Trade Me (21 page)

It’s easier to imagine myself giving than receiving. If I’m giving, I’m still in charge. I’m not vulnerable. If I’m giving, he won’t have the chance to break me down the way I know he could. I can’t let him in that much, not even in my fantasies.

I shake my head. “I’m going down to see my parents this weekend. I’m going to be leaving Thursday afternoon.”

She looks over at me and raises an eyebrow. “Wow. You might not see Blake for three whole days. How will you manage?”

My cheeks flush. She lets out a guffaw.

“He’s
coming?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Well.
That
will convince everyone he’s not your boyfriend.”

“I… It’s…” I shake my head. “It
will
help, actually. You know what my parents are like. They could drive anyone away. It’s all complicated now. I just need to remember…”

Maria is watching me with a flat expression on her face. And that’s when I realize what I said.

My parents could drive anyone away.

“No,” Maria says quietly. “Not anyone.”

I exhale and wish I could take my foot from my mouth. But those words are out there now, no matter what I say. My parents are difficult, embarrassing, impossible even. But they are also my parents, and they’ve never wanted me to be anything other than myself. By contrast, when Maria told her parents that she was a girl, they kicked her out of the house.

She was twelve.

If her grandmother hadn’t taken her in…

If I had been trans instead of Maria, I can imagine how my come-out would have gone. My mother would have been confused as hell. She would have asked me to explain it three or four times, and I’m not sure she would have gotten it even then. But I am sure of one thing: she would still love me. There is one person in this room who knows what it’s like to have parents who literally drive others away. It’s not me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was dumb of me.”

She shrugs, but her expression is flat. “It’s just a figure of speech. I’m not going to break. I know what you meant.”

But the fun has fled the room. We’re not talking to each other about boys or making jokes about orgasms any longer. She bends over her laptop and once again, applies herself to her blog.

And me?

I have a product launch to work on for a man I shouldn’t care about, who isn’t here, and who isn’t ever going to be my boyfriend. I shake my head and look down at my screen myself.

It turns out that getting to my parents’ house is surprisingly easy.

Blake comes up with a great story—we’re borrowing a friend’s car for the drive. And because it would be completely unbelievable that a friend would let us borrow a brand-new fully tricked-out Tesla, Blake calls his lawyer and arranges for us to pick up a fifteen-year-old Toyota ten miles from my parents’ house. This, I point out, is cheating on the trade—but at this point, with the end in sight, neither of us have the heart to care.

I tell my mother when we talk on the phone that he’s coming, and no, he’s
not
my boyfriend.

“Looking forward to meeting your boyfriend,” she says as she hangs up. I can’t tell if she doesn’t believe me or if she’s just teasing.

But all these things feel like details, and distant details at that, as we get in the car and start down.

It’s true that Blake has come along to drive. This is necessary because I still can’t make myself drive his car at anything other than a crawl.

“Music preferences?” Blake inclines his head to me as we coast out.

“Whatever.”

He punches up something on the screen.

“Satellite radio?” I glance over at him. “In this car? Isn’t that for peons?”

He smiles. “What am I supposed to listen to instead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have that long left to put myself in your shoes. I’m trying to think like a billionaire. I guess I just imagined that you’d hire a team of musical experts to study your tastes, and they would create a never-ending stream of perfect music for you.”

“Nah.” He shifts his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s not how a billionaire thinks. A billionaire hires a team of engineers to interface with a team of musical experts. We study everyone’s taste and create a service that automatically creates a never-ending stream of music that automatically tailors itself in response to feedback. Then we sell that service to someone else for a few million bucks. Or we grow it ourselves and get a hundred million people to pay us five dollars a month.”

“Oh.”

He glances at me. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone about your secret music business. I signed an NDA, remember?”

“No point pursuing it. Someone else already did it.” He grins. “But you know, hiring a team of musical experts to do my bidding…trust me, it wouldn’t work like that. People aren’t robots, however much money you have. Whoever I hired would have their own favorite songs, which they would foist on me. When I complained that I hated Rush, or whatever it is that one of them adored, they would get mad. The anger would fester, and then one day, when I was stuck in a car for a six-hour drive, they would send in their resignation and put the Macarena on continuous repeat the entire time. Believe it or not, even billionaires find it easier to treat the people who inhabit their lives like they’re actually people instead of machines.”

It would be easier if he were an asshole like his dad. This would all be easier. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I asked him to come down with me: because I know that I like him too much. I know I don’t want to let him go. And I need to remind myself of the many, many reasons this needs to end when he goes back to Cyclone.

I’m going to get what I need this weekend. I let a few miles slip by.

Finally, I speak again. “Look. I just want to make one thing clear. My parents can be…”

Embarrassing,
I think.
Difficult.
But I refuse to be ashamed of them.

“They come from a different culture,” I finally say. “There are things Chinese people think are private that Americans don’t. And there are things that Americans think are taboo that Chinese people talk about freely. It can be a little jarring.”

He’s only listened to them on the phone. He has no real idea what’s coming. He’s driving—a smooth eighty miles an hour, I note with jealousy—but he still glances in my direction.

“Okay,” he says. That’s it.

“I mean it.” I watch the road slip past. “My mom is going to say something that will strike you as off. Don’t look at me. Don’t act like I should join you in making fun of them later. I’m
not
going to be embarrassed by my parents. I’m proud of them.”

“Of course you are,” he says.

I try—very hard—not to think of the fact that my mom
still
refers to Bethany from high school as my fat friend. Even when Bethany is around. No matter what I say to her, I cannot convince her that this is not appropriate. My mom
is
embarrassing.

