Girl Overboard Read online

  Blame my own zero community service hours on watching one too many fashion parades at black-tie charity events where helping the poor, the hungry, and the weary takes a backseat to showing off brand-new designer outfits that could feed a village for a year.

  “Here we go,” says Lillian, a tour guide when the elevator opens. Down the long hall we charge—until I spot the large charcoal Plexiglas plaque commemorating the Cheng Foundation. I stand, transfixed, not by my parents’ names, but mine sharing the same line as Wayne’s and Grace’s.

  “The Founders’ Circle,” says Lillian, gesturing at the sign that explains that these are the donors who’ve given more than a million dollars to the hospital. “You guys do so much.”

  I nod as if I know all about how involved my family is in the community, but feel like the ultimate imposter, especially when down the radiology wing I can’t look at the young boy locked in a wheelchair, his head lolling to the side. Not Lillian. She calls like he’s any other kid, “You coming to the party at five?”

  “Yeah,” he says, his little voice all excited.

  The only time Lillian actually stops moving is at the column of orcas fronting the Sound Café, where she takes a deep breath, girding herself, but for what? Suddenly, she lets it out in a hurricane rush at the sight of her mother and her bulging pregnant stomach standing on a chair, an oversized cake topper.

  “Oh, geez, what is she doing?” mutters Lillian, hurrying to her mother. “Mom! Get down from there.”

  “Lillian, you’re here,” Mrs. Fujimoro says, relieved. The streamers behind her are already wilting, a tired bouquet. Whatever glow pregnant women are supposed to have, it’s not emanating from Mrs. Fujimoro, whose skin is more green than white. Still, she manages a wan smile. “Syrah, what a pleasant surprise. Maybe we’ll get your mother to join our guild yet.”

  Lillian casts me an uncomfortable, apologetic look, like she wants me to know that I’m not a stepping stone to Mama, and then she grabs the spool of crepe streamers from her mom.

  “We’ll finish setting up,” Lillian assures her mom, as she helps her off the chair.

  “Definitely,” I say. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

  “Resting…” Mrs. Fujimoro sighs at that unknown concept. For a moment, she clenches her jaw as though she’s going to throw up, but then peers at Lillian. “If you can handle this…”

  “Go, Mom. I got it under control.”

  Mrs. Fujimoro blows out a grateful breath and swallows hard, convulsively. “All this sugar. Who would’ve known that morning sickness would rear its ugly head with just a month to go?”

  By the way Lillian watches her mother waddle out the cafeteria, I can tell that she wishes she could leave, too. I know the feeling, that desperate need to escape, and would have relieved her here, but a screech of laughter erupts from the table where The Six-Pack are parked, chugging lattes like they’re at a coffeehouse with nothing more important to do than gossip.

  “He is so just using her for sex,” cries Chelsea, digging into a 500-calorie scone.

  “Honestly,” huffs Lillian who, like a Bao-mu in training, marches to The Six-Pack. Heedless of what this will do to her social status, she hisses, “There are kids here. So do you mind?” Not waiting for an answer, Lillian flips around, but there’s no chance she can miss the girls’ cackles, their mock “Ooooh, we’re so scared.” Concerned because I can feel Lillian’s bravado faltering, I hurry to meet her halfway.

  “My mom’s going to throw a fit because I did that,” mutters Lillian, rolling her eyes, as The Six-Pack cracks up again at their table.

  “Why?” I glance over my shoulder, meet Chelsea’s eyes and stare her down, wondering what kind of hold this girl has over Lillian. “They were being totally inappropriate. I should have said something.”

  Looking troubled, Lillian shrugs my question away. So I steer her to the dining room and say, “Come on, don’t worry about them, Warrior Girl. We’ve got a party to host.”

  Most of the women in the guild have that lethal leanness of second wives who run in Mama’s circle. They come to pay respects to me, the visiting dignitary at this party.

  “Why, hello, Syrah!” says Chelsea’s mom, smiling with such intensity she could be a model for teeth brightening systems. “Will we be seeing you at the Evergreen Children’s Fund dinner next week?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not on my calendar,” I tell her.

