Prologue
March 23, 2019
SUNNYVALE, CA (AP NATIONAL) — A stranger attack inside a CostCut chain store Thursday caused chaos. A Sunnyvale High student managed to draw his gun and subdue his attacker, a man with a prior history of mental illness. Disability advocates clash with gun rights activists as the state legislature passed one of the broadest “Good Samaritan with a Gun” laws in the nation.
“This is the clearest case of freedom to self-defend and help others without worry of repercussion,” said Mervin Taller, former state senator and now head of the Firearm Freedom Forum, a gun advocacy group. “This tragic example comes as if timed by God to show us exactly how ‘Stand Your Ground’ and ‘Good Samaritan with a Gun’ laws are supposed to work. It’s not homicide, the child saved his own life.”
Floyd Gunn of the state police union agrees. “Citizens need to be able to defend themselves—especially these days, as we can’t always be there, everywhere. This brave young man kept the attacker, who was many times his size, under control so others could escape.”
“Gun restrictors would just have the civilian populace be helpless in the face of these threats,” added Taller. “That’s why I left a secure seat in the state senate so I could devote myself fully to this issue.”
Georgia Kim wakes up the way she wakes up every day since the incident.
First, she emerges from the mists of sleep, thinks of her brother. Wonders if he slept okay. Worries briefly about SUDS.
Then realizes he is gone. Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome—or any other way for him to die suddenly—is gone, too, because it’s already happened.
The world dims. Feeling as if she has weights shackled to her limbs, she reaches over and taps her open laptop. She scans the news and the internet for stories, as if the right story—a national gun ban maybe—might bring Leo back to life. There’s still the magnet sticker for “Leo’s Lucky Rabbits Wallets” stuck to her laptop’s cover. She will not remove it. She makes sure to get up a half hour earlier than the family so she can do this scan quickly, silently. Else, her mother will start worrying about her “burning out.” Her mother doesn’t know that fighting for Leo’s legacy is what’s keeping her alive.
The news makes it sound like Leo was a combination of Godzilla and King Kong. Sure, he could be rough, ungentle. She had once shown him a bumblebee napping in a flower. Fluffy, peaceful, adorable. And before she could do anything, he’d reached over, crushed the entire flower, bee and all, in his fist, then howled when he got stung. He might have even struck her, too. That’s how he reacted to pain—it was confusing to him where it came from. His nerves were like a railroad that was all jumbled up. That was his condition. See, besides being her brother, he was also a human with a neurological condition that affected
every cell of his body. This disease, this thing made him huge while also making him “developmentally delayed”—as if it was just a temporary matter of a train being late. Nope. That condition was also who he was. The bigness and the handicap of cognition. He could barely speak. But he also never lied. And he loved. He loved many things.
Georgia has gone on so many forums to type over and over (and over—with exclamation points!!!) that people with intellectual disabilities, even though often seen as scary by the public, are much more likely to be the victims of violent crime, much more likely to be shot. She keeps a file with links to the statistics at the ready on her desktop to fire off as needed.
And the shooter wasn’t Leo’s “victim” at all. Nor was he a stranger. He was someone Leo knew all too well.
One
GEORGIA KIM
Secret Diary
(if you are reading this—STOP!!!
This is an invasion of privacy!)
August 12
Umma and Appa, fighting. Again.
I used to be relieved once they had their daily fight. It was like some kind of pressure valve was released, and we were set for the rest of the day. There. It’s done. But now, steam just keeps leaking, dripping sometimes, hissing, occasionally exploding when we least expect it. I have to get real: it’s chronic, like those underground fires that are burning in Alaska because of climate change. I give Leo a look when I think a storm is brewing. He never looks back, because that’s part of his disorder, the eye contact thing, but I wonder if he feels it, the bad air approaching. The daily bad air.
