My Most Excellent Year (2 page)

So except for my brother Augie, who lives in the Kennedy half of Brookline, it’s just me and Teddy Ballgame and our eight-year-old spaniel named Nehi. Usually Pop wakes me up at 6:00 every morning and we put on our sweats. Then we bike over to B.U. and run along the Charles River up to the Lowell tower and back—and on the way home, I give him a sixty-second head start, which he says is never enough because I always catch up to him at Dunster House. (Not that it really matters, since Nehi beats both of us back to our bikes anyway.) Boston University is Pop’s old hangout. He played football and baseball there, and he still looks enough like Joe Montana that once in a while people ask him for Joe’s autograph (usually around Super Bowl weekend). So he gives it to them. My dad’s easy. Even if he’s never heard of Stevie Nicks, Justin Timberlake, or Avi Vinocur.

That was my life until ninth grade, my most excellent year. And then I got drop-kicked by a six-year-old kid and the girl of my dreams.

English Assignment

Augie Hwong, 11
^th
Grade

Ms. LaFontaine’s Class

MY MOST EXCELLENT YEAR

Part 1: My Family

Even though my mother is an FOB (fresh off the boat) who snuck out of Chekiang Province with Grandma and Grandpa Der two steps ahead of the Secret Police, she doesn’t run around the house like those chopsticky people in
Flower Drum Song
singing “ching-a-ling-a-ling” with her finger in the air. She already knew how to speak English before they sailed into San Francisco Bay, and somehow she wound up launching every one of her civil rights crusades in the theatre column she wrote for the
Boston Globe
—even when she was reviewing
Peter Pan
. Now she covers symphonies, social events, and
local celebrities. It’s safer for everybody that way. But Mom’s the one who taught me all about original cast albums and black-and-white movies while I was still learning how to crawl. (Do
you
know who sang opposite John Raitt in
The Pajama Game
? Have
you
ever heard of Reta Shaw? Didn’t think so.)

My father and I are both ABCs (American-born Chinese), but that’s where the resemblance ends. He once played Bruce Lee in a college production of
Dragon,
and I once played Ethel Merman in a living room musicale for Grandma Lily. Dad graduated from Notre Dame without a chip on his shoulder and opened an independent bookstore on Harvard Street called The Word Shop, which is one of the most popular hangouts in Brookline. For grown-ups it’s the coffee bar, the chocolate chip lattés, and the lemon honey cakes. For kids it’s the polished wood walls, the polished wood shelves, and the polished wood floors. You can skateboard from Naked Travel Destinations to Socratic Theory in under five seconds. My brother Tick is aiming for 4½. Suddenly, so is every other sixteen-year-old in our zip code.

Even in first grade everybody wanted to be Tick. If he invented a word like
gink
, it was part of every kid’s vocabulary by the end of recess. When he wore his Red Sox T-shirt backwards because he felt like it, all the other boys started wearing their T-shirts backwards too because they felt like it. (Which, by the way, is the only fashion statement my brother ever learned to make.) But he always acted like he wasn’t even aware of it.
I
was. As a professional sideline watcher with plenty of time on my hands, I never missed a thing. In fact, the only day I ever remember being spoken to up until then was when some gink asked me if slanted eyes hurt.

All of that changed after Tick’s mom died. He was out of school for two weeks, and when he came back none of the other guys knew what to say to him. Partly because “sorry, dude” seemed kind of ginky for the occasion, and partly because—thinking like six-year-olds—they were afraid to get too close on account of what if a dead mother was catching? But I didn’t have to worry about social graces, seeing as I’d never had a chance to speak to him anyway.

“What are those?”

“Huh?” I was sitting on a low brick wall underneath a couple of spruce trees and eating a sandwich, guaranteed to be by myself as usual. That day’s menu featured roast beef on rye with something scary peeking out from under the crust. Mom always insisted on adding bok choy, chin-chiang, tat soi, shunkyo, or just about anything else that belonged in a lawn mower. For some reason mustard was out of the question.

“They look funny,” said Tick. “Like the long fingers that aliens have.”

“Uh—sprouts,” I stammered. “Want some?”

“Trade.”

So for a week I took charge of his tuna fish and ham while he had to figure out what to do with the mei qing choi. (One afternoon we decided to plant some of it and see what would happen. Nothing grew, but all of the grass died.) He never ever said anything about his mom, and I learned pretty quick that this was the Forbidden Zone—but he told me about the twenty-foot model of Fenway Park that he and his dad were building in the basement and about why he thought the rings around Saturn were made out of marbles and about his Carlton Fisk rookie card and about having two aunts who
were married to each other. I didn’t realize it just yet, but my future had abruptly made a left turn. After a couple of days all the other kids were talking to me. More important, I was talking to
them
.

Meanwhile, Tick and I were so busy making plans, I didn’t even notice. Who had the time? On any day in particular, we were pirates, aliens, cops, dino hunters, and brothers. But it was “brothers” that turned out to be a lot tougher than it looked. Once we’d thought about it, we figured out that brothers tell each other all of their secrets, buy each other cool birthday presents that nobody else would think of, yell at each other and not mean it, and always believe each other no matter how dumb it sounds. (Brothers also share the same bedroom, but we’d fixed that problem with sleepovers—because you just can’t play Galaxy Fighters on the ceiling with colored flashlights unless it’s dark.) So going by the rules, we already
were
brothers. The only thing we didn’t have was the same parents to call Mom, Dad, or Pop.

