Girl Overboard Read online

  I was?

  “We’re going to get together there for winter break,” she says.

  We are?

  “Are you taking your jet?” Chelsea asks, her eyes glazing over like she’s already en route with me to Chalet Cheng. “God, I wish we had one. It’d make traveling so much more convenient.”

  Too convenient, I want to tell her. There’s no obstacle to make you think twice about picking up and leaving again and again. Instead, I grasp for any other topic but me, my parents, and their plane to interrupt the rich-want-to-get-richer fantasy unfolding rapidly in Chelsea’s head. Thankfully, I must have good bathroom karma because just then a stall door swings open. I swear to God, Chelsea is a half-step into my stall before I sigh. “A little privacy?”

  The last thing I see before I close the door are the girls behind Chelsea running their eyes down my body, U-turning at my hips.

  Halfway through unsnapping and unzipping, I hear one of them ask in sotto voce, “Like, why would she wear boys’ clothes when she can buy anything she wants?”

  Part of me wants to tell Judgmental Girl, “Um, see how these metal walls don’t go all the way up to the ceiling or down to the floor? Not soundproof.” The Shiraz in me wants to demand, “So you mean, why aren’t I Miss Pretty in Hot Pink like the rest of you? Because I’m not trolling for boys when I ride.”

  Instead, I tell the truth, “Because I can move in guys’ stuff.”

  In the uncomfortable silence that now hangs in the bathroom, I lower my goggles and pull my beanie down, hoping that I’ll be unrecognizable again. I hustle away from the sink and back to the girl-free zone of my snowboarding crew, but the guys are hovering around Natalia, all pretty in her pale pink snow pants and silver body-hugging jacket.

  “Hey, look who said she’d video us,” says Mobey, his arm slung around Natalia, comfortable in a way that he’s never been with me.

  Yeah, look who’s not meeting my eyes, I want to snap back when Age studies the RhamiWare booth as if he’s seriously reconsidering a professional career in snowboarding. Reality is, he’s caught between Natalia and me in an emotional tug-of-war I didn’t realize I was participating in until now.

  Before I can help myself, I ask Natalia, “I didn’t think you rode?” I mean, this is the same girl who was so scared of heights, she made the chair lift operator stop when we were just five feet above the ground the one time she came snowboarding with us last spring.

  “The way you guys went on and on about snowboarding, I didn’t want to miss out anymore,” Natalia says, shrugging like she and her thick fluttering eyelashes don’t have a clue how crazy-jealous she’s making me. “I spent so much time practicing indoors over Christmas break at Mini Mountain, the guys there kicked me off the carpet and told me to get on the real thing.” She grins impishly at Age and grabs his arm with her pink-mittened hand. “So I’ll just hang on tight during the chairlift.”

  While I follow in Natalia’s footsteps to wait in line, it dawns on me that during my exile, a new Queen of the Mountain has been crowned.

  7

  Even when it’s back to just me and Age on the drive home, Natalia might as well be wedged in the seat between us, his truck feels that overcrowded.

  “So,” says Age as we finally reach the gate separating The House of Cheng from The Rest of the World. “Used, bruised, and abused.”

  I glance at him quickly, wondering if he’s talking about me post-Jared, but he starts to reach for my banged-up shoulder, thinks better of it, and lifts his own instead.

  “How’s it feel?” he asks.

  “Like a couple of sumo wrestlers have been slam-dancing with it.”

  “You’re officially back.” He grins crookedly before punching in the security code to open the gate.

  “Yeah.” As soon as Age pulls up to the garage, I duck out of his beater of a pickup, more rusted than red. My knee nearly buckles when I put my weight on it. How can I be pushing sixteen and falling apart? I smile automatically at Age when he hands me my snowboard and murmur a quick “thanks,” watching him drive off hurriedly like he can’t wait to escape our uncomfortable silence, too.

  As I limp inside the garage to put away my board, I rail to myself: God, why did I go to camp? Why did I tear my ligament? Every step from the garage to the kitchen jolts my knee, and I need to ice it. My heart, it’s already numb.

  Finally, up in my bedroom, I collapse onto the floor, wriggle out of my snow pants, and strip off the neoprene brace that I picked up at a sporting goods store. No wonder Dr. Bradford said that this cheap thing was only a placebo.

