Everything I Never Told You(49)

“So,” she said. Her fingers twitched, and she tucked them into her coat pocket. “Can I bum a cigarette?”

Jack laughed. “You’re so full of shit. You don’t smoke.” He offered the pack anyway, and Lydia plucked out a cigarette. She’d thought it would be solid and heavy, like a pencil, but it was light, like nothing at all. Without taking his eyes off the road, Jack tossed her his lighter.

“So you decided you didn’t need your brother to chaperone you home today.”

Lydia could not ignore the scorn in his voice, and she was unsure if he was laughing at her, or Nath, or both of them at once. “I’m not a child,” she said, lighting the cigarette and putting it to her lips. The smoke burned in her lungs and made her head spin and suddenly she felt sharp and aware. Like cutting your finger, she thought: the pain, and the blood, reminded you that you were alive. She breathed out, a tiny cyclone funneling between her teeth, and held out the lighter. Jack waved a hand.

“Stick it in the glove compartment.”

Lydia snapped open the catch and a small blue box fell out and landed at her feet. She froze, and Jack laughed.

“What’s the matter? Never seen Trojans before, Miss Lee?”

Lydia, her face burning, scooped up the condoms and tucked them back into the open box. “Sure I have.” She slid them back into the glove compartment, along with the lighter, and tried to change the subject. “So what did you think of the physics test today?”

Jack snorted. “I didn’t think you cared about physics.”

“Are you still failing?”

“Are you?”

Lydia hesitated. She took a long drag, imitating Jack, and tipped her head back as she exhaled. “I don’t care about physics. I could give a rat’s ass.”

“Bullshit,” Jack said. “Then how come whenever Mr. Kelly hands back an assignment, you look like you’re going to cry?”

She hadn’t realized it was so obvious, and a hot flush flared in her cheeks and trickled down her neck. Beneath her, the seat creaked and a spring prodded her thigh, like a knuckle.

“Little Miss Lee, smoking,” Jack said, clucking his tongue. “Won’t your brother be upset when he finds out?”

“Not as upset as he’d be to find out I was in your car.” Lydia grinned. Jack didn’t seem to notice. He rolled down the window and a cold rush of air burst into the car as he flicked his cigarette butt into the street.

“Hates me that much, does he?”

“Come on,” Lydia said. “Everybody knows what happens in this car.”

Abruptly, Jack pulled to the side of the road. They had just reached the lake, and his eyes were cold and still, like the iced-over water behind him. “Maybe you’d better get out, then. You don’t want someone like me corrupting you. Ruining your chances of getting into Harvard like your brother.”

He must really hate Nath, Lydia thought. As much as Nath hates him. She imagined them in class together all these years: Nath sitting close to the front, notebook out, one hand rubbing the little furrow between his eyebrows, the way he did when he was thinking hard. Utterly focused, oblivious to everything else, the answer right there, sealed inside his mouth. And Jack? Jack would be sprawled in the back corner, shirt untucked, one leg stretched into the aisle. So comfortable. So certain of himself. Not worried about what anyone thought. No wonder they couldn’t stand each other.

“I’m not like him, you know,” she said.

Jack studied her for a long moment, as if trying to decide if this were true. Beneath the backseat, the engine idled with a growl. The ash at the end of her cigarette lengthened, like a gray worm, but she said nothing, just breathed a thin cloud of fog into the frozen air and forced herself to meet Jack’s narrowing gaze.

“How did you get blue eyes?” he said at last. “When you’re Chinese and all?”

Lydia blinked. “My mom’s American.”

“I thought brown eyes won out.” Jack propped his hand against her headrest and leaned in to study her carefully, like a jeweler with a gemstone. Under this appraisal, the back of Lydia’s neck tingled, and she turned away and ashed her cigarette into the tray.

“Not always, I guess.”

“I’ve never seen a Chinese person with blue eyes.”

Up close, she could see a constellation of freckles on Jack’s cheek, faded now, but still there. As her brother had long ago, Lydia counted them: nine.

“You know you’re the only girl in this school who’s not white?”

“Yeah? I didn’t realize.” This was a lie. Even with blue eyes, she could not pretend she blended in.

“You and Nath, you’re practically the only Chinese people in the whole of Middlewood, I bet.”

“Probably.”

Jack settled back into his seat and rubbed at a small dent in the plastic of the steering wheel. Then, after a moment, he said, “What’s that like?”

“What’s it like?” Lydia hesitated. Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. You saw it in the sign at the Peking Express—a cartoon man with a coolie hat, slant eyes, buckteeth, and chopsticks. You saw it in the little boys on the playground, stretching their eyes to slits with their fingers—Chinese—Japanese—look at these—and in the older boys who muttered ching chong ching chong ching as they passed you on the street, just loud enough for you to hear. You saw it when waitresses and policemen and bus drivers spoke slowly to you, in simple words, as if you might not understand. You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair in the scene, as if you’d been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what’s she doing there? And then you remembered that she was you. You kept your head down and thought about school, or space, or the future, and tried to forget about it. And you did, until it happened again.