated and unofficially passed the torch to us. Technically anyone can help, but it's sort of our thing now. I only wish we had invented it ourselves—the colleges would have given us a lot more points.
Mrs. Thompson, the town librarian, was waiting outside the building for me. "You didn't get my email?" she said. "We had to start half an hour earlier than normal."
"I don't have anything from you," I said. I'd checked my messages during breakfast.
Mrs. Thompson smacked her forehead. "I must have sent it to just Yunie."
"I'm going to kill that girl. I'm so sorry, Mrs. Thompson. The kids must be bored out of their minds ..."
"Actually, they're doing fine," she said brightly as we walked inside. "She found a wonderful replacement."
"Replacement?" I thought Yunie had been joking before, so I assumed I'd be alone.
"Right in here," said Mrs. Thompson.
I'M GOING TO KILL THAT GIRL, I thought.
"Ready?" Quentin shouted from underneath the pile of laughing, squealing children. "One, two, three!"
He rose to his feet, kids clinging to his back, hanging off his biceps, sitting on his shoulders and using his hair as a grip. He made a slight bounce as if to throw them off, but they just shrieked with delight and hung on tighter. He was even stronger than he looked.
"Raargh!" he play-screamed, slowly spinning around underneath the toddler mountain until he faced me. "Raaaaa ... oh ... hello."
"He's been a treasure," Mrs. Thompson said adoringly. "I've never seen them take to anyone so quickly."
"Teacher's here, you little apes," said Quentin. "Quiet down and get to your spots. Or else I'll smash your heads open and eat your brains."
I thought someone would have an objection to that, but the kids all laughed and scrambled into neat rows at his behest. They plopped down onto musty blankets and cushions on the floor. Some were still talking and shoving each other.
"Change to stone!" Quentin shouted, wiggling his fingers like he was casting a spell. The children immediately straightened up and closed their mouths in intense concentration, sucking in their cheeks and biting their lips.
Call me a hypocrite, but I genuinely didn't want to make a scene here, of all places. I decided to just power through it. Plus the kids really did seem to like him. Kids could smell evil like dogs, right?
"How did you get them to behave like that?" I whispered as I slid onto the reader's bench. Yunie and I had never been able to rein them in so quickly.
"Mind control," he said. He sat next to me and handed me a book. "You can begin any time now, laoshi."
That was a little more respectful than necessary, but whatever. "Father was eating his egg," I read. "Mother was eating her egg. Gloria was sitting in a high chair and eating her egg, too. Frances was eating bread and jam."
"Omnomnom slurp slurp gulp," said Quentin. "Burp."
I was about to glare at him for going off message, but the kids giggled and rolled in their seats.
" 'What a lovely egg,' said Father." I read on. " 'It is just the thing to start the day off right,' said Mother. Frances ... did not eat her egg."
Quentin gasped as if the fate of the world rested on that little badger eating that egg. The kids did the same.
He was like a goofy morning show puppet. I smiled in spite of myself and went on. "Frances sang a little song to it ..."
We settled into that rhythm, where I did the word-for-word reading, and Quentin made sound effects, spot-on animal noises, and embellishments that kept everyone awake.
"HOW hungry was that caterpillar?" he'd shout.
"VERY!" twenty young voices would respond.
It worked. It was a lot more raucous than normal, but a lot more fun. We almost didn't want to break for lunch.
The librarians herded the kids toward the pizzas that served as the bribe to get them here in the first place. The picnic tables outside the library were reserved for the readers, to give them a moment's peace.
Quentin sat down at the far end of the table from me as I took out my lunch. He glanced at the distance between us as if to say, See? What you wanted.
"Your friend asked me to help her, and her alone," he said. "She didn't tell me you'd be here."
I believed him. Only because I knew how much Yunie delighted in trolling me at every possible opportunity.
I noticed he was empty-handed. "You didn't bring any food? This is an all-day thing."
"I didn't think to. I'll be fine."
Yeah, right. He could play tough all he wanted, but I saw him give a long look at the fruit I'd packed.
"Here," I said, handing it over. "Just take it."
