The Double Life of Benson Yu by Kevin Chong

Author:Kevin Chong [Chong, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

The house was silent. He brushed his teeth with a new toothbrush his father had given him the night before. Where was everybody? How could anyplace be as quiet as this house? In the kitchen, he found his stepmother sitting on a stool at the counter, holding a slab of lit glass in one hand, sipping from a mug of tea in the other.

“You slept well?” she asked warmly. “Your father took your sister to her ballet class.”

“What’s that?” Benny asked, his interest piqued at the device she held. “Is it like a tricorder in Star Trek?”

She laughed, self-deprecating laughter as though he’d made a sardonic comment. “Very funny, it’s not that old,” she told him. “Your father tells me to upgrade. But it still works fine.” She asked him what he wanted to do that day. As he sputtered, she suggested shopping—and he agreed, happy not to decide. The two of them would go to the mall to buy clothes for school, which he would begin the following Monday. “It’s better we go without him anyhow,” she said about Benny’s father as she wheeled around the kitchen looking for her car keys. “He gets very impatient when we shop.”

They took her car down the hill onto the highway that opened up to a parched valley. Benny’s stepmother was playing music that he liked. Electric guitars strummed, shimmering and shrieky, over the aloof vocalist. Benny turned it up. “What’s that?” he asked her.

“The Strokes. Do you like it?”

He nodded, thinking about his aunt’s record collection. “It reminds me of the Velvet Underground.”

Her eyes brightened. “I think we’re going to get along.”

Benny’s stepmother pulled off the highway into a mall. The scale of the mall multiplied his disorientation. Too many people for Benny to be the victim of a practical joke anymore, so perhaps he was in an extended hallucination. So many people in clothes he didn’t understand, fixating on their tricorders. Sometimes their hair was purple and pink, and lots of people had tattoos, even the mothers pushing their kids in strollers.

Their first stop was the boys’ section of a department store. Grabbing shirts and hoodies in fistfuls of clothes hangers, his stepmother steered him toward styles that she’d seen on her colleagues’ kids. Afterward, she recalled what it had been like to emigrate from Czechoslovakia. “I was more self-conscious about my clothes and hair than my accent,” she said over fries and Cokes at the food court. “I was thinking you might want a less conspicuous look.” Benny was relieved she’d stopped asking him so many questions. She had a way of giggling, even with her throaty voice, that seemed youthful. Maybe she actually liked him.

He was further relieved that french fries and Cokes hadn’t changed.

“I’m sorry to be bombarding you with questions. But your father hasn’t told me a lot about you,” she says. “He said you were living with your grandmother before she passed suddenly. And that your mother is already gone.” She tilted her head and looked at him softly.

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