This Is My Brain in Love Page 3

  “Yeah, because jobs for high school sophomores grow on trees around here.”

  “There’s a job right there.” Javier points to a sign literally in front of our faces, on the window of A-Plus Chinese Garden:

  HELP WANTED:

  SEEKING SUMMER MANAGEMENT INTERN TO HELP GROW OUR BUSINESS.

  WEB PAGE DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE PREFERRED.

  COME BE PART OF AN

  A-PLUS TEAM!

  I look at the sign and I can’t help it. I bark out a laugh. “Um, no,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Why not?” asks Javier curiously.

  I blink, and think. I do that a lot when I’m around Javier. Not only because he’s brilliant, but because he has this utterly objective view of the world that occasionally forces me to rethink my own biases.

  When I contemplate it, I laughed because of the visual image of me passing out fortune cookies and rolling sushi. It could easily be a Saturday Night Live skit, with the lyrics “One of these things is not like the others” playing in the background.

  My hunger pangs twist into shame. I think about my sister, and how she says that your reaction to cognitive dissonance says volumes about who you are.

  Five seconds in, five seconds out.

  I close my eyes and breathe in the warm June air. The scent of fried rice mingles with the smell of yeast from the bakery down the street.

  The unsettled feeling in my stomach calms. I look back again at the HELP WANTED sign. It’s a good poster. The job’s an opportunity to manage a team and grow a small business. I have at least one of the skills they’re looking for. Whoever made the poster has hand-illustrated it with little anthropomorphized sushi rolls and dumplings with thought bubbles saying things like “A-Plus needs YOU!” In addition to a call-back number and an e-mail address, each of the little tear-offs at the bottom has a different emoji.

  As gently as I can, I tear off the tab with the shrug emoji.

  This Is My Brain on Twitter

  JOCELYN

  I would love to describe my family’s restaurant as a dive, but honestly it’s not cool enough to be considered one.

  To be clear, the restaurant isn’t dirty—it’s just old. When my dad first visited A-Plus Chinese Garden, he was pleasantly surprised. There were no rat problems or fire hazards, and the building breezed through inspection. The decor wasn’t awful for a place that wasn’t really a sit-down spot—there were four booths with mostly intact red vinyl coverings, and room for a few tables. The walls were plain but didn’t need repainting. I hated the name, though.

  “Isn’t that the name of a convenience store? Can we change it to ‘China Garden’ or something?” I knew there was no way he’d take the “Garden” out of the name. The word for garden in Mandarin is “yuan,” which is a homonym for money. You don’t mess with those things.

  “No, no, no,” my dad insisted. “Keep A-Plus and we always be at top of search engine list.” I think he just didn’t want to spring for new signage. Six years later, same name, same ’80s decor. One winter I tried to dress the place up for the holidays, but my dad wouldn’t okay the purchase of Christmas lights. “You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.”

  Basically, when I look around the restaurant for a background image for our new Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, I have no idea where to begin. It’s like how you can enter a room where someone’s thrown a banana into the trash, and at first you’re like, “Oh, shit, someone ate a banana?” Then you wait a few minutes, and you don’t even notice it—you’ve been desensitized to the smell.

  I’m a little desensitized to design when it comes to our restaurant. I know it doesn’t look quite right, but it isn’t jarring to me anymore. More importantly, I have no idea how to fix it. I can’t even imagine it looking good, to be honest. Maybe if we made it completely dark and put in strobe lights. At least the floor doesn’t have any obvious stains—it’s a drab brown low-pile carpet that could probably hide a mass murder.

  “Do you think we should take pictures in the bathroom?” I ask Priya when she lugs her camera and lighting gear in. “That’s the nicest part of the restaurant since Dad wallpapered it.”

  “Don’t worry, I brought some tablecloths and scarves we can use as background, and we can put some food on some special serving plates,” says my genius friend.

