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A Bad Seed

by A.I. Chow

Although Sarah had always gotten along with her mother, it wasn’t until her mother returned to China that they began to talk to each other like normal people. Which was to say, her mother stopped calling herself “Mommy.” It was okay in Chinese but in English, waves of mortification ripped through her. Mommy needs garlic and vegetable oil from the grocery. Mommy will pick you up at ten. Tell Mommy what is wrong. Why do you always make that face when Mommy is talking to you?

Her mother went back to take care of her family right after Sarah graduated from college. Not her mother’s abnormally hale parents, but her brother’s son, Yong, who liked to be called Kevin. Kevin was the only male child of Sarah’s generation, the same way his father had been the only son in his. High expectations had been put on Kevin since birth. Those expectations, her mother said, had not been adjusted to match the reality of his failures.

It was a remarkable thing to hear her declare anyone a failure, especially in such a crisp, matter-of-fact tone. At home her mother would have said, limitations or left the nature of these failures unnamed, allowing them to float away into the safety of indefinites. But over the phone, her mother listed each one: a drunk, a gambler, a drug addict, stupid. Genetically stupid, in her opinion. The accident had only worsened an existing problem. He had a girlfriend now. It was always a woman who made men bad. Didn’t she agree?

“Uh-huh,” Sarah said.

“Kevin’s a very nice man sometimes. Don’t be angry at him, okay?”

“I’m not anymore,” she said. She laughed into the silence to make it sound truer. 

 

#

 

When Sarah was eighteen, right after she graduated from high school, Kevin came to stay with her family for the summer. Kevin was the first of her mother’s relatives she had met. Neither of her parents had ever said much about her mother’s side of the family, and what she had pieced together was not promising: a bunch of somewhat pathetic, down-on-their-luck, recently-suburbanized bumpkins from Jiangxi province, famous for its sixteenth-century porcelain factories and sheepish lack of distinctions since.

Her mother said she invited him to keep him from squandering all of his potential, although it seemed to Sarah that it was already too late. He had a notably long torso, fine black hair that grew out of his head like an overgrown lawn, and a soft, conciliatory voice. He had graduated from Zhejiang International Studies University and couldn’t be understood in English. So, America. 

Her mother made her and Kevin do everything together. If Sarah wanted breakfast, she had to wake Kevin up in the next room. If she wanted to go to the mall, if she wanted to go to Boston, if she wanted to go to the beach: “Bring Kevin with you.”

The worst of it was that he was good at sticking to her. Her friends were peeling away from her, though she had to admit that it was not his fault. She had come out at a party by getting drunk and crying about it, and while they were courteous about the lesbianism, they were all worried she’d get emotional again. She’d get dressed to go out, only to be told to not come if Kevin was tagging along. Their parents didn’t like the idea of a twenty-something-year-old man hanging around a bunch of teenagers, especially a jobless bum from another country.

“You didn’t look that pretty, anyway,” Kevin said.

“I don’t care what you think,” she said, wiping her face with a cotton ball soaked in makeup remover. “I’d rather be dead.”

 

#

 

There was one friend she still saw. Nicole Gu.

Their parents were good friends and saw each other every other week, but for most of high school, Nicole spent her evenings with a whole gaggle of rowdy boys known best for their academic mediocrity and smashing into each other in the halls. They were always wiping their palms on their jeans and shoving their hair out of their eyes. One of them had broken his arm trying to impress her with a skateboarding trick. Since Nicole had gotten into Georgetown, she had stopped wearing pants with too many zippers and started threading her eyebrows. Her turn away from punk had been so sharp that the boys had fled from her. Now Nicole showed up at their family’s dinners and smiled respectfully at the adults and inquired about their health instead of stomping off to the basement or designated children area. She had grown up well. Everyone said so.

