Nothing But the Truth (20 page)

F
irst thing the next
morning, we drop Mama off at her seminar in Mountain View, about fifteen minutes from Auntie Lu’s home. Tall men in crisp shirts and women in heels are descending on the Intuit headquarters, as eager for the training seminar on the new software product as my math camp buddies are for problem sets. Mama looks so fragile clutching her briefcase half the size of her body that I want to go in with her, carry some of her burden.

“Don’t worry about your mama,” says Auntie Lu, giving me a quick smile. “She’ll set them straight about who’s the boss in five minutes.”

“You mean, two minutes.” I grin back at Auntie as I scoot into the front seat, taking Mama’s place.

But when Auntie Lu pulls into the parking lot at Stanford, she looks surprised that I’m not bounding out of her mini-Cooper, all eager excitement to be back at math camp. The car is idling, and so is my butt. It’s not exactly as if my daddy longlegs can’t unfurl themselves out her matchbox-sized car (although I have had more comfortable rides, say
on a unicycle circa sixth grade, PE class). Pure dread and ner vous perspiration glue me to the leather seat.

“Everybody has been embarrassed by their mom at one point or another,” says Auntie Lu, encouragingly.

My eyebrows jump so high, I become a plastic surgeon’s poster girl for face-lifts. Embarrassing is watching Mama bargain with a salesperson as if we were in some outdoor market in Hong Kong, not in a clothing store in Seattle. All-out public humiliation is getting tongue-lashed in front of everyone at SUMaC, including my first would-be boyfriend.

“Not everyone has been yanked out of summer camp by their mother.”

Auntie Lu just shrugs. “Who cares what people think? In art, a little controversy is always a good thing.” She brushes the bangs out of my face and taps my hand that’s gripping my knee. “Coming back is what you want, isn’t it?”

It is. The last thing Mrs. Meyers said to me at the end of the year about running through doors echoes in my ears so loudly, she could have been squeezed into this car with us. I square my shoulders, at least as much as I can while wedged into this bento box of a car, and open the door wide.

“Thanks for the ride,” I tell Auntie Lu as I wriggle out.

“
Aiyo,
Patty!” For a second, she sounds unnervingly like my mother. I lean back in the car just in time to see Auntie Lu’s smile plummet into a frown. She wails, “Your shirt is soaking wet! You can’t have a triumphant return looking like
that.
”

The T-shirt I borrowed from Janie for the camp clings to my back. I reach behind, thinking I could air it dry, but the cotton is drenched through on my back and, glancing down, under my arms. Auntie Lu does have a point there. It’s one
thing to towel sweat off your forehead and another to look like a saturated towelette.

Auntie Lu digs in the backseat where she stashed extra yoga clothes. “A-ha!” she cries victoriously, and waves an orange tank top with a keyhole opening in the front. “Change into this.”

“I can’t wear that! You’re like five sizes smaller than me.”

“Come on, just put it on. No one will see you, it’s so early.”

Years of surreptitious surveillance to make sure no one is in the near vicinity when I step out with perennially mismatched Mama works to my advantage now. I do a swift, expert 360 scan through the windshield and rearview window. Auntie Lu’s right, not a soul in sight. Not in the street behind us. Not on the pathway to our side. So I whip off my damp T-shirt, toss it onto the floor and slip into her baby-sized tank. As I get out of the car, I groan. The tank top is skimpier than anything I’ve ever worn. Worse, it rides up my midriff, a couple of inches over my belly button. Mama would have had a coronary at my exposing so much skin, but Auntie Lu says, “You look hot.”

Before I can ask if she has anything else in the backseat, a chorus of “Patty!” rings out. Then I hear a familiar condescending snicker, “Get some clothes on, Ho.”

Katie of the Big Hair is leading a marching band of SUMaCers toward Math Corner. Miss Manners-in-Training looks positively scandalized that anyone could be wearing an itty bitty top the size of a bra. Let’s get real, from my side view, I could pass as a preadolescent boy, which Abe constantly points out to flat as a pattycake me. So I’m not sure what the Big Deal is, when it’s obviously not my boobs.

It’s a binary decision: either I can melt into a sweat puddle of embarrassment or I can pretend that I don’t care that I’m half-naked. The latter is more palatable. I’ve already eaten my fill of shame. So I shimmy my shoulders and hips like I’m my very own welcome home banner.