  Priya’s dad is an applied science professor at the college and her mom is a nurse, which means that she and her brother knew from an early age that they had to go into either engineering or medicine (personally, I also had business and law as options, which made my parents seem really open-minded). We had been friends for about two days when she told me her plan to sabotage her grades so that her parents would let her go to film school to study cinematography.

  “Doesn’t it bug you, to have your parents think that you’ve failed?” I asked when she told me how she intentionally put down a few wrong answers for a math test.

  “Getting a B isn’t failure,” she said, even though she knew that it kind of was, in our parents’ eyes.

  “But don’t you ever think, ‘God, if I’m not any good at this crappy school in the middle of nowhere, how am I ever going to succeed in life?’”

  “Einstein failed high school.”

  “No he didn’t. That’s a myth.” My dad looked it up once when I used it as an excuse for getting a B plus.

  “Fine, then. There are plenty of other people who didn’t get straight As who did great in life. You know how all those college counselors say that you don’t need to be well-rounded, if you’re well-flat?”

  “Is that some sort of comment about my bra size?”

  The point is, Priya’s determined to go to film school, and I’m 110 percent certain that she’s going to make it. She’s aces with a lens, whether it’s an iPhone or a video camera. She has an eagle eye for the essence of things and always knows how best to frame objects to make a picture more than a bunch of pixels. To make it into art.

  I run upstairs to grab our nicest serving plates—the ones that stay in our curio cabinet all year—and a pair of lacquered wooden chopsticks. I bring my amah, too, because she’s the most photogenic member of our family.

  When we get downstairs Priya has set up lights and draped cloths to create a shockingly gorgeous background, accented with some jade jewelry.

  “Oooh, that’s pretty. Where’d you get that necklace?” I ask.

  “It’s your mom’s.”

  I look over to where my mom is readying the register. “I’ve never seen those!” I say.

  My mom gives a small smile. “Priya need something pretty. I never get chance to wear my nice things.” It’s true. My mom does so much prep work at the restaurant that she never even wears her wedding rings. Her hands are perpetually chapped and Band-Aided to cover her bleeding cuticles.

  I swallow hard. “Thanks, Mom.” Then I ask Priya, “What other dishes do you think will look good?”

  “How about some kind of sushi and sweet-and-sour chicken?”

  “Okay, one Cali roll and one ABC chicken coming up.…”

  “I thought chicken and broccoli was ABC chicken?” says Priya.

  “No, that’s ABC broccoli.”

  It’s no secret that what’s served in American Chinese restaurants isn’t close to what most people in China actually eat. The sad thing is I’m such an ABC (short for “American-born Chinese”) that I’m used to “fake” Chinese food and find most of the dishes my amah cooks to be kind of bland. Except her dumplings, which are perfection.

  When we’re done, Priya loads up her images and I show them to my grandmother.

  “Amah, this one with you is the best one. It’s so terrific. I’m going to put it on the web.”

  “Ai-yo, why didn’t you tell me I gain so much weight?” she laments. “You should tell me early. I put makeup on.”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Wu. We can use a filter.” Priya taps some buttons, and voilà. Covergirl Grandma.

  Amah clicks her tongue and
gives a nodding frown, her way of saying “not bad.” She watches with interest as I load the image to Instagram and Twitter.

  “What is that?” she asks. “Some kind of… what you call it? Message board?”

  “It’s called Twitter,” I explain. “It’s like… it’s a way to send texts out to the whole world. We’re trying to get the word out about the restaurant.”

  “So… whole world can see this?”

  “If they follow us, yes.”

  “What you mean ‘follow’?”

  And we go down a twenty-minute rabbit hole. By the end of it, Priya has gathered up all her stuff and sent out five tweets about me trying to explain social media to my grandmother. #DontLetGrandmaTweet. Her hashtag doesn’t trend, but we do get twenty new followers.

  Even better? That night I get a résumé for my job posting.

  This Is My Brain on the Unexpected

  JOCELYN

  Because pretty much all my clothes are hand-me-downs, or from Goodwill or Target, I call an emergency fashion consult with Priya on the day of my very first employee interview.

