The Wangs vs. the World(16)

“What is wrong with everybody? Saina! Andrew! Why aren’t you guys upset? Do you just totally not care about this? We’re. Poor. Now.”

“Well, not exactly,” said Andrew. “Saina’s still rich.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“She hasn’t had the Talk,” said Saina.

“Dudes, I’m sixteen. I know how babies are made.”

“Not that one, the money one,” said Andrew.

“Wait, did any of you actually get a birds-and-bees talk?” asked Saina.

“I think that’s what moms do,” said Grace. “Babs isn’t ever going to give us the Talk.”

“I don’t know, girls, maybe she’s just dying to be asked. Maybe all she’s ever wanted to do is explain the wonders of menstruation to you both.”

“Gross, Andrew. Stop,” said Grace. “Will you both just be adults for a minute? What talk? And what money? Saina, why do you have money? Do you mean, like, besides from your art and stuff?”

“It’s the seventeenth-birthday talk. Dad takes you to the Polo Lounge and tells you about your trust, and then you sign something that says you won’t get to touch it until you’re twenty-five,” said Saina.

“Actually, Dad took me to the Palm,” said Andrew. “You know, steaks. And he let me drink a martini.”

“If he’s going to wait, why not wait until we’re eighteen?” asked Grace.

“I guess he figured seventeen was old enough. You have to sign before you actually turn eigh—”

“Wait,” interrupted Grace. “How much money?”

Andrew waited for Saina to answer. She took a moment, and then said: “Two million at twenty-five. And then it was going to be another five million when we turned thirty-five.”

Suddenly, Andrew felt sick. Hearing Saina say the number out loud made it crunch in his head.

Seven. Million. Dollars.

Holy f*ck.

Somehow, he had kept himself from thinking about that number. In the abstract, he’d actually found it a little embarrassing, to be due seven million dollars just for being the product of his father’s sperm. “I’ll earn my own way,” he might have said, knowing that the money would still be there and everyone would just think he was even cooler and more honorable for turning it down at first. But now, to lose seven million dollars without having done anything wrong—one day to have it and the next day not—it just wasn’t fair.

He could have been rich. And so what if he hadn’t earned any of it? He was going to be rich. He was going to be rich. No more.

Grace wasn’t saying anything. Neither was Saina.

“Guys,” said Andrew. “We’ll be cool, yeah? Gracie?”

“That was a lot of money,” she said. “And I didn’t even know I had it.”





九

Helios, NY


“BABY, YOU OKAY OUT THERE?”

Oh. Right. Grayson.

“Are you coming back to bed?”

She’d have to get him out before the family got there.

“Saina, baby—I’m cold here without you! Come in and get snuggly.”

Now. It would be easier if she did it now. They would feel the stink of him if she waited too long, and her siblings would look at her in that new way they had, like they couldn’t understand why her life had stopped being amazing but didn’t want her to know it. They hated Grayson now. Andrew—sweet, peacekeeping Andrew—had responded to Grayson’s betrayal by asking her: “Am I supposed to come to New York and beat him up now? Because I will if you want me to. I really will.” And Gracie had offered to bomb his Facebook fan page with mean comments, offered it so seriously, like a battle tactic, that Saina had laughed and incurred further Gracie wrath on Grayson’s behalf.

Would he go? Saina was half afraid that he wouldn’t. Half hoped it, too. He’d shown up on her doorstep a week ago carrying a rucksack stuffed with rumpled T-shirts, offering up a fistful of wildflowers that he’d picked off her front lawn. Even before she heard the knock, Saina knew it was him. She’d felt it: a quickening, a shimmering, a pitched battle between her red and white blood cells and then boom boom boom—his closed-fisted pounding. Her wineglass squeaked against itself as she set it down, its molecules crowded tight, the liquid inside turning to blood, then vinegar, then back to an organic local blend. That glass had held together, but she’d fallen, fallen out of her carefully molded resistance and—hair down, bra off, legs splayed—into him.



It was over fast. Afterwards, Saina had half slumped against the leather chesterfield, looking up at the raftered ceiling, blinking as Grayson buried his face in her neck. “You still smell the same,” he’d said, lips against skin. She’d blinked again. The ceiling needed work, but it was hard to find someone willing to leave the beams undisturbed.

Grayson had let himself go slack against her, taking the weight off his own knees. His arms tightened around her shoulders and he’d fallen damply against her leg.

There was a place in sex that emotion didn’t quite reach. No matter how great the betrayal, how intense and inflamed the anger, how long the separation, there was a place that was just bodies fitting into each other—unquestioning, uncomplicated. Easy. It felt so easy to lie here, joint and groove. Maybe they should do this. Make a new life in the Catskills. It would be far enough from the people they’d messed up being. Grayson could share the little barn that was going to be her studio, or maybe he could have it and she’d take the attic, with all that good light.