  What this girl needs is more than a placebo, and I scoot back on my bottom—no, not the most graceful locomotion method, but I’m too tired to stand—over to my desk, where I place an SOS call to Dr. Bradford’s answering service: “Hello, this is Syrah Cheng.” Within a minute of throwing around the Cheng name, Dr. Bradford himself is on the line, never mind that it’s a Saturday.

  “Syrah, how are your parents?” he asks in his growly voice.

  “Great. It’s me that’s not doing so wonderful,” I say, rubbing a finger along the largest of my scars, still angry red.

  “Did you reinjure your knee?”

  “I went snowboarding today, and you’re right. This neoprene brace doesn’t do anything. Dr. Bradford, I really need a custom one.” Even as I cringe at how I sound every bit the spoiled brat everyone thinks I am, I can’t stop begging. “A kid at my school has one and he skis with his all the time.”

  The doc doesn’t answer so I prepare to launch a second assault, but then he says, “One, you don’t need any brace. Your knee is ninety percent back to normal, as strong as it’s going to get with your hamstring graft. I don’t think I need to remind you why I recommended doing a patella graft instead.”

  “No.” God, why did I let Mama override that graft, which leaves a longer scar but stronger knee, in favor of the hamstring graft because it heals prettier?

  “And two, braces are just crutches. Before long, you’ll think you need it for everything.”

  “It’d just be for snowboarding,” I say, wincing at the whine in my voice. I swallow and try to channel all the Ethan Cheng control I can. “I just need a little extra stability for my landings.”

  “Syrah, I’m sorry—”

  “But it’s not the same. Nothing is the same.”

  “Nothing is ever the same.”

  Thank you, Dr. Bradford, but right now, I don’t need a primer on Zen Buddhism and how the one and only thing that doesn’t change about life is that everything changes.

  He continues, “So I’m telling you, braces are more psychological than physiological support. Keep doing your exercises. Other muscles will compensate for your compromised hamstring.”

  Something tells me that a billion lunges and leg presses and squats won’t get me back to where I left off. With a “thanks” so polite that Mama would have approved, I hang up the phone and drag myself to the bath, thinking I can multitask: ice my knee while I soak my muscles and brood.

  As the water runs in the bathtub, I step on the scale. One bit of good news—I lost a pound. Even so, when I catch my reflection in the mirror, I yank my eyes away so I don’t linger on my stomach or my thighs. Even with my eyes closed, I can see the bruise already mottling my shoulder, as dark and tender and reproachful as the realization that you can’t return to the good old days no matter how hard you try.

  8

  With the oasis of winter break shimmering on the horizon, the teachers are cramming in as much work as they possibly can in these last two weeks. Especially Mr. Delbene. My journalism teacher’s lecture today not only defies all the normal laws governing time, space, and speed, but it’s building suspiciously to a Big Project.

  “So I was thinking,” says Mr. Delbene, rocking up and down on his Birkenstocks, one foot stockinged in red, the other white. “What is my legacy going to be?” Pinching the last issue of our newspaper between thumb and forefinger like it’s a dirty diaper,
he asks, “Why isn’t anyone reading this?”

  Easy. Can you say, Cure for insomnia? When the Wall Street Journal reads like a gossip tabloid compared to your high school newspaper, something’s terribly wrong. I glance around to see if the rest of the class have caught the undeniable stench of impending homework, but no one’s paying attention. That is, no one’s paying attention to Mr. Delbene. They’re all occupied with messaging each other about hooking up at Sun Valley or the Bahamas or wherever they’re heading for winter break. I’d be right with them except the guy I’d be messaging hasn’t called me once since we went riding on Sunday. Obviously, Age is being quarantined, Dr. Natalia’s orders.

  Thankfully, Mr. Delbene has terrible eyesight and an even worse sense of direction in his lectures. So while everyone else is messaging and I’m manga-ing, he veers off mid-thought, this time meandering away from his personal contribution to history and over to history at large. “Amazing, isn’t it,” he mutters, “that the fifteenth century Ming Dynasty nurtured the fine arts, just like the Medicis in Renaissance Italy?”

