This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,31
off one youtiao and reach for the remaining one only to have my mother slap my hand away gently. “Aiyo, Xiao Jia. Chi taiduo, duzi pang.” She pinches my belly fat and I give an indignant yelp. “That for your brother to eat.”
“What, so it’s okay for Alan to be overweight?” I protest. My mom, empress of Fat Shameland, just shrugs and moves her size-two waist over to the sink to do dishes. It’s like she doesn’t care that people die from eating disorders every year.
Since the day I hit puberty, my mother’s been on my case. On a daily basis, I’m told that my belly’s too big (duzi tai pang), that I’m a hunchback who needs to stand up straight (ting xiong yidian), and that my hair is a mess (toufa luanqibazao). I’m surprised she hasn’t hit the trifecta already in the half hour I’ve been downstairs.
My teachers at school would never call me a rebel, but I find little ways to act out: sneaking bites of food when my mom isn’t watching, savaging my hair with rubber bands when I forget hair ties, and generally perfecting my lady sprawl in mixed company. It’s not even like my mom has time to really police me—she’s too busy, which takes a little away from my satisfaction with my rebelliousness, but not too much.
“I don’t get it,” my brother whines when I make him show his work for a problem. “I got the right answer. Why do I have to go through all these steps?”
“It’s for your own good,” I say, cringing a little at how much I sound like my dad. When he rolls his eyes, I throw my hands up in the air. “Look, I’m the cheapest tutor you’ve got, so deal with it. You can either take my advice or ignore it and flunk the class again.”
He seems to choose the latter option, gluing his eyes to the back of our generic Cheerios box.
“Earth to Alan. Hello?” When I grab the box away from him, he gives me the same innocent smile he’s had since he was a four-year-old getting into trouble with our parents. “Do you want to play your freaking Fortnite or not?”
“Fine,” he groans. In the next hour, Alan has to go to the bathroom twice, prepare himself a mid-morning snack, and go upstairs to bring down his window fan, but we finally get his worksheet done. Then he’s in his room logged onto his computer within ten seconds.
For the first time in what seems like forever, I can just do nothing. My parents and Amah are already downstairs doing prep work. I know they’ll call up when they need me, or pound on the ceiling with a broomstick if the landline downstairs is being used to take orders. For these few minutes before the lunch rush, I can sit.
“So there’s good news,” I tell my dad while we clean up after lunch. “We sold all the pot stickers, and literally thousands of people stopped by and now know about us.” My dad grunts with approval, and his eyes practically light up with dollar signs. “Once we include all our expenses, we net about eight hundred dollars, which I think is great considering it’s our first year—”
“Dengxia, dengxia. Ni shuo shenme?” my dad interrupts. “How you sold out, but only get eight hundred bucks?”
“Well, there’s the cost of food and equipment rental, and there was the Expo booth fee.…” I don’t mention the labor costs.
“How much this booth?” my father asks suspiciously, his Wasting Money Warning System blaring.
I’m glad that he’s been too busy to ask the question until now. I try not to have my voice wobble. “Well, it was four hundred dollars, but as you can see we really made it up.”
His eyes bug out and he opens his mouth to say something, then stops. His brow furrows and his gaze grows distant before he squints at me. “You still make eight hundred dollars. You sell more than twelve hundred dollars’ worth of food?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
My dad does his “not bad” frowny face, the one that makes him look like a surprised catfish, and my heart does a little flip. That’s practically his version of a high five.
“Overhead too high,” he grumbles as he takes a stack of flat take-out menus and turns them into trifolds. “Next time work on cutting expense. How much you charge per order?” he demands.
“Five for five dollars, but next time I think we can do four for