Page 5 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
“You can’t keep being like this, you know, Meimei,” she said as she applied her thousandth coating of mascara.
“Like what, Ci?” But I knew, without really knowing, what she meant.
In the mirror, I could see Iris rolling her eyes. We used to be close. When we were little, we’d play all sorts of games together—dress-up, house, Lego. The only thing Iris never wanted to play was hide-and-seek. When I asked why, she said, “What if I hid so well nobody could find me?”
I didn’t really know when we stopped being close, but if I had to guess, I’d blame it on the boobs. They changed her, seemingly overnight. She went from an older kid who was happy to play with me to a teenager I didn’t recognize. I still didn’t.
“This helpless act,” Iris said, gesturing at me.
“I’m not helpless,” I said helplessly.
“You’re so pathetic.”
Her tone was so acerbic that tears immediately rushed into my eyes. Iris was the only person who could make me cry with just one sentence.
“Oh my god, are you going to cry? See what I mean? Jesus.” Iris dropped her mascara into her makeup bag and zipped it up. She looked pissed. She always looked pissed, especially when she talked to me.
I didn’t trust myself to speak without my voice cracking, so I didn’t say anything.
“When are you going to toughen the fuck up?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She stuffed her makeup bag into a backpack and slung it over one shoulder. In her baggy jeans and tank top,Iris looked so cool. I admired her and I hated her. For a moment, she frowned at me, hesitating. I braced myself for whatever barbed thing she was about to lob at me, but all she said was, “Well, see you around.” Then she strode out of her bedroom without another glance.
I sat at the foot of her bed, listening to the sounds of Iris leaving home for a whole other country. I wasn’t going to the airport; Mama and Papa were dropping Iris off before going to the clinic. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Part of me wanted to cling to my big sister, spend every last moment with her, wave at her madly at the gates and watch her plane leave the tarmac. The other part of me knew that if I did that, all she would do was roll her eyes and tell me to grow up and stop embarrassing her. That was the thing with Iris. Even at fifteen, she knew that the best way to say goodbye was to not say it at all.
• • •
By the time I graduated high school three years later, Iris and I were as good as strangers. She’d come back every summer, and each time, I recognized less and less of her. It wasn’t just that she looked different—so American in the best possible way, her hair, her clothes, even her eyebrows. It was the way she talked and the way she moved. Her American accent was flawless, zero traces of Indonesia in the way she spoke. She spoke like a true ABC—an American-born Chinese. When I spoke to her, I became painfully aware of my own horrible Indonesian accent, the way the R’s rattled harshly on my tongue while they flowed out rich and smooth from Iris’s mouth. Eventually, I stopped talking to Iris altogether.
So when I graduated high school and was bundled onto aplane for LA, my insides were twisted into tight knots. Even though I’d known for years that this was always the plan, that Chinese-Indonesian kids, upon graduating high school—usually at the age of sixteen if they attended a Singaporean high school like I did—were usually sent to American colleges (mostly on the West Coast due to the large Asian population, though for some random reason, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor also had a huge number of Chinese-Indonesian students), I was still terrified. Still filled with a sense of:Holy shit, is this really happening?
Iris had moved out of the group home a month earlier in preparation for my arrival, and we would be living in a two-bedroom apartment with each other. The idea of sharing an apartment with my sister was terrifying. But I could never fully explain why to Mama and Papa. And I doubt they’d be interested to know, anyway. It wouldn’t change a thing. It wasn’t like I could live on my own at sixteen, and I didn’t want to live in a group home. They’d eat me alive. I spent the entire flight to LA watching movies, trying not to think about the fact that I was on my way to a whole new life in a whole new country where everyone spoke an entirely different language.
Iris picked me up at LAX. It was the first time I’d seen her driving, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything cooler or more grown-up. She drove with one hand on the wheel and her other arm resting on the door. Her eyes were hidden behind huge sunglasses, and I was sort of glad I couldn’t see them because I had no doubt she was looking at me with disdain. To be fair, I would look at myself with disdain too. Next to Iris, it was glaringly obvious how un-American I was, in my unfashionably colorful clothes that Mama bought me and my unflattering chin-length hair. It wasJanuary, and even the air here was so different from the air in Indonesia. Lighter, with a slight bite that I found magical.
“You’re here,” she said with, to be honest, way too much resignation.
“Yeah.”
She sighed, then was distracted for a while as she merged onto the freeway. When she turned her attention back to me, I stiffened, bracing myself. “God,” she muttered.
I don’t know why—maybe it was the disgust in her voice, or maybe it was the fact that I was sixteen, and I finally had my very own boobs (not as big as Iris’s, but they were very definitely there), or maybe it was the LA magic working its way through my veins. Whatever it was, for once, I didn’t cower. Instead, I fired back, “Why do you hate me so much?”
There was a pause. I could tell Iris was shocked by that. Maybe talking back was a mistake. I wished I could pluck the words out of the air and swallow them.
“I don’t hate you.”
“Really?”
“Really?” she mimicked in a squeaky voice. “Dude, seriously. Stop being so needy, oh man.”
“I wasn’t being needy. I just—I’m surprised, that’s all.”
“Surprised that I don’t hate you?”
“Yeah.” I hesitated, going over my next words to make sure they wouldn’t come out needy or pathetic or whatever else would give Iris fodder. “You always seem so angry when you talk to me.”
She made a noise that sounded like “Huh.” Then she said, “Well, I don’t hate you. You piss me off all the time though.”
“Why?”