Obviously, I didn’t know my parents before they were married, but I know from my aunt Clara that theirs was a whirlwind romance, one with some Romeo and Juliet–type troubles (like Dad’s family in Korea didn’t want him marrying a Korean American who could barely speak Korean) to overcome, two extremely good-looking young people. I want a time machine so I can see this. Or, act as lawyer, judge, spy, family FBI investigator and demand they produce evidence for their union. Photos, videos, courtroom sketches—I don’t care. Not just for me, I want to see them take in their first dates. Their first, fluttery kiss. The love-blind light in their eyes. I want to see how each thought the other could make them into a better person. I want to see them with so much hope for their pairing that they stride hand in hand into their future together, smiling. Wedding pictures don’t count. Anyone can fake their way through those.
I’ve never had a boyfriend, so I’m hardly the expert on why people come together, no less decide to spend their lives together forever. But I have zero doubt that they were once deliriously in love. And likely still are (however, produce the evidence, please!). And of course, they produced Leo and me.
- I want to know them when they were happy together.
- I also want to know that it wasn’t Leo who changed everything.
I shut the book. A sparkly horse cover. I’ve been “off” horses since sixth grade, but my parents seem to think I just stay the same and don’t get older. I can’t help wondering if it’s because Leo has never mentally gotten older since he was maybe three. I don’t know. But I’m still thinking of my own line—“produced Leo and me”—and cringing. I don’t even know how to talk about sex without blushing and metaphorically ducking my head into the sand, giggling like some middle schooler and not a
rising junior. But I know that for most kids, picturing their parents having sex is the number one thing they do not want to think about. But I do. I want to know that they “made love” (also cringe, but a little better phrasing) and that Leo and I came out of that. Instead of Leo being the biggest barrier to our family happiness, the biggest obstacle to my success. When it’s the opposite. Truly. Why can’t they see that?
Oops, losing the thread here. I want to be a writer, maybe, but the diary is no longer a compendium of funny and interesting vignettes I could use in a novel someday. But to keep the pen moving (as one of my writing teachers recommended we do to keep the creative juices flowing), my diary ends up repeating words over and over in the pauses, kind of like Leo. Why why why why why why? did we have to move?
I know why we moved. Between my parents, their own refrain (with different tones): “Because of Leo.”
That’s a lot to put on Leo, who has never ever asked for any of these things. He hasn’t asked for anything, because he can’t really talk.
But I know he’s sad. I’m not sure he knows exactly what’s going on, but it’s been a year since Aunt Clara’s accident. Aunt Clara, the one other person who takes time to try to understand him. To let Leo be Leo even when it means he squawks like a bird when he’s excited. Or when he calls me Nuna, older sister, and repeats “Nuna keep me safe, Nuna keep me safe”—Clara and I knew he wasn’t being imperative but instead signaling that he felt safe and secure, at least in that moment. But Appa would sigh harassedly about Leo’s “vocal stims” and how his behavior plan means we are absolutely not supposed to answer him. But I often do. I can tell he feels comforted when I say, “Yes, Leo, you are safe. Nuna won’t let anything happen to you.” Whether he understands the reassurance or it’s just the reply he expects to hear, closing a kind of circle. See, the fact he can speak words makes Appa think, well, he should be able to talk and understand. But that’s just not how it works in Leo world.
See, despite their good intentions, Umma is always too busy rushing to keep all the family stuff together—Leo’s schooling, his therapies, his new clothes and shoes now that he’s growing like the Hulk—to spend much time seeing him. She’s the one everyone calls—the day program, the school—when there’s a problem. Everyone waits for her to fix it. I get that she’s doing the best she can on the special needs treadmill. I try to lie low and never add to her burden.
Appa also loves Leo (I know it!) but has turned most of his attention to me as if he’s a car with its high beams on all the time—stuck on me as “college candidate.” He’s gone full tiger dad, applying himself as if his job is getting me into Harvard. Where I won’t go unless, like, Leo moved to
Cambridge with me. They don’t think I’m serious. Who could say no to Harvard? Well, me. I’m as serious as hell.
Within this disconnect between all of us, every encounter of the mater and pater has the potential for fireworks and sparks (not the good kind, but the kind that leaves Umma quietly weeping in the thin-walled bathroom of the apartment, Appa walking around, his face a hardened cast). Don’t they think about how this affects us?
My guess is that this move to Sunnyvale is a last-ditch attempt to reboot the family, our little self-contained operating system, glitches grown too frequent to ignore—the flickerings of if something isn’t done, the whole thing’s going to implode, that our motherboard is failing.
