This is a continuation of the story from my last post. Basically, it’s what I’ve written in the past 1 and a half… or so. I guess.
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Usually, it was just me and Lily for dinner. Our mom was usually gone because of her work for a fashion magazine and our dad was usually working late in research late. Lily and I would usually order out for Chinese because it made it feel like we were still kind of Asian. Sort of. Asian-American, at least. Most of our second-generation Asian-American friends were jealous of the fact that our parents were largely absent from our teenage lives, freeing us to the allures of alcohol, drugs, pre-marital sex, and substandard (at least, supposedly substandard for Asians) grades. Honestly, it didn’t really feel that much different to us because this was the way it had always been.
We ate in relative silence with the TV running in the background. Lily kept looking up like she wanted to say something. I refused to pay her any attention. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“What?” I said, feigning confusion.
“About Evy.” She picked around her food with her chopsticks. “I know you’ve liked her for a long time and that it must be hard to move on from that.”
“Mmm.” I shoved in a noodle in my mouth. It tasted deliciously greasy and MSG-y.
“I still think that you should give up on her though.”
“Mmm.”
A couple seconds passed. The garage door opened up with a loud rumble. Lily looked up to see Dad walk in. Dad sighed with relief. “Chinese again?”
Lily nodded. “That’s not healthy,” Dad said, grimacing, but he accepted the carton of processed noodles, limp vegetables, and questionable meat.
Lily shrugged. “You can cook something else if you don’t like it,” she sniffed.
Dad stuck a pair of chopsticks into his food and sat down at the kitchen computer to look at the state of the stock market. He began to eat, and then turned around as if he had suddenly remembered something. “Tyler, did you submit your early applications in yet?” he asked.
Crap. “Uh, yeah, I’ll get on that,” I said.
“Hurry up!” Dad said sternly. “You only have a week left to go. What are you waiting for? You should do everything as soon as possible.”
I waved my chopsticks impatiently. “I’m just editing the essays,” I said. It was a total lie, but whatever.
Dad made a disbelieving noise, but he turned back to the computer. “I don’t care, it’s your future,” he grumbled.
I rolled my eyes and kept eating.
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I was laying in bed listening to Coldplay over my computer speakers. If I ever made a movie of my life, I’d have Coldplay in the soundtrack. I couldn’t go to sleep without music. I didn’t like waking up to silence.
So. Tomorrow. I’d have to go back to school tomorrow. It’s not like my dad would let me stay home for something as trivial as being rejected by a girl. A pretty girl. A girl I liked. Nope, there was absolutely no chance of that.
I sighed and went to sleep.
