I’ve always had this theory that if I want something badly enough, the universe will make sure to keep it just out of my reach—either out of boredom or cruelty, like an invisible hand dangling stars on a string.
Sometimes the universe will be creative with its tricks too. Take, for instance, that morning a snowstorm appeared out of nowhere. It never even snows in our part of town, and the sky had been an especially vivid acrylic blue, the sun fat and golden and rising over the tufted treetops. But I’d left all my notes in the classroom at Saturday Chinese school, and I desperately needed them for Havenwood’s monthly language test on Monday—I still couldn’t remember half the phrases we’d been taught, which ones meant “this floating life” and which ones meant “the flow of years like water” and “to dream of becoming a butterfly.” If I didn’t have my notes, I would fail.
And if I failed, I would have to tell my parents. Watch them try to hide their disappointment.
So I’d rushed down to the car, my chest tight, my heart thrumming with urgency, when, as if summoned by a curse, the clouds had flocked together overhead like wild dark birds, and the temperature had plummeted. The snow had fallen fast, in a mad flurry, quickly sweeping across the town and blanketing the elm trees and blocking off the roads. Chinese school ended up being closed for the entire weekend—something I hadn’t known was possible, considering that it never closed, not even during Christmas and New Year’s or when one of the buildings caught fire—and I learned to never expect any help from the universe.
But I still can’t stop myself from hoping it’ll be different this time around. Maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe the universe will be kind for once, and when I reach up, the stars will fall into my palms.
Maybe . . .
I lean my head back against my locked bedroom door and draw in a deep, rattling breath. Another. Another. It doesn’t work; the terrible tingling sensation in my fingers only spreads down to my feet, mutates into a violent trembling. My laptop is open and laid out on the floor below, the screen staring back at me like a beckoning, the time blinking in the corner.
4:59 p.m.
One minute until the email from Harvard arrives. Until I can know for certain if I was accepted or not. If I’m good enough or not. One minute until my life changes for better or worse, every passing second stirring up the wasps in my belly.
I can almost imagine it playing out like a scene from a movie. The beautiful, life-changing ding of my notifications, the words I’ve been dreaming of unfurling before me in concrete black-and-white text—Congratulations, Jenna Chen, I am delighted to inform you—the way my parents will beam and beam when I run downstairs and tell them, just before we head over to my auntie and uncle’s house, where they’ll finally get to brag about me. That’s how it always goes in those Harvard acceptance reaction videos, and I’ve watched every single one of them, half salivating, my wanting overtaking every cell in my body, pressing down hard on my chest like a physical sickness.
But then I imagine thousands of anxious high schoolers spread out across the world in this exact moment, all making the exact same wish, all staring at their laptops, waiting for the same email to come in. People like my cousin Jessica Chen: people smarter and cooler and objectively better than I am. People who’ve been preparing for this moment since before they could walk, who haven’t already been rejected by all the other Ivy Leagues they’ve applied to so far. The very thought makes me claustrophobic, makes doubt chew a ragged hole through my gut.
Ding!
I jump at the alert. It’s louder than I imagined, the sound harsher.
One new email.
My heart lurches into my throat. This is it—oh god, it’s here, it’s really happening. I’m going to throw up.
I brace myself, all my muscles tensed as if for a boxing match. My fingers are shaking so hard that I have to click the email four times before it loads onto the screen. There’s something about the moment, all the buildup before it, that feels almost anticlimactic. The air doesn’t change. The ground doesn’t shift beneath my feet. Just a quick, simple action, a blink, and there it is: a few pixels on my laptop that’ll determine the entire trajectory of my life.
At first I’m too nervous to even absorb anything, can only gape at the wall of text, the Harvard logo splashed across the bottom like a bright bloodstain.
Then the words creep into my vision:
I am very sorry to inform you that we cannot offer you admission. . . . I wish that a different decision had been possible. . . . Receiving our final decision now will be helpful . . . as you make your college plans. . . .
I read it, read it all over again, and my gut sinks down to my feet. Time seems to warp around me, trapping me within it like an insect in amber. Distantly, I can still hear Mom and Dad moving downstairs, the sharp rattle of car keys, the clack of shoes, their muted bickering over how many wontons to bring with them to the gathering at Auntie’s place. But they might as well be thousands of miles away.
I pick my way through the rest of the email, as if there might be some other piece of information I’d missed, some final thread of hope. But all I see is further confirmation of what I’ve always known, deep down in the core of me.
In recent years . . . faced with increasingly difficult decisions. . . . In addition, most candidates present strong personal and extracurricular credentials . . .
I’m simply not that good.
Not in academics. Not in extracurriculars. Not as a student, or a daughter, or a human. It doesn’t matter if I crammed my brain to the point
of breaking with formulas and dates, threw myself into my classes, painted until the skin on my hands blistered and split open. Here is incontrovertible proof. Something in me is missing. Lacking.