She didn’t have a chance to speak with Nicole privately until the summer potluck at the Chinese church. Sarah’s mother was taking Kevin around to everyone she knew. Sarah bet her mother was taking him to the ones with businesses back in China. Her mother had forced Kevin into a suit, and every now and then, Kevin would reach out and shake hands, then step back while Sarah’s mother resumed talking.

“Come work for my dad,” Nicole said over the din. “Your mom won’t have him follow you if you have to go to work.”

Two years ago, Nicole’s father had quit his job at a physics lab to get into business. He had opened a little art gallery in town to sell his paintings. The shop was doing well enough to spur him to test a potential expansion at the mall in Providence, selling Korean phone charms and cellphone cases and chunky, five-dollar beanies out of a stall.

Sarah’s parents had plenty of opinions about Mr. Gu’s career change. They thought he had to be depressed. If he and his wife really wanted to do business, they should’ve gone back to China and invested in generic pharmaceuticals or an app or a university instead of these little pieces of trash. And could you believe he was selling paintings? That he made himself? Something had gone wrong.

“Are you sure?” Sarah said.

“Yeah, definitely,” Nicole said, unconvincingly.

A week later, Mr. Gu picked her up early in the morning and drove her to the mall. The stall was between the Build-a-Bear and a shoe store. He showed her how to operate the register, bought her coffee, and gave her a backless stool to sit on. “Your resume, that’s most important,” he said, and took off.

She sat there all morning, kicking her heels against the legs of the stool. At noon, Nicole arrived. She had clearly benefited from sleeping in: her firm skin, her shining, straight-ironed hair.

“Anyone bought anything?” Nicole said.

“Not really.”

“I’ve been bringing books. If you don’t have anything to do, why don’t you buy something for me? I need a shirt. Something that fits me, instead of… billowing everywhere, or making me look like a hobo.” She swiped her hand down her bare arm, from her shoulder to her freckled wrist, then back up.

Sarah had shopped for friends before, but only with them. She tended to cave easily to dissenting opinions, was happy to have them override her. Buying something for Nicole alone, buying something without knowing what she’d think of it, something that might displease her… 

She paid thirty dollars for a shirt in a state of flustered disgust with herself and rushed back to the stall. Nicole was still there on the stool, reading a paperback. When she saw Sarah, she looked up twice—first just to confirm it was Sarah. The second time she put the book face down on the counter and stood up, surprise rising up from her clean limbs. The mall light on her neck had a conniving glint, as though she had seen something in Sarah she expected to make good use of.

 

#

 

After that, Sarah always stayed at the mall with Nicole until her father picked them up. She worked Wednesday through Sunday from the mall’s opening to just after lunchtime when Nicole came to relieve her. Nicole always had something for her to do: buy her a shirt or a scarf or a camisole. Buy coffee or a snack or lunch. Go watch a movie, one she had seen already, one that was a bore. Now watch that same one in 3D. Before she knew it, the money she had expected to make from the job had nearly all gone away.

She had a little more than three weeks of this routine when her mother called her at the mall just before nine.

“Are you selling fast? Mommy doesn’t think it’s good for you to spend so much time away from home when family is visiting. So Mommy’s bringing Kevin over, okay?”

“But I’m at work,” she said piteously, to no effect. An hour later, Kevin came lumbering toward her in his track pants and gray and lime running shoes, his head turning slowly back and forth as he walked. Normally he looked stilted and uncomfortable out of the house, but today he seemed unusually composed, as though he had a secret mastery over the rest of them.

“Where can I get a chair?” When she tried to ignore him, he repeated a little louder, “Where are the chairs?”

“I don’t know. This one was here already.”

“I’m tired,” he said.

“So?”

“I want to sit.” He gave her one of his long, stupid looks which always inspired some form of action from her mother, whether it be to produce a sliced apple or ask Sarah to practice English with him. Sarah crossed her legs and looked down at her phone.

“Did you hear me?” he said.

He was close enough that her elbow brushed against his stomach. She hunched over.