"Thanks!" He held up the gift for a brief moment with both hands like a monk accepting alms. "Peaches are my favorite food in the universe. But this one looks different?"
He took a nibble and his eyes grew as big as plates.
"It's a peach hybrid," I said. "Crossed with a plum or apricot or something. You like it?"
"It's amazing!" he mumbled through massive bites, trying to keep the juice from dribbling far and wide.
I watched him eat, completely absorbed in his treat. It was cute. If he had a tail, it would've been wagging like a puppy's.
I decided that small talk was acceptable. "You handled Mike and his gang pretty well," I said. "Where did you learn wushu?"
"Didn't," said Quentin. "Never took a single lesson in fighting."
"Oh? What about babysitting? You're a natural at that, too?"
"I've got a lot of little cousins and nieces and nephews back home that I used to take care of. I like kids. I was happy to volunteer for this."
He shifted the peach stone into his cheek like a gumball and stared accusingly at me. "From what I could gather from your friend, however, the two of you are only doing this to gain access to a magical kingdom called Harvard."
"Pfft. Yale would also suffice."
He didn't appreciate the joke. In fact, he grew downright serious.
"It seems to me that you are jumping through many hoops to please some petty bureaucratic gatekeepers," he said.
I laughed. I'd never heard the admissions process described like that before.
"That's how the system works," I said. "You think I care about my grades just because? You think I enjoy working on my essays for their own sake?"
His na?veté was strange. A transfer student from the mainland shouldn't have been this clueless. Most of them were only here in the first place to improve their shot at a top-tier school.
"I'm doing this because I don't want to be poor," I said. "I don't want to stay in this town. I want to move forward in life, and that means college. The more prestigious the better."
I wadded up my paper bag and chucked it into the recycling bin. "If you're a taizidang like my mother thinks you are, then you wouldn't understand. You probably had everything handed to you."
He looked disappointed in my response.
"I hope you have better luck with the system than I did," he said.
Quentin had a troubled, faraway look on his face, like he was remembering his own long-ago ordeal in academia. He must have gone to one of those cram-factories where they spanked you with abacuses. Maybe that was how his English seemed to be improving at an exponential rate.
I sighed. "You want half of my sandwich? It's ham and Swiss."
"Thanks," he said. "But I'm a vegetarian."
We went way over our allotted time. At the close of the Read-a-Thon, there was a whole crowd of parents just as enthralled as the kids they'd come to pick up.
"George didn't say a word," I read. "He felt quite trembly. He knew something tremendous had taken place that morning. For a few brief moments, he had touched with the very tips of his fingers the edge of a magic world."
"The End," said Quentin. Somehow the difficulty level of the books had risen over the course of the day. The two of us got up and took a bow at Mrs. Thompson's insistence while everyone clapped.
The room began to clear out slowly, the adults lingering to chitchat with each other and the children running around to enjoy their last moments of freedom.
"How soon can we have you two back?" Mrs. Thompson said with a smile. "After today's performance, I'd be willing to make this an every week thing."
An adorable little cherub tugged at Quentin's trouser leg.
"Where's the pretty girl?" the kid said to him. "You should read with the pretty girl instead of her."
"Beth!" Mrs. Thompson gasped. "Your mother's calling. Get along now." She shooed the towheaded child away from the awkward-bomb she'd just dropped.
Yunie and I spent so much time together it was only natural that people would refer to us as a pair. And no one thinks she's gorgeous more so than me. She's petite, slender—the natural beauty.
Which means I'm the ... not.
If she's the small one then I'm the big one. If she's the friendly one who's on good terms with everyone, then I'm the rough one with a sharp tongue and bad temper. If she's the attractive one, then, well, it's pretty obvious what's left over.
"Yeah ... so, uh ... this was a one-time arrangement," said Quentin.
"Aw," Mrs. Thompson said. "But the two of you have such good ..." She waved her index fingers crisscross at him and me.
"Comedic contrast?" There was way too much edge in my voice. "Yeah, we're a regular Laurel and Hardy. I'll see you next month."
I spun on my heel and went out the back of the library, avoiding the crush of parents and children in the front lobby.