Lisa Ko - The Leavers

Deming wouldn’t have the scar on his right forearm that Daniel had gotten from skateboarding with Roland in eighth grade. While Deming was growing up in Chinatown and the Bronx, was Daniel hibernating, asleep in Planet Ridgeborough? Or had they grown up together, only parting ways after the city? Daniel had lay dormant in Deming until adolescence, and now Deming was a hairball tumor jammed deep in Daniel’s gut. Or Deming had never left Rutgers Street; he’d been here all along.

The front door of 27 Rutgers squeaked open, and a woman with a bouquet of grocery bags walked out. Worried he might seem like a creep, Daniel took out his phone and pretended to text. He knew it wouldn’t be Deming, couldn’t be Deming, yet he felt wasted with disappointment.

Under the Manhattan Bridge, the sounds around him coalesced. The fruit and vegetable vendors here were speaking Fuzhounese, and he knew what they were saying, the words not nonsense sounds but sentences with shape and meaning. The words plowed in, discovered a former residence, and resolved to stay. He repeated them until he was confident they’d be the right ones, then moved toward the vendors.

“Hey, you,” called a man weighing vegetables in a saggy blue coat, knit hat, and jeans. He had tobacco-stained teeth, a gray beard, and one gold crown. “What do you want?” he said in Fuzhounese.

“Hello,” Daniel said.

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“You Chinese?”

“Of course I’m Chinese.”

He fumbled for his wallet. The word for watermelon had swum up and emerged, and he concentrated until the rest of the sentence returned. “Give me a watermelon. They’re fresh right? Good watermelon, right?” He recalled enough to haggle, bumping the guy’s price down twenty-five cents, and it felt like he’d been born again.

The man said, “Go lower than that and my family will starve, thanks to you,” but there was laughter behind his scowl.

Daniel accepted the watermelon, triumphant. He pointed to a pile of greens. “And those. Half a pound. Broccoli.”

He carried the groceries to Roland’s apartment. It was one o’clock on a Tuesday, the winter sunlight so bright he had to squint; he had no plans for the rest of the afternoon. For years, he hadn’t allowed himself to think of those days after Mama never came home, after Leon left and Vivian left him with strangers, and now he imagined his mother waiting for him on Canal Street with a cigarette, remembered her duck walk as she made her way across the ice, the firmness of her hand in his. He’d be taller than her now, but there would be safety in her hand. Once, when he and Angel had been talking about their birth families, she had asked if he still wanted to find his mother, and he said no, not anymore. It was enough for him to accept that she was gone. But he’d never had the chance to ask her why she returned to China — she hated Minjiang — or to understand why he ended up in Ridgeborough.

He stopped on a corner, took out his phone, and responded to the e-mail Michael had sent months ago, hitting send before he could change his mind:

you’ve got the right guy. what’s up?

In Roland’s kitchen, he steamed the broccoli and cut slices of watermelon. It beat eating another deconstructed burrito at Tres Locos, and was cheaper than eating out. His current credit card balance was $2,079.23, with eighteen-percent interest, and that wasn’t counting the ten thousand he owed Angel. Seeing the bill every month from the credit card company made him so anxious, he created an auto-withdrawal from his bank account for the minimum payment — last month it was twenty-two bucks. He hadn’t talked to Angel for months, but now he would have to see her on Saturday, at her father’s birthday party, along with Peter and Kay.

In high school, he’d played Texas Hold’em with other guys at parties and had a talent for noticing their tells while hiding his own, the years with Peter and Kay making him an excellent keeper of secrets. Sophomore year at Potsdam, he heard about online poker, and when he was procrastinating writing papers, he would play a few games, nothing big. Over the summer, living in Ridgeborough with a job painting new five-bedroom houses on the edge of town, he learned he had a knack for deciphering patterns online: the players who folded often and only bet when they had good hands, the action ones who bet foolishly and gambled too much. Back at school the following fall, he’d met a guy named Kyle who was winning real money, a thousand in one night, and Daniel started playing more, six, even ten hours a day, one sit-and-go tournament after another, winner takes all. Late one night he emerged from his dorm room to use the bathroom, hearing the sounds of chips and shuffling cards as he refilled his water bottle in the sink, then scurried back down the hall and resumed playing again, clicking to bet and raise and fold, betting thrice the big blind before the flop and watching his money tick higher. The hours blurred until he heard slamming doors and voices, his body cramped and sore. He’d played into the next day, or the day after. At some point, the overhead light had become painfully bright, and sunlight started falling across the keyboard. He drank Red Bulls, pissed into the empty cans. He bet the pot on a full house and realized he’d been panting out loud. The next day, he heard people shouting his name from a very far distance, and opened the door to see his hallmates there, checking to see if he was still alive. Cards moving across their faces.

When Peter and Kay called and asked if he was going to classes, he’d assured them he was. He could win $4,000 in one night of playing tournaments, then lose that much in thirty minutes. At one point, there was $80,000 in his account. It didn’t seem like real money, but it was. He could have withdrawn it and cashed out, but there was always one more game, and one more after that.

All he needed was one good win, but the number that constituted a good win changed whenever he hit it. He shut down the account at zero then put it back up a day later. He went two whole days without playing, drove to Montreal with some friends to see a concert, and afterwards he wanted to buy himself a new guitar, new gear, get back into music. One more game and he’d be set.

He’d taken out a private loan to pay for next semester’s tuition, since his grades had gotten too low to qualify for financial aid, and burned through the loan money in a day. He borrowed what he could from friends, twenty here, fifty there, opened new credit cards and maxed them out. The shakier he got, the more he lost, and the more he lost, the more of an action player he became. He borrowed two thousand from Kyle with a promise to repay him in two weeks, but knew it was over when he kept losing, got frazzled when he heard the warning beep that he was running out of time to bet. So he bet half the pot on a 7–2 off suit. This was a surprise: suicide was also a rush.

He paid Kyle back, two hundred dollars. “Where’s the rest?” Kyle said.

Kyle and his friends, two beefed-up brothers that looked like they lifted cars for fun, began to come by his room several times a day, asking for the money. Daniel stopped leaving his room or opening the door. Now he was $10,000 in the hole.

Angel was going to school in Iowa. She had waitressed all summer and fall, working nights and weekends to save up for her spring semester abroad in Nepal, where she was going to teach at a school for girls, then spend the summer backpacking around Southeast Asia. She’d always loved architecture, geeked out on the layouts of cities, the differences in public transportation. Daniel had been dodging her calls for weeks, but he answered one night and told her about the losing streak, the money he’d borrowed from Kyle. “I need a favor,” he finally said. “I’ll pay it back in a week.” She had been reluctant, but agreed to transfer him ten thousand dollars. He would get Kyle off his back, get his accounts square again, then take out another loan and use that money to pay her.