“Jenna! Are you ready to go?” Mom always sounds like she’s yelling from across a crowded marketplace. I startle at her voice, then, stomach churning, slam my laptop shut. Wipe roughly at my eyes. Ignore the dangerous ache building at the back of my throat. “I already told your uncle and auntie we’ve left the house.”
A recent memory resurfaces: my mom resting her chin against my shoulder as she watched me send my applications off, one by one, exhaling alongside the whoosh of every email. Later, she had spent hours in the kitchen making eight-treasure rice, adding in so many extra red dates and nuts the top layer was almost completely covered. To celebrate all your hard work, she’d said, smiling. It’s going to pay off, I can feel it. We’ll have a bigger celebration once you get in.
“Jenna? Did you hear me?”
The wasps inside me grow louder, their buzzing incessant.
“I—I’m ready,” I call back, even as I reach for my coat as slowly as possible, comb my hair back strand by messy strand, take the stairs one step at a time, delaying the inevitable.
How am I supposed to confess to my parents that everything they’ve done for me—leaving behind their old lives, moving across the world, spending what should’ve been vacation money on overpriced textbooks, waking up at dawn to drive me to tutoring centers, all so I could have a better education—was for nothing?
By the time we pull into my uncle’s driveway, I still haven’t figured out how to tell them.
Maybe, I muse to myself, my head resting against the fogged-up car window, it would be better if I burst into tears. Told them through hysterical sobs. Maybe then they would at least feel sorry for me, and spend most of their energy consoling me, instead of scolding me, or wondering where they went wrong. But they’ve already been understanding enough. That’s the thing. Each time a new rejection letter from Yale or UPenn or Brown popped up in my inbox, or in our mail, they’d be the first to squeeze my shoulders and say, It’s fine, we’re still waiting to hear back from the others. Except I’d seen for myself the growing concern in their eyes,
how it’d spread over their aging features like a shadow; I bet Jessica’s parents had never looked at her like that before in her life.
Besides, what could my parents say this time around? There are no good schools left. The only ones we haven’t heard back from yet are my safety schools, the kinds of schools I was embarrassed to even be applying to. Of course Jessica hadn’t applied for any safety schools at all, because she didn’t need them. Her getting into the Ivies was already a foregone conclusion, a fate carved into stone for her probably since she was still in the womb. She’s just that good. That unreasonably, unfathomably perfect.
And I can never be her.
It’s such a suffocating thought—that everything I will ever feel and know and accomplish must begin and end with my own mind.
“It’s so beautiful,” Mom remarks as she steps out of the car, taking in the full view of Uncle’s house. She makes the same comment every time we come here, and every time, it’s true. I climb out after her and stare down the wide, windswept driveway, lined with magnolia trees, their petals flushed pink and smooth as wax, their slender branches reaching up toward the vast late-afternoon sky. And beyond that, the three-story house rises like a white-painted castle, with its massive floor-to-ceiling windows and ivy-crawled walls and marble balustrade balconies. It’s the kind of house that comes with its own name, dated back to the pre-WWI days and stamped in gold over the front door for all guests to see: Magnolia Cottage.
Once, when our mutual friend Leela Patel had come over for a study date with the two of us, she’d raised her brows, both her jaw and her bag dropping to her feet. “That’s your house, Jessica?” When Jessica nodded, with her signature small, humble smile, Leela had whistled. “Damn. I always thought a bunch of rich white people lived here.”
We’d all cracked up laughing, not because it was that funny, but because it was so accurate. My uncle and auntie might have moved over to America from Tianjin just three years before my parents did, but they seem to fit in better than we ever could. Every day, while my dad drives across town at dawn to set up air conditioners and inspect switchboards and my mom balances on her too-tight heels behind a reception desk, Jessica’s parents list off tasks to their assistants and close seven-figure deals from inside their spacious private offices. In the summers, when
we budget for a two-day road trip to the closest beach, Jessica’s family flies business class to a luxurious resort in Italy. Jessica’s parents have everything: their lavish house and massive garden and high-end clothes. And they have Jessica.
My parents? All they have is me.
I swallow the bitter thought like poison and hurry to help Mom with the wontons. She’s packed five whole Tupperwares of them, all freshly wrapped and uncooked and stuffed with our special pork-and-shrimp filling.
“Is . . . there a festival going on that I don’t know about?” I ask, surveying the food.
She flicks my forehead lightly, then fiddles with her fake Chanel scarf. It’s the one she always wears when she’s meeting Dad’s side of the family. “Shush. You can’t expect us to show up at your uncle and auntie’s house empty-handed, can you? They’re already too kind to us, hosting these gatherings every time.”
