Running through Sprinklers Read online

  For my family

  and

  for all my girlfriends, past and present.

  Especially you, Dany Lee. Magic World Forever.

  RED MAPLE TREES LINE OUR cul-de-sac like candles on a birthday cake. Close your eyes and make a wish. You could probably blow all the candles out. The trees here aren’t as big as the ones you’d find in Vancouver. Here, in the suburbs, in Surrey, the trees are younger—weaker, even. So small and thin, they need wooden stakes strapped to them to keep them from slouching over. So small and thin, they flicker when the mail carrier walks by.

  A letter slips through the mail slot. It is from my best friend from across the street. You see, we figured out this scam. Actually, she figured it out. It’s a good one, so listen up. She got this idea of trying to send me a letter without having to pay for a stamp. So instead of writing her address as the return address, she wrote mine, instead. The post office people probably got angry, thinking, You idiot, you forgot the stamp, here’s your stupid letter back. Only thing is, the letter ended up at my house instead of hers. And that’s just what she wanted.

  All the letter says is:

  Dear Sara,

  Muahahahahahaha!

  Isn’t she the best? She always has been, for as long as I’ve known her, which has pretty much been my whole life. So when I learned the big news, it gave me this real bad feeling inside. Nothing is going to change, she promised me.

  But that was the year everything changed. It was the year I lost my best friend and witnessed the biggest missing persons case in Canadian history unfolding right in front of me. It was also the year I almost lost myself.

  When they first built suburbs outside Vancouver, it’s as though they thought that the sameness of everything would keep the outside world away and the rest of us safe inside. But the thing is, change happens from the inside out, too. So when last summer came to an end, just before my final year of elementary school, my twelfth year in this world, not even the perfect roundness of the cul-de-sac could help me.

  1

  IT’S AUGUST and the refrigerator is Nadine Ando’s dance partner. She puts her hand through its handle and swings it open to cool her body down. Plants her right foot on the floor, pulling her left leg behind her, her toes a perfect point. Then in one swift motion, she flips over and bends into a backbend and shows off her belly button to the ceiling. A dip into the clear bin, VEGETABLES, and then she comes up with one single carrot.

  “I’m on a diet,” she says, and walks over to the kitchen table, where I am.

  Me: “Why?”

  “Just trying to be healthy,” she says. Crunch. Crunch. “What are you eating?” Crunch.

  I look down: Steaming-hot ramen noodles with ice cubes swimming in a salty, beige soup. The ice cubes are a trick I use to cool the soup down just a bit. They make large oily swirls around the white noodles. I like how the noodles look, blond and crimped, like my old Cabbage Patch Kid’s hair.

  Jen, in the hall: “Hey, didn’t you eat, like, half a chocolate cake last night?” Jen is Nadine’s sister. She’s ten, a year younger than us. “Diet, my butt!” she says.

  Mrs. Ando, somewhere in the house: “Everyone in the minivan now! And, Jen, watch your language! Christ.”

  In the grocery store:

  Mrs. Ando, Nadine, Jen, their little sister Megan, and me. Mrs. Ando is pushing a shopping cart down the canned-soup aisle. She picks up a can of clam chowder. Nadine gives me a look, as if saying, I hope that’s not tonight’s dinner.

  She cups my elbow and whispers, “Let’s go.”

  We run. Race ahead to the meat section, guessing which part of the cow’s body is mushed-up behind the plastic wrap. To the vegetable and fruit section, little sprinklers spraying a light mist on our faces. To the school-supply section, giving each other tattoos with black pens, then changing our minds, trying to rub them off, red skin, no luck. To the makeup section, where Nadine swipes a tester of red lip gloss across my lips. “You’re so pretty,” she says.

  When school starts, Nadine and I will be in grade seven, which will be our last year of elementary school, which means we will be the oldest. So maybe I should start wearing red lip gloss.

  I look in a mirror: It looks like I ate raspberry jam. It kinda tastes like jam too.

  Um. Maybe I won’t get it after all.

