Permanent Record by Mary H. K. Choi

Author:Mary H. K. Choi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Chapter 22

That night I dream about accidentally posting a selfie on Lee’s Instagram stories. A bleary, ugly smear with one eye closed and my mouth ajar.

It’s humiliating how unimaginative it is. I swear I’m getting stupider.

The worst part wasn’t the act itself. It was the aftermath. I was trying to rationalize to her that it was an accident, convinced for some reason that it was my dad’s fault. Lee gets angrier and angrier because she can’t get a straight answer, and I wake up feeling as though I’d had a fight with my mom. The Freudian implications make me want to hurl.

I know my mom deserves an explanation about Five Points, but I add it to the list of things I am completely incapable of handling right now.

Over the next week Lee and I talk every night anywhere from ten seconds to hours when neither of us can sleep, but otherwise it’s a montage of getting up, going to work, going home, opening the rice cooker, getting made fun of by my friends, blowing off Rain, seeing Rain when I know my mom’s at work, going to bed, and getting up again. Rinse and repeat.

Tice texts me, go outside it’s nice, but I sleep through both the message and the afternoon, and by the time I make it into the world the warm weather means nothing more than the slippery, hardened ice floes giving way to disgusting slush puddles.

His text is as much as we’ve talked in weeks.

When I join the roommates, minus Dara, in the living room to watch Tice’s character get killed, I nurse a low-grade hostility but eat the celebratory pizza anyway.

“Man, they really let you cook this episode,” says Miggs. We’re transfixed as Tice is obliterated in John Woo slow motion.

“Yeah,” he says, smiling, eating his pizza with a knife and fork off a plate on his knees. We’re way past making fun of him for it, but tonight I’m tempted. “I was supposed to get doused with Novichok nerve agent in the first five minutes, but they extended the arc a little.”

A calendar alert chimes on my phone. I swipe it away. I’ve been doing it for the past two days.

One week until my application for Five Points is due, with or without Joey Santos’s cosign. But even more pressing, as far as my heart is concerned, is that I have three weeks to apply for summer semester at NYU. Two months after that to figure out how to pay for the $8,706.00 in tuition and fees for six credits if I get in. I wonder if I remember my log-in for Albert, the NYU computer system.

As the camera punches in to Tice’s bloodied face, I wonder how much he got paid for everything. A few hundred? Thousands?

I swear if this dude got thousands of dollars to play a stereotype on TV . . .

I wonder if I could be an actor. Isn’t it easier to get into college when you’re famous?

I lean back in my seat.

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