But I feel the need to point out that despite living in an “urban” area that was cramped—often smelly in the alley, yes there was crime—our whole apartment building was a family. Umma and Appa pride themselves on their self-sufficiency, maybe were a bit on the maniacal side of privacy, but there were a couple of times when, like, if they forgot something for Leo while waiting for the bus, if Mr. Goh the super was out watering the one gangly tree, they’d let him watch Leo for a second while they dashed back upstairs. Not everyone loved Leo, but everyone knew him. When he was in his phase of slipping out of the apartment, there would always be people retrieving him.
But living like sardines also means having some idea of what’s going on with your neighbors, no matter how much you want to hide. There was always “I cooked too much!” food circulating between floors, especially when someone was sick or in need. And, like a family, there were fights over whether we could leave bikes and strollers in the hall (fire hazard) or if dogs needed to take the service elevator (“so insulting”—dog owners; but also, Leo is deathly afraid of dogs).
Like I said, we were a family. Now we’re in a house and it’s like we’re living in outer space—soundless, airless.
I’m most surprised about Appa, an only child. He used to talk about how lonely he was growing up, especially as his mother died when he was five and his father had to travel for work and he was shuffled around relatives all over Korea—with varying degrees of welcome, including his uncle’s wife muttering under her breath about the expense, his cousins cold-shouldering him entirely. It was lucky he had his friend Byun in middle school. Byun’s family had an astonishing five siblings, which was good because that meant more hands on deck at the family’s fried chicken place, King’s, and showed Appa what a happy family could look like. With him in it.
“You and Leo are lucky—that is double what I had,” he would chuckle. Sometimes, like waiting for the other shoe to drop, I’ll wonder if he actually meant to
have five kids like Byun’s family. Byun married an Italian woman he met during a study abroad and moved to Italy. Their Christmas cards are wild—in the pictures, it seems like no family gathering has fewer than a hundred people in it, including all the nonnas and grandpas and zillions of kids and babies and pregnant ladies. I have heard Appa sometimes talk about Byun as “crazy” to Umma, how his family was so disappointed by what he did, especially as “first son,” which I guess comes with all sorts of expectations in Korea. But Byun seems bursting with happiness in all the pictures. And it seems like his family, at least some of them, has come around. Is Appa maybe even a little jealous that his friend went and did something no one told him he could do? That people generally don’t do? Like reaching for an unlikely happiness and just making it work.
I guess you could say the gift my brother gave me was learning early on that adults don’t know much more than kids. They’ve been around longer and have the benefit of experience, but that’s about it. So much depends on what you do with the experience. For instance, I grew up alongside my big brother. There hasn’t been a time when I haven’t known him. I know him better than anyone—including those harrumphing experts who spend five minutes with us and, one time, even told Umma to take Leo outside so he could hear what Appa was saying! From the very first expert, I saw they are faking it, parroting stuff from their books on genetics, on neurology, on behavior. They don’t know much about what’s going on with Leo, so they fake it and make it sound scientific.
Oppositional defiance disorder. Lack of mirror neurons. Emotional empathy deficit. Receptive language disorder. Must have a DNA deletion somewhere. An IQ so low it’s almost negative. PGSU: possible genetic syndrome: unknown. Ideopathic (my favorite!). He’s never going to get better from where he is.
That last one kills me. Who can predict anything about anyone’s future, especially when they also keep saying he has an unknown syndrome? When I bring this bit of illogic up, Appa the science guy, the radiologist who literally works with black and white, doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve poked a huge and gaping hole in their logic. He only says, “Well then, that’s why you have to become a doctor.”
It was through Google, when I was trying to find something about Korea for a school project, that I learned about the Sewol ferry disaster. Hundreds of schoolkids were going on a class trip and were giddy with excitement. What they didn’t know was the ship was terribly overloaded with cargo. In the middle of the journey it started to capsize. The captain made an emergency announcement: the students needed to stay where they were so the adults could find them. This left the halls clear so that the captain, instead of going down with the ship as brave captains purpor
tedly do, was able to be the first one off when the Korean coast guard appeared. He didn’t even get his shoes wet, while, within the next half hour, the boat tipped over and water flooded the little rooms belowdecks where all the kids, patiently waiting for adults to come save them, died. The ones who didn’t listen to the repeated announcements to stay put, the scrappy disobedient ones who went and saved themselves, lived.
