New From Here, page 14
Mom’s face softens a little. She sighs. “I just wish you had asked me first.…”
I nod with regret.
“Was it just my clothes and some candleholders?” Mom asks. “You didn’t take anything else out of my closet?”
I shake my head. “Nope!”
“No brooches or earrings that were in the special velvet box in my closet?”
At the mention of a velvet box, I freeze. “What earrings? We didn’t sell any earrings.” I think back to all the stuff on the table… then remember the velvet box. The one that couldn’t open. Oh no. I glance at my siblings. “I thought that box was empty!”
Mom puts a horrified hand to her face.
“Tell me you didn’t sell it! There were earrings inside—real rubies! They were an anniversary present from your father!” Mom shrieks.
My brother and sister stare at me.
“I didn’t know!” I say. “I thought it was empty. Honest! I even tried opening the box, but it wouldn’t open! That’s why I wrote a quarter.”
“You sold it for a quarter??” Mom says, feeling her forehead with her hand like she’s about to pass out. “They’re worth like a thousand dollars!”
Lea jumps up from the couch. “We have to get it back!”
“Do you remember who paid for it??” Bowen asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t remember! There were so many people!”
“Think, Knox, think!!” my siblings urge.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to remember. A blur of faces swirl through my mind, but honestly, I was too hyper-focused on getting them all to add Dad on LinkedIn, I can’t remember what any of them looked like. At the thought of LinkedIn, it suddenly hits me. “We have everyone’s emails! We could send them an email!”
“And say what? We accidentally sold you thousand-dollar earrings for a quarter, please email us back?!” Bowen asks, shaking his head. “They’ll never respond!”
“You have so little faith in people!” I shout.
Bowen points his finger at me. “You’re the one giving away family treasures for a quarter! They’re probably already on some old lady’s ears by now.…”
Lea bursts into tears at the heartbreaking possibility that our mother’s precious anniversary earrings from Dad are on another woman’s ears.
“It’s okay…,” Mom says, trying to calm us down. “Not like Dad and I are going on a date anytime soon.…” She feels her bare earlobes with her fingertips.
“I’m so sorry, Mommy,” I say.
Mom puts her hand over mine. “I know you are. And I’m happy you guys took the initiative to start a garage sale.” She looks into our eyes. “But next time, please be more careful.”
“I promise I’ll get you back your earrings,” I say to Mom.
I stand up and walk to my room. Even though I try so hard, I keep messing things up.
Chapter 47
Lea shuffles into our room later that night in her fuzzy slippers with a heavy look on her face. “I just talked to Mom,” she says to me. “I told her it wasn’t all your idea to sell her stuff. It was mine, too.”
I climb down from my bunk, surprised. She didn’t have to do that. Still, I appreciate it.
“What are we going to do?” Lea asks, plopping down on the floor.
I sit down next to her with my computer on my lap and load up LinkedIn. One by one, I sort through Dad’s new connections, trying to see who could have possibly bought the earrings. But all of Dad’s new adds look like they could rock a pair of rubies!
“We have to find Mom’s ruby earrings,” Lea says. “We can’t just let some stranger walk off with them!”
“Agreed,” I say.
“Okay, so mei mei,” Bowen says, using the Chinese term for “sister” as he joins us on the floor. “You were sales. Do you remember seeing anyone holding the box?”
Lea closes her eyes. “I think I saw a couple with a spotted poodle standing by the box.”
Bowen frowns. “A spotted poodle??” he asks Lea. “There’s no such thing!”
Before I know it, Lea and Bowen start arguing about whether or not poodles can be spotted.
“Maybe it was a mix between a Dalmatian and a poodle!”
“They don’t exist!”
“You want to bet?” Lea asks.
I wave my hands in the air to put a stop to the puppy debate. “So what did they look like? The couple?”
“I don’t remember,” Lea says.
We all think for a long, hard minute. Then Lea’s eyes brighten and she runs across the room to the window.
