White Ivy(21)

Of the six boys on the boat in Changshou Lake, Ivy liked the athletic-looking Wuling the most. He didn’t speak much but his black eyes were swarthy and intelligent, and there was an elusive quality about him, not unlike Gideon, to which she was immediately attracted.

Jojo said she liked Kai, a small-framed boy with chipmunk-like cheeks and a pouty lower lip. Jojo flirted with him in the typical Chongqing fashion—by making fun of his clothes, telling him how poor he looked, how dirty his hands were, how crude his accent. But then, in a surprise twist, Kai asked Ivy to be his girlfriend. He said that all of them had talked it over, and it was decided by the group that he had first right to ask her out because he liked her most. Ivy supposed this was the Communist mentality she’d heard so much about: even the right to ask out a girl had to be approved by the group.

There was Jojo, trying to snicker, her eyes only a little sad. Seeing Ivy’s hesitation, she said, “You two are perfect for each other!” She grabbed Ivy’s hand and pressed it into Kai’s.

Ivy was as indifferent to the person of Kai as she was to an individual leaf of a tree, but she worried that if she refused him, all the boys, including Wuling, would be lost to her. “I’m willing to try it,” she said. Kai grinned from ear to ear. That settled, Ivy and Jojo strolled with the boys around the lake until the moon came out.

“You two should hold hands,” instructed Jojo. Kai shot her a grateful look. He took Ivy’s hand, they intertwined their fingers. She felt a twinge of aversion, but when she saw Jojo’s face looking longingly at him, she quickly repressed her own unpleasant feelings. In the middle of their walk, Kai said, “I want to show you something.” He led her a few meters away so that they were out of sight from the others. He stopped and, without warning, leaned in and kissed her in an almost frantic motion.

It felt entirely different from kissing Roux. Ivy had, by now, mostly blocked out those memories, which only occasionally resurfaced in dreams, the details vague and muddled. But there was nothing vague about Kai’s taste of garlic and scallions from their dinner, and Ivy had to resist the urge to break free from his wet mouth. She guessed this was the price she had to pay for having a boyfriend.

He told her he loved her on a muggy afternoon, one week later, lying next to her in the attic bedroom of one of his friend’s houses, a musty, windowless place that reminded Ivy of a horse stable. “Wo ai ni,” he whispered, a shy rabbit look on his face that would have melted Jojo’s heart but that only induced in Ivy a mild fondness. She said the words back. She felt nothing except a small prick of desolation, more troubling than disappointment because she couldn’t understand why the reality of being loved had failed to live up to her expectations. It was Kai, she decided, who must be the cause of this queer flatness. He wasn’t the right boy. Almost immediately, her mind began drifting to Wuling, the detached and watchful friend who’d not said more than a dozen words to her, yet whose silences sent more shivers down her spine than all of Kai’s forthcoming kisses.

On her last night in Chongqing, she and Jojo went with Kai and Wuling to the Yangtze River to skip rocks under the Dongshuimen Bridge. At the river, Jojo rolled up her pants and walked into the water. The little tides caused by the boats going by lapped at her ankles, then, as she waded in further, at her calves. They called out for Jojo to get out of the river—it was dangerous to go in too far, they cried, it’s too dark, you can’t see where the water gets too deep. Jojo ignored them. With a tragic tilt of her head, she waded in deeper and deeper until they could barely make out her outline in the darkness. Ivy cried to Kai, hysterical, “Go after her! She’s heartbroken because of you.”

“What’d I do?”

“Just go! Do you want her to drown herself?”

Confused but obedient, Kai muttered curses underneath his breath as he took off his shoes, rolled up his pants, and went in after Jojo. Ivy saw the two of them a few yards away from shore, Kai’s hand on her cousin’s wrist. Jojo made a play at shaking him off. It almost looked like they were dancing.

While Kai and Jojo were in the water, Ivy turned to Wuling. Her legs were planted firmly in the sand, shoulders squared. A pose of defiance. He was the first to speak.

“Do you already have a boyfriend in America?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you. A girl like you reeks of pampering.” Then he crushed his beer can with one hand and flung it into the bushes. His swarthy black eyes came toward her.

They kissed, hidden in the leafy shadows of a banyan tree, his long, rough fingers on the back of her neck, her hand slipping underneath his shirt, feeling his stomach undulate like bricks coming loose. Maybe passion, Ivy thought dreamily, could only bloom in illicit places. Maybe that was why the only ardent encounter she’d ever witnessed had been between Roux’s mother and Ernesto’s father, and why Nan and Meifeng constantly warned her of dirty bad boys with dirty bad thoughts and intentions. It was implied that all girls were victims of these boys, and to enjoy the company and caresses of one was to be what Nan had accused her of after Gideon’s sleepover—a harlot.

Back at Aunt Hong’s living room that night, her lips still stinging from Wuling’s kisses and her cheeks sticky from Kai’s farewell tears, Ivy came upon the four thousand RMB Nan had given her in the back pocket of her shorts. She gave the entire wad to Jojo. “I love you, meimei,” Jojo squealed, then wept. “You’re the only one who’s ever taken care of me.”