Picture Us In The Light(53)

“The rent is too high here.”

“What? But—” The words get jumbled on their way to me; I have to untangle them and even still they barely make sense. “But we—”

“We have no choice. It’s too expensive.”

I have grown up in this house. My life is literally written on its walls. I know this kitchen so well I don’t even see it anymore; I have to look around it and focus in order to ground myself. “Can’t we get a loan? Just until Ba finds—”

“That is not an option. We can no longer afford it.”

“But, I mean, you’re just never going to find another job or what?”

“Daniel,” my mother hisses.

My face is hot. “Can’t you talk to the landlords? They probably don’t want someone else to—”

“We’ve already spoken to them.”

I never even think of the landlords, shadowy beings who occasionally appear when a pipe bursts. I don’t think of our home as theirs. “Can you talk to them again?”

“There’s nothing more to talk about.”

“But we don’t—then what are we even supposed to do? Just move into some random apartment or something?”

My parents exchange another look. “Daniel, Cupertino as a whole is very expensive. Apartments are no more affordable. Cupertino is a terrible value for the money, and we don’t need to pay for a good school district anymore because you have already been accepted for next year. So we will move to San José.”

“San José?” Technically Cupertino shares a border with the west part of San José, on the other side of De Anza. “Like where, where Los Dos is? Like by Westgate?”

“It will be…less close to here.”

“Okay, then where? Like by Valley Fair or what?”

“Not by Valley Fair. More…past the airport. It’s all we can afford.”

“The airport? I can’t live all the way over there and go to MV.”

My mom flinches—they knew that already, of course. She pushes my noodles toward me. “Aren’t you hungry?”

This can’t be happening. What the hell. What in the absolute hell. An old panic rises up, that same trapped feeling I remember from when they told me we were leaving Austin—the world trailing away from me as I struggle after it.

“I’ll get a job,” I say. “It can’t be that much of a difference, right? In rent? I’ll get a job and—” I remember. “I just sold a drawing. I made three hundred dollars.”

They both look surprised. “Where?” my dad says.

“At this gallery—it’s kind of a long story. I found it online, and someone bought one of the drawings—”

“Where? How did—”

“It’s kind of a long—anyway my point is that I just made three hundred dollars. That can help, right? And maybe I’ll sell more. Or I can get a job and—”

My mom’s face is pained. “It’s already done. We’ve already signed the paperwork.”

“Like where exactly?” I let my phone thud onto the table. “Show me on a map.”

My mom does, reluctantly, pointing to an area northeast of the airport that I’ve never been to in my life.

“That’s like forty minutes away.” People go eat in that area or Milpitas sometimes, there’s this hot pot place Regina’s family always drives out for, but that whole lower curve under the Bay always felt so irrelevant to me. And I’ve been perfectly happy with that. I love Cupertino. I never wanted a reason to know where anything else was.

“It’s really only thirty minutes when there’s no traffic.”

“Okay, fine, thirty—that’s not—don’t you have to give at least a month notice to the landlords?”

“We gave notice two weeks ago.”

Two weeks? The past two weeks I was finding out my portfolio was accepted at Neighborhood. I was driving to SF with Harry for the installation the past two weeks. I trusted my parents when they said everything was going to be fine. “You’ve known about this for two weeks?”

She looks away. “We didn’t want you to worry.”

“But I could’ve gotten an after-school job, or I could have—”

“No,” she says firmly. “Your job is to prepare for art school.”

There’s a film over my eyes. The refrigerator buzzes louder. Everything I can think to say swirls around like mixing paint. Finally I say, “So all this time you’ve been lying to—”

My dad gets up abruptly, making me jump. The suddenness of it makes me back away, but he’s not headed in my direction after all—his footsteps fall through the living room and then down the hallway. His door slams.

My mom gets up from the kitchen table.

“Later this weekend we’ll find moving boxes,” she says. “You can start packing your things.”



“You’re moving? You’re moving where?” Harry blinks at me, nothing computing, his mind not awake enough yet to process the information. It’s just before seven-thirty and the bell hasn’t rung yet, and we’re huddled by Regina’s locker, Harry and Regina holding hands, all our sleep-deprived classmates walking zombielike past us in the early morning cold. I took the news to bed with me last night; I didn’t have the energy to call Harry after trying to make myself invisible, cloaked in my anger, all day. I forgot at first this morning when I woke up, and then it all crashed back over me again.