Crash Landing by Li Charmaine Anne

Author:Li Charmaine Anne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Annick Press
Published: 2024-02-06T15:17:25+00:00

* * *

. . .

I walk through the week with held breath, paranoid that my parents will find out about the graffiti trip. But they don’t. Instead, Wendy steals the spotlight again.

She comes home just before dinner on a rainy orchestra day, steaming with emotional heat. Goes straight to her room, slams the door shut, and starts screaming and ripping and throwing things.

We all stand in the hallway as De Di jiggles the locked doorknob to no avail. He smacks the door with the palm of his hand. “Ah Mui! What is going on?!”

“I-I-I . . .” The sound of Wendy blubbering into a tissue, and then she screams, “I got a C+ on my physics exam!”

My parents and I all look at each other. Wendy has never, ever gotten anything lower than a B. Ever. She once joked—only to be scolded by our mother for joking about such things—that she’d rather get pregnant than get a C.

De Di clears his throat and leans against the door. “What was it, a small pop quiz?”

“No! A unit test!”

“But you studied, didn’t you? How did that happen?” Ma Mi says.

“Go eat dinner,” De Di tells us. “I’ll talk to her.”

Ma Mi and I pick at our food while De Di talks to Wendy through the door, pleading with her to stop throwing books against the wall.

“I wonder what happened,” Ma Mi mutters. “She’s always in that room of hers, studying and studying, never letting us in. Do you think she’s faking? Maybe she’s playing computer games or talking to her friends?”

I wonder if she’s been spending more time with Justin.

“Aaiii, she’s always been so sensitive,” Ma Mi continues. “Blows up at the littlest thing.”

“She’s afraid of disappointing you and De Di,” I say.

A nervous laugh from Ma Mi. “But we’ve never laid a hand on either of you. We’re not the type of parents who will disown you for bringing home a bad grade.”

“Maybe.” I drown my gai lan in oyster sauce, ignoring my mom’s disapproving glare. “But Wendy believes she must be perfect in everything. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

I shrug. De Di comes downstairs sighing and shaking his head. He grabs a bowl and heaps rice and gai lan into it. He’s about to add barbeque pork when I remind him it’s Wendy’s vegetarian day. De Di nods and adds tomato egg instead. He brings the bowl and Wendy’s favorite pair of chopsticks from when she was little—a pink-and-white Hello Kitty set that is honestly too short for her fingers now—up to my sister’s room. When he returns, he flops down at the table with a heavy sigh.

Ma Mi shakes her head. “I told her not to go with us to that dinner with the Chius. She probably didn’t have enough time to study.”

De Di’s voice is low and gravelly. “She’s very stressed. Don’t scold her.”

“She didn’t look stressed last weekend.”

De Di stirs tomato egg into his rice. “Stress can show up in a number of ways.”

Ma Mi speaks into her rice.

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