Lisa Ko - The Leavers

“You serious?”

“Come on, we can grab a beer, chill.”

Cody considered this. “I am kind of parched.”

IN THE BACK ROOM of the Black Cat, the only business open on a block of boarded-up storefronts, four middle-aged men were playing a cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” Amber and Kelsey waved Daniel and Cody over from a table near the stage.

“You guys found each other,” Amber said. “You smell like a bong.”

“Like Colorado,” Daniel said.

“How’s all that studying going for your test tomorrow, Wilkinson?”

“What test?” Daniel poured himself a glass of beer from the pitcher on the table. The band broke into a guitar solo and the lead singer, bald and stocky, started headbanging. Daniel laughed. “These guys suck.”

“They’re not that bad,” Kelsey said.

“They’d last half a song in the city until they got booed offstage.”

“Guns N’ Roses is all right.” Cody screwed up his face and played air guitar. His fingers weren’t even in the right places for the imaginary frets and strings. “ You’re in the jungle now! I don’t care if they suck. I don’t care.”

Kelsey shrieked. “Oh my God, you guys are twins!”

Daniel looked down. He was wearing his hiking boots, even in the middle of the summer, because he didn’t have any other shoes. Cody was wearing a pair, too. Both of them wore blue jeans and black T-shirts.

“You’re like the Asian version of Cody,” Amber said, and everyone laughed.

Kelsey took a picture with her phone. Cody said, with a fake lisp, “We planned our outfits together.”

The singer screeched. The band, at least, looked like they were having fun.

He came home at midnight, his buzz long gone, and lay on top of the same quilt that had been there when he’d first become Daniel. Those early months in Ridgeborough had been suspicious, begrudging. But at some point it had become easier to play along; it had become second nature. The doubts had burrowed deeper until he barely felt them at all. By his last year in high school, thinking of Deming or Mama was like remembering a terrible band he had once loved but now filled him with mortification. Only once, in high school, after he saw the Chinese woman in the mall, had he let things slip. When Kay and Peter had told him that he had to stay home and study for the SATs instead of going to see a band with Roland, Deming had said his real mother would’ve let him go. It had popped out, unbidden, real mother an abstraction; Mama would probably have made him stay home. He hadn’t meant to hurt Kay and Peter that much, but he was angry at the injustice — if he missed this show he might never see this band again! — and Kay had winced and told him it wasn’t the end of the world. “We are your real family,” Peter had said.

Back then, the mystery of what happened to his real family had been too enormous to solve. But now he had found them, and nothing had changed.

He’d have to pull an all-nighter to finish the essays. Schenkmann had returned his last paper marked up in red pen. He typed his name out on a blank Word document, followed by the date. The cursor blinked back at him as he read the first question again.

Discuss two major theories that characterize the role played by interest groups in U.S. politics. Describe the insights these theories can offer regarding the operations of the legislative process.

He sighed. He had never seen the guy who was playing poker in Econ class again; Amber said he might have dropped out. Daniel closed his laptop and decided to take his guitar out instead. A new thing was forming, not the essay he was supposed to write, but the song he’d been working on before he left the city.

Two hours later, when he returned to the essay, he saw an e-mail from Angel. He’d been sending her the occasional message, but this was the first time she had responded.

Daniel, PLEASE don’t text me anymore. I wish you the best.

~ A

He read it again. She had wished him the best. It was proof she still cared for him, otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered to write at all. He recalled her clear, low voice, devoid of shrillness or forced emotion, and craved her decisiveness, her competence; he would keep writing her until she understood. Because here was a way he had changed: he’d lost his mother and Roland, things that should have made him feel worthless and rejected. Yet it hadn’t destroyed him.

He’d do it for Angel, then. School, grades, career, show her he could get it together. She would have to forgive him. He hit reply, a streak of hope:

i’m going to do better for you

The front of the card was pastel blue plaid. “Dear Dad,” he wrote. “Happy Father’s Day. Love, Daniel.”

“I was thinking,” Kay said, sitting next to Daniel at the kitchen table, “since it’s Father’s Day and all.”

He folded the card into the envelope, licked and sealed it, wrote “Dad” on the front.

“About how Mother’s Day has always been a little uncomfortable for me. I appreciate how you always give us cards. But I can guess that maybe these aren’t the most comfortable holidays for you either?”

“I don’t mind.”

“I mean, when you were younger I thought I didn’t deserve to celebrate the holiday, that it was, I don’t know, inauthentic for me to do so as an adoptive mother. Elaine was the one who told me, just embrace it. It didn’t do you any good to have a parent doubting her ability. You needed a mother, and if I wasn’t a mother, than who was?” Kay ran her fingers along the edge of the table. “I had those doubts a lot when you first came to live with us.”

Daniel pushed his empty sandwich plate around in a semicircle. Peter was upstairs in the study; he should go spend more time with Peter. It was Father’s Day.

Kay’s eyes flipped from Daniel’s face to the wall to the kitchen window. “We were so afraid of doing something wrong. We thought it would be better if you changed your name so you would feel like you belonged with us, with our family. That you had a family.”

Daniel never knew if Kay wanted him to apologize or reassure her. Either way, he always felt implicated, like there was some expectation he wasn’t meeting.

“Mom.” He didn’t want to see her cry, especially if it was on his behalf. “It’s okay.”

Kay got up, and he heard her opening the drawer of the dining room cabinet. She returned, placing a fat manila envelope on the table.

“What’s this?”

“It’s all the records we have concerning your adoption. The correspondence with the foster care agency, the forms we filled out. I’ve been meaning for you to have them.”

Daniel opened the envelope and flipped through the stack of paper, saw the forms and e-mails he’d read that afternoon ten years ago. “Thanks.” There would be nothing in here he hadn’t seen before.

“Your father didn’t agree with me about doing this. He said it would only stir up bad memories, but I insisted.”

Daniel bent the envelope’s metal clasp back and forth. “I do know some things, actually. I should tell you. I found my mother recently — I mean, my birth mother. She’s in China.”

He told Kay about how his mother had gone to work and never came home, how Leon had left for China six months after. How Vivian had gotten him fostered. That his mother might have been deported.

Kay looked like she’d been punched.

“I spoke to her,” he finally said. “Twice.”

“What did she say? What was it like?” Kay’s smile was trembling at the sides, so strained it looked like it hurt.

“It was good, though a little weird, and my Chinese is rusty but we managed to understand each other. She lives in Fuzhou, and she’s married and working as an English teacher.”