Our eyes follow our sister’s finger as she points to our neighbor across the street. There, up on the beam of his roof, is a video camera, pointed right at our garage!
Chapter 48
It’s too late to go over to the neighbor’s house that night. Mom has a rule about not going out at night ever since Dad’s luggage got stolen from the garage. I was only two when it happened, but Bowen said it was super scary. Mom tried all day long to call the cops, but because nobody got hurt, the cops didn’t even come by.
So we wait till morning.
Bright and early the next day, we head across the street. We’ve never gone to talk to our neighbors before, except when Mom went around and let everyone know about the luggage theft, and that’s when folks started putting up security cameras. I gaze up at the camera as we wait for our neighbor to answer the door.
“Hello?” we ask. “Anyone home?”
We hear slow, faint shuffling coming from inside. Finally, an old man opens the door.
“Hi! We’re from the yellow house.” I smile at him, pointing to our home. “We were wondering if we could check out the footage from your security camera. Something happened at our house this weekend.…”
“Oh, I don’t know how that thing works. But if you wanna check it out, go right ahead.” He opens his door wider to let us in.
“Thanks!” we say.
“Name’s Cliff Brady,” he tells us. We shake his hand as we walk inside. I peer around his spacious living room.
Mr. Brady shows Bowen the den—he tells us that’s where he keeps all his Wi-Fi and home surveillance stuff. As Bowen disappears into the den to check it out, Lea and I wait in the living room, marveling at all the pictures and memorabilia on Mr. Brady’s walls. He sure has lots of stuff! I’d love to have a garage sale with it, then immediately kick myself for thinking that. What did Mom just say about selling off other people’s stuff?
I point to an old picture of a major soccer match.
“Wow… you were in the World Cup?” I ask him. I peer enviously at the uniforms of England versus Argentina.
Mr. Brady chuckles. “No, I covered the World Cup,” he says. “I was a journalist for many years. Now I just sit by the telephone, waiting for my grandkids to call me.” I glance at his phone. It’s one of those old telephones with the round dial.
“Cool!” Lea says, sitting down and playing with it. “I wish we had one of these!”
“It’s so old-school!” I say, reaching for it too.
“You like it?” Mr. Brady chuckles. “I got it for three dollars at a garage sale!”
“We had a garage sale this weekend!” I tell him. My face falls. “That’s kind of why we’re here. We accidentally sold our mom’s anniversary earrings.”
“Oh, well, you gotta get those back,” Mr. Brady says. “They’re irreplaceable! I still remember every anniversary with my lovely Dorothy as though it were yesterday.…” Mr. Brady walks over and, with a trembling hand, picks up a faded old black-and-white wedding picture of him with his wife.
Lea and I walk over to look at it.
“She passed, unfortunately,” Mr. Brady says, shaking his head. “It’s just me now, in this big old house all by myself.” His eyes get misty for a second. “I miss her every day.”
My sister and I tell Mr. Brady that we miss our dad too. That’s why we had the garage sale—to raise enough money to get Dad a plane ticket so we can be a family again.
“Well, here, let me help with that,” Mr. Brady says, taking out his wallet. With his shaky hand, he starts pulling out bills, but I push them back. It wouldn’t be right to accept his money. Mom wouldn’t like it if she knew.
“Thanks, but we need to earn it,” I say to Mr. Brady.
“Good for you!” he says. “I like that.”
“So if you ever need someone to cut your grass or give you a cucumber facial…,” Lea says.
“Well, I already have a gardener. But I like the sound of a cucumber facial,” Mr. Brady says.
Lea grins and holds up a finger. “Be right back!”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, my sister is in the middle of slathering Mr. Brady’s face with homemade cucumber gel—her facial keeps getting more and more professional—when Bowen walks back in from the den.
“Got the footage!” he says, holding up a USB. He adds with a smile to Mr. Brady, “Oh, and I fixed your Wi-Fi!”
