Nothing But the Truth (6 page)

Thankfully, I don’t run into anyone because I don’t think I can manage a “hello” or “sorry” without breaking apart, and I don’t want
that
to get back to Steve Kosanko.

I reach my locker. For one long, Alzheimer’s moment, I can’t remember my combination. When I finally do, I paw through a year’s worth of high school detritus: notes from Janie and Laura, empty potato chip bags, a couple of lint-covered gummy bears, crumpled quizzes. I almost lose it when I find a picture of me and Mark that slipped to the back of my locker, snapped at his house after we practiced his campaign speech, the one that I wrote for him, the one that he passed off as his own. I would tear the picture up into a million pieces, but I’m on a mission now.

I shove aside my biology book, and at last dredge up the oversized, orange T-shirt, left over from a couple of weeks ago when I wasted my time painting a “Make Our Mark! Vote Scranton!” campaign banner. Who would have known that it would be
my
cheek that would carry his friend’s wet mark?

The bell rings, lockers clang shut, and kids race to class. I’m usually part of the student herd, but today I head to the girls’ bathroom. Luckily, it’s empty.

The damp spot on my sleeve, left from wiping Steve’s spit off my face, is drying, but I’d rather break out worse than Dylan Nguyen than keep this spitrag on for another minute. I don’t even bother with a stall. Instead, I yank off my brand-new shirt and drop it onto the sticky bathroom floor. On the wall is a flyer for last week’s ju nior prom. The day after Janie’s boyfriend asked her to go with him, she went shopping for The Perfect Prom Dress with her mom. I prescribed The Perfect Prom Therapy for myself and blew the last of my Chinese New Year lucky money on this red shirt.

Can you say, “Buyer’s remorse”?

The freebie T-shirt I got for running the Sound to Narrows 12K race with my cross-country team hangs loose and falls past my thighs. Not a good look, I’m sure. A glimpse of myself in the mirror confirms that, but as I look at my reflection, I wonder what it is that makes Steve hate me so much. Sure, my hair is more black than brown, and my eyes have a slight almond tilt to them. But my teeth are as white as snow, and half of me is just the same as him, Mark and 99.98 percent of my high school. So why does being part-Taiwanese make me all-disgusting in Steve’s eyes?

My right cheek hurts from all my scrubbing, but I can’t stop squirting more soap into my hand and lathering again.
The cold water makes my teeth clench, but I splash until my whole face feels numb.

Here’s the thing: no matter how much I scrub, no matter if my skin is rubbed raw, no matter how much cover-up and concealer I wear, I can’t erase who I am. I feel like I’m stuck on some infinite teeter-totter: too-white, too-Asian; too-white, too-Asian. As much as I try to balance in the middle, I keep getting slammed, from one side to the other.

Against my pale, cold skin, my eyes look darker than ever. I finally ask myself the question that hurts the most: How could Mark have joined Steve’s hate-spewing squad? Save getting a lobotomy, how am I ever going to forget the sight of him, driv ing away like he had no idea what Steve had just done to me?

I turn away from the mirror. Running my red shirt in the washing machine a hundred times in a row, fading it to pink, would never salvage it. It’s stained forever, marinating in the memory of Steve Kosanko and his scummy new sidekick, Mark Scranton. I pull the photo of me and Mark out of my back pocket, feeling like I’m going to throw up as I look at his face, no longer gorgeous, but gross. I crumple Mark in my hand and flush him down the toilet.

Mama would have had a conniption about the colossal waste of forty bucks if she saw me tossing my ruined shirt into the garbage. That would surely have brought on Lecture Number Five: You So Wasteful.

But I don’t look back.

The halls in between
classes are usually a no-geeks-land as the exceptionally brainy and fashion-challenged hurry to avoid being picked on.

I wish I could stay out here in the quiet where I can see forever down the hall. But this is a no-girls-land, no matter who she is, because Mr. Allen, the vice-principal, is waddling out of a classroom, heading straight toward me. He looks like a beluga whale, in the same puffy, white, harmless way.

