This Is My Brain in Love Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Ilene Yi-Zhen Wong

  Cover and interior illustration of brain copyright © Nick Kinney/Shutterstock.com. Cover design by Karina Granda. Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

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  First Edition: April 2020

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gregorio, I. W., 1976– author.

  Title: This is my brain in love / by I. W. Gregorio.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020. | Audience: Ages 12+. | Summary: Rising high school juniors Jocelyn Wu and Will Domenici fall in love while trying to save the Wu family restaurant, A-Plus Chinese Garden.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019033954 | ISBN 9780316423823 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316423847 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316423854 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Restaurants—Fiction. | Cooking, Chinese—Fiction. | Anxiety disorders—Fiction. | Chinese Americans—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | Love—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.G7415 Thi 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033954

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-42382-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-42384-7 (ebook)

  E3-20200306-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  This Is My Brain on Bankruptcy

  This Is My Brain on Summer Vacation

  This Is My Brain on the Impossible

  This Is My Brain on Unemployment

  This Is My Brain on Twitter

  This Is My Brain on the Unexpected

  This Is My Brain on Chemistry

  This Is My Brain on Hope

  This Is My Brain on Action

  This Is My Brain on Smiles

  This Is My Brain on Work

  This Is My Brain on Hormones

  This Is My Brain on Confusion

  This Is My Brain on Frugality

  This Is My Brain on Pot Stickers

  This Is My Brain on Drama

  This Is My Brain on Sales

  This Is My Brain on Fatigue

  This Is My Brain on Stew

  This Is My Brain on Food Joy

  This Is My Brain on Success

  This Is My Brain on Touch

  This Is My Brain on “Friendship”

  This Is My Brain on Tension

  This Is My Brain on Consequences

  This Is My Brain on Radio Silence

  This Is My Brain on Communications Lockdown

  This Is My Brain on Business

  This Is My Brain on Second Chances

  This Is My Brain on Solicitation

  This Is My Brain on Personal Statements

  This Is My Brain on Delayed Gratification

  This Is My Brain on Numbers

  This Is My Brain Off Script

  This Is My Brain on Mute

  This Is My Brain on Notice

  This Is My Brain on Placebos

  This Is My Brain on Interviews

  This Is My Brain on Unsolicited Advice

  This Is My Brain on Blank

  This Is My Brain on Hold

  This Is My Brain, Powerless

  This Is My Brain, Helpless

  This Is My Brain on Edge

  This Is My Brain, Trying

  This Is My Brain on Rage

  This Is My Brain on Panic

  This Is My Brain on Guilt

  This Is My Brain on Recovery

  This Is My Brain on Tropes

  This Is My Brain on History

  This Is My Brain on Surprise

  This Is My Brain on Answers

  This Is My Brain on Moving Pictures

  This Is My Brain on Pride

  This Is My Brain on Truth

  This Is My Brain on Drugs

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  For O and G, as a promise to walk with you through doubt, fear, anger, and sadness

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  Prologue

  This is a mostly happy story. It’s important for you to know this because if there’s anything I hate the most, it’s a book that makes your emotions feel like a child’s overloved comfort toy being flung around a washing machine. The ones where it seems like the story’s all beautiful and nothing hurts, until someone kicks the bucket at the end, tearing a hole in your belly and removing organs that you didn’t know existed. I’d rather know ahead of time whether to bring tissues. It’s just better for your heart, you know?

  I say this to you because I want you to be reassured. I want you to know so when the story ends with me staring at a pill bottle, wrestling with what to do with it, you’re prepared.

  It’ll all be okay.

  I promise.

  This Is My Brain on Bankruptcy

  JOCELYN

  Irony: The year I decide that central New York isn’t a total dump after all, my dad finally admits that it was a mistake to move here.

  It’s one of the rare days that my whole family gets to spend together. Usually my parents trade off running the register downstairs in the restaurant, because they’re incapable of trusting anyone else to do it, but when our water main breaks in the middle of the lunch rush, we can’t get a plumber to come in until dinnertime.

  My brother and I greet the news like it’s a snow day. Family meal! Amah, our grandma, won’t be doing prep work, so she can help Alan with his algebra! We won’t need to help with cleanup after we’ve finished our homework, so maybe I’ll finally have time to work on the screenplay I’m writing with Priya!

  The excitement dims pretty quickly, though, when I see that my mom’s almost at the point of tears when she writes the CLOSE FOR REPAIR sign that I edit to read CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.

  I start to get really worried when I watch my dad pour Pepto-Bismol for his dinner instead of his usual chrysanthemum tea, so I pay more attention than usual to the heated conversation my parents have in their bedroom. I basically speak Mandarin at the third-grade level, never really having applied myself at the Mohawk Valley Chinese Association’s weekly language school, but even I can pick out the words “expensive” and “no money” and “back to New York City.”