“Your mother said you’re spoiled,” he said. “She says you’re coldhearted and don’t really care about her.”

“All parents say that.” Unless their children were servile and spineless. She put her phone away and took a book from her bag.

“But that’s what she says about you to all the Chinese people.”

“She just wants them to make her feel better. She doesn’t actually mean it.”

“She says you are most likely a ‘bad girl.’”

He said the last two words in English. A bad girl. She had done everything correctly in her life: liked by her teachers, admitted to a good university, and a ten-year plan that included a respectable career in computer science. If she didn’t like boys enough, at least she didn’t like them too much. He was Kevin, the cousin with no prospects. If anything, he was the bad one. But what he said pricked her. She could see her mother cutting Kevin mango slices and saying those words exactly. Sarah, she’s most likely a bad girl. Her eyes watered.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I told her you’re a good girl. You don’t do anything interesting. I’m tired.” He moved so his stomach pushed against her elbow.

This time she got off the stool. She had an almost overpowering dislike of him, a dislike that compressed her to a stack of irritation. When Nicole arrived earlier than usual, she took the bus with Kevin instead of staying at the mall. She was in a bad mood and didn’t want Kevin following her around and seeing how she spent her money. He was very stupid and would misunderstand her.

 

#

 

They had been on the bus for fifteen minutes when Kevin pushed the stop button.

They were in the Jewelry District, a place she had only ever driven by on her way to her father’s office at the Rhode Island Hospital. The neighborhood was hospital administration buildings, half-built luxury apartments with advertisements covering the unfinished top floors, and a few coffee shops and restaurants dropped in for good measure. Kevin looked up at a parking garage, a familiar distaste crawling across his face.

“We’re already out of the city?” he said. “Are these buildings old?”

“I don’t know? Not as old as the ones in College Hill?”

“I’m hungry.” 

He wanted to be taken to a restaurant he had spotted from the bus, three or four blocks behind them. But she refused and took them to a barbecue place she had been to before with her friends. He was engrossed by the menu, reading slowly and asking her to explain the difference between a quesadilla and St. Louis ribs. Then he turned over to the drinks menu and went quiet. Please don’t embarrass me, she thought with a painful throb.

“Your mother says you always go out drinking,” he said. “Where do you do that?”

“I don’t do that. She’s wrong.” It didn’t matter, anyway. She only drank at her friends’ parties, and she wouldn’t be invited back until Kevin went home.

He got one drink, then had another. His face turned pink, the back of his neck a strangled purple through his tan.

When they were done eating, he said he wanted to go back home. Since he didn’t have a credit card, Sarah had to pay.

The way she remembered it, she fell behind so she could put her wallet back into her purse. There had been a problem with the zipper, and she stopped to get the teeth in alignment. Kevin pulled ahead of her with his awful swagger. His shoulders tilted up and down as he walked and his arms swung low, as though he was trying to graze the back of a bristly, bow-legged dog. He whistled a few short notes, head rolling like an off-balance dreidel as he swung into the street. The zipper opened up. Now it wouldn’t close. Up ahead, at a T intersection, she heard a thump.

When she looked up, his feet were already parallel to the curb. His shoulder and head smacked into the street in front of a green Subaru. Her legs jerked towards Kevin, but her torso twisted back to the barbecue place. Her feet crossed over one another and she went nowhere. The driver, a round woman wearing a powder blue cardigan, got out of the car and crouched next to him. She had to bunch her pants around her crotch to keep the fabric from straining at the thighs. Sarah went to the middle of the street and stood over the woman and Kevin. There was no blood. Kevin moved, one hand behind his hand and his legs kicking out at apparent random.

“Cunt doesn’t know how to drive,” he said.

“Are you okay?” the woman said. “Are you all right? Do you speak—Chinese, I think he’s talking to me in Chinese.”

“I’m not…” Sarah said. “I think he hit his head. I can call an ambulance.”