“You did?” Mr. Brady asks, face beaming and glistening with thick, gooey cucumber aloe vera. “I’ve been trying to get that thing fixed for months!” He reaches for his wallet and stuffs twenty dollars into our hands. “Here, kids, you’ve earned it.”
“Thanks!” We grin as we race back to our house with the USB!
Chapter 49
We squeeze in front of Bowen’s computer, clamoring to look at the footage. The bright noon sun streams through the window.
“There’s the spotted poodle right there!” Lea points to a little dog at the garage sale.
“That’s not a spotted poodle,” Bowen corrects her. “That’s a Boston terrier.”
“Really?” Lea asks, looking closely at the dog. He seems to be wearing a special collar. It glistens in the light every time he runs up to his owners and licks their hands.
“Oh, and there’s the box!” I point to it in the hand he’s licking.
Bowen pauses the footage and zooms in on the owners’ faces. They are two guys. The box is in the hand of the guy holding the leash. I pull up LinkedIn and we start searching through profiles of the people who added Dad, but unfortunately, none of the profile pictures look like the guys in the screen.
Either they changed their profile pictures or they somehow slipped by without adding Dad—those sneaky rascals!
“Now what? How do we find them?” Lea asks.
My mind races a mile a minute. “We know they have a dog!” I say. “Let’s go to the—”
“Dog park!” Lea finishes the thought, jumping up.
I grin.
Bowen takes a screenshot of the Boston terrier couple and prints it out with his printer. We run downstairs and grab our bikes, hollering to Mom, who’s on the phone talking to Auntie Jackie, that we’ll be back by dinner.
* * *
“Okay, if we see them, I’ll do the talking,” Bowen says when we get to the parking lot of the local dog park. I look over at him. It’s nice he’s helping us with this, but why should he do all the talking?
“Why you?” I ask Bowen.
“Because I’m the oldest!” We can hear the friendly barks of curious pups, and it makes me miss Cody so much.
“Fine,” I reply.
Lea points to a little Boston terrier that looks just like the dog in our picture, trotting ahead off leash.
We immediately start running after it.
“Here, little guy, wait up!” Lea says. But when we get close, we see that unfortunately, it’s not the same dog. He doesn’t have a sparkling collar on his neck, like the dog in the picture.
The owner, a woman with pink hair and a Team Herbivore shirt, pulls out her AirPods and asks us, “What’s going on?”
“We’re trying to find a dog that looks just like yours,” I tell her, holding up the picture.
She glances at the picture. “I’m sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t know those two guys.”
Putting her AirPods back in, she starts jogging away, then stops. “Wait, but I think I’ve seen that dog before, at puppy socialization class!”
“Really?” we ask.
“Yeah, now I remember the collar. Here, I can give you the number of the instructor,” she says, jogging back.
“That’d be great!” we say. Bowen pulls out his phone and the woman adds the number into it.
“Thanks!” we say to her.
As the woman jogs away, I leap into the air. “We caught a scent in the trail! We’re gonna get Mom’s earrings back!”
Lea and I hold our breath as Bowen calls. Unfortunately, the dog trainer doesn’t answer. We leave a message. As Bowen puts his phone away, a labradoodle runs over to us. For a second I think it’s Cody, and my heart leaps to my throat! But then I realize there’s no way Cody could be here, and the collar on him says CHARLIE.
We bend down to pet Charlie the labradoodle.
“Awww, you’re so cute,” Bowen says, while Charlie licks Bowen’s ear, making him laugh. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
The next thing I know, a loud and cranky voice snaps sharply at us, “Get away from my dog!”
We turn around and come face-to-face with a furious-looking white man in a fisherman’s hat and glasses. “Did I say you can touch my dog?” he barks at Bowen.
Bowen scrambles up and shakes his head, looking down. “No, sir.”
“Then why are you touching my dog, you oriental??” the man demands.
Bowen freezes. I furrow my eyebrows, confused, wondering why he’s calling my gege by the term used to refer to rugs. Obviously, Bowen’s not a rug.
