The Year of the Crocodile (3 page)

Our eyes meet. We stare at each other for a very long time.

“Shit.” She looks away. “I was afraid this would happen. I like you.”

I don't smile. “There was a fifty-fifty chance.”

She fetches a bag of blue icing and begins to write letters across the giant penis she has drawn.
Congratulations…

She shakes her head as she writes in swirling cursive. “Tomorrow, we're going out with our friends. Tonight, it's just our family. You should come over. We play games and make noise and eat a lot of food.”

“Great.”

“Need the address? Directions?”

“Nah. I have it all.”

Hong Mei pops a plastic top on the cake and walks to the counter. “Here.” She pushes the cake to me, and I read the lettering for the first time.
Congratulations on your penis!

“Honey, when you're done here, could you—” A blond woman comes up behind her and takes one look at the cake. Her eyes widen and she looks at me. “Oh my God. Sir. Is this what you ordered? I'm so sorry. That's not—we don't—that is, we're a family friendly—”

“Relax,” I say. “It's okay.”

“But—”

I give her my best glower, which is pretty fucking effective. “Are you insulting my taste? I've always wanted to have my dick and eat it, too.”

She flushes. “Oh. Um.” She looks at Hong Mei, and then back at the cake. “Okay.” She scurries away.

“Okay. Tonight. Six o'clock is good,” Hong Mei says. “See you then.”

“Want me to bring anything?”

She considers this for a moment. “Soju,” she finally says.

“Soju? Isn't that Korean?”

“Because I
like
soju,” she says. “Oh.” She frowns at me. “Shit. Rehab. Is it okay for you to be around alcohol? I should have asked first.”

I meet her eyes. “Shit that makes me work
less
has never been my problem. Alcohol's fine. Anything else?”

She glances down at the frosted sheet cake in my hands and shrugs. “Cake.”

I
wait
until I'm back in the car before I start composing my fucking email in my head. It's all fragments, ones that I don't let coalesce into anything like a real conversation.

You would like Hong Mei.

Not that.

You would get a fucking kick out of this cake.

Not that either. I'm doing my best to
not
be a complete basket case. I've managed to succeed with semi-reasonable regularity, at least since I got out of rehab. It's one thing to send emails into the fucking ether to wither and die unread. It's another to hold complete, imaginary conversations about day-to-day events with that same fucking ether. I've given myself far too much latitude with regard to my stupid self-indulgent shit. Pretending that things are like they once were, like I can just have a conversation as if everything is still hunky-fucking-dory? There's a superlatively self-indulgent fucking falsehood.

Instead, I send a variant of the same email I've sent every day since last July.

Hey, asshole.

In case you were wondering, and you weren't, you're still completely fucking wrong. Fuck off with your stupid bullshit. I'm not over you. I still love you. I will always love you.

T
hings are going well
. My sister Mabel suggested we play Pictionary, probably because Blake has an app that generates Pictionary prompts from the web, and she and Blake have teamed up against me and my mother.

Mabel and Blake get along like gangbusters. They met almost a year ago; she came up and spent a week with us in May when I started my internship at bioLogica. While I was working, Blake showed her the entire Bay Area. He let her get her nose pierced, which he managed without parental permission by falsifying an adult ID for her on Cyclone machines. She's worshipped him ever since. They couldn't be more different—Mabel is Chinese, poor, and plays the saxophone, while Blake is a billionaire—but they have a weird connection where somehow three squiggles on a page turns into—

“Moose,” Mabel is saying. “Antlers. Uh, Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

Blake points at her. “Bam! You got it.”

Mabel raises her arms in victory.

“How do you even
know
who Rocky and Bullwinkle are?” I ask. “You're fourteen.”

“YouTube.” She shrugs.

Blake shakes his phone, frowns, and shows the prompt to my mother.

She peers at the screen and tilts her head in confusion. “I don't even know what that means.”

“Antenna,” Mabel is saying. “Radio. Satellite dish… Uh, lots of them… SETI at home? No. I have it. Distributed computing.”

“How?” My mother is shaking her head. “How? How do you get
distributed computing
from…” She holds up the paper. It's a series of… Bows and arrows? With boxes?

I have no idea.

There's a knock at the door.

“Ah,” my mother says. “Tina, get the door.”

“You're just trying to distract us.” Mabel frowns in our direction. “Ignore them. Time is still running. Draw, Blake! Draw like a motherfucker!”

Blake has had an interesting influence on my little sister's vocabulary.

I get the door. I'm paying more attention to the conversation behind me.

“Toilet. Flushing. Whirlpool!”

“We're on fire!” Blake says.

“No, we're on water!”