  We all meet up at the checkout counter. Each kid has picked something out: Nadine vanilla lip gloss, me some grape-flavored gum, Jen a newspaper, Megan a sniffle from the frozen foods section. And Mrs. Ando still has the clam chowder. Nadine flashes me a look, as if saying, We’re definitely eating at your house tonight.

  The cashier is a tall blond woman. She looks like a model, even in her red-and-white uniform. She slides each item through the scanner. Beep. Beep beep. The lip gloss, beep. She keeps looking at us kids, at Mrs. Ando, then back at us kids.

  She asks, “Are these all yours?”

  “No.” Mrs. Ando laughs. “One isn’t. Guess which it is.”

  The cashier points to Megan, whose skin is a lot lighter than the rest of ours. Mrs. Ando shakes her head and lightly places her hand on my head. “It’s this one.”

  We jump out of the minivan as soon as Mrs. Ando pulls into the carport. We run down the driveway. Nadine grabs my hand.

  “Where are you going?” Mrs. Ando asks.

  “Fraaaaaance,” Nadine hollers back.

  “Are you having dinner over there?”

  “Yeaaaaaaaah,” we sing.

  There are six houses in our cul-de-sac. Six different houses, in six different colors, which have probably changed colors six different times: peach yellow blue green rose white.

  My house is light brown, like a paper bag. And we have the largest front yard in the cul-de-sac, perfect for summer sprinkler run-throughs. There is the Cortes house, which is dark brown with caramel garage doors, like a chocolate bar. Then it’s the Chin house, which used to be Marty’s—it’s the exact same green as Green Timbers Forest, our favorite place to play hide-and-seek, a few blocks beyond the cul-de-sac. The baby yellow Singh house, then the lighter green Koffmann house (green tea ice cream), and finally, behind us, the prettiest house of all . . .

  The Ando house. It’s a bluish-gray color and sometimes, when it’s about to rain, you can’t tell the difference between the house and the sky. It has two big front windows that look like two big eyes staring back at you. And when it does rain, the water slides down the glass, like tears; it’s so pretty. And through these windows, you can almost always see everything the family does, especially at night, when the blue flicker of the television makes dancing shadows glow.

  We stop and look both ways before crossing the street. There never are any cars. It is a cul-de-sac, after all. But we look, or at least make it look like we’re looking, and dart across the circle of cement like mice on a kitchen floor. I hold my breath as we cross.

  Nadine and I are sitting crossed-legged on my bedroom floor, chewing grape gum and making friendship bracelets for each other, weaving our favorite colors together. Pink is hers, purple is mine.

  My ten-year-old brother, James, comes in to watch. The smell of bulgogi swirls up the staircase, into my room, and up our noses. This smell of garlic and sweet soy sauce means “Go downstairs.”

  Standing at the top of the staircase, I hear familiar sounds. I can tell that Auntie Moon and Uncle Dong are over because Mom’s speaking louder. It’s like her volume goes up or something when she speaks Korean.

  “Hello, Sara!” Auntie Moon says. I love Auntie Moon’s face. It glows, like a moon. But I think that’s just her moisturizer or whatever.

  She and my uncle, who aren’t exactly my aunt and uncle, are sitting on the wooden stools that surr
ound the kitchen island, watching my mother wrestle with opening a glass jar, throwing her head back, laughing loudly, the way she always does when we have people over for dinner. Dad is home early from work and quietly circles them, pouring red wine. Finally, Mom releases the jar’s strong smell: kimchi.

  Nadine watches Mom.

  “Your mother is the most beautiful woman I know,” Nadine once told me.

  Mom stands at five foot four. She is thin, size 4, she once told me, which is weird because I’m a size 14 . . . but I guess that’s kids’ sizing. Her face is the shape of a flattened heart, with brown eyes, a small nose, and full lips, the only plump thing on her body. She never wears any makeup, except a deep red lipstick, two rose petals on her face. And it never comes off. Even when she eats, even when my dad kisses her, even at bedtime when she comes in my room to say good night.

  “Sara Smith, did you practice piano today?” She furrows her brow, like she’s actually saying, “Get your act together.”

  “Tomorrow. I promise,” I say. Her brow irons out a bit.