Neither of us says the obvious—that the only reason my uncle and auntie always host is because our house is way too small to fit all of us, what with its one-and-a-half bathrooms and living-room-slash-kitchen. Even the dining table Dad dragged home from a garage sale a few years ago is only made for four people at most.
“I told you not to pack so many,” Dad mutters as he follows us down the driveway, the gravel crunching beneath his old sneakers. “Nobody’s going to finish all of that. And they’re already preparing hot pot.”
“Better to bring too much than too little,” Mom returns.
“Then we should’ve brought the apples from our backyard. Add more variety—”
“Apples? Do you want them to think we’re cheap? Besides, some people don’t even like them.”
Dad looks so affronted you’d think he’d invented the fruit himself. “Everyone loves apples—”
We’ve reached the front door now. When it swings open, revealing my smiling uncle and auntie, I watch my parents pause mid-bickering and switch to bright smiles, the whole thing quick and subtle as a magic trick.
“It’s so good to see you!” Mom greets, passing the wontons forward. “We made some extra ones, and thought we’d share them with you.”
etches the slippers. It’s what she tells Mom every visit; sometimes I swear all the adults are following some kind of secret rulebook on social etiquette. “I keep telling you, you don’t have to bring anything. We’re all family here.”
“It’s because we’re family that we should all share,” Mom insists. Another all-too-familiar line, followed by the even more familiar “By the way, you look so skinny. Have you been eating well lately?”
I tighten my grip on the wonton containers, dreading the moment they finish running through the pleasantries and turn their attention to me. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep pretending everything’s fine when I’m one wrong question away from breaking down. And I can’t imagine anything more mortifying than breaking down over my Harvard rejection at my Harvard-bound cousin’s house.
“Jenna!” Uncle greets me first, waving me into the warmth of the living room. As different as he is from Dad, I’ve always liked him; he smiles more than he laughs, seems to know something about everything, and unlike most grown-ups, he never treats me like a little kid. But today, I just want to get away from him. From all of them. “How have your studies been?”
“Oh, not bad,” I say, hoping he can’t hear the catch in my voice.
“You’re being modest,” he says, nodding sagely. “I’m sure your grades are excellent.”
They’re not. Harvard doesn’t seem to think so, anyway.
But before he can pursue the topic, Jessica appears beside him like a living saint. An enviably accomplished saint dressed in arctic-blue cashmere and a perfect plaid skirt. From afar, Jessica and I look so similar that we could easily be confused for each other, and at school, we often are. But one day I overheard a girl in our history class comment, in this flat, blunt way that meant she was being totally honest, that I look like the dollar-store version of Jessica Chen.
Ever since then, I haven’t been able to stop seeing it. Obsessing over it. Whereas Jessica’s hair is black and glossy, like something out of a shampoo ad, mine is dull and deep brown; whereas her complexion is Chinese-beauty-pageant smooth, mine is sickly looking, even after layers of foundation. She’s also taller in a supermodel way, with the long neck of a ballerina and the posture of a princess.
“Oh my god, hey.” She beams at me, all her straight white teeth flashing. She’s never had to wear braces either, never had to suffer to make them the way they are; her teeth are just like that, which pretty much sums my cousin up. Jessica Chen has always been a natural. She was born the best, while I’ve spent my entire life trying to just be good, and I’ve failed at even that.
I chew down on my tongue until it’s numb and force myself to beam back. “Hi.”
“Guess who’s here.”
Something about the way she says it, how she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet, sends a jolt of unease through me.
“Huh? Who?” I crane my neck and scan the room, but all I can make out is the usual casual display of wealth: the chandeliers glittering above the plush couches, the gleaming Yamaha piano set in the corner for every visitor to listen to her play “River Flows in You,” the gold-framed abstract paintings adorning the walls, the patterned porcelain vases and decade-old yellow wine stacked on the bookshelf, beside rows upon rows of trophies. All Jessica’s, of course, for everything from advanced algebra to badminton to cello.
Then a boy our age steps out from behind the shelf with quiet, unfathomable grace, and my stomach flips.
I almost don’t recognize him right away. His hair’s grown longer, the thick, dark strands curled beautifully around his head like a crown, his jaw sharper, his shoulders broader than they were a year ago. But that self-assured expression arranged on his face is exactly as I remember it. So is the not-quite smile playing across his lips as he meets my gaze. It doesn’t matter that I blocked him on every single social media platform when he left for his fancy medical youth program in Paris on a full scholarship, that I tuned my parents out every time they brought up “Mr. Cai’s talented son.” He might as well be engraved in my memory, etched into my mind, every part of me. I remember it all.
The shock of seeing him here in Jessica’s living room—lovely and real and unexpected—today, of all days, feels like a punch in the face. My skin burns, and it takes an impossible degree of self-restraint not to flee in the opposite direction.