“Why can’t we call them that anyway?” Well, we tried it just to see what would happen, and our families got used to it so quick that nobody remembers who’s genetic anymore. Whenever Pop takes us out to the Union Oyster House for dinner, he always introduces us as his kids—and when we went to Daytona Beach over Easter with Mom and Dad, the hotel rooms were reserved for “Mr. and Mrs. Hwong and sons.” Of course, once in a while people look at us funny and you know they’re trying to figure out how both of us can be brothers when only one of us is Asian, but we just tell them that we have different fathers. (Hey, it’s
true
, isn’t it?) And nobody ever had to ask twice.

Then Tick decided it was time to add one more member to our family when he fell in love for the first time. Up until then, the
girls he generally went after were quiet, timid, pliable, and all over him—but his new target was headstrong, opinionated, intelligent, an admitted pain in the ass, and she couldn’t stand the sight of him. Most people don’t like challenges. Tick collects them.

My brother had most of the answers—and if he didn’t, he usually knew where to look for them.

But by ninth grade we
all
needed a little help.

English Assignment

Alejandra Perez, 11
^th
Grade

Ms. LaFontaine’s Class

MY MOST EXCELLENT YEAR

Part 1: My Family

My brother Carlos is the ideal ambassador’s son. He knows how to bow, he can make small talk with foreign diplomats in six different languages, he never passes gas, and he’ll be Secretary General of the United Nations before he turns twenty-five. That is, assuming his little sister can learn how to keep her mouth shut.

“Alejandra, say hello to the Prime Minister of Denmark.”

“Why?”

I don’t mean to suggest that I disliked the Prime Minister of Denmark, or any of his policies for that matter. I was five. I would
have answered with the same “Why?” had I been told “Abuela is taking you to see the elephants,” “It isn’t polite to talk about Tía Maria’s mustache,” and “Don’t flush until you wipe.” You really couldn’t take me
any
where.

But thanks to my best friend Clint (a Secret Service agent who managed to carry an assault weapon and understand children at the same time), I learned early on that I could always find a welcome at the Georgetown Public Library. Every Saturday morning, Clint walked me through the cavernous reading room to the much cozier children’s corner, which we weren’t allowed to leave until I had at least three books under my arm. One of them turned out to be
The Bracelet
by Yoshiko Uchida. That was a mistake. A
big
mistake. In it I met a little girl named Emi, who lived on the West Coast in 1942. For some reason, all of the kids who were partly Japanese and partly American had to leave their homes and go into prison camps with barbed wire and guns, and that meant that Emi had to say good-bye to her best friend Laurie. So Laurie gave her a friendship bracelet to make sure they’d remember each other until Emi could come home again. I got as far as the part where Emi lost the bracelet at camp and was afraid it meant that Laurie was going to forget about her before I burst into tears and had to be calmed down by Mamita’s maid and three of Papa’s most devoted chargés d’affaires.
Who makes up a story like that for a child??
It was only at dinnertime that Consistently Correct Carlos admitted that the Japanese American internment was, in fact, one of the less fortunate chapters in our history, and that there really might have been an Emi after all. I was furious. And that was before anybody had told me about the Freedom Riders.

Naturally there were bound to be a few conflicts with Papa,
Mamita, and Forever Flawless Carlos. The family business depended on tact and diplomacy, and meanwhile they were raising a ten-year-old activist who could find a social issue in a box of Kleenex. After I’d told the Korean ambassador that I had little use for either half of military Korea but at least the south knew how to say “May I?” before they shot you, I was persona non grata all along Embassy Row. And since I’d obviously become a disappointment to every one of my relatives, I compensated the only way I knew how: straight A’s, Honors English, Honors Math, and first prize in two national creative writing competitions. I decided that if I
had
to join the diplomatic corps sooner or later, at least I’d have the academic credentials for it—and all I’d need to learn in the meantime was how to stop talking. But two things happened back to back that turned my plans inside out.

The first was an accident. I’d been sent home from school with the flu, and Clint was so determined to cheer me up that he went DVD-shopping to find an extra-special movie that might take my mind off the fact that I was never going to eat again. What resulted was a copy of
Damn Yankees
, which was either a lucky choice or a deliberate move by Clint to start a civil war in my own family. Until I recovered enough to return to class, I was glued to the television screen watching Gwen Verdon dance a tango and a mambo again and again until I could match her step for step. And except for the vomiting, I’d completely forgotten that I was supposed to be sick.

Less than a month after that, Papa had business at the United Nations, so we found ourselves in New York at the Broadhurst Theatre for a performance of a musical called
Fosse
—where, for two and a half hours, the most beautiful men and women imaginable
used their bodies to create sheer magic. By the time the curtain had come down, my eyes were wet and I was absolutely certain I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I also knew that I’d need to be re-born to different parents first. (Proof: Papa thought the show was “mildly diverting,” Mamita wished that the boys had worn more clothing, and Utterly Unassailable Carlos—eighteen at the time—missed the whole thing when he ran into the only Argentine vice consul on West Forty-fourth Street and spent both acts in the lobby, chatting him up about tin and copper deposits outside of Buenos Aires.) Faced with the prospect of bringing shame to my very visible family, I was convinced that I could keep myself from even
thinking
of becoming a dancer just as long as Papa never retired as ambassador to Mexico—something that certainly wasn’t going to happen in
my
lifetime.