Nothing but the truth: (and a few white lies) Read online

  I smile faintly. "That's the god-awful truth."

  "Right on," says Cole.

  "Patty wrote the truth," Janie says, wrenching around in her desk to stare pointedly at Mark. "Did everybody else?"

  Mark gets out of his hot seat so quickly, he knocks over his Untruth Statement. All his white lies spill onto the floor. He doesn't stop to pick up any of the loose pages, just slinks out of the classroom.

  "Mark?" calls Mrs. Meyers. She frowns, confused. Her eyes dart first to Janie and then rest on me.

  Why can't I confront Steve and Mark myself? Janie, fearless Janie, who says cellulite be damned and wears thigh-high skirts anyway, can. And does.

  I duck my head, ashamed of my silence. My hands push in my stomach as if I could dig out the truth, tug it from my belly button.

  But the only truth is this: I've demolished my GPA. Next year's class president hates me now. Steve Kosanko is going to be the Grim Reaper of my sophomore year. And a butt ugly shirt can't cover the fact that I'm a coward, no different from Mark.

  Why is the truth so hard to swallow?

  Apparently, Mrs. Meyers can't swallow my hard, bitter truths either.

  "Patty," she says. "I want to see you after class."

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  8 * Incomplete

  As the other students pile out of the classroom, I can hear summer vacation lightening their voices. Mrs. Meyers doesn't seem to hear anything, erasing the chalkboard in long, full sweeps, as if cleaning it is the only thing she's thinking about. In my mind, I'm halfway through bleaching my skin before Mrs. Meyers turns to face me, looking as if she knows what I'm doing and doesn't like it.

  With a slight frown, Mrs. Meyers picks up a thin, red file folder and heads toward my desk, sitting down in Janie's seat beside mine. She says, "What you wrote is good, very good." Her eyes probe mine, like she can see straight over my Great Wall of Chinese Silence. "Your Truth Statement is stronger than anything you've produced this year."

  I nod, OK, wondering, so why hasn't she handed me my paper yet?

  "But you only wrote half the truth."

  "Half?" I repeat.

  Mrs. Meyers nods, closes her eyes, and when she opens

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  them, they're urgent, hot black coals. She hugs the file folder with my writing to her heart before she hands it to me.

  When I open the file, my breath escapes in a whoosh, sounding like the air escaping out of a deflating balloon.

  Incomplete. Written in bright, red ink. That one damning word is a stake through my broken heart. How did she know? Today, I feel incomplete in too many ways to count. My family missing one doting father. My half-and-half self. My nonexistent love life, including a newly fractured fantasy. Take it from me; my Truth Statement is the least of my worries.

  My tongue stops working, and I stutter, "But, but... I th-thought you said this was better than anything I've written."

  "It is. And it's more truthful than half of what I read," says Mrs. Meyers, throwing her hand out to take in the entire empty classroom.

  "Then why..."

  "Because you can do better." Mrs. Meyers crosses her arms. "You wrote this in one night."

  A pronouncement, not a question. I nod slowly. How can I deny it when that's the God's honest truth?

  "Excellent for one night's work." Her smile is admiring, but then she scribbles the words I've seen on my papers all year long. "More. Give me more." Her fingers tap her bottom lip, her forehead wrinkles pensively "No, what I mean is, give yourself more." She stands up. Even in her heels, I know I must tower over her by a good six inches. Hating to feel gawky, I stay in my seat while Mrs. Meyers returns to erasing the chalkboard, standing on tiptoes to skim the top. "You'll have until the end of the summer to rewrite this."

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  Good, because when Mama sees the big "I" on my report card, I'll be confined to math camp for the rest of my life. That should be plenty of time to write the Whole Truth.

  "Oh, and Patty..."

  I sigh. What now?

  "Mr. Powell told me that you got into math camp in spite of your best efforts." Another amused smile plays on her dark lips. And here I thought that I had done a good job hiding from everyone that I can do math. When I want.

