Soon Enough, Later: Fiction by Naomi Gage

It had been six weeks, but the memory lay in her like the pit of a stone fruit. Lila hunched over in the passenger seat, leaning her head against the cold, greasy glass of the window. Rain drummed the glass with a wild, hammersome kind of fury that seemed fatally separate from the precise, measured conversation inside the car. Lila fantasized punching the window open, breaking it like a flower splitting into bloom, fractals spiraling everywhere— how the bone would brutalize the skin, nerves lighting up. 

Her mother said, turning smoothly left: “Thanksgiving coming up.” Laura Soon was a woman of sparse, chosen words and long silences. She wore a chunky watch on one slender wrist. Penny said, from the backseat: “We should make something different.” She was in seventh grade, and was ferociously intolerant towards traditions. 

“Different?” Laura echoed. In ten minutes they would be at school, Lila thought, and she could disappear into the impersonal hallways, the cold clatter and rush of people passing. “Yeah,” Penny said, and then, insistent now: “We always make the same stuff. Pumpkin pie. Roasted potatoes. Grilled chicken.” 

“Yum,” Laura said, unfazed. Lila pressed her fingers into her temples again. She wanted to say something, but the effort of speaking would break the thin, fragile skin of solitude she had built around herself like a shield. 

“Why don’t we ever make something that’s us?” Penny said. Her voice was thin, reedy, and she twisted restlessly in the backseat like a fish flopped up on a deck. She wore massively baggy dark-wash jeans, the kind that all the cool seventh graders were wearing. Lila didn’t know if her younger sister was one of the cool seventh graders; she hadn’t been in the same school as Penny since the 5th grade. “You 

know. Us. Something Taiwanese. Whatever. Not the same old American stuff.” “We are American,” Laura said, gently. They were pulling into the parking lot of Penny’s junior high now. 

“No,” Penny said, furiously, “Not like that. You know what I mean.” 

For the first time, Laura’s mouth tightened, and something about the texture of her skin, the set of her lipsticked mouth, looked fragile, and not just fragile but old. Her sister was braver than her, Lila knew, infinitely braver, the type to go rattling out on a white horse with clattering steel to steal the princess from the jealous dragon. But Laura was no dragon. Something in her eyes looked lost, as if she had let something precious slip from her fingers and was unsure of whether to dig for it or let it go without protest. 

Penny shifted anxiously in the backseat, her Jansport backpack already zipped and donned. At last Laura said: “OK. We can make something Taiwanese for Thanksgiving.” 

“OK,” Penny said, uncertainly. She leaned forward, her sweet dark hair swinging into Lila’s face, and pecked her mother on the cheek. A waft of passionfruit gum, and then she was off, yellow rainboots sloshing in the mud. Laura watched her go, her face looking cracked open. 

Lila said nothing, watching her mother’s face. She would be late for class. 

Eventually Laura put the car back into drive, and silently they drove on. 

 

Here was the thing that had happened a while ago, six weeks ago in fact, although its consequences were still rattling through Lila’s life like shock waves after a natural disaster. It was

September then, and the leaves were starting to turn. She remembered their transient gold heralding the first rumblings of fall, pumpkin spice lattés and ropey cableknit sweaters in shades of umber and deep maroon. Lila had gotten her driver’s license, and she had illegally driven her boyfriend Alessandro to get ice cream, which they licked with the relish of the uncaught. She remembered the last faded beams of summer, and their laughter, and how they had risen at the end to throw their cups away, sticky fingers tangling together out of habit. Later he had a soccer game, and she had a party to attend. 

Lila remembered her outfit exactly, down to the last detail: dark tights with a subtle sheen, a wine colored corduroy skirt, a tight cream sweater. Gold necklace, mascara, lip stain. Lila was clutching a red Solo cup of water, sweating condensation against her neck, when the guy came up behind her, and palmed at her breast. She jerked away, the water splashing against the side of the cup, and a few people looked over, then looked away. He laughed, and she knew who he was: his name pressed like a spoon against her tongue. Lila turned away, blindly. 

After that things dissolved. Later she would understand that he had slipped rohypnol in her Solo cup, and that he had followed her through the crowd while she pawed at the sea of moving, indifferent backs. She felt like an animal, that things were too complex, and strange, machinated against her understanding. The lights looked red and throbbing, although it was only a house party and there were photos on the walls. Her shoulder brushed the side of a pitcher, which held frosty lemonade; the cold was so startling it registered as pain. She cried out, and this was before he touched her. 

The next day people were saying all sorts of things— that they had seen Lila and the boy kissing, feverish with mutual desire, or even that she had been the one to drag him to a dark corner of the house and unbutton his shirt. In fact she actually did not remember what had happened, and fear kept her from speaking out in her own defense. What if their version of events was the truth? In her version, her muscles had slackened under the influence of the drug, and she could not move. She had woken up still dressed, in her bedroom; she didn’t know who had driven her home. 

In all versions, the same thing happened after: Alessandra broke up with her, and people looked at her with open disgust in the halls, the way they would look at a heaped pile of dung. She had friends still, but she could feel their strain, which would become resentment, given time. 

