A few weeks later, I caved and came clean, but Max and I were done. He still let me over his house, but he’d tell friends to keep an eye on me, not to leave me alone in any room. His mom wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t even look in my direction. Bye-bye pizza nights. His dog, a dachshund, would bark at me as she followed me to the bathroom.
At school, I tried to switch cliques, but I’d been marked as a thief who couldn’t be trusted. Mac was my reset button. New school. New friends. New life. The challenge was my mother.
She leaned into the form and squinted. “I never heard of this school. Why doesn’t it say Lowell?” Lowell was the only public high school in San Francisco that afforded her bragging rights, a feeder school to UC Berkeley and where my brother would be entering his senior year. If I were to get in as well, she’d do a victory lap in Chinatown, dragging me around the markets, the newsstand, the bakery, the herbal store, the bank, the takeout place with the fried chicken drumettes. She’d boast to whoever was behind the counter about her second Lowell son. Never mind the long line of grandmas behind us at the register, eyeing my mother like she was a freak for her long hair that ran down to her knees, for her heavy makeup, for her leopard-skin heels. This was a fish market not a runway! My mom would ignore these looks and chat with the cashier. She’d demonstrate her skills at Praising without Praising. “This son takes school too seriously. Just like his brother. They both go to Lowell. This one can’t stop reading. Even takes his books with him to the bathroom. So strange.”
“Those are comic books,” I’d say, but she wouldn’t translate. She’d just pat my head like I was a silly kid.
A splash of water fell on the form. My mother was stuffing plates into the dish rack. “I don’t have grades good enough for Lowell,” I said. “I’ve been telling you that for the longest.”
“How do you know if you don’t apply? Cross that school out. Write Lowell.”
“Lowell has a different form. And the deadline was last week.”
“Mouh gong daaih wah.”
“I’m serious.”
“Are you crazy!” She ripped off her dishwashing gloves and tossed them at the cheap wallpaper above the sink. The wallpaper, a grid of yellow and blue lines, functioned as a backsplash.
“You don’t understand how Lowell works. I didn’t at first either, but the counselor broke it down for me. She showed me a table. No, not a physical table, like a chart. It tells you what kind of grades and test scores you need to get in.”
In the beginning of middle school, I’d bring home As and Bs, but my mother would say, “How come not 4.0 like your Goh Goh?” Lowell became a dead-end, but I wasn’t brazen enough to blow off school completely.
“I’m like a B student,” I said to my mother, “some Cs thrown in, so maybe more of a B-. I wouldn’t have had a shot.”
“You get As.”
“They don’t count sixth grade.” I decided to not make things more complicated by bringing up extracurricular activities, how I was lacking in this category as well. I played baritone in the school band, but it was hard to be proud of that. I’d started off on the trumpet like my brother but got demoted to the baritone. The music teacher grouped us with our fellow instrument players, arranging us in a row according to skill. She ranked me last among the baritones, fourth out of four. It was a comfortable position. Anything I did was a bonus.
“Tomorrow,” my mother said and clapped her hands, “we’ll go down to the district office. Get this straightened out. Sure, sure.”
“Mom, it’s over.” I tried to hand her a pen. “Here. Sign.”
She grabbed the cordless phone and stabbed it towards my face, nearly poking my cheek with the plastic antenna. “Call your Bah Ba,” she said. “Tell him you want to be a bum.”
I placed the phone on the kitchen table. I couldn’t take her seriously. She knew I didn’t know my father’s number, though it wasn’t far from me, scribbled on the calendar above the washing machine. On occasion we did speak on the phone. He’d call and I’d play the role of my mother’s secretary: Yeah, she’s home. Hold on. No, she’s not. I’ll tell her you called. Did my mother really think my father would lecture me? We all understood Bah Ba was a simple man. Father: make money, send to wife. Mother: kids.
I chalked up Bah Ba’s indifferent attitude to genetics, some absent-father gene that plagued Lams. I didn’t know his family, but I imagined his brothers, his dad, his uncles, all these men living apart from their families, the Lams—a clan of distant fathers. It wasn’t personal that Bah Ba was uninterested in me. He just wasn’t capable of it. He was a victim of the Lam gene. I didn’t follow my theory to its logical conclusion—I carried the gene myself.
“Lowell is all hype,” I said to my mom. “Colleges don’t care what high school you went to.”
“Lum Goon Saang,” she called for my brother.
“What?” Goh Goh was sitting in the easy chair in the living room, next to the doorway.
“Tell your brother how stupid he is.”
“I’ve been trying to tell