“Oh, don’t bother. The hospital’s right there. We can take him to the ER.”

“The big one, right?” she said, even though she already knew the answer.

Kevin’s eyes were slit with pain and contempt. He pushed himself to his elbows and said, “What’s going on? What does this woman want with me? I want to go home. Mengyi, do something.”

The woman helped Kevin to his feet, then guided him in the backseat of her car.

“I’m taking you to the hos-pi-tal,” the woman said, and shut the door. She held the passenger door open and gave Sarah an urgent look. Kevin did, too.

A rush of cold water numbed her hands and fingers.

“I don’t know him,” Sarah said. “I was just getting lunch.”

 

#

 

She got on the next bus and hit traffic. She held her phone in her hands, tapping the screen to keep the light on. What she ought to do was call her father. He was a doctor and would know what to do. Or her mother. But Nicole’s name was right there.

“What’s up?” Nicole said.

“I’m in trouble.”

“You’re where?”

“I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I’m sure he’s fine. Nothing that bad happened. I’m not in anything.” Now that she had said all that, she felt utterly incoherent. She tried to think of a way to make sense of what she had said, but every possibility fell into an increasingly sardonic shade. “I should go,” she said.

“Sarah—Sarah, hold on.”

Go to my place, she said. The spare key’s under a brick by the zucchinis in the garden. She’d have to eat before everyone came home, but if she didn’t mind being a little hungry, she could crash at her place for the night.

 

#

 

So she went, going in through the back like Nicole told her. It was an unfamiliar view. Their families usually met at Sarah’s place because of her father’s cat allergies and, like a normal person, Sarah had always come in through the front. She liked coming in like this, secretly and secretly invited.

Nicole’s home was older than hers and always smelled of cloves and freshly laundered clothes. The halls were cool and dark. No one was home.

She sat on the couch, eating cereal out of the box and fondling the geriatric cat until it flattened its ears against its head and ran away.

Nicole returned just before five. 

“Done eating yet?” she said. “Great. I’ll get the basement ready.”

Half of the basement was Mr. Gu’s art studio, the other half old furniture and merchandise to be sold in the following weeks. The couch she was to sleep on was piled high with boxes of flip-flops. They shoved boxes on top of other boxes to make room: creepy cute dolls on top of nail files on top of Korean foundations. Nicole threw a thin pillow and some blankets onto the indent on the couch and looked down at her handiwork, satisfied.

“That should be good enough for the night,” she said.

“I feel like Harry Potter,” Sarah said.

“It’s not that bad. Keep the lights off and don’t flush the toilet and my parents won’t know a thing. I’ll check in on you after dinner. You need any water? I can bring you another pillow.”

“No,” she said, trying to disguise her deepening unhappiness. She had been hoping to be invited to Nicole’s room. Nicole always looked displeased if she caught Sarah coming up the stairs if she was taking too long straightening her hair or looking for her bag, so she had always put on an affect of not caring and never asked to go inside, never even knocked. But she had been hoping.

“Cheer up,” Nicole said. “I’ll come back for you. Obviously.”

 

#

 

The window above Mr. Gu’s desk had a narrow view of the garden. She recognized the view from the paintings he had in his shop, the long horizontal scrolls with flower buds and weeds rising out of black soil, their thin-necked silhouettes drooping and dotted with pale ink wash to imitate bokeh. She was toying idly with the brushes when her phone gave one beep, then a second. Three missed calls, two voicemails. Are you somewhere? Where are you? Call Mommy back.

She had to stand on Mr. Gu’s table to get a strong enough signal to make the call, holding onto the dusty windowsill for balance.

“Did you know, it is not a good thing to not come home for dinner without telling people where you’re going,” her mother said. “And you can’t let Kevin eat too much or he’ll become fat again. Are you listening to me?”

“Hi Mom,” she said.

“Do you know where Kevin is?”

