Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

If your car begins to skid, you should… All of the answers seemed plausible. She skipped ahead. When are roads and highways most slippery? How much distance should you leave between yourself and the vehicle in front of you under good road conditions? To her right, a man with a mustache closed his booklet and put down his pencil. C, Lydia guessed. A. D. On the next page, she found a list of sentences she could not complete. When driving behind a large truck on the freeway, you should … To safely navigate a curve, you should… When backing up, you should… She repeated each question to herself and got stuck on the last words, like a scratched record: you should, you should, you should. Then someone touched her shoulder, softly, and the woman from the front of the room said, “I’m sorry, dear, time’s up.”

Lydia kept her head bent over the desk, as if the words would not be true until she saw the woman’s face. A dark spot formed in the middle of the paper, and it took her a moment to realize it was the mark of a tear, that it was hers. She wiped the paper clean with her hand, then wiped her cheek. Everyone else had gone.

“It’s okay,” the woman said. “You only need fourteen right.” But Lydia knew she had filled in only five circles.

In the next room, where a man fed answer sheets into the scoring machine, she jabbed her finger with the tip of her pencil. “Eighteen right,” the man said to the girl in front of her. “Take this to the counter and they’ll take your picture and print your permit. Congratulations.” The girl gave a happy little skip as she passed through the door and Lydia wanted to slap her. There was a brief moment of silence as the man looked at Lydia’s form, and she focused on the splotch of mud on his boot.

“Well,” he said. “Don’t feel bad. Lots of people fail the first time.” He turned the paper faceup and again she saw the five dark circles, like moles, the rest of the sheet blank and bare. Lydia did not wait for her score. As the machine sucked in the answer sheet, she walked straight past him, back into the waiting room.

There was a long line at the counter for photos now; the man with the mustache counted the bills in his wallet, the girl who had skipped picked at her nail polish. The pigtailed girl and the boy had already gone. On the bench, James sat waiting. “So,” he said, looking down at her empty hands. “Where is it?”

“I failed,” she said. The two women beside her father on the bench looked up at her, then quickly away. Her father blinked, once, twice, as if he hadn’t heard her properly.

“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “You can try again this weekend.” In the cloud of disappointment and humiliation, Lydia did not remember, or care, that she could take the test again. In the morning, Nath would leave for Boston. All she could think was: I will be here forever. I will never be able to get away.

James put his arm around his daughter, but it weighed on her shoulders like a lead blanket, and she shrugged it off.

“Can we go home now?” she said.

• • •

“As soon as Lydia comes in,” Marilyn said, “we’ll say surprise. And then we’ll have dinner, and presents after.” Nath was up in his room, packing for his trip, and alone with her youngest, she was planning aloud, half talking to herself. Hannah, delighted to have her mother’s attention even by default, nodded sagely. Under her breath she practiced— Surprise! Surprise! — and watched her mother pipe Lydia’s name in blue onto the sheet cake. It was supposed to look like a driver’s license, a white-frosted rectangle with a photo of Lydia in the corner where the real photograph would be. Inside, it was chocolate cake. Because this was an extra-special birthday, Marilyn had baked this cake herself — from a box, true, but she had mixed it, one hand moving the mixer through the cake batter, the other holding the battered aluminum bowl still against the whirling blades. She had let Hannah pick out the tub of frosting, and now she squeezed out the last of the tube of decorator’s icing spelling L-Y-D and reached into the grocery bag for another.

Such a special cake, Hannah thought, would taste extra-special, too. Better than just plain vanilla or chocolate. The box had shown a smiling woman hovering over a slice of cake and the words You mix in the love. Love, Hannah decided, would be sweet, like her mother’s perfume, and soft as marshmallows. Quietly she extended a finger, gouging a small dip in the perfectly smooth surface of the cake. “Hannah!” Marilyn snapped, and swatted her hand away.

While her mother smoothed the dent with the spatula, Hannah touched the frosting on her finger to her tongue. It was so sweet her eyes watered, and when Marilyn wasn’t looking, she wiped the rest of it onto the backside of the tablecloth. She could tell by the little line between her mother’s eyebrows that she was still upset, and she wanted to lean her head against Marilyn’s aproned thigh. Then her mother would understand that she hadn’t meant to mess up the cake. But as she reached out, Marilyn set down the tube of icing mid-letter and lifted her head, listening. “That can’t be them already.”

Beneath her feet, Hannah felt the floor shiver as the garage door groaned open. “I’ll get Nath.”

By the time Hannah and Nath arrived downstairs, though, Lydia and their father had already come from the garage into the hallway, and the moment for Surprise had passed. Instead Marilyn took Lydia’s face between her hands and kissed her on the cheek, hard, leaving a red smudge of lipstick, like a welt.

“You’re home early,” she said. “Happy birthday. And congratulations.” She held out a palm. “So? Let’s see it.”

“I failed,” Lydia said. She glared from Nath to their mother, as if daring them to be upset.

Marilyn stared. “What do you mean, you failed?” she said, honest surprise in her voice, as if she had never heard the word.

Lydia said it again, louder: “I failed. ” It was almost, Hannah thought, as if she were mad at their mother, mad at all of them. It could not be just the test. Her face was stony and still, but Hannah saw the tiny trembles — in her hunched shoulders, in her jaw clenched tight. As if she might shiver to pieces. She wanted to wrap her arms tight around her sister’s body, to hold her together, but she knew Lydia would only push her away. No one else noticed. Nath and Marilyn and James glanced at each other, unsure what to say.

“Well,” Marilyn said at last. “You’ll just study the traffic rules and try again when you’re ready. It’s not the end of the world.” She tucked a stray lock of hair behind Lydia’s ear. “It’s okay. It’s not like you failed a school subject, right?”

On any other day, this would have made Lydia boil over inside. Today — after the necklace, after the boys in front of the car, after the test, after Louisa — there was no room left in her for anger. Something within her tipped and cracked.

“Sure, Mom,” she said. She looked up at her mother, around at her whole family, and smiled, and Hannah nearly ducked behind Nath. The smile was too wide, too bright, cheery and white-toothed and fake. On her sister’s face it was terrifying; it made Lydia look like a different person, a stranger. Again no one else noticed. Nath’s shoulders unhunched; James let out his breath; Marilyn wiped her hands, which had grown damp, on her apron.

“Dinner’s not quite ready yet,” she said. “Why don’t you go up and take a shower and relax? We’ll eat early, as soon as it’s done.”