  After a long phone call, my dad finally sits down at the dinner table. It’s littered with the usual hodgepodge of microwaved kitchen leftovers. The moo shu pork looks particularly deflated.

  My mom looks at him expectantly, a
lmost hopefully. He nods and looks at the rest of us. Amah and I look at him, but my brother is too busy stuffing his face with a day-old egg roll to actually notice that my dad’s joined us.

  “Alan,” my dad says sharply. He waits for Alan’s five-second attention span to focus before he says, “Second Uncle says manager at Queens branch of his restaurant go back to China. May be time to go back to the city.”

  The silence after his announcement is suffocating, like someone’s hoovered away all the life in the room. Living over a restaurant, you get used to a constant soundtrack of activity underlying your life. There’s always the sound of chopping, or the clank of a wok banging against a stove, or someone shouting or cursing in Chinese.

  My amah is the first one to make a sound. It’s a soft, noncommittal hum. Two notes, questioning, neither approving nor disapproving.

  Alan, still chewing, manages only a shrug and a “Huh,” which makes no sense because he’s the one who’s spent the majority of his life here.

  So it’s up to me to say loudly, “No.” Because we can’t move. Not now, after I’ve found an actual bubble tea place in this godforsaken backwater. Not now, when I’ve finally got a chance to take a film class at the local college. Not now, when I’ve painstakingly identified a group of people I can tolerate as friends, and even found a best friend.

  My mom’s looking down at her hands, and my dad’s glaring at me, so I elaborate. “Dad, please say you’re kidding. I’ve literally spent the last six years of my life complaining about moving to central New York, and you want to give up the restaurant now?”

  My dad bristles at my tone (I swear, there are actual hairs at the crown of his head that stick up when he’s agitated). Alan’s eyes dart back and forth between my dad and me. With his cheeks still full of food, he looks like a squirrel watching a tennis match.

  “Xiao Jia” is all he says, his voice low and warning.

  I back down and try a different tack. “But… what about the schools? They’re amazing. You know I’m already set up to take a college class in the fall. And the restaurant has a following now.” Not a big one, but there are definitely regulars. “What if Alan takes over my deliveries so I can work the counter more and we, like, start a Facebook account or something. For free advertising. Check-ins, you know. It’s a thing.”

  “Why are you only thinking of this now?” Dad asks. “You have been working at restaurant for forever, and never do no thing.” The worry lines on his forehead have morphed from frustration into suspicion. It’s a subtle shift, but a familiar one.

  I don’t say: “Because the place sucks the soul out of the living.”

  Instead I say: “I didn’t realize how desperate things were. I thought we were doing okay.” Looking back, I can see the signs. When Mr. Chen went back to Kaohsiung to be with his family, we never replaced him. My mom worked double shifts instead, and my dad started to do his accounting and ordering at the restaurant so he could lend a hand when things got busy. Suddenly a lot of little things make sense: why my mom would scold me when I’d leave the light on after leaving a room, why Alan couldn’t go on his sixth-grade field trip to Great Adventure, why they canceled our Netflix subscription so I had to “borrow” Priya’s log-in information to feed my prestige TV and film addiction.

  “Has this been going on for years?” I ask my dad, horrified.

  His bowed head, and his silence, are my answer.

  A few years ago, there was a 5.0 earthquake on the East Coast, with its epicenter in northeastern Pennsylvania. It was a pretty big deal and caused some minor property damage (coming from the West Coast, of course, Priya rolled her eyes and sent out a meme about lawn chairs being knocked over). I’ll never forget how my body felt in that brief moment of shift: paralyzed yet at the same time pushed by an outside force terrifyingly beyond my control.

  I feel the same sensation right now. And I think: This is it. This is the “Nothing Is the Same Anymore” trope.

  When I started hanging out with Priya and really started getting into film—not just watching movies, but analyzing them—it was kind of a buzzkill to realize that so many of the movies that gave me joy as a kid were actually pretty formulaic. Priya and I would have “Name That Trope” movie nights during freshman year (I usually won, because her parents majorly limited her screen time, whereas mine were so busy with the restaurant I could usually sneak in some TV with my amah). But as our game evolved from a joke into a way of seeing life, I realized that tropes are more than just clichés. They’re neither good nor bad. They simply are, like earlobes and Winnie-the-Pooh. They’re a reminder that all stories are cut from the same cloth, with patterns that are recognizable, even when they’re unique and surprising. Seeing these patterns helps us make sense of the world, helps give us a framework for navigating what might come next.

  What comes next for me is the “Big First Choice” trope. Am I going to go gentle into that good night, or am I going to be dragged kicking and screaming from the life I’ve finally built for myself?

