Trade Me (14 page)

During the launch of the Tempest smartphone, Adam was interrupted in the middle of his initial presentation. His phone rang loudly in the middle of a discussion of cloud storage. He looked around and slowly pulled out the as-yet-unannounced phone.

“Yes?” he said shortly, looking around the audience. “This isn’t a good time. I’m kind of busy.”

The audience laughed good-naturedly in response.

Adam’s features changed as he listened. “Where’s Blake? He has
detention?
This isn’t a good time for that. He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

Louder laughter erupted.

“Well,” Adam said, “yes, I can understand where you’re coming from, Mr. Whitesend. I’m not trying to argue that my son should have special treatment. Wait. Yes. I
am
trying to argue that. Can’t he do this next week? He’ll stay twice as long.”

A deeper frown.

“Oh, you already offered that as an option and he said no?” Adam rubbed his forehead. “I see.” He hung up and slid the phone back in his pocket.

“Hey, Adam,” someone yelled from the audience. “What was that?”

“You’ll see,” he responded.

But the best part was when he got to the Tempest reveal. As Adam started showing off the smartphone features, Blake started texting.

It was one of the funniest things in a launch ever—Blake sending pictures of his teacher, taken with perfect comic timing. He sent a video near the end of the teacher in charge of detention looking up, frowning, and starting down the aisle.

Finally, a single text appeared on Adam’s screen.

This is Mr. Whitesend. What is this thing?

Everyone online initially assumed it
had
to be staged. But the other students at Blake’s high school insisted that it had really happened—that he had gotten detention, that he’d argued. Two students had even been in detention with him as it all happened, and they swore it really went down that way. The internet is still arguing, eight years later, over whether it was real or not.

I have access to the scripts, and I get to find out the truth. Yes, it was scripted. All of it. Both the principal and Mr. Whitesend were in on it, with signed releases and everything. Mr. Whitesend apparently got paid a mountain of money in exchange for looking like the bad guy.

There are years of launches, hours of Blake and Adam shows. And once I start diving into the edited scripts, I only get more confused.

“We’re selling family,” Adam wrote in an earlier comment as he crossed off someone else’s suggestion. “We make people want to be part of the Cyclone family. This doesn’t do that.”

But when someone else suggested a truly heartwarming scenario three years ago, Blake nixed it.

“Cute,” he says, “but can you see Dad and me doing that? It has to be a true construction.”

Those are the words I see over and over, in every launch script over the last ten years: True construction. The Blake and Adam show may be scripted, but it’s also something real. It has to be something that could happen, something, perhaps, that even
did
happen. It’s fake, but it’s based on good source material. The launches chronicle their growing relationship from father and son to friends. They’re sweet. They’re endearing. They’re authentic. And—I remind myself—they’re putting all of this on display for the purpose of selling more products, which is completely fucked up.

There’s only one launch I can find in the entire twenty-year period that isn’t completely scripted. It happened a year ago, when one of the key presenters passed away two nights before. Without any explanation that I can find, Blake and Adam axed the entire goofy script they’d put together.

There was nothing written to fill the space, just a short interchange between Blake and his dad. Blake deleted the idea that had come before. He added two lines in its place.

Announce moment of silence.

Stage direction: don’t cry.

His father, in turn, deleted the second line with a comment of his own.
Irrelevant. I don’t cry.

Blake added the line back in.
That’s for me, asshole.

It takes me three days to understand what Blake has asked me to do. He was right; I can manage most of the launch. There’s an entire team that is involved with the script. They’ve been doing this as long as Blake has, and they’ve already sent in suggestions that I will only have to modify.

Blake doesn’t need me to write a product launch, not really. He needs a true construction. He wants me to write the next chapter in his relationship with his father, the man he loves so much that it hurts.

And I don’t have the truth.

I don’t like being taken by surprise. I especially don’t like discovering that I’ve landed in the middle of a morass.

After a few moments’ contemplation, I head south to meet Blake after work.

I had the responsibility of finding Blake a suitable job—and trust me, that wasn’t as easy as it might seem. His name is recognizable enough that he’d draw notice almost everywhere. His resumé is glowing—so glowing that for an entry-level job, it’s practically radioactive. Imagine applying for a job in fast food with
Vice President of Interfaces, Cyclone Systems
as your last position.

Luckily, I know someone who owes my mom a favor.

It’s ten at night when I open the doors to the restaurant where he’s working.

“Closed!” sings out Mr. Zhen from the back as I slip inside. The walls are paneled in faux-rosewood scenes that are supposed to give off an indeterminately Chinese vibe. At least they would if I didn’t know that the chop in the corner translates to something like “Turgid Mutton.”

“We’re closed,” Mr. Zhen insists, bustling through the kitchen door. But he stops when he sees me and a smile spreads over his face. He takes off his hairnet, revealing approximately three strands of hair.

“Tina!” He switches to Mandarin. “I’m glad you came. Nice boy you sent to me. I’m really happy.”

“He’s going to work out?” I have to admit I’m a little surprised. Not that I thought Blake would be unwilling to work; he’s too competitive to not try his best. I just kind of assumed he would suck at manual labor.

Mr. Zhen waves a hand. “A little slow, but he’ll speed up. We just have to break in his soft hands.” He laughs. “But I see why you sent him my way. It’s nice to have someone back there who speaks Mandarin for a change. My last dishwasher was Mexican and we could never talk about anything.”

Blake speaks Mandarin? This is news to me. I smile tightly. “I thought you’d like that,” I say instead.

The kitchen door opens and Blake comes out. He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. It must be humid back there, because the shirt clings. Just a little. He’s not built like a wrestler—he’s far too thin for that—but there’s nothing on him but muscle. His tattoo is visible, rippling on the skin of his arm. I swallow.