“You can’t just go up to people’s dogs and touch them, it’s unhygienic!” the man continues to rant.
Lea and I take a step backward, away from the angry man and his dog. We’re both scared. But the man turns to us and mutters, “You two are okay.”
I look up at him, confused. “But you just said—”
“I’m only worried about this one,” the man says, pointing to Bowen. “People like him are the reason we now have this virus in the world. Go back to where you came from! If your people weren’t so filthy—”
Bowen immediately turns and sprints away, hiding his hot face with the sleeve of his hoodie.
“ ‘Your people’??” I say to the man. “That’s our brother!”
“Yeah!” Lea cries out. “You can’t speak to him that way!”
“He’s your brother?” The man frowns at his dog. “C’mon, Charlie, let’s get away from these crazy mutts,” he says as he gives his dog’s collar a hard yank and pulls him away from my sister and me, eyeing us with disgust.
* * *
We find Bowen on a bench on the outskirts of the park and sit down next to him. I try to talk to him, but every time I say something, he snaps, “Stop. I’m fine.” I know he’s not really fine because he’s clutching the paper with the Boston terrier’s picture so hard it’s practically soggy.
My mind can’t stop thinking about what that man said, and it makes me want to scream. How could he say that to Bowen? To us? My hands ball into fists as I replay his words—these crazy mutts. It fills me up with so much pain. And yet I know the pain I’m feeling is nowhere near what Bowen must be feeling. I gaze over at my brother, wishing he’d let it out. Even a trickle…
But all he says is, “Don’t tell Mom about this.”
“Why not?” I ask him. “It’s not right! She needs to know!”
Quietly, my sister whispers to me, “Why’d that man say, ‘Go back to where you came from’?” she asks. “Does he mean our house three blocks away?” She doesn’t get it. She’s too little to understand.
“No, that’s not what he meant,” Bowen says as he gets up and walks over to his bike. He kicks the metal kickstand hard as he reminds me, “Don’t tell Mom.”
I wish I could tell my brother he shouldn’t be embarrassed by what happened. That man should be embarrassed. We did nothing wrong. As I pedal furiously, following my gege home, I hope the pain will slowly dry up like the slobber on my hands where the dog licked me.
Chapter 50
Bowen doesn’t say anything at dinner about what happened at the dog park. When Mom asks us how our afternoon was, he gives me a don’t you dare look, then stuffs a bunch of instant dinner rolls into his mouth. Mom is too busy trying to get Lea to eat her vegetables to notice anything is wrong.
I google the term “oriental” on my computer after dinner. Bowen walks in as I’m searching and immediately slaps my laptop shut.
“Don’t google that,” he hisses at me, like I’m looking up something R-rated. “EVER!”
“Okay, okay,” I promise him. Instead, I pick up the posters Lea made for the garage sale. We took them down around the neighborhood after the sale. I start rolling them up.
“What are you doing?” Bowen asks.
“I’m saving these. You know, in case we have another garage sale.”
“We’re not having another garage sale,” Bowen says, reaching for the scissors. “I’m cutting these up.”
I look up at him in alarm and hold the posters close to my chest protectively. “But what about Dad?” I ask. “What about our plan to get him here?”
Bowen doesn’t say anything.
I sink to the floor and peer up at him, trying to read his face. As gently as I can, I bring up what happened at the park. “You can’t let that guy get to you. Forget about him.…”
“I can’t just forget, okay?” Bowen says. “You don’t understand, it’s different for you!”
I search my brother’s eyes, struggling to understand.
“People look at you and they see a white kid. They look at me, and they see…” Bowen covers his face with his hands. “A virus carrier.”
“Well, they’re wrong!” I jump up in fury. I walk over to my brother and gaze between the cracks in his fingers. I take a deep breath and tell him the real reason why I kicked the soccer ball way over the fence. It wasn’t because of my ADHD. It was because of the mean things Tyler was saying about Christopher and me.
