Home Leave: A Novel (12 page)

That wasn’t true, and I told her so. It unnerved me to see Sophie so upset. Between the two of us, she had always been the braver one, even though I was older, which was embarrassing. If we went to camp together, it was she who hung out with the popular kids and braided the counselors’ hair and gave them back massages, while I sat in the shadows of the campfire, burning my marshmallows. If we went to our parents’ friends’ houses for dinner, something I always dreaded, it was Sophie who would suggest that all the kids play army dodgeball. It was Sophie who told me that Santa Claus didn’t exist, and it was Sophie who could read scary books before going to bed, and watch Indiana Jones without running out of the room, unlike yours truly. So this was a new side to her, and even though it pained me to see her so down, there was a tiny part of me that was thrilled to finally be the tough older sister.

“I hate them,” she said.

“They’re just dumb kids.”

“Why didn’t they go after you?”

“I guess because I don’t have your perfect blond curls,” I said, which came out a little more bitter than I’d intended it to. I’d always been jealous of Sophie’s hair. It was the same shade as Mom’s, especially in pictures of Mom as a kid at Grand Ada’s house (that’s what we called Mom’s mom, who lived in Mississippi). But now I felt pretty smug about my iron-straight hair.

We stood there for a while, just watching the pond. There were a couple of ducks paddling around, looking depressed, surrounded by paper cups, cigarettes, and plastic wrappers.

“China sucks,” said Sophie. I knew she was waiting for me to agree, but for some reason I held back and stayed quiet.

“What’s the first thing you would buy at Kroger’s?” I finally asked her.

“A Butterfinger,” she said immediately. “You?”

“A box of Honey Bunches of Oats.”

“Weirdo.”

We walked back, me humming the Honey Bunches of Oats theme song. It made me feel invincible, as though by summoning up the memory of the cereal commercial—a cartoon farmer walking through his wheat field, singing, birds flying down to join him—everything else—the rock gardens, the heavy museum doors, the echoing rooms, our parents, frowning—was only half-there, only half-real.

I always assumed it was the Suzhou incident that prompted Sophie to cut her hair. According to Mom, who went with her to the hairdresser’s, which was just the master bathroom of a French lady in our apartment building, Sophie kept telling Madame Claude to cut it shorter and shorter. Mom let her do it, something she wouldn’t have done in the States. That was one thing in China’s favor; it had really relaxed Mom’s policies. Before China, we were stuck with one measly hour of TV a week, on Saturdays, which always spurred big arguments between me and Sophie. She wanted to watch Garfield; I wanted to watch country music videos. Now we were free to watch as much as we desired, although it was mostly crappy Australian TV, with emu puppets, and 1970s shows like
The Stunt Guy
, which just featured some dude crashing cars, falling off cliffs, and getting back up with a crumpled smile, saying “No worries.” We were also allowed to have any kind of cereal, including Cap’n Crunch, which had been reserved strictly for grandparent visits in Indiana or Mississippi before. Mom had even agreed to let us get a Nintendo, a sign that she’d truly broken down.

When Mom and Sophie came back from the fourth-floor French-lady hair salon, I nearly spit out the Sprite I was drinking. Even though Sophie had always been tomboyish, playing sports and shunning dresses, she had also been extremely vain about her hair. Those long curls were the first thing everyone commented on when they saw her. As opposed to what they said when they saw me, which was inevitably how tall I was. (I didn’t really consider that a compliment. It was like the difference between calling the flowers of a rosebush beautiful and remarking on how tall the bush is. Who cares if it’s two feet or four? Everybody knows it’s the Christmas red of the petals that counts.)

I don’t think Sophie had really thought the whole boy-look thing through. She had to put up with a little bit of teasing at school, but like I said, she had a knack for being popular that saved her, and, before you knew it, two other girls in her grade had whacked their hair short, too. It was only when we were around Chinese people, on our Sunday walks through Shanghai with Mom and Dad, or during company banquets, that it was an issue. If anything, Chinese people touched her sheared curls even more now than before. “Your son has a beautiful hair,” they would tell my parents, and Sophie would fume. She took to wearing sweatshirts, hood up, even in the hottest weather, walking as fast as she could, her eyes on the ground.

