In the first few weeks of school, I still help my parents out at the bakery. It’s what any good daughter would do, particularly the eldest ones of immigrant families. My sister prefers to lounge in bed on her computer; my parents’ will no match against her sheer stubbornness. I try to get her to help me, but she pouts and lashes out when I tell her to lift a finger.
“Why don’t you do it? You’re already standing up.”
It’s her favorite line to say, typically followed by a poorly aimed slipper to my head. It remains a mystery to me why my parents allow her to be this way. Lazy. Stillborn. Slow. She’s the family’s precious youngest daughter, shoulders light without the burden I have to carry.
Somehow, my brother is worse. If there were a competition for “laziest person ever,” he would win by a mile. He doesn’t lift a finger for a single chore. Somehow, that doesn’t stop my mother from putting the best cuts of meat in his bowl or giving him an extra helping of rice.
Sons were worth more than daughters in our culture. Even if my mother said she loved us all equally or if my father punished us all if one of us misbehaved, every family had a favorite, and that favorite was clearly Rui.
My mother calls him a blessing, saying that she and my father were trying hard to have a son. She would laugh, saying how lucky it was that it only took three tries for her to get him. Were it not for his gender, Rui would have been useless. I have no doubt that if he had been born a lazy and stupid girl, he would have been given up for adoption with no hesitation.
Because Rui was a boy, there was one thing he could do that Ming and I could not. That was carrying the Ng family name. If he had children in the future, they would have my father’s last name. If I ever reached that stage of life, my kids would be unable to take my name, as women in Chinese culture keep their last names.
It was a silly distinction between my brother and the rest of my siblings. But apparently it was good enough of a reason for him to have his own room, nicer clothes, and whatever it was he desired. At the moment, he was having his pick of the bakery goods as I mopped the kitchen floors. It was unfair, but there were other things on my mind.
I was looking forward to starting my junior year at Two Bridges. It promised to be stressful, starting with SAT exams and culminating in college applications in the winter. My parents were already pushing me to apply to all of the Ivy League schools, my mother in particular being extremely Harvard hopeful. She even bought a sweatshirt with the crimson H for me, so high were her expectations.
“You’re the only one in the family who can do this,” she confided in me. “Nǐ hěn cōngmíng. You will go places I cannot reach.”
It was too bad that my intelligence didn’t earn me a better place in her heart. But if being smart meant going to the best colleges and getting the highest-paying jobs, then it didn’t matter. One day, I will move out of my family’s cramped apartment and be richer than their wildest dreams.
For now, all I can do is bring cookies and pastries to school and work hard.
I enter the homeroom, grabbing my new schedule for the year from the teacher’s desk. Inside, my classmates were whispering about new classes and rumors. Maia and Ainsley sit off to the corner, comparing their classes. I join them, slipping my schedule on Ainsley’s desk.
“I’ve told everyone,” she says when I take my seat next to her.
“You did what about who?”
“About you know who,” Maia adds in unhelpfully.
Then, it clicks. As if drawn by a magnetic pull, my eyes go to her. She’s as pretty as ever. Actually, somehow the summer has made her prettier, which is wildly unfair.
She sits alone, which isn’t unusual. The only difference between this year and last year is the way people look at her. It reminds me of the way she used to look at me.
“Let’s see if she can stay in third place with everyone knowing that she’s a scholarship student.”
What Ainsley said was mean-spirited, but I don’t bother to correct her. I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad for my ex-friend. She wouldn’t hesitate to do worse to me.
We shared the same dark secret, but I was smart enough not to let the whole school know.
Throughout the day, Natalie’s fall from grace was all anyone could talk about. Mr. Lee had lost millions of dollars for the hedge fund he used to work at. The mistake was so costly that he was blacklisted from the top financial firms. To top it off, there were rumors that Mr. Lee gambled away his family’s savings. All of the magical money that Natalie was born into vanished.
Over the next week, I watched her descent from riches to rags with morbid fascination. Here was the girl who abandoned me suffering tenfold. The student body tore into her, all the more ravenous because she was quiet and beautiful.
It was weird, hearing the word “scholarship” uttered like a slur. I earned my spot here purely through my grades. Ordinarily, that would have made me, Natalie, and two other mystery students better than our peers. But in Two Bridges, money mattered just as much as grades. Without a trust fund or an inheritance, I didn’t fit in. If anyone knew, they would say I was poor and undeserving. Or at least, Ainsley would.
“If that beggar wasn’t in the rankings, I would be in seventh place,” she crows between mouthfuls of cookies. “Two Bridges is a school, not a charity.”
Ainsley didn’t actually call her a beggar, but she did use a word that was far less pleasant that also happened to start with a B.
“There had to be something wrong with her,” Maia rationalizes. “She was smart and pretty. It would have been unfair if she were rich, too.”
“Oh boohoo, spare me your nonsense karma logic. I’m all three and the universe hasn’t punished me for it.”
Something in me shifts. “What did she ever do to you?”
“Hmm?”
Maybe my voice is too low, but I feel I speak clearly enough. I repeat my question.
“She left you. Isn’t that enough of a reason to hate her?”
It was enough for me to resent her, but it didn’t explain my friend’s vitriol. Something in Ainsley’s tone told me that her feelings were personal, long before I came into the picture. She would have spread the rumor regardless of whether or not it was true.
“I think Yan is talking about the other thing,” Maia nudges gently. She turns to me. “You know how much Natalie cares about boys.”
Ainsley frowns deeply. “I don’t want to talk about that thing. It happened two years ago.”
“It was your first crush. I think the story is quite romantic.”
She buries her head in her hands, crushed by embarrassment. “We really don’t have to talk about it.”
“If you say so.”
Later, after school, Maia pulls me aside in an empty bathroom to tell me the truth. She locks the door behind us, barring any intruders.
“Ainsley confessed to her crush in freshman year. Natalie ruined it. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know. And in that same year, Natalie’s father acquired a contract that Ainsley’s family had wanted for quite some time.”
Maia’s words come out in a rush. Despite the fact that we were the only two in the bathroom, she leaned close enough for me to smell her makeup and perfume, a sweet woody scent that made my head spin.
“Who did Ainsley like?” I was friends with Natalie that year and didn’t recall her stealing any boys.
“I don’t know. She’s very secretive about that stuff. But I’m worried about her. She’s too obsessed with that girl.” Maia pulls out her phone, tapping a bedazzled nail on the screen. She pulls up an account on Instagram with no profile picture. I read the username and stiffen.
“DieNatLee? That’s not very creative.”
She rolls her eyes. “I think this is someone’s burner account specifically used to bully Natalie. Look.” She clicks on Natalie’s profile, tapping into the comment section of every photo.
I scroll through rows of expletives, wincing at the ones that encouraged her to kill herself. In her most recent post, one comment stands out to me.
Now that your piece of s*** dad can’t pay your tuition, how much are you gonna sell your body for?
“If you think that’s bad, you should see the Facebook page,” she says, cutting into my thoughts.
She taps on her phone again, pulling up the website in incognito mode. The page’s cover was an unflattering picture of Natalie with comments and posts from boys in our class.
$5.00. $100.00. $0.10. -$500.00.
“What do those numbers mean?” I stare at the varying prices with fascination.
“It’s the price the boys in our class are bidding to spend the night with her. Very gross. But I’m worried that Ainsley is behind the Instagram account and the Facebook page.”
I bite the inside of my cheek in frustration. “She wouldn’t do that, would she?”
Maia closes her phone. “I don’t think anyone knows what Ainsley is capable of.”
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