“I’m in Boston with my friends. He said he could take the bus home.”

“Kevin is in the hospital. Do you want to come home and visit him with Mommy?”

“Not really.”

“‘I don’t think so, not really,’” her mother said, chirpy. “It’s always the same with you.”

“I told you, I’m already in Boston,” she said. “I’m not coming all the way back just because he has a stomachache. He’s fine.”

“So that’s it?” her mother said. “He’s your only family in the whole United States, and you’re going to let him die in the hospital?” 

She had seen him get up and talk and move around. He had gotten into the car under his own power. If he was really hurt, she would have seen it. But maybe he had broken something inside, or he was bleeding from his liver or his kidney or something, and they had him in surgery. She rocked back and forth on Mr. Gu’s desk. The paper crinkled beneath her shoes.

“He’s not that hurt, is he?” she said. “It’s only a few scratches?”

“A few scratches, from what?”

“From—from the accident.” 

“Accident, what accident? You say ‘accident,’ but what do you mean?” Sarah’s breaths became wet. She stammered, a few times, I, I—but her mother said, “I knew it. I knew Kevin wasn’t lying. You always think you’re so sneaky, but everyone knows about you already. Everyone knows what type of person you really are.”

Her skin, from her shins to her forearms to the bridge of her nose, went tight and hot. She couldn’t handle the idea of herself as a transparent being—to be stripped violently of her skin, it was completely intolerable to her. The muscles stretched across her shoulders and neck trembled, the way a dog’s did from fear. The dusty ink-splattered floor, the rhombus of light on the desk and chair, the sun, none of those things could keep her safe from that horrible genetic gravity. She would never let Kevin, that mumbling, useless beast, drag her anywhere.

“Why do you like him so much?” she said. Her voice was a horrifying whisper-squawk, tight and constricted in her throat. “If he wanted me to stay, then he’s the one who should’ve asked. How was I supposed to know?”

“It’s okay, Sarah,” her mother said. “Stay in Boston if you want. Mommy will take care of this.”

She tried to say something but all she produced was, “I don’t, I—” before letting out an insensate groan. She had to get off this desk. She had to get out of here. Was there really no escape?

 

#

 

She fell into the couch. When she shut her eyes, an enormous red storm roved across her brain, sucking her up in its massive scope. The winds carried the noise of insect chitin popping and tearing apart. She chased the storm with her eyes, trying to catch the specks of blue and green at the center.

Someone touched her bare arm. Sarah jerked awake. Just Nicole. Just them. 

“Your mom called and said your cousin’s in the hospital,” Nicole said.

“Did you tell her I was here?” Sarah said.

“Nah.” Nicole’s geriatric cat came wobbling down the stairs. It disappeared between a pair of boxes. They watched the cat waddle.

“Can I charge my phone?” Sarah said.

“My charger’s in my room,” Nicole said and bit her lip. She led Sarah upstairs.

Sarah had been inside Nicole’s room before, but not for a year or two. It was mostly the same as the last time she had seen it. Black sheets on a neatly made bed, a poster of the Lord of the Rings movie hanging over a white desk, a figurine of a bare-chested boy in swimming trunks beneath an iron lamp. Sarah should have been happy to be here, very happy. Yet all she felt was something cool and hefty settling into her skin, like quicksilver.

Nicole plugged Sarah’s phone by the windowsill. She leaned against the wall, then the desk, her leg bouncing up and down. She touched each of the trinkets on her desk. Then she said, “Close your eyes. Put your arms in the air.”

“Why should I?” she said.

“I don’t know. Because you’ll like it?”

“Like what?”

“Okay, I get it. You’re too good for this.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“No, it’s fine. I get it. We can put you back.”

“Wait,” she said. She straightened her arms above her head and shut her eyes. A spindly giggle leapt inside her mouth, threatening to escape.