I open the door. I'm staring straight ahead at a white T-shirt. Plain. No logo. I look up, and I swallow. Adam Reynolds is standing in front of me. He's holding a large, white box in one hand. A padded laptop case is slung over his opposite shoulder, and he's looped a grocery bag over his free wrist. His hair, a mix of gray and white and dark, is a mess.

He needs to shave.

He needs to explain why he's here.

“Hey, Tina,” he says, like nothing is weird about his presence. “Nice to see you again.”

“You see?” my mother says behind me. “Fireworks are traditional for the new year.”

Shit.

“Adam.” I swallow. “I didn't know you were…” Son of a bitch. I glance behind me at Blake. He still hasn't noticed his dad is here, but he must have known. He
must
have known. Right?

Fuck. I'm not sure how to introduce Adam to my parents. I've fielded snide comments from my mom for almost a year. My dad has given me as many pointedly neutral remarks.

Adam Reynolds? He's not exactly the kind of man who backs down from snide comments.

There will be mushroom clouds.

Mine first. I'm going to kill Blake.

But my mother stands up from her seat on the sofa. “Adam.” She walks toward him like she knows him. “So glad you could make it.”

“Hey, Hong Mei. Thanks for inviting me.”

They stop in front of each other, looking each other up and down like stiff-legged suspicious cats. My mom is a full foot shorter than Adam, but there's a bristle to her that more than makes up the height difference. I have been dropped into bizarro world. How… What…

He hands her the box. “I brought cake.”

She frowns. “Cake? You call
this
cake? What did you do with
my
cake?”

Her cake? What cake?

“Had it couriered up to Cyclone,” Adam says with a shrug. “I figured that since I have to actually eat whatever shit I brought, I'd get something a little…” He pauses.

“Think carefully,” my mother says, holding up a finger in warning. “Do not say that you obtained a better cake than the one I made for you with my own two hands.”

Adam snaps his fingers. “Thanks. That's precisely the fucking word I was looking for.
Better
. Yes, I'll fucking call it better. What the fuck is But-R-Crème anyway? That shit sounds fake as fuck.”

“Of course it's fake,” my mother snaps. “But if you think fucking is fake, I feel very, very sorry for you.”

The mushroom cloud is happening in front of my eyes.

Instead of getting upset, Adam shrugs. “Point to you,” he says. “And yes, the cake I brought is a fucking salted caramel chocolate. It's better. Ten out of ten people with fucking tastebuds prefer caramel to trans-fat emulsified fucking corn syrup, or whatever the fuck that shit was.” He wanders over to the table, laden with food. He sets down his cake box and takes some bottles out of the bag.

“Soju,” he says.

Goddammit. I was wondering why my mom didn't get any soju this time around. I knew something was weird.

“Adam,” my mother is saying, “let me introduce my husband. Jian, this is Adam Reynolds. Adam
loves
China.”

“How exciting,” my father says. He stands up and holds a hand out to Adam. “So do I. We have that in common.”

If I'd had time to prepare them, I'd have told them that he hates handshakes. It probably wouldn't have changed anything.

Adam looks at my father's outstretched hand. Very slowly, he takes it.

My mother and Adam have obviously met, or at least talked—how, and to what purpose, I have no idea. They've met and the world didn't end.

Surely the apocalypse is coming soon.

“Espresso!” Mabel is saying. “Five seconds left. Blake, do another one, do—”

She stops mid-sentence. Blake is frowning at us. “Dad?”

“Hey.” Adam holds up his hand in a perfunctory wave. “Good to see you, asshole.”

“Dad, what the
fuck
are you doing here?”

Adam Reynolds ignores this. Instead, he uncaps the soju and accepts a plastic cup from my mom. “So how does one drink this shit?”

“It tastes like crap,” my mom says. “Chug it all at once.”

I shake my head behind him.

“You sure you're not an alcoholic?” my mother asks. “Tina never gave me a list of all the ways that you're fucked up.”

There is nowhere to hide. I look over at Blake.
Help me,
I mouth
.

“Workaholic,” Adam says. “Everything else stems from that.” He tilts the cup up, and thankfully, does not take my mother's advice. He takes a sip and frowns pensively.

My mother persists. “You know what you need to get everyone's mind off your big drug scandal?”

Shit. This is not happening. I almost whimper. The only thing worse than my mom yelling at Adam Reynolds about human rights abuses is my mom offering him helpful advice. This will not go well. This…

“What do I need?” He gives her a curious smile. “I'm gonna bet Martin in PR will fucking
love
your advice.”

“A sex scandal,” my mom says.

“I was right.” Adam looks up. “Martin's gonna love it.”

“Sex is much more interesting than drugs. These days, so few things qualify as a true scandal, though. And you're not married, so cheating is not a possibility.” She frowns. “Probably you'd need an orgy to really get attention. And pictures. Pictures are more likely to go viral than text. I read that. You should tell Martin.”