This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,30
picture of me. “Hashtag Mopey McMopeface.”
“Hashtag Too Exhausted for My Homicide Filter to Work.” I snap back.
“I get it,” she relents. “But we had a great day on social media. One hundred new followers, a couple of retweets by the official Boilermaker account. And hey, two sign-ups for our e-mail list!”
“Wow, what does that brings us to? A grand total of five?” My voice isn’t dry. It’s just dehydration. “The spambots are going to be hacking into us any day now, I mean, we’re major influencers.”
Priya’s used to ignoring me when I’m like this, probably because she’s got two older brothers. Snark just rolls off her like water off a duck’s back.
“Will’s a good guy,” Priya says then. “He was totally trying to drag you out of your funk, but you wouldn’t have any of it.”
I think of the way Priya and Will clicked right away, of how effortlessly they worked together taking orders while I did all the food work. “Well, if you like him so much, maybe you should marry him.” I pitch my voice to sound like a whiny eight-year-old, aiming for irony but missing it by a mile.
Priya stiffens in the seat next to me, and I apologize before she can reply. “I’m sorry, that was out of line. I’m a shit human being today.” I know that she would never take Will from me. Not intentionally.
She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, and the pause while she composes her response is the only thing that hints at how much I’ve hurt her feelings. Priya and I never have to worry about what we say to each other. “It’s been a long day,” she says finally.
“Thank you for helping,” I say in a small voice. “I know there are more fun things to do on a summer Friday.”
“Psht. Fun is for the lazy,” she says. She pauses and looks out the window for a second. “It was important. And you did good.”
The closest I can get to accepting her praise is silence. But that’s the thing about best friends: Priya understands me anyway.
The next morning I wake up feeling like I’ve been run over by a cement mixer and then baked in a pizza oven. The tip of my nose burns like it’s had an encounter with that character on Game of Thrones who skins his enemies, and my neck aches so badly I can barely turn my head to see what time it is.
I lie in bed for a few minutes after I wake up. Maybe closer to an hour, who’s counting?
My brother, apparently. At nine o’clock exactly he starts banging on my door at just about the same tempo that my head is pounding.
“Jiejie,” he yells. “I need you to help me with my homework.”
I burrow my head farther into my pillow. “Jesus Christ, it’s Saturday morning.”
“Dad says I need to get it done before I can do any screen time. The guys are doing an epic multiplayer today, but Mom says I have to help out downstairs for lunch because it’s going to be so busy. Baituo, Jiejie, bangwo?” It’s a low blow for my brother to switch to Mandarin, and he knows it. Nothing triggers my guilt and filial piety more than my formal title of “Big Sister.”
“Only because you said please,” I grumble as I roll out of bed, muscles screeching. After I brush my teeth I pop some ibuprofen and splash some cold water over my face before staring at myself in the mirror. I don’t have bags under my eyes—I’ve got suitcases, and my hair has the opposite of body. It lies like a corpse on my oily scalp.
At the breakfast table, while I’m helping my brother with his homework, I have coffee and youtiao, baseball bat–length sticks of fried dough that Priya once described as a chubby churro without the cinnamon sugar. It’s basically Taiwanese comfort food, and I can’t help but think that if Will tasted one he’d probably try to get me to sell them in the restaurant, too.
It’s sweet how excited he is about “authentic” Chinese food, but right here and now I resolve to keep youtiao under his radar for as long as possible, because it’s just not worth the weird looks, the disbelieving chuckles, and the times we’d have to explain what it is and how to eat it. We’re a crappy Chinese restaurant, not a Ten Thousand Villages. Our food will never come with a pamphlet celebrating its exotic origins.