Page 32 of I Hope This Doesn't Find
Julius nods along, but his eyes follow his brother as he shakes hands with an enthusiastic fan. They take a selfie together, James’s signature winning smile and the cover of his debut on display. The fan appears to be bawling.
“People always act like that around him,” Julius remarks under his breath. “Even our own parents.”
“Your parents . . . always ask your brother to autograph the collar of their shirt?” I ask as James whips out a gold Sharpie he apparently just keeps in his front pocket.
Julius lets out a surprised scoff of laughter, proving my theory from earlier. His smiles really do feel like miracles. Especially when you’re on the receiving end of them.
Warmth spreads through me, but then I give myself a mental kick. Remind myself of who I’m talking to.Julius Gong.The boy who’s made my life unbearable for the past ten years. He wouldn’t even be here right now if he wasn’t forced to by the principal.
“I better go home,” I say.
His expression flickers. “So soon?”
I pause, caught off guard, and his demeanor changes in response. The smile is gone in a flash, the lines of his face carved into their usual cool, unimpressed mask.
“I mean, aren’t you going to transcribe the notes first?” he asks. “Surely you don’t intend to leave that work to me?”
Thisis the Julius Gong I know. The Julius Gong I can comfortably hate. I’m almost relieved. “I’ll transcribe them,” I tell him, only so we can wrap this up faster. “I’ll email the finalized version to you by midnight.”
“Okay. Good. You better.”
I begin to shove everything in my bag, but he adds, “I hear you’re throwing a party this weekend?”
My hands freeze over my notebook. “Is there a problem with that?”
“So you really are. Hosting a party.” He stretches the last word out like it’s something ridiculous, like I’m planning to house an elephant or organize a Christmas feast in late April. “Why?”
“Because I feel like it,” I say, defensive. I’m lying, of course, but I’m more offended by the implication that I can’t be the kind of person who’d throw a party for fun. That he thinks he has me all figured out. That I’m an open book to him, and he can read me easily, better than anybody else.
“You never do anything just because you feel like it, Sadie Wen,” he says, flattening his palms over the table. “You must have a multistep strategy. A long-term objective. Or else why are you inviting people like Rosie to your house?”
“Does it matter?” Irritation races through me like brush fire. “It’s not like I’m invitingyou.”
His black eyes glitter. I watch his throat move slightly before he replies, his voice cold, “I wouldn’t have come even if you did.”
“Okay,” I say flatly. I don’t tell him I had considered inviting him this afternoon; we’re inviting most of the year level anyway. But now that thought—the very fact that I’d evenentertainedthe idea—mortifies me. Why would I ever give Julius a reason to reject me? Rejection is the most humiliating form of defeat. It’s losing the battle before it’s even begun. It’s lowering your weapon so they can spear you in the chest. “Then don’t.”
“I won’t,” he says, his jaw taut.
“You’ve said that already.”
“I want to make it clear.”
“Don’t worry, it’sveryclear to me.”
We glare at each other, breathing hard as if from physical exertion, my nails digging into the metal spiral of my notebook. Nobody else has ever had the power to fill me with such pure, blistering rage. To make me so angry I want to flip over a table, stamp my feet like a screaming toddler, burn holes into the carpet. Before I can do any real damage, I take my things and leave without even bothering to zip up my bag.
But my fingers itch the whole way home, and for the rest of day, as I close up the bakery and do my daily workout routine and finish my homework and brush my teeth, I can’t think about anything except him.
Our school forces us to fill out these career surveys at two separate points in time: one in year five, and one in year eleven. They assure us that the surveys are anonymous, so weshould feel comfortable being honest, but the results always end up posted on the very public bulletin board with our names attached right below. Well, the majority of the results anyway. The student who’d writtensugar babyfor their answer had theirs taken down within an hour.
A quick glance at the board and you can pretty easily spot the emerging pattern. The kid who wanted to be a playwright now wants to be an accountant. The boy who wanted to be an astronaut now plans on becoming a pharmacist. The one who wanted to be an artist now has their sights set on med school. Hobbies are traded for more stable, lucrative, practical careers. Dreams are shattered once the mechanics of going to the bathroom in outer space are taken into greater consideration.
But for Julius and me, our career goals have stayed consistent throughout the years. In year five, we were already researching the highest-paid jobs and the most in-demand degrees; him, because he craved the prestige, and me, because I just needed the fastest route to the best future for my family. Something that paid the bills on time, that guaranteed stability regardless of what became of my brother’s sporting career, that would give my mom something to brag about to the nosy aunties. So on both occasions, he wrote downlawyer, and I wrote downdata analyst.
Abigail’s career ambitions, on the other hand, have jumped all over the place. Her results were a list of crossed-off and rewritten answers, covering everything imaginable: professional taster, professional equestrian, ballerina, fashion stylist, online dating ghostwriter (which I didn’t even know was a thing), and party planner.
“You know what? I really, truly feel party planning could be, like, a viable career for me,” Abigail says as she backs away from the confetti machine and surveys my transformed living room. “What do you think, darling?”