I was especially haunted by the story of how one boy gave his best friend his life jacket because he couldn’t swim and the friend lived but the selfless boy died. Why should such a wonderful soul be needlessly sacrificed on the altar of adult malfeasance?
Rightfully, the survivor kids have been shaming the adults, especially the captain, ever since. But, adults being adults, they protect each other. It’s easy to dismiss kids as hysterical. Too young. But what else can we be if not young?
That’s why no one asked Leo or me whether we should move. Or even what we thought about it. Even though they claim it was “for the children.” Leo and I both have opinions—and they should count. Leo and I haven’t even seen Sunnyvale!
My newest guess, discovered as I was researching the high school and right on its website:
#1 ranked US News & World Report!! For sending kids to four-year colleges.
It has to be why, at least partially, both Umma and Appa see this new place, this next year, as the on-ramp leading up to a break with Leo. The site actually had a list of students who got into Harvard and Yale and Princeton last year. And maybe I will be on that list, too. I’ll go away to college and that will be that, they think, the start of Georgia Kim’s own life. They don’t understand who I am. That I am who I am because of my brother, and I don’t know who I am without him. And that’s truly okay with me. I am going to show them this year that we need to always be together. I don’t care where I am—city, country, outer space—as long as I am with Leo. And I plan to stay by his side. Maybe they won’t agree, but then it’ll be up to Leo and me to save ourselves.
welcome to sunnyvale!
home of the fightin’ bombers
undefeated state champions
We take an exit off the highway filled with the usual road ragers and find ourselves suddenly . . . here. How to describe? Our City High journalism teacher Mr. Mack instilled in us the “vivid, original description,” which also
relies on “close, nonjudgmental observation” and “taking notes, notes, notes—you think you will remember details, but you won’t.” He gave us these skinny notebooks that fit in our shirt pockets and made us write down everything we saw for a week. He said it was better to write by hand. I cheated a few times and wrote into my phone and then copied it into the notebook. But he’s right. I was surprised every time I looked at it. I didn’t remember seeing stuff with my own eyes, apparently a very selective camera.
Here’s what I see as we drive in: new-looking houses doubled in size because of attached three-car garages and endless lawns, uniformly lush, each blade seemingly trimmed to a precise height by scissors. Mr. Goh had tried to maintain the strip of lawn in front of the apartment building but too many passersby let their dogs pee on it and it just looked like it was tie-dyed brown. So he put in fake grass, the same kind as on welcome mats. Here, the bright green grass looks fake but is real.
“These houses look like movie sets,” I remark to Leo, who grunts. Each pristine, beautiful. No chipping paint or peeling window frames. But also no people in those windows or enjoying the green velvet lawns. Many houses have cars sitting in driveways in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. In one lone window I see movement—a dark-haired lady in T-shirt and jeans, vacuuming; her beater car says Happy Maids. Where is everyone?
Umma gets a text from the movers that they are stuck in traffic. Probably on the same highway we just got off of. The traffic was indeed horrific, hence the road ragers, whose honking and cutting off put us all in a mood.
“I thought they were supposed to be there already when we arrive.” Appa is already sounding tense.
“They were,” says Umma, as if it’s obvious. “I notified the guards at the gatehouse to let them in.” There’s this trapdoor feeling I get, like simultaneously my guts are falling out and also I’m being punched in the stomach. Like things are out of control and there’s this free-floating specter of blame, a big black blob that needs to attach to someone, and if you manage to get it attached to someone else, you win.
“It’s not my fault,” Umma says, with emphasis.
“I never said it was,” says Appa, a little louder than is called for. See what I mean? I cross my fingers. I have nothing to do with this. Leo least of all. But the black blob whispers in my ear that this is all because of Leo.
The trapdoor is wide open. The blob slithers in; ...
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