Banquets were even worse because she couldn’t wear a hood. Back then, it seemed like we had to go to banquets at least once a week. Dad’s Chinese joint-venture partners would throw them in his honor, or to celebrate some contract they’d signed that week. They lasted forever and consisted of about a million courses. Sophie and I would sit there chugging coconut milk or sugary orange juice, picking at the stuff on our plates. Some of it was delicious, like the shrimp dumplings or steamed ginger fish, but there were a lot of unsavory mystery elements involved with most of the dishes. Back in Atlanta, one of our favorite games had been taste tests, where one of us would blindfold the other, and then go in the pantry and spoon out Worcestershire sauce or sesame seeds, or shave off the top of a Pop-Tart, and put it into the other person’s mouth. The only rule was you couldn’t mix things, on our babysitter’s insistence, because she didn’t want us to puke. Back then, we had known everything in the pantry, so the whole blindfolded business was a challenge but not inherently scary. But in Shanghai, at the banquets, you had no idea what you were getting into: was it jellyfish or tongue or liver something? The translator didn’t usually help, though he tried. “Bearded scrounge dipper,” he would announce, or “pearl imperial abalone.” Mom said we should try a little bit of everything, but after a couple glasses of wine she would stop checking on us and we could eat whatever we wanted, which usually meant multiple courses of fried rice.

Anyways, during those dinners, there was a lot of Dad’s Chinese colleagues and their wives patting Sophie’s head and calling her a lovely boy. In the States, if Mom or Dad had corrected such a mistake, the offending party would have apologized and said yes, how silly of them, Sophie was a beautiful girl. But in Shanghai they would just argue back, as though maybe Mom and Dad had gotten it wrong. I was used to Sophie getting more attention, even before we moved to China. She had always possessed something that drew people to her, including me, as much as I tried to ignore that pull. But in Shanghai I suddenly felt lucky to be the one who escaped notice. I had a new feeling of needing to do something to rescue her, to help her out. I had always been the sensitive one, but I could sense the dynamic was changing. She would make up excuses so she wouldn’t have to go for family walks on Sundays, and she grew quieter in general.

I wanted my old sister back. I didn’t want to be the one to chatter brightly at dinner about everything I’d done that day. That was her turf. I didn’t know what to say when Mom and Dad trained their gaze on me, desperate. That’s the only way I can explain why I went along with Sophie’s scheme.

It was about a month after she’d cut her hair, in the late spring. I heard a knock on my bedroom door, really soft. I was working on impossible math homework. Things had gotten a lot harder in math and science since coming to Shanghai, because the Korean and Taiwanese kids in my class were a million times better than the rest of us, and our teacher, Mrs. Ng, who was Singaporean, said we should all be at their level. I was totally lost, and making Cs and Ds on tests for the first time in my life. I hadn’t told Mom and Dad yet, although Mom would probably find out soon, since she taught fourth grade at our school and had lunch with Ms. Ng every day in the teachers’ lounge.

Sophie opened the door a crack. “Hey,” she said, and entered without asking, which I let slide. Her voice had an urgency to it, and some of her old excitement, like when she would be in a huddle with the neighborhood kids in Atlanta, hatching a plan for how to steal the flag from the other team. Those games had always been pointless to me, I could never summon up any kind of caring for a stupid old flag, and it had been exhausting to pretend that I did. But Sophie lived for that kind of thing.

“I have a plan,” she said.

She unfolded a wrinkled piece of notebook paper, onto which she’d scrawled long lists in pencil with headings like: “Supplies,” “Tickets,” and “Important Phone Numbers.” Basically, the plan was to run away from home. Or, as Sophie argued, when I put it that way, the plan was to run
back
home, since Shanghai was not our home and never would be. The heart of the scheme entailed going to the airport, buying tickets with one of Dad’s credit cards, and moving in with Sophie’s best friend in Atlanta, Ana. “Go for it,” I said. “I’m staying here.”

“Come on,” she said.

“Forget it.” I turned back to my homework.

“Pleeeeease.”

“Get out of here.”

“I need you,” she said, and I softened a little but didn’t say anything. “I don’t look old enough,” she said. “With you, it’ll work.”

That hurt, but I also knew that Sophie would never admit that she really just wanted me with her. That’s how she was. “You’ll never pull it off,” I said.