  “Really?” Her eyebrows lift and she steps closer to me, a telltale sign that she’s preparing for The Ask, the moment when she’ll request that I put in a good word to my parents. See, this is why I stopped going to the gym. Strangers would approach me while I was trapped on the treadmill, downright pleading that my parents donate a couple of thousand here, a couple of thousand there.

  Luckily for me, Lillian’s grim announcement—“We’ve got forty-five minutes before the kids descend”—saves me from making party chitchat. The next half hour passes in a flurry of flinging streamers, table rearranging, and “fluffing” the dining room until the national colors appear to have been changed to red, white, and pink. Apparently, the guild hasn’t gotten over being bumped from hosting the Valentine’s Day party.

  How ironic that I, the girl with the most backward fashion sense, get assigned displaying duties for the cookie-decorating tables, as if genetics have conferred me with Mama’s primping skills. As Mama points out in her pre-party conferences with her event planner and their post-party critiques, presentation is everything. You simply would not throw down food in—quelle horreur!—plastic platters and call that a display, would you? Which is why I’m artfully “merchandising” individually wrapped and pink-ribboned cookies that look vaguely like groundhogs.

  “You’re great at this!” Lillian says on her third inspection round before groaning when a woman saunters in, clutching a bouquet of balloons. “No latex allowed! How’d she get past security?”

  As I finish stocking the workspace with more frosting and hundreds of plastic knives (pink, of course) so that the kids don’t double dip and create a watering hole of communal germs in these canisters, the sound of children—loud, excited, and boisterous—echoes in the cafeteria. They spill into the dining room on crutches, in wheelchairs, and with IV poles.

  Demonstrating innate party skills that would make Mama proud, Lillian jumps into action, directing a few to the beanbag toss and pointing others to my station.

  “You can take a cookie and decorate it over here,” I explain to three kids. As I help them unsheathe the cookies from their cellophane wrappers, the telltale yelp of a scared kid pierces through the cafeteria hubbub. Glancing up, I spot a little boy with outrageously long eyelashes burst into tears, fear at first sight of the clowns. The red-wigged wonders duck-walk toward him. He cowers. The clowns freeze. It’d almost be a comical standoff except the boy’s mother snaps at him—“Stop it!”—which infuriates me, because, clearly, he can’t stop whimpering. And I don’t blame him. In my book of horrors, clowns rank right up there with hairy spiders and hairless dogs.

  Still crying, the boy hides behind his mom, a frowsy woman whose thick legs are made thicker in shapeless fleece sweatpants. Unfortunately, the kid’s tears start a downward spiraling trend. A little girl emits a full-throttle shriek.

  “Oh, my God,” says Lillian, who’s now at my side, wearing what Age calls my ay-dios-mio look of mingled stress and despair. “What do I do?”

  “I said, stop it,” the boy’s mom repeats sharply, impatiently shaking him off her leg.

  Years of being Mama’s hostess sidekick has trained me on the finer details of party crisis management. I tell Lillian to man my station and hurry over to extract the distraction, not a moment too soon.

  “Over there,” I order the clowns, who slowly back up in the face of this toddler terror and veer off to a group of pro-clown children.

  The kid with the eyelashes sucks down a huge gulp of air, like he’s suffering from post-traumatic clown syndrome, and his mom’s eyes narr
ow as she gears up for her second eruption. My approach doesn’t stop her from snipping, “Big boys don’t cry.”

  Ignoring her, I bend down to look straight into the boy’s eyes and confess, “I’m afraid of clowns, too, and look how big I am.”

  Our mutual clown phobia wins the boy’s confidence. After he wipes his nose with his hand, he slips it in mine. My first instinct is to pull my hand away, rub it on my pants, and sanitize my skin with hot, sudsy water, but there’s nothing but trust in his big hazel eyes. I forget about the germs transferring to my skin.

  “What’s your name?” I ask him.

  “Frank.”

  “Well, Frank, come with me.”

  A father and his sniffling daughter are steps away from leaving the cafeteria. Not on my watch.