Jasmine hoots, “Woo hoo!”

I stop my futile yank-and-tug when Stu eyes my abs like he’s spotted nirvana.

“Now,
that’s
a triumphant return,” says Auntie Lu approvingly and drives off. I stare after her cherry red car in wonder. Is attitude truly the only thing separating embarrassment from triumph? That a little sass could turn you from a social zero to social hero?

There’s got to be something to that, I think, when I run over to join the group, screaming, “I’m back!” Stu wraps his big, strong, trustable arms around me. And when I peek over his shoulder to smile at Jasmine, I notice that Katie looks deflated, a cream puff without her fluff.
Hi-yah, White Girl! The Kung Fu Queen is back in town.

“My turn,” Jasmine tells
Stu and throws her arm around me like we’re the inaugural members of the Kung Fu Kick-Ass Club. I never thought I’d be happy to see Building 380 or look forward to three straight hours of math. But I practically skip up the stairs, under the archway and into the classroom, dragging Jasmine along with me. It doesn’t hurt when I peek over my shoulder to see Stu, watching me with a half-smile like he’s never known anyone quite like me before.

As Jasmine and I start down the back row where we usually sit, Anne hurtles past us. Her head is down, all math
business. But then Anne slides a proud look at me. “I knew you’d figure out a way back.”

I watch Anne continue by herself to the front of the classroom, where she claims her regular spot, first row, three chairs in. I’m not sure who’s more stunned: Jasmine that I’m leading us to the head of the class or Anne that I’m sitting next to her. But they both go with the Patty flow, somehow knowing that I’m on the cusp of an amazing revelation: being part of an all-girl Asian Mafia isn’t a bad thing. It just took me a long time to realize that there’s something rice-porridge-
môe
comforting in not needing to translate any weird Chinesey things, like Mama going ballistic because I was out with a guy when I should have been home with a book.

“So, do you think the Potluck Mamas are already talking about how I came this close to being a Stanford math camp dropout?” I ask Anne.

Anne looks at me admiringly and gives me a no-biggie shrug. “Who cares what they say? You’re going to be a potluck urban legend. Buildering and boys. What’s next?”

Now, that’s an epitaph I could live with. So I open the notebook Janie gave to me way back before math camp started and write:

Given:
Patty Ho is a potluck urban legend.

No proof necessary. It’s a given!

This morning, Professor Drake lectures us about Group Theory, which just so happens to be what my Research Project team is studying. It’s actually a fairly straightforward
concept. In math-ese, a Group is a Set with binary operations that satisfy certain axioms. Sounds scary, but it’s not. In Patty Ho-ese, think of a “Set” of people: me. Anne. Jasmine. What makes us a Group is that we’re bonded together.

Patty + Anne + Jasmine = Asian Mafia Girls = people’s assumption that we’re obedient, smart Asian girls who know all the answers in every class.

Patty + Anne + Jasmine = Kung Fu Kick Ass Club = we are strong separately, but we are hi-yah! strong together.

Stu passes me a note: “Can you come to the party to night?”

That’s when I remember the math camp shindig tonight. I wish I could go. I really do, but I shake my head, and catch his disappointed frown. I promised Mama I’d be back at Auntie Lu’s for dinner. Besides, her permission for me to stay at math camp definitely did not include going to any parties, sanctioned by the professors or not.

So I write: “What happens to Stanford men under the full sun in the Quad? Find out after class.”

I watch while Stu’s mouth turns up in a sexy smile after he’s read my note. He checks his watch like he’s counting down the milliseconds. And only then do I tune all my brain cells back into Professor Drake. Almost all of them, anyway. I catch Stu’s eye and wink at him.

As I stand in
the middle of the Quad, I decide that when I’m in Stu’s arms, it doesn’t matter whether we’re kissing under the moon or sun—full, half or otherwise. It all feels good.

I tilt my head up to study Stu’s face. “So you feel dif ferent yet?”

“Hmmm,” he says, furrowing his eyebrows like he’s thinking hard. “Maybe we better try it again.”

I lean in for another kiss, not caring that bikes are whizzing past us or that a tour group is approaching on their way to MemChu. That’s when I realize what happens to Stanford men and women who kiss in the Quad in broad daylight. They look like a Stanford couple.

“You sure your mom’s not lurking somewhere?” he asks against my cheek.