  Ultimately, we throw together the black slacks that I wore once for a middle school chorus concert with a blouse that my auntie Lei got from Taiwan. I even sneak into my parents’ bathroom, steal some lipstick, and comb my hair. Checking myself in the warped bathroom cabinet mirror, I have to give myself props. Pretty good “She Cleans Up Nicely” trope.

  At 1:50 I head down to the restaurant. The place is pretty much dead except for the sounds of Jin-Jin cleaning up the kitchen in the background, so I bring out my laptop and transfer the questions from Monster.com onto a legal pad, as if that were somehow more official.

  At 1:53 I grab two glasses of water, feeling only a little silly when I set them on cocktail napkins, because it’s not like Formica forms water stains.

  At 1:58 the bell jangles as someone comes in. It’s a tall black guy in a navy-blue suit that doesn’t quite fit him. He looks almost lost, and there’s a furrow between his brows as he scans the restaurant before settling on me.

  “Can I help you?” I ask. “We’re still serving lunch if you need anything.”

  “I’m, um, William Domenici.”

  I puff a laugh. “Oh, of course. Sorry,” I stammer, and give my head a shake, only barely resisting an actual facepalm. Way to get off on the right foot. “Sorry. Please come in.”

  Oh, God, I’m such a screwup.

  WILL

  The girl at A-Plus is quite pretty, or would be if her mouth wasn’t twisting in dismay. She has shoulder-length hair that frames round, full cheeks and brown eyes with thick, quirky eyebrows.

  “Sorry. Please come in,” she says.

  “I wasn’t who you expected,” I say grimly, a familiar tightness growing in my chest.

  “No, not really.” She smiles crookedly. “You just look so professional I didn’t take you for a high school student.” At that her smile breaks open, and the pressure under my breastbone recedes. She stands up and beckons me in to sit at her table.

  “Hi, William. I’m Jocelyn Wu,” she says as she extends her hand. I try to subtly wipe mine against my pants before holding out my own. Her hands are soft and dry. They feel like my mother’s favorite blue silk scarf.

  “It’s Will. Call me Will.”

  This Is My Brain on Chemistry

  JOCELYN

  Will sits across from me and I slide the glass of water over to him. He nods in thanks and fiddles a little bit with the corner of the napkin. It’s the smallest sign of nerves and reminds me that I’m supposed to be running the show.

  It’s hard to feel in charge when he’s wearing a suit and I’m in an outfit Frankensteined from my thrift-store chic wardrobe. I feel… short sitting across from him and straighten up a little bit. But it’s weird. He doesn’t act tall, and his shoulders slope a little bit, almost apologetically. It’s cute. Or it would be if I weren’t concentrating on interviewing him. Which I totally am.

  I clear my throat and peek down at my notes.

  “So, Will. What makes you interested in working here at A-Plus?”

  WILL

  I swallow, and suddenly I can feel my heart throbbing in my ears. This is the question that I’ve dreaded the most, that I pondered all last night as I second-guessed my decision to accept the interview. I’m still not sure if I’ll get it right.

  “I’ve eaten your food before and think that it’s great. I like that you can use my web skills, and it’ll be cool to get behind-the-scenes in the restaurant game. Plus, I work for the St. Agnes school paper and my adviser wanted me to learn how to manage a team and grow a business.”

  She nods, expression neutral. I want to see that little sliver of a smile again, so I add, my voice shaking only a little, “Also I thought your sign was cute.”

  If you were to measure it, her lips probably tick up only a millimeter. But it brings me miles closer to calm.

  JOCELYN

  I knew the emojis would be a hit. I knew it! My dad frowned and said it looked “not professional,” but I was right. I let myself preen for just a second and then settle down to business. Who is this guy and do I want to pay him with the money I shredded my soul to earn?

  “You said you work for the school newspaper at St. Agnes?” That’s the local Catholic school. No wonder I didn’t recognize him.