  “Wait!” I call. The man stops, looks at me questioningly, as I gaze around, desperate. To the side, The Six-Pack are spectators in my fiasco, showing no intention of leaving their gossip to help me. And this is how they define “community service”?

  The dining rooms to the side of the cafeteria are empty, and I commandeer one. Heading into the private room, I tell them, “We’re going to have our own party here.”

  Announcing an impromptu party is easy compared to figuring out what to do with two kids, a mother, and a father who are now staring at me around the conference table. I have an awful déjà vu feeling of being back in Mr. Delbene’s classroom without a plan or an inkling of an idea. I glance around for inspiration, but come up only with a TV monitor mounted to the corner of the room, a whiteboard, and a wheeled computer rack.

  According to Mama, the host is supposed to please her guests’ senses, entertain them, create an unforgettable party. It is unforgettable, but not in the way Mama has ever imagined. I wipe the sweat off my nose. The two kids begin to sniffle; the adults shuffle uncomfortably.

  Frank’s mother raises an eyebrow at me and then slings her body against the back of her chair, challenging me to get myself out of this one. Plaintively, as if she’s personally footing the party bill, she demands, “Well?” But she doesn’t wait for my answer, apparently writing me off as a dud, and instead hefts herself from her chair, which releases a sigh, relieved of her load. Halfway out the door, she remembers Frank and asks, “You want a cookie?”

  Yeah, load him up with sugar, I want to throw back at her. That’ll make him less scared. Right. No matter how much I stuff or starve myself, it doesn’t change my fear of failing or make me feel like I’m enough.

  Outside, in the main dining room, the rest of the party crowd are laughing, probably at some clown antics. Thinking fast, I ask, “Do you know what I do when I’m scared of something?”

  The kids shake their heads.

  “I draw. Wait here for a sec,” I tell them, and retrieve my backpack from under the treat table, which The Six-Pack are now visiting, giggling while slathering on thick, half-inch layers of frosting under Lillian’s disgusted gaze.

  “Doing okay?” asks Lillian, as I run past her.

  “Great,” I say over my shoulder. The truth is, I’m more worried about her being caught in the eye of The Six-Pack hurricane than about me.

  When I return to the private dining room, a tall bald boy whose lanky build mirrors his IV pole has joined our anti-clown crowd.

  “This is Derek from the third floor,” says Frank, looking awed.

  “What’s the third floor?” I ask, mimicking Frank.

  “CCA,” says Derek, his mouth set hard like a man’s rather than a boy who’d look at home at my high school.

  “CCA?”

  “Cancer Care Alliance.” Derek looks at me defiantly, his glare daring me to utter one “sorry” or think “you poor kid.”

  Luckily, Frank points at my backpack on the table. “What’s in there?”

  Glad for a subject change, I draw out my notebook, the one I’ve never shown to anyone. Not even Age. I tell them, “My journal.”

  “Hey, that’s manga,” says Derek, leaning across the table to get a closer look at my journal. I fight the urge to slam it shut and cast a cautious glance out the door at The Six-Pack, who I definitely don’t want nosing into my private world, but they’re too busy devouring their cookies. “Did you draw that?”

  I nod and flip forward to more panels of Shiraz riding the mountain, her private snow park. “See, that’s me snowboarding,” I say. “Or at least, the me I was before I tore up my knee and had to have surgery.”

  Derek nods solemnly, not only understanding but approving how I’ve made a glorified version of my old self. He points to the frame where Shiraz launched into big air over Grace and Wayne back at Baba’s party.

  “Can you draw the me before I got sick?” he asks.

  “Me, too,” says Frank, his eyelashes still spiky with tears.

  “Do him first,” says Derek, nodding over to Frank, volunteering him as the human guinea pig in this test procedure.

  So I study the little boy for a moment and then turn to a fresh page, sketching out a three-paneled frame, two little boxes offset within a larger one. As I draw, Frank sidles up to me, so close I can feel his warm breath on my hand. A lion takes shape under my pen.

  “See? You read manga from right to left,” I tell him.