I wish he hadn’t said that. Mama’s not waiting for me, but Jasmine is. We’re supposed to go run the Dish in fifteen minutes. If Janie and Laura could only see me now, they’d be laughing themselves silly, calling me a hypocrite. It’s always bugged me how they could cancel plans with me on a whim whenever a boyfriend came on the scene. Our shopping dates? Homework sessions? Poof! Those vanished with this inevitable excuse: “<> and I are getting together. We’ll go <> another time, OK? You understand, right?”

As much as I want to stay here with Stu, hang out with him all day, I don’t want to be one of those girls who blows off her friends. That’s not how Kung-Fu Queens treat their Asian Mafia soul sisters.

I pull back from Stu and tell him, “I need to get back to Syn.”

It’s been seventeen hours
since I’ve been wrenched from Synergy, and already my room there doesn’t feel like it was ever mine. When I flop on what used to be my bed, under the poster of the toned Chinese climber guy that’s back on
the wall, it hits me: I don’t truly belong here. I tell myself that being a part-time camper is better than being a pulled-out camper, but sometimes optimism is a hard, half-full cup to swallow.

“You should have seen Katie last night,” says Jasmine, stripping out of her miniskirt.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say, she was hoping to provide a little comfort to Stu, who was majorly bumming.” Jasmine pulls on some black workout pants, a jog bra and sneakers for our run. “Not that you have anything to worry about. Did you see his face when he saw you this morning?”

As a matter of fact, I did. And I felt his welcome back kiss in the Quad, thank you very much.

“You sure you can’t come tonight?” she asks.

“Positive. I’m homebound every night for the rest of camp.”

Jasmine studies me for a moment and then gathers her climbing shoes and backpack. As she does, she says, “Little change in plans then.”

A week ago, I would have said,
If you’re going to builder, shouldn’t you go at night so you don’t get caught?
But today I ask, “Can I go with you?”

Jasmine doesn’t answer, not with words anyway. She just tosses some stretch pants over to me to wear instead of my running shorts. I take that as a
Get your hapa ass in gear.

The difference between buildering
in the dead of night and buildering in the bright light of day is a couple
thousand
Stanford summer students, professors, staff and visitors, give or take a few. At least, we seem to pass that many on our way
to the backside of Encina Hall. Like the scholarly looking woman who zooms down the path, nearly impaling me with her handlebars. She doesn’t even notice that I jump off the cement walkway and stumble into the agapanthus, as she races in her own Tour de Trance.

Suddenly, foreboding gives me the shivers all the way down to my scrunched-up toes. I’ve obviously lost my mind to think that clinging to the side of a building could be “fun.” I’m just about to trail after that zombie-biker-woman when Jasmine hands me a pair of soft climbing shoes. Before I can demand where she got shoes my size, she’s rummaging in her backpack.

“I can feel you stressing again,” she says. “Don’t. It’s not like we’re doing Hoover Tower.”

I gulp. HooTow, as it’s called, is the 285-foot pinnacle in the Stanford range of buildings, but Jasmine just laughs and tells me that no one’s seriously attempted climbing it since the 1970s. As if that makes me feel any better.

“So what are we climbing?” I finally ask.

“The Torture Chamber.”

“Jasmine! Don’t even give me some BS that it’s a perfectly safe route.”

“Would you rather do Genocide?” she asks, all innocent bright eyes.

I’m picturing Patricia-cide, with me falling off a thirty-foot-high wall. Two men in short sleeves, one with oversized glasses, meander past, but don’t see my panic, they’re so engrossed in debating some macroeconomic public policy. I groan softly. But my abject misery doesn’t stop Jasmine from kicking off her sneakers and wiggling her feet into the tight climbing shoes. Being out in the open in broad daylight is
not the discreet first climb I was picturing, especially not given my firsthand experience with Stanford’s security guards. A trespassing citation is just what I don’t need, not when I’m already on probation with Mama.

“Isn’t there anything else?” I ask, hopefully.

“Sure. If you want to do President’s Wall, I’m all for it.”

“No,” I say quickly. Yeah, why don’t I just climb right by the President’s window with a little howdy-do shake of my butt? Then everyone at the entire school, including Katie, could watch my hapa ass be permanently thrown out of camp, dorm
and
university. “Torture Chamber sounds great.” I try a different tact. “But what if we get caught?”