“Patty, anything wrong?” he asks, concerned.

This is one of the times when being part-Asian works to my advantage. Mr. Allen takes one look at me and sees only what he expects to see from a girl whose last name is Ho: a studious Asian kid. He assumes that I have a perfectly acceptable reason for being late. Part of me wants to pretend that I was up to no good:
Nope, just looking for a safe place to get high, thank you very much.

When it comes down to it, what can this beluga whale do when just yesterday he was the one who clapped the great white Steve Kosanko shark on the back and handed him the student citizenship award for the second year in a row? He was the one who announced to the whole school that Mark won the election.

“All righty then. Better head to class,” Mr. Allen says, lumbering away and expecting the silent Asian girl standing alone in the hall to follow his directions. I hear and obey.

I drift into Honors
English late. Mrs. Meyers is leaning against the blackboard, legs crossed like she’s at a bar, just chatting with some friends. She scans my ice-numb face and her gaze drops down to my T-shirt. A question instantly formulates in her eyes. I may not be the most fashion aware, but I know better than to wear a too-big, orange T-shirt listing corporate sponsors unless I’m outside, sweating from running
or biking. I have become my mother, whose fashion sense is: the cheaper the better, but free is best.

Worse, I can feel Mark scrutinizing me, but when I glare at him, dare him to look at me straight in my face, his eyes fall to his hands, twisted on his desk. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is our future leader of America.

“Everything OK, Patty?” asks Mrs. Meyers.

I nod and plaster an A-OK smile on my face even though I don’t think I’ll B-OK for a while. As I slide into my seat, Janie whispers, “What happened to you?”

I take one look at Janie with her pink miniskirt and funky cowboy boots and chubby thighs. She can complain all day long about being fat, but her extra fifteen pounds don’t stop her from getting dates, don’t stop her from fitting in, don’t stop her from being normal. By virtue of blotchy red skin that is still white when it counts, she doesn’t get spit upon. Jealousy scrambles sure-footed into my heart.

Her forehead-wrinkling half-smile of support makes me ashamed of my Janie-envy. This is my best friend, after all.

“He spit on me,” I mutter to Janie, as I pass up my English composition book. I don’t have to tell her who the “he” is. “And Mark was with him.”

Janie’s solidarity is immediate, never mind that she’s had a not-so-secret crush on Mark for the past two years, too, not that I’ve ever admitted my own stupid infatuation. She screws up her face in disgust. Without any hesitation, she swivels in her seat, facing Mark, and mouths: “Asshole loser.”

We can glare all we want at him, but there’s nothing anyone can do about the real loser. Not when Steve’s mother is on the school board. Not when the last time I lodged a complaint, my ju nior high school principal, Mrs. Stark, just
hemmed and hawed and said she’d look into it. What she meant was she was looking into her future as a principal.

“Some of my favorite reads, perfect for keeping your brain sharp this summer,” says Mrs. Meyers, back to business. Normally, I’m all ears in Honors English, totally absorbed because Mrs. Meyers talks to us like peers, not kids. Her hand floats across the chalkboard, but her writing could have been Sanskrit for all its wriggles in front of my unseeing eyes.

“I loved
The Corrections,
” cries Anne, ever the dedicated Asian student even on this last day of school when all the grades have been calculated. I want to shake her: You are the reason why everyone hates us. Why everyone calls the two of us the Asian Mafia even though only one of us dominates every class discussion. Guess which one? God, Anne, why do you have to raise the curve? Why can’t you stay quiet like me?

Mrs. Meyers hefts a huge cardboard box onto her desk. Her hands are on either side of the box, like she’s protecting its contents. “Now the day you’ve been waiting for. I can honestly say that I enjoyed reading every one of your Truth Statements.” She picks a couple off the top of the stack. Thick binders. Laminated covers. Professional bindings.

I feel like my lungs have collapsed. On the Monday they were due, Mrs. Meyers gave us an extension until three in the afternoon to turn in our Truth Statements, a special dispensation because of the Spring Fling. I hadn’t seen anyone else’s work. Until now. Hadn’t we all moaned about how behind we were on writing our Truth Statements?