But she’s my mom.

And I know that when Blake tells me afterward that she’s a little
too
much… I will be able to hold on to that memory. I’ll use it to remind myself.

See? We would never have worked.

“Just so we’re clear on that.” I give him a tight smile.

“Hey.” He smiles. “I am one hundred percent onboard for a no-parent-shaming compact. Do you know how embarrassing my dad is?”

“Nice try. I’m sure your parent who features regularly on the news is completely comparable to my outspoken activist Chinese mother.”

“Ha. You didn’t see him when I was a kid. When I was twelve, my teacher asked my dad to come and talk about what it was like to run a major corporation.”

“Just to set the stage, I’m guessing this wasn’t a public school?”

“Nope. But my dad being my dad, it took him about thirty seconds to drop an f-bomb. The teacher, of course, interrupted him. And explained that she didn’t allow
those words
in her classroom.”

“I can imagine that went over really well.”

“Your imagination is precisely on point. Dad said, ‘Why the fuck not?’ And when she tried to explain that the kids had to learn professionalism for their future careers, he came back with, ‘Why are you lying to them? Businessmen swear all the fucking time.’”

I can’t help but smile at this.

“Of course she got mad. And she told him that swearing was indicative of a lack of creativity. She said that anyone could swear, but it took real imagination to come up with a good insult.”

I don’t know Adam Reynolds well. But I understand him well enough to know that he’s deeply competitive. I wince.

“Naturally,” Blake continues, “Dad took this as a personal challenge. And so he asked her for a demonstration. So my poor hapless teacher said, quite primly, ‘Well, you could call someone a spitting goat, or say they have a mouth filled with putrescent filth.’ Dad nodded along like he was agreeing with her. And he said, ‘You mean I could refer to someone who told me not to swear as a wizened fruit or as having the intellectual capacity of a desiccated rabbit corpse.’ And of course everyone knew he was talking about her and she got even madder.”

“What did she do?”

“Oh, nothing. Because then Dad turned to the class and said, ‘Here’s the thing. If
spitting goat
is a good insult, isn’t
spitting goat fucker
better? And if you’re going refer to putrescent filth, shouldn’t you take the time to call it putrescent ass-filth?”

I can just see Blake’s dad doing that—looking over the class and growling profanities at twelve-year-old kids with no compunction. I bite back laughter.

Blake sighs. “So imagine how that went over with the other parents. Their kids came home calling each other ‘wizened cock-fruit suckers’ and ‘bastard sons of a desiccated rabbit corpse.’”

I can’t help myself. I’m laughing.

“And that is how you came to be looking at the only kid who ever got expelled from Middle Prep because of his dad.”

“Seriously? He didn’t just pay them off or something?”

“No! That was the worst part. He refused to even try.” Blake drops his voice in a gravelly imitation of his dad. “‘If those dipshits are so fucking moronic that they’re afraid of a few, short Anglo-Saxon words, why should I give them good fucking money to teach you?’”

“Okay,” I admit. “That is pretty embarrassing.”

“He used to do this thing, too, where if he got mad about something I was being taught in school, he’d just show up in class and argue with the teacher. In front of everyone. And they never knew what to do or how to get him to leave them alone, because he was
Adam Reynolds.”

“Let me guess: your dad got mad a lot?”

“The worst time was when I was eight and they made us make Mother’s Day cards. When my dad found out, he flipped his lid. He went in and…” Blake trails off and looks over at me. “Well, let’s just say that one was ugly. I think the teachers all fought just so they wouldn’t have me in their classes.”

I know the official story of Blake’s mother, which is that there is officially no story. The only thing that either Blake or his father have ever said in public is that his mother has never been a part of Blake’s life. There’s been no explanation why. Blake’s Wikipedia page is quite clear—someone went and looked up his birth certificate, and the only parent listed was his father. His mother was listed as
unknown.
How that happens, nobody quite knows. Money, I guess. Lots of it.

“Are you adopted?” I ask.

“Nope.” His face doesn’t flicker.

“Are you sure? Because I wouldn’t put it past your dad not to tell you—”

“First, it wouldn’t matter even if I were. But second, aside from the obvious physical resemblance between us, we tested a DNA app a year ago. I am one hundred percent certain that I am my father’s biological child. And in case you’re wondering, no, I have never wished I had a mother. My dad contributed about three parents’ worth of child rearing.”

“I know.” And, strangely, I do. I’m not even being sarcastic.

“If you’re thinking of asking,” he says, “I don’t even know her name. I’m pretty sure Dad would tell me if I asked. But I haven’t.” He doesn’t look at me. “I don’t want him to think that he hasn’t been enough for me. So I don’t ask.”

His hands grip the steering wheel tightly as if he expects some kind of argument.

“Okay,” I say to him.

After a long silence, he speaks again. “We all have our limits with our parents. You won’t be embarrassed by yours. And I won’t ever,
ever
hint, think, or in any other way countenance the implication that I need anyone other than my dad. Because it hurts him. Every single time someone asked in an interview if he’d been thinking of getting me a mother, as if he could just pick one out of a store, every time someone asked how he could possibly do it alone—I could just see him gritting his teeth.” Blake lets out a breath. “I don’t want to do that to him. That Mothers’ Day card…I started that one. My teacher told me I had to make a card for my mother, and I refused. She said I should be grateful to the woman who gave birth to me, and I—um—may have thrown a tantrum.” He shrugs. “I regret nothing.”