  In the frying pan: The meat sizzles louder, then softer, depending on how my mother’s chopsticks slide across. Mom rips pieces of lettuce (water droplets fly!) and stacks each thin, crisp leaf on top of the others on a paper towel. Finally, the rice cooker’s red light turns off, giving us the go-ahead.

  “Okay, everyone.” Mom laughs. “Buffet-style.”

  Though we’ve done this a million times, I show Nadine how to hold the lettuce in her palm, spread hot rice on it, plop a few pieces of bulgogi on top, wrap it, and pop it in her mouth. “It’s called ssam,” I explain. We do this over and over again, and our mouths love the cold of the lettuce, the warmth of the rice, and the saltiness of the meat. And Nadine and I are glad that we decided to eat on this side of the street tonight.

  I was just a year old when I first met Nadine Ando. We were the first families to move into the cul-de-sac. My parents were pushing my stroller down the driveway to take me to the edge of Green Timbers Forest to pick some blackberries because my dad wanted to make a pie. Mr. and Mrs. Ando were doing the same, carrying ice cream buckets and pushing Nadine’s stroller. Her younger sister, Jen, then only a few months old, was strapped to Mr. Ando’s chest. Mom said me and Nadine wouldn’t stop looking at each other. “It was like seeing your reflection in a mirror,” she said. “Right down to the mole above your lip.” And for a long time, I thought the way we and our siblings looked was totally normal. I think it’s because up until I was, like, five or something, I truly believed everyone everywhere had one Asian parent and one white parent.

  2

  I AM FIVE years old.

  Every morning, I am so happy to wake up. I think, I can’t wait to play, I love everything. It’s summer. I get up and put my bathing suit on right away, rush downstairs, and eat a bowl of cereal. Then just as I’m finishing my bowl, the door opens and Nadine comes running in, barefoot, wearing her bathing suit, a pink one with ruffles around the tummy, like a tutu. She’s growing out of it a bit so you see her nipples. It’s so funny. I shouldn’t laugh, though, because mine is small too; it goes up my bum.

  Things we do: fill buckets with water, drown worms in them, spray the banana slide, slide down it, run through the sprinkler, and then do cartwheels through the sprinkler.

  We come in for lunch, and then go back out until it’s dark outside. It gets pretty cold sometimes and we shake but we just hold each other for a while, warm up, and then run around for a bit longer.

  I climb up onto the piano bench and play for Nadine all the songs I learned in my new piano class: “Hot Cross Buns,” “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She dances to everything so I play “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and she walks around like a chicken, haha!

  We knock on Marty’s door. Marty opens it. He and his wife said whenever we want an ice cream cone all we have to do is knock on their door. We like Marty because he isn’t old like our parents and understands us and our need for ice cream and goes away and comes back with one cone for each of us: Nadine and me. Sometimes we knock on his door four times a day.

  Nadine and I slam her bedroom door closed because we don’t want Jen to come in and play with us. We say, “If you tell on us, we won’t play with you ever again.” We say, “Shut up, you stupid baby.” I say, “I won’t play with you if you don’t shut up.”

  And with this, Jen stops. She’ll do anything just to play with us.

  At lunch, while eating mac ’n’ cheese (with a squirt of ketchup), I tell Nadine where I’m going.

  “Korea,” I say. “It’s a place.”

  Nadine: “Where is it?”

  Mrs. Ando, in the living room: “It’s near Japan!” She walks in carrying Jen on her hip. “It’s where Ojisan and Obasan are from!”

  Before I have to leave, Nadine says, “Say hi to Japan for me.” And then out of nowhere Jen starts crying. And then Nadine looks at Jen and starts crying. And then I look at Nadine and start crying. And we don’t know how it happened but now we are all crying on the living room floor and can’t stop. Mrs. Ando calls my house and Mom comes to take me home.

  Halfway down the driveway, I hear music coming through the Andos’ living room window. The Andos are playing “Sara” by Fleetwood Mac on their parents’ cool record player. She misses me already, I think. I don’t want to go, I don’t. I don’t want to be anywhere but with Nadine. But I cross the street anyway to go to Korea.

