I Hope This Doesn't Find You by Ann Liang

Author:Ann Liang [Liang, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

I’m trying to tiptoe my way down the hall when my mom calls my name.

“Sadie? What are you still doing up?”

I spin around, and the room spins too. The alcohol is still sloshing around in my stomach, my bloodstream, rendering everything blurry and surreal. I have to squint hard to focus. My mom’s removing her coat, setting her car keys down on the counter; they’re easily recognizable because she refuses to throw out the bright ribbons from chocolate boxes and insists instead on wrapping them around the key ring. There should be five ribbons in total, but when I blink, they duplicate into a mess of squiggly pink and blue lines.

God, I’m so drunk.

“I’m not drunk,” I announce loudly. This seems like the normal, not-guilty thing to say, but I can tell from the way Mom stares at me that I’ve slipped up somehow. It’s okay, I attempt to calm myself, biting my tongue so hard I taste the sharp tang of blood. At least she hasn’t found out about the party. You’ve cleaned up most of the evidence. There’s absolutely no way—

“Did you . . . host a party while we were gone?” Mom asks, frowning. Before I can reply, she strides into the living room and starts inspecting all the furniture. I want to disappear. “The dining table is askew. The books on the shelf aren’t in alphabetical order. The left cabinet drawer is open. And is that—” She wipes a finger over something on the wall so minuscule that I can’t even see what it is until she holds it right up to my face, under the lights. “That’s a piece of glitter, isn’t it?”

She’s being very accurate. It is, indeed, a singular, dust-sized speck of glitter.

“We don’t own anything with glitter in this house,” she says, switching to Mandarin now. She always speaks in rapid Mandarin when she’s agitated, as if all the words in the English language aren’t enough to contain her rage. “Glitter is, without a doubt, the worst thing humanity has ever invented.”

For reasons that escape me, I decide that the best response to this is: “What about weapons of war?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I backpedal. I’m having trouble standing up and talking at the same time. Or maybe just standing up without support. Or maybe being a human in general.

“What’s going on with you?” she asks, her gaze heavy on me.

Everything is too heavy: the air around me, the clothes on my body, the skin on my bones, the invisible force pressing against my chest. The effort of a single, shaky breath. I can feel my palms sweating, the truth rising up like bile. “I—”

“Did you miss us?” Max comes strolling into the room from the other side of the house, grinning wide. He’s holding up a packet of Wang Wang soft gummy candies—the lychee-flavored ones I love the most—which he waves around before me like a victory flag before dropping it into my palms. “Dude, you should have been there. Da Ma invited a bunch of her friends over and I absolutely thrashed them at mahjong.

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