Rent a Boyfriend - Gloria Chao Page 0,31

tables, so Xing took a cue from our father and chased down the shrimp dumplings, stuffed eggplant, and turnip cake. Only, he managed to do it without creating a Lu Pàng–size scene.

The smell of the food stirred up memories of lazy Sunday afternoons with my family, stuffing ourselves so full of shrimp we could barely move. Even my mother’s clucking tongue had been silenced by thousand-year-old egg congee.

And now we were divided. Those memories were fading.

Xing and I clicked our chopsticks together—a toast he had created to distract my younger self from our parents fighting about the thermostat, my mother’s cooking, the amount of tofu in the house. Well, more accurately, it was my father yelling as my mother cowered.

My shoulders relaxed, falling away from my ears. Okay, we could do this. Yíbù, yíbù, until we took enough steps to wade through the crap.

But then it was like my brain couldn’t take it anymore—the chopstick toast, the dim sum smell, the fact that Xing felt both like my blood and a stranger. . . .

I hated myself at the moment, for lots of opposing reasons. I hated that I had let this go on for so long, let others decide for me that my only sibling was going to disappear from my life. I hated that I was disobeying my parents right now, choosing the person who had so easily abandoned me and ignored my subsequent phone calls.

And I hated myself for adding yet another secret to my already overloaded plate. It was like trying to contain three spoonfuls of stuffing in a dumpling—it was so overfilled the skin barely met on any side. All the secrets threatened to spill at any moment. If I ever tried to finish the dumpling, it would explode when I squeezed—meat and veggies everywhere.

This had happened to me, literally, when I was little and learning how to make dumplings. It seems like it should’ve been a small issue—maybe even something many parents would have laughed at and given the child a pat on the head for being cute—but to my parents who grew up with nothing and scrimped and saved every grain of rice, wasting food was punishable. That was when I learned life was unfair.

I knew the danger of what I was doing, yet I had done it anyway. There was no one to blame here but me. I had called Xing first.

Shit. Maybe I should run for it now while I still could. We hadn’t actually spoken yet—it was salvageable.

But then he smiled at me, and I remembered. How he knew my—correction, our—parents, and I didn’t have to explain myself. He knew the culture, not just as a whole, but through our little window.

We didn’t speak as we loaded our plates, and it shouldn’t have surprised me—we had four years of ground to cover—but it still made me anxious. What if too much had been lost to time and we could never get it back? What if it would never be the same again and he would forever be a stranger?

“How could you just disappear like that?” I blurted out, my voice shaky. “I tried to call you so many times.”

Xing’s mouth was open, a piece of eggplant a few inches away, but it slipped from his chopsticks and clunked onto his plate, spraying sauce. He was frozen for a second before closing his lips. . . . But he left the sauce where it was, which reminded me that he was still the same person I remembered, never cleaning up after himself.

I could see him turning the words over in his head and it sent a zap of frustration through me. “Stop filtering everything, Xing. Just tell me what you’re thinking, the truth. Not some pretty answer you think will resolve everything.”

He spoke immediately, the words falling out fast and a bit jumbled. “I didn’t want to make you choose. I bowed out so you could keep your relationship with them. You need them more than you need me.”

“How could you decide all that without asking me?”

There was a long pause. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have. But you were so young. I thought I was doing what was best for you.”

“Best for me? You shoveled a bunch of crap on me when you left. I had to fix everyone whenever your name came up, and worse, I had to become the perfect Taiwanese poster child to make up for all the shame you caused. I was never let out. I missed