Laura dropped her off on the curb; Lila got out without an umbrella. “Bad girl,” Laura said, and forced an umbrella into her hand. “You’ll be sick. Are you warm?” 

“Yes,” Lila said. She was wearing a puffer jacket, and she felt light and cold and transparent, like a chip of flinty rock or a shard of plastic. Laura peeled away from the curb, and Lila trudged into class. She was two minutes late to calculus. Lila sat in her normal seat and looked at the bright projector beam until her eyes blurred and all the integrals looked watery and strange, like the sinuous curves of some ancient rusted language. 

First period went by quickly, and then second period too. Math and physics. These things remained constant in the wake of such a dishevelment; they did not slip or skid askew the way relationships did. The numbers felt hot and alive like brands under her fingers, her black pen. 

Before third period she dawdled, hanging in the bathroom and blinking through the dizzying haze of mango-flavored vape smoke that always permeated the stalls. Her nose was running a little, and her hands were weirdly shaky. When Lila looked down at them, she noticed that they looked like deformed

white birds, stark in the plain, garish light. Two girls passed by, speaking in low voices around a breath of exhaled candysmog. Her hands would not stop shaking. 

Alessandro was in her third period, was the truth of it. He said nothing to her, nothing, would not look at her, as if the mere sight of her was hateful to him. She was now the only person in the bathroom. There was something climbing up her throat— blindly she scrambled across the bathroom and wrenched open a stall door. 

It came from her like an exorcism, bile in her throat, ribs seizing and knocking and juddering like a faulty machine. She went on her knees before it, vomiting into the disgusting school toilet. When it was over she rinsed her mouth in the sink and went, with a sense of deep relief, to the nurse’s office. 

At the nurse Lila was wrapped in a strange, scratchy blanket and the nurse took her temperature. There was a cautious, pinched look on the nurse’s face. She handed something in a cardboard box to Lila; Lila took it in her hands. The nurse told her to go to the bathroom with it, and Lila understood that it was a test for pregnancy. 

There was no fuss, not that Lila would have expected or been prepared to deal with one, when she and the nurse beheld the two pink lines, blooming, unfurling slowly along the grade of the paper. The nurse’s voice softened. Lila called her mother, who was at work, to pick her up. There was only a day left, anyway, until Thanksgiving Break. 

At home she took off her school clothes like unloosing the clasps of a cage and crawled into her bed, where she slept like a stone for six hours. When she woke, it was to Penny shaking her shoulders. Lila stirred, and relaxed when she realized who it was. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Penny said, narrow-eyed in the dim. Lila had drawn the window blinds closed, and the room was shrouded and warm like a womb. Womb. The word turned over inside her, and she felt suddenly immensely frightened; the emotion moved through her like a lightning strike and she sat up suddenly, without meaning to, dislodging Penny. 

Penny poked her. Lila swatted at her finger, without force. 

Lila said: “So. What’re we making for Thanksgiving?” 

Penny twisted irritably. She said: “I don’t know.” 

“We make Taiwanese food for chūn jié, you know,” Lila said, gently. She felt sleepy but clearheaded. “It’s not like we never have it.” 

“But,” Penny said, and then rolled over, nestling into the space beside Lila. Her voice was muffled in the comforter when she spoke next. “Everyone always asks in class what you make for Thanksgiving. Everyone has something. But no one ever asks what you make for chūn jié, no one knows it even happened—” 

“Billions of people in Asia would beg to differ,” Lila muttered. 

“We’re in America,” Penny said, angrily. Her voice cracked. Lila patted her hair, and Penny pushed her face against Lila’s thigh, bullishly. Eventually Lila fell asleep again.

The next day Penny was off from school too, and they made mápó dòufu in a big clay pot. When Lila leaned over the pot the heat sprung up at her, dewing her face, her neck. She drew back a little, but smiled, and tasted the broth when Penny pressed a spoon into her hand. The Sichuan peppercorn made her tongue burn with a strange, clear, radiant heat, like prickling sunlight in her throat. She swallowed; broth trickled down. There was a low ache in her belly. 

“Are you OK?” Penny said, worriedly. She had been watching Lila like a hawk. “If you’re going to barf, don’t do it in the pot, please.” 

Lila went to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet. The ache was back, like someone was going through her organs with a bunched fist. She scrunched her legs up, and breathed through it. A falling sensation took hold of her. When she looked in the toilet bowl, she saw blood, a wash of blood, thick and juicy and vibrant with clots like raspberry jelly. 

The blood looked so alive, Lila thought, dizzy; it could not belong to something dead. But it did, and it was gone when she flushed the toilet. 

She put on a maxi pad, and washed her hands, and went back to the kitchen.

Naomi Gage is a Taiwanese American high school student living in Los Angeles, California. She likes pistachio ice cream, speculative fiction novels, and listening to Taylor Swift. Her current favorite word is “tittle”, which is the word for the small dot above a lowercase’i’ or ‘j’.

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