But her excitement was infectious. She slept in my room that night, in the other twin bed, and we stayed up late talking about “the plan.” Pretty soon I could picture it too, being back in Atlanta, enrolling in Piedmont Middle School, where all my friends were now, not having to be around all the weirdos at Shanghai American School. I still felt awkward around everybody there; my plan to be wildly popular hadn’t really panned out. I’d never been very outgoing, but I’d always had a best friend in Atlanta, plus the neighborhood gang. Now I just had Sophie.

The next morning, we went downstairs with our backpacks and hid in the mailroom instead of waiting with the other kids for the bus. Through a crack in the door, we watched Mom come downstairs and take a taxi to school. Then we hurried back up to our apartment, giggling like crazy in the elevator. I should point out that normally Sophie and I never did anything wrong—never disobeyed Mom and Dad, I mean. It’s hard to explain why. Aunt Ivy told me that one time, when she was babysitting us, when I was six and Sophie was four, she heard us fighting in the bathtub, and she came in and asked us what was going on. Apparently, we told her we were “pretending to have an argument.” So to go from never being rude at the dinner table to running away from home was a big step. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like the adventure we’d always wanted China to be, ever since Dad had told us we were leaving Atlanta.

We didn’t know where Mom and Dad had put our suitcases, so we just started shoving clothes into our backpacks. I found Sophie in the kitchen, filling plastic bags with food. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“For the trip.”

“They feed you on the airplane, dummy.”

She looked sheepish but kept out a can of Pringles. “Just in case,” she said.

We went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and into the closet where we knew Dad kept a bunch of change, candy bars, and a few fifty-yuan bills. Sophie stuffed it all into the front pocket of her backpack.

“We forgot the credit card!” I cried at the door, secretly relieved that the plan would be foiled.

She whipped it out of her back pocket. “Sneaky,” I said, impressed and a little disturbed that she’d suddenly gotten so good at stealing. I could feel Mom’s disappointment leaking into me. So much for the wise-older-sister routine. But I reasoned that I was helping Sophie. We needed to get out of here. Shanghai was good for Mom and Dad but not for us. Had anyone asked us if we’d wanted to move to China? No. They’d just informed us we were going. And sure, back then we thought it was going to be great. All the kids had treated us like celebrities, and I’d figured Shanghai would look like the inside of the Golden Dragon Restaurant back in Madison—red lanterns, big fish tanks, fortune cookies. I hadn’t counted on what we had found here, where I felt lost and not really myself at all. I told myself that leaving was the adult thing to do.

I wrote something to this effect in a note to Mom and Dad and stuck it on the refrigerator. Then we hauled everything downstairs, got in a taxi, and told the driver to take us to Hongqiao Airport.

Everything went according to plan until we got to the Delta counter. An older white woman, who reminded me of Aunt Beth, peered over the counter dubiously. “Where are your parents?” she asked when I presented the Visa card.

“They’re divorced,” Sophie suddenly piped up. “We haven’t seen our mom since Christmas five years ago. Our dad said we should come here and buy tickets with his credit card. He’s going to join us soon.”

I gaped at Sophie. The Delta attendant looked unimpressed. “You’ll have to wait until your dad comes,” the woman said.

“Okay, ma’am, thank you,” I said, and took the card back. We stepped out of line.

“She was about to buy it. Why’d you give in?” Sophie demanded.

I didn’t answer and walked briskly to the airport exit. “Where are you going?” Sophie yelled at my back. “Leah! I know you can hear me!”

Outside, on the curb, I hailed a taxi. “Get in the car,” I told Sophie.

She shook her head.

“Get in.”

She threw her backpack on the sidewalk and crossed her arms. “Forget it. I’ll go by myself.” She tried to snatch the credit card from my hand. That did it. I took her by both arms and shoved her in the taxi. I was bigger than her, and it took her by surprise. I’d never pushed her around before, aside from playing basketball or wrestling in the backyard in Atlanta. “
Shanghai Shangcheng,
” I told the driver in Mandarin, our apartment building. Sophie tried to get out of the car, but I held on to her arm. “Ow, you’re hurting me,” she wailed. “Let go!”

I wouldn’t, and I reached over her and locked the doors. I was furious. For lying so smoothly, for dragging me into this. I shook her roughly and she cried out in protest. “I can’t believe you lied like that,” I said. “‘We haven’t seen Mom since Christmas five years ago.’ What is wrong with you?”