Nicole smoothed the collar of Sarah’s shirt. Then she shoved Sarah sideways onto the bed. Her thigh hit the bed first, then the rest of her, hips and ribs and arms, head banging from one elbow to the other like a one-brained Newton’s cradle. Her jaws swung shut, catching her lip between her teeth.

Nicole settled next to her and did nothing, in the dithering way. Then she punched her, a shot to the neck that made Sarah spray spit into the blanket. She pulled a tissue out of the box on the desk and wiped her face and retched into it a few times. Nicole laughed, something Sarah wasn’t hurt by because she also looked horrified. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought I’d be able to… I didn’t think it’d hurt.”

“How could you not think that?” Sarah said once she caught her breath.

“You probably think I’m a monster.”

“I don’t.” It was true, but it was also leverage. She pushed her tongue against the place she had bitten herself, hoping for blood. “Come back?” she said in a voice she knew was humiliatingly pathetic and manipulative. Even though her diaphragm felt ready to spasm at any second, she stretched herself out to welcome Nicole into her own bed.

Nicole slid in, lining herself up so they were nose-to-nose. They were similar in size to one another, their knees and hips level. This pleased Sarah. They kissed, not well. She felt stupid for wanting this so much and being too incompetent to enjoy it.

Nicole’s hand settled against her neck, at first gently, rubbing over the spot she had punched. The heel of her palm settled above the dip of Sarah’s collarbone, the open wing between her thumb and index finger against Sarah’s throat. The rubbing became a press, and Sarah almost giggled. An imperious current coursed through Nicole’s face to her shoulder and then her hand. Her grip tightened again on the sides of Sarah’s neck. This time she didn’t let go.

Sarah didn’t move. She was aware it was a bad position to be in, optically speaking. But the worse position was being sent back to the basement, to wait down there and find out that she had killed Kevin, or something equally awful had happened, like a letter had come through the college she had gotten into saying that her admission had been rescinded because she had killed her cousin.

She made herself still and let her head roll back. Nicole made a pleased noise that made Sarah’s neck flash with heat. She was kissed with delirious, minute movements on the mouth. Nicole’s hand flexed, sometimes no tighter than a necklace, other times slipping hard and high enough that Sarah’s tongue was pushed forward in her mouth. All the blood in her head concentrated above her brow and below her eyes, blood trying to turn her head away, air in her nose thinner than the top of a mountain—then the heat around her neck vanished. Her vision was dark, as though she had been plunged through a cloud.

“One more,” Nicole said, and cut Sarah’s head from her body with a firm squeeze. No kiss this time. But this way she could feel how Nicole’s hand trembled against her neck, and her legs, too, spine and hips shifting in nervous jerks as the mattress springs rolled beneath them. She could feel Nicole’s breath on her face, see, even through her darkening vision, her bright teeth. She felt, instead of fear, branded by tenderness, burning around her neck.

Nicole let go. She said, her voice soft with suspicion, “That was really nice.”

“Oh, good,” Sarah said in the most banal croak. She couldn’t help it. The pain, still fresh, left her too spread out to say anything smarter. Not that she had said anything smarter in the minutes or weeks after.

“You were just alright,” Nicole said.

She was looking at Sarah the way she had looked at all those boys who had circled her in school. But she hadn’t done anything with them, Sarah knew she hadn’t—at least, if she could convince her, then…Sarah struggled, bug-like, to speak.

Nicole turned her head to check her alarm clock with an almost professional air: you’ve had your five minutes of choking, now pay up. “My parents will be home soon,” she said. 

“I wouldn’t… I’d be,” she said, and that was all. The rest of the words left her behind. She let herself be taken back to the basement to sit in the dark, surrounded by the detritus of someone else’s life.

 

A.I. Chow is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Indiana University Bloomington. She writes stories about Chinese American mishaps, doomed Martian expeditions, and animals up to no good. You can find her on Twitter (@antagonagram) and occasionally in real life.

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