Page 16 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
Oliver hops up the bus steps first. He’s the only person here with the energy to hop anywhere right now; I caught him charming the flight attendants into sneaking him quality coffee straight out of business class. “Yeah, dude,” he says with a fully caffeinated grin, beckoning Cyrus over. “We’ll be bonding in no time. It’ll be like a sleepover—come on, I know that very deep down, you’re excited.”
I catch the look of dismay on Cyrus’s face before he follows Oliver into the bus.
“Leah, you’ll be with Daisy Yun,” the teacher continues.
More hot gusts of wind blow my bangs across my forehead as I shove my suitcase into the lower luggage compartment. I quickly flatten my hair back down and greet my new roommate.
“Hey,” I say, joining her at the bus door. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
She seems somewhat startled, as if convinced I might be talking to someone else. “Um, hi.”
Inside, I drop into the window seat at the front, squeezing over for Daisy to sit down next to me. She does so very carefully, hugging her bag tight to her chest, tucking her dress around her legs. She doesn’t say another word until we’ve left the glass maze of the airport far behind us, the city rising tall on both sides of the highway.
I’m really here.
In Shanghai. On the other end of the world, thousands of miles from all I’ve ever known.
My eyes drink in the views as they rush by, my lips parted in awe. It’s a city made for movie screens, a city that’s stepped out of history, with one foot in the future. A city big enough to get lost in, or big enough to fit in. We speed past sparkling new subway stations, faded wonton restaurants, flower shops bursting with pink tulips and chrysanthemums, chairs stacked up beneath plastic awnings, stores illuminated by tiny LEDs spelling out advertisements in characters I can’t read. I try to commit it to memory, taking mental photos of everything I see: the twelve-story malls, the lush green of the parks breaking up the yards of steel and cement, the potted plants dangling from apartment windows, the groups of men playing mahjong in the alleyways, the woman walking her pet alpaca along the pedestrian crossing.
“Is this … your first time here?” Daisy asks. Her voice is quiet, almost hushed, like she’s scared of disturbing me.
I pull my gaze from the window, flushing when I realize that I must look like a typical wide-eyed tourist. “Yeah. Is it yours?”
She shakes her head. “My dad’s side of the family is from Shanghai. I come here basically every holiday.”
Her Chinese must be so much better than mine. The familiar insecurity prickles uncomfortably against my skin. Even though my mom insisted the program was perfect for people like me,I’m starting to fear that everyone on the bus is better at Chinese than I am, that I’m the only tourist here. Cyrus’s Chinese is perfect. Two of the girls filled out their customs declaration forms in Chinese. And Oliver was flirting in Chinese, which would require a particular command of the language. Luckily, my own flirting tricks are pretty universal, since they’re limited to squinting and smiling and twirling my hair in a semi-ironic way, and hoping the other party finds me attractive enough.
“So why did your parents sign you up for the program?” I ask Daisy.
“My parents didn’t,” she says, picking at a piece of lint on her dress. “Um, I did. People are always telling me to explore new things and be more social and push myself outside my comfort zone—and my comfort zone is the size of my bedroom, so …”
“Who’speople?”
“Teachers. Relatives. The school librarian. Whoever writes the advice columns in magazines. My neighbors. My dentist.”
I bite back a laugh. “It’s nice that your dentist is so invested in your social life.”
“My dentist recommends that I ‘put myself out there’ more often than he recommends that I floss properly.” She sighs and looks at my ear, which is the closest she’s come to making eye contact with me so far. “It’d be so much easier if I were you.”
“Me?” I repeat.
She waves a hand in a general gesture toward my face like that’s answer enough. “You’re so confident and just, like, composed, you know? Like you’ve got everything figured out.”
It’s not the first time someone has called me composed in recent years,though my mom prefers the adjacent, less flattering Chinese termduanzhe.Literally speaking, it means “to hold” or “to carry,” which always conjures the image of someone balancing a bowl filled to the brim with water. One step out of line, one careless move, and everything will spill over.
I consider telling her that I’m not any of the things she thinks I am, but I don’t want to break the illusion. It would be like a magician showing the audience exactly where the rabbit is hidden.
I wouldn’t have the chance to, in either case. The bus rolls to a stop in the hotel parking lot, and we’re all ushered through the entrance in a mess of half-zipped jackets and straggling suitcases.
“Hurry up,” Wang Laoshi chides. “We have a whole evening planned out ahead of us.”
The lobby is larger and more impressive than any of the hotels I’ve stayed in before, with contemporary sculptures rising up to the highest floors and chandeliers lighting up the space. My attention skips from the pop-up stall near the elevators promoting pretty glass jars of tomato juice to the posters advertising the hotel’s afternoon tea service, before landing on the robots carrying bottles of water and clean towels and room service trays. I watch, fascinated, as they wheel themselves over to the concierge desks, their screens flashing. Nobody else even bats an eye at their presence, as if we’ve been living casually among robots since the beginning of time.
“We’ll be meeting down here in an hour to go on the night cruise,” Wang Laoshi says as he hands out our key cards. “Go take a quick shower if you must. Just don’t be late.”
There are plenty of things I can settle for, but a quick shower before a night out is not one of them.
In our lavish hotel room, I blow-dry my hair and straighten it, even though it’s technically already straight, because there’s a crucial difference between naturally straight hair and flat-ironed hair. Then I unpack three bags of makeup products, letting them spill onto my side of the marble counter. Daisy’s side is almost empty in comparison, and much neater: just her toothbrush standing in a plastic cup, a small tube of sunscreen, and moisturizer.
