Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

He fiddled with the clasp of the necklace, struggling with the tiny spring loop. “I wanted gold, but a reliable source told me everyone was wearing silver this year,” he said. Lydia ran a finger along the velvet lining of the box. Her father was so concerned with what everyone was doing: I’m so glad you’re going to the dance, honey — everyone goes to the dance. Your hair looks so pretty that way, Lyddie — everyone has long hair these days, right? Anytime she smiled: You should smile more — everyone likes a girl who smiles. As if a dress and long hair and a smile could hide everything about her that was different. If her mother let her go out like the other girls, she thought, it might not matter what she looked like — Jackie Harper had one blue eye and one green, and she’d been voted Most Social last year. Or if she looked like everyone else, perhaps it would not matter that she had to study all the time, that she could not go out on the weekends until she’d done all her homework, that she could not go out with boys at all. One or the other might be overcome. To be pulled both ways — no dress, no book, no locket could help that.

“There we go,” James said, the catch springing open at last. He refastened it at her nape, and the metal cut a line of cold, like a ring of ice, around her throat. “What do you think? Do you like it?” Lydia understood: this was meant to remind her of all he wanted for her. Like a string tied around her finger, only this lay around her neck.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and James mistook her hoarseness for deep gratitude.

“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll get along with everyone. You can never have too many friends.” And Lydia closed her eyes and nodded.

The next day, in honor of her birthday, she wore the necklace, as her father suggested. “Right after school,” James told her, “I’ll take you over to get your permit and we’ll have our first driving lesson before dinner.” Her mother said, “And after dinner, we’ll have cake. And I’ve got some special presents for the birthday girl.” Which meant books, Lydia thought. That night Nath would pack his suitcase. All day she consoled herself: In six hours, I will have my permit. In two weeks, I will be able to drive away.

At three o’clock, her father pulled up in front of the school, but when Lydia picked up her bookbag and started for the sedan, she was surprised to see someone already in the passenger seat: a Chinese woman — a girl, really — with long black hair.

“So nice to finally meet you,” the girl said as Lydia climbed into the backseat. “I’m Louisa, your dad’s teaching assistant.”

James paused the car to let a cluster of junior boys meander across the street. “Louisa has an appointment and since I was coming this way anyway, I offered her a ride.”

“I shouldn’t have said yes,” Louisa said. “I should have just canceled it. I hate the dentist.”

As he crossed in front of the car, one of the juniors grinned at them through the windshield and pulled his eyes into slits with his fingers. The others laughed, and Lydia scrunched down in her seat. It occurred to her: the boys probably thought Louisa was her mother. Squirming, she wondered if her father was embarrassed, too, but in the front seat, James and Louisa hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Ten bucks says you don’t even have one cavity,” James said.

“Five,” Louisa said. “I’m just a poor grad student, not a rich professor.” She patted his arm playfully, and the tenderness in her face shocked Lydia. Her mother looked at her father this way, late at night, when he was caught up in his reading and she leaned against his armchair affectionately, before nudging him to bed. Louisa’s hand lingered on her father’s arm and Lydia stared at them, her father and this girl, cozy in the front seat like a little married couple, a tableau framed by the bright screen of the windshield, and she thought suddenly: This girl is sleeping with my father.

It had never occurred to her before to think of her father as a man with desires. Like all teenagers, she preferred — despite her very existence — to imagine her parents as eternally chaste. But there was something in the way her father and Louisa touched, in their easy banter, that shocked her innocent sensibilities. To her, the faint crackle between them blazed so hotly that her cheeks flushed. They were lovers. She was sure of it. Louisa’s hand was still on her father’s arm and her father didn’t move, as if the caress were nothing unusual. In fact, James did not even notice: Marilyn often rested her hand on him just this way, and the feeling was too familiar to stand out. For Lydia, however, the way her father kept looking straight ahead, eyes still scanning the road, was all the confirmation she needed.

“So I hear it’s your birthday today,” Louisa said, twisting toward the backseat again. “Sixteen. I’m sure this will be a very special year for you.” Lydia didn’t respond, and Louisa tried again. “Do you like your necklace? I helped pick it out. Your dad asked my advice on what you might like.”

Lydia hooked two fingers beneath the chain, fighting the urge to yank it from her neck. “How would you know what I like? You don’t even know me.”

Louisa blinked. “I had some ideas. I mean, I’ve heard so much about you from your dad.”

Lydia looked her directly in the eye. “Really,” she said. “Daddy’s never mentioned you.”

“Come on, Lyddie,” James said, “you’ve heard me talk about Louisa. How smart she is. How she never lets those undergrads get away with anything.” He smiled at Louisa, and Lydia’s vision blurred.

“Daddy, where did you drive after you got your license?” she asked suddenly.

In the rearview mirror, James’s eyes flicked open in surprise. “To school, to swim practices and meets,” he said. “And on errands, sometimes.”

“But not on dates.”

“No,” James said. His voice cracked briefly, like a teenage boy’s. “No, not on dates.”

Lydia felt small and sharp and mean, like a tack. “Because you didn’t date. Right?” Silence. “Why not? Didn’t anybody want to go out with you?”

This time James kept his eyes on the road before them, and his hands on the wheel stiffened, elbows locking.

“Oh, now,” Louisa said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.” She put her arm on James’s elbow again, and this time she kept it there until they reached the dentist’s office, until James stopped the car and said, to Lydia’s outrage, “See you tomorrow.”

Despite his daughter glowering in the backseat, James did not realize anything was wrong. At the DMV, he kissed her on the cheek and took a chair. “You’ll do fine,” he said. “I’ll be right here when you’re done.” Thinking about how excited Lydia would be, permit in hand, he had forgotten all about the moment in the car. Lydia herself, still roiling with the secret she was sure she had discovered, turned away without a word.

In the test room, a woman handed her an exam booklet and a pencil and told her to take any empty seat. Lydia made her way toward the back corner of the room, stepping over bookbags and purses and the legs of the boy in the next-to-last row. Everything her father had ever said to her bounced back in a new tone: You can never have too many friends. She thought of her mother, sitting at home, doing the laundry, filling in a crossword, while her father— She was furious with him, furious with her mother for letting this happen. Furious with everyone.

At that moment Lydia realized the room had gone silent. Everyone’s head was bent over the test. She looked up at the clock, but it told her nothing: not when they started, not when the test ended, only the time, three forty-one. The second hand tick-tick-ticked around from eleven to twelve and the minute hand, like a long iron needle, jumped forward another notch. Three forty-two. She flipped her booklet open. What color is a stop sign? She filled in the circle for B: Red. What must you do if you see or hear an emergency vehicle coming from any direction? In her haste, the pencil slipped outside the bubble in a jagged claw. A few rows up, a girl with pigtails rose, and the woman at the front gestured her into the next room. A moment later, the boy sitting next to her did the same. Lydia looked down at her booklet again. Twenty questions. Eighteen left to go.