  "Stanford, you know, is nothing like this." This time, Mrs. Meyers gestures with her white chalk to the halls, where I can hear chasing feet and shrill screams. If I close my eyes, I could swear I was still in elementary school. Either that, or this is just one of the nightmares I have before big meets and important tests. "All I'm saying, Patty, is when a door like Stanford opens, run through." Her arms are crooked at her side, tensed like she's going to break into a sprint herself. "You might be surprised to find yourself on the other side."

  Great, my Honors English teacher can moonlight as a fortune cookie writer. Like always, I keep my thoughts to myself.

  No one must have informed Mr. Powell that today's the last day of school because he jots another geometric proof on the chalkboard. I'm not joking. Then again, he's fairly oblivious, which accounts for his nickname, Mr. Bowel. As in, he's lost in the bowels of math. So it's no big surprise that when kids pass yearbooks to each other to sign, me included, Mr. Powell is still mumbling circuitously with his back to us. Cole hands me his yearbook, and I write the first thing that

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  pops into my head: "Run through open doors, dude!" Which, I suppose, means that my conversation with Mrs. Meyers has lodged itself in the bowels of my subconscious. Her message must make sense to Cole because he skims my inscription and nods wisely. "Right on," he whispers to me. "Open doors!"

  Mr. Powell drones on, adding two new columns on the chalkboard, more proofs about who knows what. For a moment, I zone out, imagining the geekzoids lurking on the other side of my math camp door. Then, on the last clean page of my geometry notebook, I write:

  The Patty Ho Happy Camper Theorem

  Given: Math camp is a done deal.

  Prove: It is the op en door I'm supposed to run through this summer.

  Statement

  Reason

  1. I don't have a summer job lined up.

  1. Given. Procrastination, what can I say?

  2. All the good jobs are taken now.

  2. Given. Big oops.

  3. I want to be far, far away from Mark Scranton...

  3. Given!!

  4. ...and Mamas glowering. Therefore, I might as well embrace math camp because its not like I have anything better to do.

  4. Save me !My excitement is overwhelming.

  If math camp is my open door, why does it feel like I'm being locked away?

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  At lunch, Laura practically causes a riot when she crashes across the cafeteria, bumping into everyone to get to me. Ever the idealist, Laura looks at me so earnestly, we could have been back in fifth grade, cementing our friendship over a petition to save the rain forest. Which means one thing. Janie's already shared the news of my early morning run-in with Steve. Somehow, I don't know what's more gratifying: that I don't have to retell the story or that Laura looks like she wants to stamp out Steve Kosanko, high school pollutant.

  "You've got to tell your brother about Steve Kosanko," Laura declares as we walk to our usual lunch place, third table from the cafeteria's back door. An excellent escape hatch in case I'm caught by Steve on my own.

  "If you don't, we will," says Janie, already scanning the lunchroom for Abe.

  I shake my head. Belly-button Grandmother doesn't need to tell me what could happen. The headline in the newspaper would read: "Harvard student rejected for fistfight." I couldn't be responsible for that. Geez, then I'd have to live the rest of my life as the Reason for Abe's Failure. Thanks, but being the Disappointing Daughter is tough enough in House Ho.

  "School's over in three hours," I tell them. "It's not worth it."

  "Then what are you going to do next year? Or this summer?" demands Laura.

  According to my Happy Camper Math Theorem, math camp is as good a pl
ace as any to run to. Maybe not with my arms spread wide the way Mrs. Meyers wanted me to, but with my eyes wide open. I know what I'm getting myself into. Stanford is 903 miles from Mama, 903 miles from Steve Kosanko and not nearly enough miles from Mark.

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  That's how I find myself announcing as if I planned this all along instead of Mama, "I'm going to math camp."

  "But you don't even like math," says Janie, all confused. "This is another weird Chinesey thing, isn't it?"

  No, this is just a weird Patty thing. But I simply shrug, not saying anything at all.

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  9 * Potluck

  "Come downstairs! Mama bellows from the kitchen. "Everybody almost here!" Another loud clang comes from below, and I wonder, What on earth could Mama possibly be cooking now? She's already made enough food to feed the imperial army and besides, isn't the point of a potluck that everyone brings a dish to share?