“Aaron Cai,” Jessica says unnecessarily, gesturing between the two of us as though it’s our first time meeting, when I’ve known him
all my life. His father is best friends with my dad, and my family had invited them to move closer to us, after his mother passed and his father stopped cleaning, stopped cooking, stopped almost everything. I can’t even imagine a world where I don’t know him, where I wouldn’t pass him ready-made lunches before school, where the three of us didn’t spend our childhood summers hanging around on Jessica’s porch together, sharing chocolate pies and staring at the stars when darkness fell.
“You haven’t changed much,” Aaron says, stopping a foot away.
The heat in my skin rises. I know he probably doesn’t mean it like an insult, but after our last mortifying exchange, I’d made it a mission to change myself. To metamorphize into someone gorgeous and glamorous and inimitable. Sometimes at night, I’d envision our next meeting. How his eyes would widen at the sight of me. How he’d eat his words, regret everything.
But today is starting to feel like a cruel lesson in the difference between imagination and real life.
“Neither have you,” I reply, though when it comes to him, this is a compliment. When you’re so widely known and loved, so soaked in glory you’re swimming in it, all you have to worry about is maintenance, not metamorphosis.
“Aaron finished his program early,” Jessica explains. “He’s going to spend the rest of his senior year back here with us. Isn’t that great?”
“Oh” is all I can think to say.
Aaron hesitates, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a single pen. “As promised,” he says, holding it up to me.
I freeze. The pen is intricately designed, plated in rose gold, with a delicate flower charm dangling from the end, the petals carved out of crystals. He remembered. My throat burns with the knowledge, every moment from our past coalescing into the present. We were only twelve when he made the promise. He and Jessica had been selected to attend a math tournament in New York, and even though I’d tried to act like I didn’t care that I hadn’t even been considered for it, he must have seen the disappointment on my face.
I’ll bring something back for you, he’d said, smiling, tugging lightly at my hair. What do you want?
cast me a knowing look. You always want something.
I wanted to go with him. I wanted to be on his team. I wanted to be smart like him and Jessica.
How about a new paint set? he’d suggested. You’ve been drawing a lot, haven’t you? A good artist needs good supplies.
That was the first time anyone had ever acknowledged that I was good at something, and so casually too, like it was obvious. Warmth curled inside my chest. I have enough paints—I just want a pen, I had told him. It was a small lie. My paints had almost run out, but a pen seemed like a much simpler and cheaper option, something he could find without trouble. I can use it for my sketches.
But when he returned, he gave me one of the fanciest fountain pens I’d ever seen, the kind a queen might use to sign her letters. From then on, every time he had to leave for a competition or debating camp or a school excursion, he would come back with a new pen just for me.
As I take the gift from him now, I’m tempted to laugh at myself. An entire fortress, built painstakingly over the year in his absence, threatening to crumble at the light touch of a pen. Zhen mei chuxi. The familiar phrase of disdain echoes inside my head. It’s what my mom would say whenever I was being slightly pathetic, like when I’d beg her to buy ice cream for me at the mall, or when I’d cry over a tiny scratch on my hand. “I . . . thank you, Cai Anran,” I say, his Chinese name falling a little too easily from my lips.
“You really didn’t need to bring so many presents for all of us,” Jessica adds.
It’s only then that I notice the boxes of dark chocolate and bottles of fish oil supplements laid out on the couch. My stomach sinks. He’d remembered his promise, but I had forgotten that Aaron Cai has a dangerous way of making everyone feel special.
I can sense Aaron’s gaze on me when he says, “It’s no big deal. Both your parents and Jenna’s parents have been so nice to me—I mean, you’re even letting me impose on your family dinner.”
“Are you kidding? The more people the better, especially for hot pot.” Jessica shakes her dark, glossy hair out as she laughs.
I breathe through the wire coiling around my ribs, feeling the same way I had the morning they left for the math tournament, my feet rooted to the spot, my eyes following their tall, graceful, receding figures to the bus, the distance between us drawing wider and wider. They’ve always looked like they belong next to each other.
Then Jessica whirls toward me, her skirt fanning out in a perfect circle. “Oh! We prepared that extra spicy sauce you like. I asked Ma and Ba to put it in a separate pot for you, though, since Aaron wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
Another thing about my cousin: she’s as naturally kind as she is talented. Sometimes—and I know it’s awful—I almost wish she were a terrible person. Someone undeserving of her success. Someone I could hate without feeling like the villain.
I tuck the pen away and follow silently after her to the dining room, where all the adults have congregated too, their conversation traveling down the well-trodden routes of real estate prices and our school’s extracurricular activities. Good. So long as they don’t turn their attention to college applications, ...
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