  “I just finished my sophomore year.”

  “Me too. I’m at Perry High.” Weird, to be interviewing someone who is the same age as me. My eyes flick toward the legal pad with questions from Monster.com.

  “Tell me about your greatest strength? And your biggest weakness?”

  Will nods and looks straight at me, and wow, effective use of eye contact. While his skin is a smooth medium brown, his eyes are dark, almost black, kind of like mine. “My greatest strength is probably that I am very detail oriented and careful. I think before I act and try to consider all the consequences of my actions before I do anything. That’s how my parents raised me.”

  He says the last part almost as an afterthought and breaks our gaze to take a sip of water.

  WILL

  My parents raised me to be thoughtful, of course, because when you’re black in America you need to consider the consequences of your actions in a way that other people don’t.

  Sometimes, though, thinking too much can paralyze you. So when Jocelyn asks me what my biggest weakness is, I tell the truth. “I guess the flip side of thoughtfulness is that I can think too much. Once in a while, it takes me too long to get things done. My sister, Grace, calls me a camel.” I grin, thinking of last Christmas when she gleefully packed my stocking with dromedary-themed stuff. “I can agonize for hours over things that seem trivial to others. But the thing is, I feel like when I make decisions, I can stand by them.”

  JOCELYN

  Will’s honesty catches me off guard. “Good answer,” I blurt out a millisecond before the silence gets uncomfortable. I blush. God, how condescending.

  He takes it in stride, and I wonder if it’s because he’s been told too many times how “articulate” he is. “Thank you.”

  I look at question number three. “So, what do you want to know about us?”

  “What are the general duties you mentioned in your e-mail?” Will asks.

  I shrug. “Whatever needs to be done. The main thing I need help with is social media and outreach. We need to get more customers. But the more customers we have, the more we might need someone to help with processing credit cards and delivering. Do you have a car?”

  Will nods.

  Thank God. If Will can drive, we can expand our delivery radius—right now we only deliver to where my brother and I can bike. We really aren’t going to find a more perfect candidate. The restaurant might actually have a fighting chance.

  “Anyway, that’s the deal. I think you’d be great for the job. We can’t really pay you more than minimum wage plus gas mileage, but you’ll also get some money from tips. You could probably get thirty to forty dol
lars if it’s a good night. And of course, we’ll provide a meal each shift.”

  This is the part that I dread: I watch him do the mental math, and I step back for a second and consider this from his point of view. He has a good résumé, excellent references. What the heck do I think A-Plus Chinese Garden can offer him?

  Nothing.

  I close my laptop and finish off my water in one gulp. “I can give you a few days to make your decision. I know you’ve probably got a lot of options. But if it sweetens the pot any, I can also add the Netflix password that I stole from my BFF into your compensation package.”

  He grins at that, the corner of his eyes crinkling, and I feel a pang that it might be both the first and the last time I ever see his smile.

  WILL

  When Jocelyn offers me a job on the spot, our role reversal is so absolute it’s dizzying. All of a sudden, I’m no longer the supplicant. I’ve been chosen, and I don’t know what to do with my newfound power to reject.

  I don’t respond immediately, and Jocelyn’s face falls, and I’m surprised by how keenly I feel her disappointment in my own chest. It seems out of proportion to what I could offer as an employee.

  If I’m being honest, I applied to the job to prove to myself and to Javier that I’m an equal-opportunity job seeker, and I agreed to the interview mostly because it seemed like a low-stakes way to get another interview under my belt. But then today when I told Manny where I was going, he got really excited. “Did you know A-Plus is the only restaurant in that strip mall that hasn’t closed in my lifetime?”

  It made me wonder if there is a story there. In the Spartan, we’re always writing about stores that are opening. We’ve never really done a piece on the restaurants—the Utica institutions, really—that stay open. Just last fall, Javier went for a photo shoot for an article about a new gastropub; I remember laying out his photos and being surprised by how trendy it looked, and thinking that the owners must have spent a fortune on interior design.