  I walk past Abe's bedroom, plastered with Japanese anime posters featuring doe-eyed girls with impossibly big boobs. He's prone on his bed as if reading comic books has sprained his brain. Let me get this straight. On our first day of summer vacation, I've been mopping, and now he's the one moping?

  Earlier, I set the buffet table and polished the windows (as if anyone other than Mama was going to notice whether they were dirty or not) while Mama stewed in the kitchen, muttering about how Mrs. Shang, better known as The Gossip Lady, would just bring Jell-0 again to our potluck party. "She's so cheap! I spend twenty dollars on duck and she spend a couple of cents," she grumbled as she poured another can of beer on top of the duck. It ate at Mama, that Jell-O inequity.

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  Abe sighs and throws his arm dramatically over his eyes.

  "What's wrong with you?" I have to admit, my pity meter is running on empty. If I had gotten into Harvard and were escaping Mama and memories of Mark, you wouldn't have caught me lolling around, potluck or no potluck.

  But, no, Abe moans, "God, why do we have to have a potluck tonight?"

  "Oh, poor you," I say, picking a careful path through to him. Catch my room flooding ankle-deep in clothes, and Mama's screeching would have been so loud, banshees would have flocked to her for lessons.

  But then I see the gray HARVARD T-shirt, balled up in his right hand. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. This is Mama's hour of glory, proof that no one ever need pity Ho Mei-Li for being the sole unmarried woman in the Potluck Group.

  Mama doesn't just want to trot Honest Abe out tonight; she wants him gift-wrapped for everyone to envy, specifically Mrs. Chan, who spent the last seven years bragging about her own son's genius-level IQ, his perfect score on the SAT and his grand master chess status. An hour into Abe's acceptance at Harvard and Stan's rejection, Mama revised history. Lo and behold! Abe was no longer wasting his time with sports; Stan Chan, former Potluck Group pet, wasted his with chess. Faster than Ichiro can steal second base, Abe's baseball trophies were yanked off his desk and displayed prominently on the mantel. Guess who gets to dust them?

  So shoot spit-'n'-shine me; I giggle.

  Abe's eyes narrow, looking dangerously like Mama's, and he hurls the T-shirt at me. "You wear it then, if you think it's so funny," he bites out.

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  My hand darts out to grab his T-shirt from the air, a fast reflex response from years of dodging the balls he's thrown at me.

  "Sorry, I'm going to Stanford." And with those words, I fall in love with my Stanford card. It strikes Abe speechless.

  The doorbell rings, and Abe and I look at each other in dread, reunited partners in misery. His head flops back onto his pillow; I want to flop onto the floor like a spineless jellyfish. When I was nine, I figured out the Potluck equation: one night of potluck bragging equals four days of parental nagging. "How come you not read Pride and Prejudice like Emily?" or "How come you not get A+ in science like Stan?"

  Tonight would be different.

  Mama was singing to the tune of "O, Harvard Mia," an aria she wrote and practiced daily over the past four months.

  "Showtime," I say, floating Abe's T-shirt on top of his face and hustling out of his bedroom before he can clobber me. I hear a ball bouncing off the back of his door as it slams shut.

  For the first time since Belly-button Grandmother prescribed Tonic Soup, our house is filled with fragrant scents. Beer duck, mapo tofu, stir-fried rice vermicelli noodles. While all the kids are feasting in the family room, the parents in the living room are eating morsels of Mama's pride and joy, meticulously prepared, generously sized and Harvard-filled.

  To Mama's vast disappointment, the Chans, better known as The Wise Guys for having such a smart-ass kid, called earlier, saying that Stan had caught the flu. More like a bad case of Family Shame. But I couldn't blame the Chans. Being compared to Abe for fourteen years has been an effective diet

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  for my self-esteem, whittling it down to chopstick-thin proportions. Who'd suffer a starvation diet like that willingly, for even a single evening?