“Thank you, Mr. Zhen,” he says in passable Mandarin. Son of a bitch. “I…” He pauses, thinking. “Now bowls clean. Tomorrow I more fast.”

His vocabulary sucks. His grammar is terrible. Blake Reynolds speaks white-boy Mandarin. But he actually speaks it.

At that point, Blake looks over and sees me. He blinks, and then very slowly, he smiles.

He holds up his hands. “No bowls!” he says.

“I thought I’d give you a ride home,” I say in English.

He switches naturally. “Ah. You’re a goddess.” He smiles at me. “I thought you were just here to taunt me.”

“Why taunt you as you walk past when I can taunt you the entire way home?”

“Good point.” But he grins at me and puts on his coat. Which is good. I didn’t want to look at Blake’s biceps anyway.

He follows me to the car parked just outside, starts to go to the driver’s side, and then shakes his head ruefully, circling back to the passenger side.

He slides in and leans back against the seat.

“Tired?” My tone is not entirely innocent.

In response, he groans. “Last year, I ran a fifty-mile race in the mountains of Spain. It was cold and raining. Someone died of hypothermia. I fractured my tibia.” He shuts his eyes. “That was worse than this. Marginally.”

It’s a good thing he’s shut his eyes. This way, he won’t notice that I’m only going twenty-five miles an hour.

“So,” I say. “You speak Mandarin.”

“My dad took me to China for three months when we were working out some manufacturing details. I forced myself to do some crash-course learning, enough to be polite. It smoothes things over when my father—um.” He stretches and rolls his neck. “Speaking of impressing people. You’ve been holding out on me.”

I pull out—slowly—onto the main thoroughfare. “
I’ve
been holding out on
you?
You have to be kidding me.”

“Yeah. You give that whole our-lives-are-equal-value speech, and then you don’t tell me that your mother is some kind of badass.”

“
My
mom?”

“Mr. Zhen told me all about her. What is she, some kind of super-lawyer?”

I don’t want to get into this with him. I hate trying to explain Falun Gong to Westerners. Sometimes, I wish my parents had been caught up in something comprehensible, like tax reform or Tiananmen Square. I’ve tried telling people before, and it rarely goes well.

Falun Gong is a system of exercises, something like Tai Chi or Qi Gong. It’s illegal to practice it in China, so illegal that the Chinese government runs reeducation camps to forcibly brainwash practitioners.

No, it’s not a freedom of speech issue. No, it’s not a religion, not like you understand it. It’s never going to make sense to you, which is why immigration judges don’t always get it. It’s like free exercise of…exercise, and my mother spends all her spare time beating her head against that wall.

“Come on,” Blake says. “You can tell me.”

I sigh. “She’s not a super-lawyer. She’s not even a lawyer. She quit school when she was sixteen.”

He frowns at this, sitting up straight. “Huh. From what Mr. Zhen told me, I imagined her sitting in a tiny law office in Southern California, striking fear into the hearts of xenophobes everywhere.”

“No. She only strikes fear into the hearts of xenophobes buying cakes at Wal-Mart.”

At his puzzled look, I explain.

“She decorates cakes for a living. The immigration stuff is just…a hobby. She helped a friend figure out what she needed to do, made some connections. Then she helped her friend’s friend. The next thing you know, she’s the person who knows random things. She helped Mr. Zhen find a decent lawyer. Then she helped him pay the bills.”

Blake considers this, rubbing his chin.

“I’m pretty sure that makes her even cooler. By day, she frosts cakes.”

“By early morning, really,” I interrupt. “She goes in at five. She’s off by two.”

“By late afternoon,” Blake continues, without missing a beat, “she’s…uh…”

“Please don’t give my mom a superhero name.”

“Fine. What is it like having her for a parent? That must be totally cool.”

I think. “Terrifying.”

A silence descends on the car for a moment.

“And you know what?” I say. “I didn’t pick you up because I wanted to talk to you about my mother. I need to talk to you about your dad.
You’ve
been holding out on
me.”

He doesn’t bother pretending that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He puts one hand over his face. “Yep,” he mutters. “The Blake and Adam show. Here we come.”

“Were you going to mention that to me?”

“I hinted at it. Earlier. I told you the launch touched on personal topics. I was going to talk about it as soon as I knew what to say.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Are you trying to make me fail? You could get away with that short thing six months ago because all you had was a few product refreshes. But Fernanda is huge. She’s new. You’re going to need something epic, and I don’t know you and your dad well enough to do this.”

He sighs. “I know.”

“I started making a list of possibilities, but they all sound stupid and fake. If I’m going to get this right, I need more information. What is it like, working with your father?”

He turns away from me and looks out the window. For a few long minutes, he doesn’t say anything. And then finally… “Terrifying,” he says shortly.

“Dammit, Blake.”

“Why are you going twenty miles an hour?” he asks. “You could be going twice as fast. Faster.”

“Because,” I say through gritted teeth, “I
like
driving at this speed.”

“Seriously? Are you a terrible driver or something?”

“I swear to God, if you give me that Asians are terrible drivers spiel at this moment, I am going to kick you out of this car so fast—”

“Tina, I’m asking if you’re a terrible driver because you’re driving twenty miles an hour and everyone is passing you. This is a thing that terrible drivers do.”

I don’t know if I can explain why I find this car so frightening. It’s powerful. It’s fast. I could go sixty and not even notice, and that’s the problem. I feel like I should notice having power like this. Like if I ever
stop
noticing, I’ll lose something important.

I grit my teeth and inch the speed up to twenty-four. “Satisfied?”