Talk about truth is cheap. The whole truth was that everyone—except me—went full-throttle for the A+.

Mrs. Meyers beams, proud mama who gave birth to all these overachievers. “Most of you are ready to write spectacular,
honest college applications. Just remember, dig deep inside yourself to find the real answers. The real truth.” Then Mrs. Meyers starts calling up people to collect their Truth Tomes from her. “Anne.”

The front of Anne’s three-inch binder is decorated with a collage, rice paper decoupaged with photographs of a traditional Chinese garden moongate. Geez, even if she listed all her spelling bee trophies and math championships and geography ribbons, they couldn’t have filled an entire binder, could they?

“Mark,” calls Mrs. Meyers.

The Class Coward shuffles up to claim his binder-clipped ream of paper, at least fifty pages thick. Too bad he keeps his eyes averted from the blasts of disgust coming from my desk. I’d bet every one of my favorite books and Janie’s entire ward robe that there isn’t so much as a single sentence in Mark’s Truth Statement that says he’s friends with a racist pig. Or that he’s too much of a wimp to stop Steve Kosanko from spewing on me.

A shimmer of pink diverts my attention from The Traitor. Janie, who triple-spaced and wide-margined last year’s world history report, holds a dossier with a pink cover sheet tied together with a sparkly silver ribbon. I stare at her work, betrayed again. Hadn’t she been stressing about this assignment as much as I had?

Come on, people,
I want to shout.
We’ve been alive for about fifteen years. How much truth could any of us accumulate?

My paltry three pages are such a weak excuse of a Truth Statement that I’m the only one without mine back at the end of the class. Anne doesn’t miss this fact, projecting in her loud voice as if we’re at dim sum and need to talk over the chattering Chinese and rolling carts: “Where’s Patty’s?”

“The only truth we need to know is that her shirt is butt ugly.” Cole laughs, nothing but good-natured humor. His grubby concert T-shirts never look any better than what I have on, and everyone knows it.

I smile faintly. “That’s the god-awful truth.”

“Right on,” says Cole.

“Patty wrote the truth,” Janie says, wrenching around in her desk to stare pointedly at Mark. “Did everybody else?”

Mark gets out of his hot seat so quickly, he knocks over his Untruth Statement. All his white lies spill onto the floor. He doesn’t stop to pick up any of the loose pages, just slinks out of the classroom.

“Mark?” calls Mrs. Meyers. She frowns, confused. Her eyes dart first to Janie and then rest on me.

Why can’t I confront Steve and Mark myself?
Janie, fearless Janie, who says cellulite be damned and wears thigh-high skirts anyway, can. And does.

I duck my head, ashamed of my silence. My hands push in my stomach as if I could dig out the truth, tug it from my belly button.

But the only truth is this: I’ve demolished my GPA. Next year’s class president hates me now. Steve Kosanko is going to be the Grim Reaper of my sophomore year. And a butt ugly shirt can’t cover the fact that I’m a coward, no different from Mark.

Why is the truth so hard to swallow?

Apparently, Mrs. Meyers can’t swallow my hard, bitter truths either.

“Patty,” she says. “I want to see you after class.”

8
Incomplete

A
s the other students
pile out of the classroom, I can hear summer vacation lightening their voices. Mrs. Meyers doesn’t seem to hear anything, erasing the chalkboard in long, full sweeps, as if cleaning it is the only thing she’s thinking about. In my mind, I’m halfway through bleaching my skin before Mrs. Meyers turns to face me, looking as if she knows what I’m doing and doesn’t like it.

With a slight frown, Mrs. Meyers picks up a thin, red file folder and heads toward my desk, sitting down in Janie’s seat beside mine. She says, “What you wrote is good, very good.” Her eyes probe mine, like she can see straight over my Great Wall of Chinese Silence. “Your Truth Statement is stronger than anything you’ve produced this year.”

I nod,
OK,
wondering, so why hasn’t she handed me my paper yet?

“But you only wrote half the truth.”