  In the airplane, when Mom says it’s time, I say: “Hi, Japan.”

  I love Halmonie. She is small and wrinkly and kind of smells like Mom and I don’t understand what she says to me, but all my brother and I do is lie on her heated floor with her arms around us, watching cartoons on the American army channel. I think, I could lie here forever, I really could.

  I love Halmonie’s food. It makes my tongue tingle. I eat a full bowl of rice at every meal and everyone pinches me and calls me tong tong, chubby. We eat dinner at breakfast. Rice, fish, vegetables, kimchi.

  I teach Halmonie how to say “Shut up.” She says it over and over and over again, and she knows that it’s not nice to say and we both laugh, and Mom gives us a look, but then laughs too and lets us have our fun.

  My aunts take my brother and me around to the shops and we point to something that we like in the window and they buy it for us right away. I wonder why they are so good to me, why they love me so much even though I never see them.

  My relatives gather around me, everyone says, she’s so pretty, she looks so western. Later, Mom tells me that they are saying how lucky I am that my eyes are so big, how I look like my dad. Though I feel sad because I don’t want to look like my dad. He’s a boy. I want to look like my mom.

  There are so many uncles and aunties in Korea. My mom tells me to call all these people uncle and auntie and big sister and big brother, and I wonder if everyone in Korea is family.

  Halmonie gives me some chicken feed. I go outside with her and she lets me throw the seeds on the ground. The chickens are in their little house. Halmonie goes back inside and I feel like I’m the only thing outside, alone. But then big huge rats come out from underneath the little house instead, eating all the food. They go back under just as the chickens come out looking for food. The rats stole the chickens’ food. I wish I could say something to someone.

  My uncle is playing with his dogs, telling them to lie down, to bark, to sit, all in Korean. I say the same, in English, but they don’t understand. It’s a funny thing that these dogs can only understand Korean. These are really Korean dogs.

  We’re on the bus and a white man sits near us. Mom whispers, “He’s from Canada too, he’s got a Canadian flag on his backpack, see?” I walk up to him and start talking to him to see if he lives near us, and he says he’s from a different place, and he doesn’t care.

  Mom says we’ve only been in Korea a month, but I feel like it’s been forever. Mom hands over the phone to me and it’s Dad, and it bothers me that I don’t quite rememb
er what his eyes or his nose looks like.

  I don’t want to leave. I yell as Mom carries me to the car. “I don’t want to leave Halmonie,” I say, and Halmonie looks through the car window and nods her head and though she smiles, I know her now, I know she is sad too.

  At home, the house looks different. I’m not sure if the carpet is darker or lighter than how I remember.

  Dad says, “Nadine is here.” I peek my head around the corner and see her standing in the hallway, unsure whether to come in or wait outside, and when we look at each other it’s like we don’t recognize each other anymore. But then we go to my room and we play and everything is just like the way it was before.

  3

  NADINE AND I are at my house, playing with Cookie, my hamster. We put him in his plastic ball and let him run around the downstairs of my house.

  I got Cookie more than three years ago, in grade three, after my orthodontist appointment one day. This happened after spending most of the summer trying to convince Mom it was a good idea.

  I remember how I begged: “Pleeeease, Mom. I’ve never had a pet before.”

  “Why do you want a rat? They are so dirty. I don’t understand,” she said.

  Me: “It’s not a rat. It’s a hamster. They’re small and cute and they don’t have those long tails.”

  She actually looked slightly thoughtful. She said hesitantly, “Just how long are their tails?”

  “No longer than a centimeter, I swear.”

  “And when will it die?”

  “In two years, I promise.”

  It’s now past the two-year death wish and my hamster is still going strong. He’s almost four years old. I’m not kidding. He’s even got gray hair and survived a stroke. But I think the reason my hamster has lived so long is because when I first got him, my mom was too freaked out to let him in the house so she banned the cage to the garage. Cookie spent the first year inhaling the fumes of Mom’s stinky Chinese medicine that she cooks on a little camping stove in the middle of the garage.