  “Instead of this way,” Frank says, tapping the left hand page.

  “Smart boy.”

  He beams at me as if I’m some kind of angel-hero, and I have to force myself back to his manga. In the leftmost panel, I zoom up to the lion, snoring in a hospital bed. In the one below that, his eyes bordered with lashes the exact length and curl of Frank’s, crack open. I draw a clown’s bulbous nose poking into a thin frame running the length of the paper on the next page. And then beside that, the lion roars loudly. All that can be seen in the very last panel are the undersides of the clown’s big shoes as he runs away, afraid.

  “Cool,” Frank whispers.

  “My teacher says we’re not supposed to write with curlicues,” the little girl tells me solemnly as I add swirls to the letters in Frank’s name.

  “We’re all allowed to break rules every once in a while,” I say. Meeting Derek’s gaze—one that’s hungry for attention but too cool to ask for it, too insecure to risk possible rejection—I ask, “So what should I draw for you?”

  Before long, a choir of munchkins, all singing “draw me,” are clustered around the conference table. There’s almost nothing left of my manga-journal when the party winds down, half the population at Children’s, it seems, are skipping back to their hospital rooms, clutching drawings of themselves as dinosaurs, giraffes, elephants, monkeys.

  Derek holds his, a baseball dude, gently, as though he doesn’t want to wrinkle this image of himself. “So, thanks,” he says awkwardly.

  “Any time,” I tell him before he leaves, dragging the IV pole behind him like it’s the shadow of his old self. I don’t hear Lillian come up behind me until she says, “So the clowns are grousing that you ruined their party. But you saved mine.” She holds out a tray of cookies to me. “You must be hungry.”

  “No, thanks. I can’t afford it.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding, right?”

  As much as I appreciate her vote of confidence about my body, I shake my head and flex the fingers on my left hand. “If your party had lasted three minutes longer, you would’ve had a mutiny on your hands. I exhausted my repertoire of animals. What the heck is a chiru?”

  Lillian laughs, shrugs, and places the cookies down to look at my now-depleted journal.

  “You’re a great artist,” she says seriously. “I had no idea.”

  I toss my pens into my backpack, pleased at her compliment. “This was fun.”

  From the cafeteria, laughter follows after a woman swats her friend with a wad of crepe paper.

  “Do they need help cleaning up?” I ask.

  “Nah, they’re the clean-up committee.”

  As I zip up my backpack, I think about the times I sneak into the kitchen late at night, eating when no
one is watching, and mindlessly I murmur, “They can snack on the leftovers with no one knowing.” Lillian looks at me funny, so I change the subject by asking, “Where’s The Six-Pack? I mean, your friends.”

  Confused for a moment, Lillian starts laughing. “You mean Chelsea’s crowd? Didn’t you see them leaving halfway into the party?”

  “I guess I was too busy drawing poison dart frogs. And a chiru, whatever that is.”

  As we leave the private room, Lillian says, “Thank you. Really, thanks for helping.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing. The Six-Pack ate and ran.”

  “You mean, they ate, traded sex tips, and ran.”

  “Well, yeah. And you didn’t just show up. You stayed and helped. That’s everything.”

  “No way,” I tell her. “I should be thanking you.”

  “Why? For subjecting you to clowns?”

  “Okay, not the clowns.” I lift one shoulder, a half-shrug. “For letting me help.”

  “We make a good team.” Lillian grins at me. “When you took on that mom and those clowns… God, who would have thought someone as tiny as you could be that ferocious.”

  “What about you? Lecturing The Sex-Pack…”

  “The Sex-Pack!” Lillian convulses with laughter. “That’s good.” She casts me a sidelong look. “You know, you’re not exactly what I thought you’d be.”

  “Right back at you. And, for the record, this isn’t how I envisioned spending my Groundhog Day.”

  “What? You didn’t picture yourself celebrating at the hospital with me as a date?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Have a consolation cookie,” she says.

  So I do, trying not to calculate all the calories I’ll need to work off tomorrow after school. But for the record, I don’t need a single speck of sugar to feel good, not right now.