  Come on, like you really had to ask.

  I start off with appealing to my dad’s natural tightwad tendencies. “You can’t really want to move back to New York. Didn’t you mention last week that Second Uncle’s parking space costs more than our rent?” We left the city when I was pretty young, but I remember him constantly complaining about the traffic, the rude customers, and how Second Uncle lorded over him. “Where would we live? Alan and I are too old to sleep in the same bedroom anymore.”

  “You think I haven’t think of this?” my dad grits out. “You think you so smart?”

  “Aiya, Baba,” my mom murmurs, putting a hand on my dad’s arm before things escalate. “Ta xiang bangzhu ni.”

  Dad’s nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath, and he rubs his hand over his eyes.

  I regroup and try a different approach. “Baba. Mom’s right. I’m sorry I haven’t been more involved in the restaurant. I just want to help. Let me look at the numbers, brainstorm some strategy—that commerce elective you made me take has got to be worth something, right?”

  Even as I say it, I get the sinking feeling that my dad’s right. It’s arrogant for me to imagine that I can swoop in with ideas from a high school Intro to Business class and turn around a restaurant that’s been floundering for years. It’s a measure of how desperate the situation is that my dad just throws up his hands and mutters, “Haoba, suibian ni,” which is the equivalent of “Fine, try it your way.”

  I take it as a win. For now.

  This Is My Brain on Summer Vacation

  WILL

  It’s the last day before summer vacation, and I may be the only one at St. Agnes High School who’s apprehensive about it. The twenty-four-hour news cycle of my mind is on overload. Manny is practically bouncing off the walls, high-fiving all his buddies from the soccer team and yelling “T minus one, baby!” He’s got a sweet gig at Amazing Stories, the local comic book store, so he’s essentially going to get paid for sitting around reading manga all day. Javier’s floating through the hallway wearing his shades and noise-canceling headphones, with a particular spring to his lanky step, telling everyone who will listen about the internship our computer science teacher helped him get at ConMed. If our local Students Against Destructive Decisions chapter were to see them, they’d put Javier and Manny into an ad depicting people who are “high on life,” right next to their retro THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS posters where the subject’s neurons are eggs cooking in a pan—meant to represent the perils of substance abuse.

  I’m the only one of my friends who doesn’t have a headline, and the worst thing about it is that I have only myself to blame.

  My anxiety only ratchets up when Javier and I walk into the media studies studio, which feels strange because for the past ten months it’s been my favorite place at St. Agnes. When I enter the classroom, Mr. Evans grins up at us like we’re prodigal sons returning.

  “Will! Javi! Grab your chairs. I’m getting ready to give out my supe
rlatives.” About a decade ago, St. Agnes’s staff got rid of yearbook polls after a voting scandal led the administration to proclaim that “all our students are likely to succeed, so there is no value in suggesting that popularity can predict future achievement.” That didn’t stop Mr. Evans from making his own superlatives list as a way to announce next year’s editorial staff for the Spartan.

  When I go to collect a chair from the bank of computers lining the room, it slips from my sweaty fingers, making an ungodly clatter. In my mind, I’m already making up my own superlative: William Obinna Domenici, Most Likely to Have Clammy Hands. No one seems to notice the racket, but my face still burns as I take my seat.

  Mr. Evans perches himself on the edge of his desk, pushes up his horn-rimmed glasses, and thanks us all for a fantastic year. “You all should pat yourselves on the back. Online clicks were up ten percent, and we had an increase in ad revenue as well. Kudos to our business team.” He nods in my direction, and next to me, Sanjit Mehta (senior, business manager) puts out his hand to high-five me (sophomore, reporter) and Javier, (sophomore, photographer). The knot in my chest loosens up a fraction.

  All day, I’ve been trying not to hope too much. A fair and impartial review of my prospects concludes that I’m too young to be one of the executive-level editors. When Mr. Evans sent around his end-of-the-year survey of staff, though, I figured it would be reasonable to throw my hat in the ring to be business manager since Sanjit is graduating. Barring that, I’m hoping to be a section editor at least. Opinion is my first choice—even though I hate arguing in person, I love being able to construct an argument on paper—then Features or News. Those are the high-profile sections that would get the attention of a school with a prestigious journalism program.

  Mr. Evans starts off by acknowledging the graduating staff. Our editor in chief, Julia Brown (Most Likely to Be Incarcerated to Protect Her Sources), is going to Northwestern to study journalism; Sanjit (Most Likely to Retire at Forty) to Penn for business. Next, he announces the new editor in chief, executive editor, and managing editor, all juniors. I try to be a team player and look happy when three upperclasswomen snag the sections I wanted.