  Mr. Delbene’s monotone lulls me into a meditative state, and I start sketching Shiraz at Wicked in Whistler. An unexpected, excited rise in Mr. Delbene’s voice bumps into my musings. He pulls away from the whiteboard, not noticing that his pilled-up cream sweater is speckled with blue and red dry marker.

  “If you could change anything in our paper, what would it be?” Mr. Delbene’s hands circle in big arcs like he’s swatting away the confused fog spilling out of our heads.

  Around me, a couple of kids finally get an inkling that Mr. Delbene is about to load us down with a project over winter break. I angle my head thoughtfully as if I’m considering his question in case his eyes land on me.

  “Where should we focus?” He strides to the front row, the poor sacrificial lambs. Standing before Alexander, whose grandfather was a football jock way back when, Mr. Delbene demands, “Kill sports coverage?”

  Whether we’re fourth generation old money (whose grand-fossils made their fortunes chopping down trees in the name of timber) or new money (whose parents made a killing in the tech boom), we’re all short-changed on ideas.

  “Randy.” Mr. Delbene swivels suddenly to the boy on my right. “What would you do?”

  “Huh?” For the last fifteen minutes, Randy’s thumbs have been glued to his BlackBerry.

  “Think,” Mr. Delbene prompts urgently. “You’ve got to have some ideas.” Wild-eyed the way a Tang horse would look in a losing battle, Mr. Delbene considers us one after another. “Someone in here must have some plans to turn this rag around?”

  No one answers, not even Lillian, who for once is gazing out the window instead of paying attention. Mr. Delbene looks panicked, seeing his future as a senior citizen and not liking it. Oh, great. Just great. His bugged-out eyes settle on last-resort me. “Syrah?”

  Usually, I keep a low profile during classroom discussions. I mean, who am I to disappoint everyone who expects me to shoot out pithy, wise, Ethan Cheng–worthy aphorisms whenever I open my mouth? Like now. Even as I try to formulate some intelligent, creative idea, Mr. Delbene drifts to the next victim as though he knows that none of my plans are going to come to anything.

  “Next Tuesday,” he intones with such unusual decisiveness that everyone shakes out of their pre-Valentine-winter-break haze. “Bring in at least one viable, somewhat creative, out-of-the-box idea to turn this paper around.”

  A few minutes after the final school bell rings, it’s down to a couple of stragglers outside in the bus circle. All the buses have already left. So have the private vans and the cars of those few parents who bother to drive rather than delegate that job to the hired help. A red Mercedes rounds the circle, nearly dousing me with dirty puddle water, and I watch enviously as a sullen sophomore, mortified that his dad has picked him up, slouches down low, becoming a human iceberg. Only the top of his head is visible through the window. That kid has no idea how lucky he is that his dad showed up.

  Obviously, Mama isn’t picking me up the way the daily schedule left on the breakfast table informed me she would. She must have found some new store in San Francisco that she just had to scope out, and in her state of shopping nirvana extended her trip. The clouds release a rain shower, and I pull my hood over my head as if that’ll hide me from the truth: the van is long gone, and I’m stuck at school.

  Oh, joy, The Six-Pack are descending the staircase, two-by-two, Noah’s representatives of the Proud Crowd, chosen to be saved from this great deluge. One problem: their ark is nowhere to be seen.

  “You sure your dad’s picking us up?” Chelsea asks Lillian, frowning because she has to (gasp!) wait in the rain.

  “He’s coming,” says Lillian, sounding anything but sure. She bites her lower lip uncertainly and repeats, as if she needs to hear her own reassurance, “He’s coming.”

  “Good, ’cause my hair’s going to get all frizzy out here.” Chelsea pats her brown curls, comforting them.

  Adults-in-training, Lillian flips on her phone, and I return to my own high-tech appendage, pretending to everyone on the sidewalk that I have calls to return, messages to check. Why, this snippet of free time is a veritable godsend in my busy, important life, except that I get a direct dial to Mama and Baba’s voicemail. My own is empty—just checked and still not a peep from Age.

  “When does that party start again?” asks Chelsea, not caring that, one, I haven’t been invited to said party, and, two, I can hear perfectly fine since she’s standing no more than two feet away from me.

  “At five. We’ve got an hour and a half,” says Lillian, checking her watch. “No worries.”