  As if The Gossip Lady overheard my thoughts, she shrieks with laughter. Name any Asian person within a fifty-mile radius, and Mrs. Shang can dredge up some juicy tidbit, usually embarrassing like when she told everyone that Mr. Chu had been fired after working in the same high-tech company for twenty-two years. Soon after that bit of news traveled from her mouth to our ears, the Chus dropped out of The Potluck Group. While we don't see them anymore, The Gossip Lady makes sure we're kept current on their affairs.

  We kids glance uneasily at each other because, given different circumstances, it could be one of us that the parents are laughing about. Once, we posted an eavesdropper near the adults who were playing a ruthless game of My Kid Is Better Than Yours.

  "Mrs. Shang just said that Emily made it to first chair in the symphony," the eavesdropper reported. "The youngest first chair in five years."

  "Wow," Emily said, looking shocked. "Mama said I took too long to make it to first chair."

  The rest of us glared at Emily, not because we were jealous of her so much as we dreaded the post-potluck lecturing: "If you practiced violin harder, you could be like Emily. You practice two hours tomorrow."

  There are four families and nine kids in The Potluck Group. One lucky one, Emily the Virtuoso, has already escaped to college. Sitting across the living room from me are her little sisters, the China Dolls. They're identical twins a year older

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  than me whose claim to potluck fame is their glossy, jet black hair and porcelain skin. My whitened skin gets no such looks of envy. I've cheated by adding white to my gene pool whereas the China Dolls are pure-breeds, superior for producing such light skin on their own.

  They are doing an extreme makeover on The Baby, the three-year-old who just started Saturday morning Chinese school, poor bo-po-mo-fo thing. They've already painted her fingernails, and have moved on to her toes. I tuck my long, bare feet under my legs. My feet are at least twice the size of the China Dolls' tiny ones. Before anyone arrived tonight, I stashed my size ten sandals in the closet so I wouldn't hear their "Wow! Patty, your shoes are so big!" when they placed their child-sized ones next to my dragon boats the way they usually do.

  With a few deft twists of The Baby's wispy hair, the China Dolls convert Mei-Mei into Bebe, complete with a sophisticated up-do. In less than five minutes, The Baby accomplishes what I haven't been able to do in six years: be inducted into the China Doll private sorority, an exclusive club only for the petite, beautiful and all-Asian.

  "This would have been cute for the last school dance," says China Doll One, taking The Baby's hand and twirling her around.

  China Doll Two looks at me curiously. "What did you wear to yours?"

  They are so lucky, those China Dolls. Their dad is a second-generationer, meaning he was born in America. The fallout of that good luck is that the China Dolls can wear makeup, dress in the latest fashions and even hear a

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  compliment or two straight from
his mouth, if not their mom's. It's why the China Dolls have such, shall we say, healthy self-esteems.

  While I try to figure out a way to be honest yet save face, I look away to where Anne is studying a math book, not paying attention to what the China Dolls are doing to her baby sister. What a geek-and-a-half. School's over, summer's begun. But even Anne somehow convinced her first-generation parents to let her go to a school dance with some hunk from another school. So that makes me a double geek. I've never even been asked.

  "I didn't go," I mumble, reaching new lows on the Social Scale.

  "Really?" shrieks China Doll Two so loud, she could have gone vocal cord to vocal cord with her mom, The Gossip Lady. "But Mama told us that you can go to dances now."

  "Yeah, but only with Taiwanese guys."

  "But you're white!" says China Doll One.

  My cheeks flame. Whatever whiteness there is on my skin burns to a crisp. I am too white to be one of the China Dolls, not white enough for Steve Kosanko.

  China Doll One giggles. "Well, we can only date Taiwanese guys, too, right, Grace?"

  "Right," says China Doll Two, grinning secretively at her twin.

  Anne, the other outcast shunned from the China Dolls Club for her flat seaweed hair and stumpy legs, looks up from her math book. "I think Asian guys are cute."

  At this, China Doll One snorts. "Like, when have you ever dated an Asian guy?"

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  "Like, when have you?" asks Anne.

  Panic wrinkles the China Dolls' foreheads, making them look like overgrown Shar-Pei puppies. Had they known lines pleated their precious skin, the China Dolls would have sprinted home in their tiny sandals to slather on a mud mask. China Doll Two demands, "How do you know?"