  “So, I’ve been wondering, how does it feel to have”—Chelsea points a finger at Lillian—“your dad work for”—the finger aims at me now—“her dad?”

  Sorry, but according to The Syrah Cheng Way, business hierarchy doesn’t translate into a social one, especially not the high school variety. Even though I keep my voice mild when I tell Chelsea, “They all work for someone. My dad’s accountable to all the investors,” I raise one eyebrow a la Wayne when he wants to make it painfully clear to me how stupid I am. Surprise, it works on Chelsea, too. She shuts up.

  The rain pounds so hard now that it bounces off the cement sidewalk to douse our feet a second time on its way down. Nice. So it’s a mass girl exodus to the overhang, as we all huddle in our jackets. Seattle gets thirty-six inches of rain a year on average, but no one carries an umbrella at school ever. I suppose you get used to drizzle the same way people on the waterfront stop hearing the Argosy ships with the tour guides commentating over loudspeakers: “And if you look through those windows, you’ll see a real T-rex skeleton that the Microsoft exec who lives here personally excavated. And just across the lake over there is the home of the man you can thank every time you turn on your cell phone: Ethan Cheng.”

  Lillian’s dad swerves into the parking lot. So what if he’s too busy talking on his cell phone to acknowledge the daughter waving at him? He showed up and that says everything.

  Trying to look busy is hard to do when rain is dumping, and I have nowhere to go, and no way to get there. Just as the rest of The Six-Pack hightails it to the dryer ground of the minivan, Lillian turns around to ask, “I don’t suppose you’d want to go to Children’s Hospital to help with a party?”

  “Children’s Hospital?” It’s ridiculous but I feel relieved that what everybody’s been talking about isn’t another Viewridge party I learned of after the fact, or worse, been invited just to foot the bill, kegs and all.

  “It’s going to be a zoo today, which I guess will be good since it’s our party. So yeah, you’re probably too busy, have other plans for Groundhog Day,” Lillian rambles nervously, as she hurdles over guardrails that are surrounding me for good reason. Quickly, she backtracks to the safety of being virtual strangers when I don’t answer right away. “Okay, so I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

  “Come on, Lillian!” hollers Chelsea ou
t the open door.

  Lillian sighs so softly I bet she’s not even aware she’s making a sound. But I hear that release of breath as if it’s been broadcast around me. I know that sigh, that sound of resignation and frustration. It’s the way I feel when Mama and Baba drag me to one of their black tie events to socialize with people I “ought to know.” I study Lillian curiously. Maybe she isn’t just another Chelsea girl-bot, but a Six-Packer who wants to break free of the plastic ties binding her to that group. I throw her a lifeline that I’ve always wished someone, say, Grace or Wayne, would toss to me: “So, a Groundhog Day party?”

  She smiles sheepishly. “Another guild already had dibs on Valentine’s Day.”

  “I’d love to help,” I tell her.

  “Really?” Lillian’s voice climbs up a high-pitched scale, reaching disbelief but not the upper climes of girlfriend shriek. Still, it’s close enough.

  I nod. “Really.”

  9

  Frankly, hospitals freak me out. The last time I was in one, I awoke from my knee surgery to learn that (big surprise) my dearly departing parents had left the hospital for some conference in Paris, assured that all went well. And the time before that, I was with Age, the day his mom slipped into a coma. So despite the two lilac-spotted giraffe statues posed outside like greeters at an exotic boutique hotel, Children’s Hospital is still a place for the sick, injured, and scared.

  Apparently, Lillian isn’t afflicted with my hospital-phobia, because she marches as though she were a regular through the double glass doors and past the mural of elephants and giraffes drinking at a watering hole. A man and a woman, both in shapeless function-before-fashion scrubs, overtake us. The Six-Pack are nowhere to be seen.

  I ask Lillian, “So how often do you volunteer here?”

  “Volunteer? Not all that often,” Lillian answers without breaking her stride. Even at the elevator, she’s all impatient movement, jabbing the up button and tapping her foot until the doors open. Even before I’m all the way inside, she’s pressed the button for the fifth floor. “My mom started a new guild with a bunch of the other moms at school. So I got dragged in to co-chair this party with her.” Lillian quickly appends, “Not that I mind. This has knocked off my entire service learning requirement for the year.”