Chapter 2: Back to the Future.
Back to the fucking future (or past — I never understood that stupid title. I mean, why would you say “back to the future” when most of the time they were going into the past?):
Set the flux capacitor back-in-time clock on the DeLorean for seventh grade, and the location to the kitchen table inside the brick ranch at the corner of Maple and Greene Streets in Marcine, Ohio.
Ready? Here we go.
Momma slides still-crackling bacon and fried potatoes onto my plate out of the cast iron skillet she holds with a scorched oven mitt dotted with little pink flowers. I push my bacon and potatoes to the side, reach for the bowl of scrambled eggs.
“More eggs?” she says skeptically when I pile them onto my plate. Her tongue clucks against the roof of her mouth. “Lord, child. How you stay so skinny, eating like that?”
I shrug my shoulders, because how the hell would I know? All I know is that I’m hungry, all the time hungry, and even though I already had one big pile of eggs and one helping of bacon, I know I’ll be trying to sneak snacks by the time Social Studies hits if I don’t put a little more food in my stomach.
“She eats like a pig,” quips my sister Dutch. Her name’s not actually “Dutch,” it’s “Dechen,” but I had trouble saying that when I was little, so she’s been Dutch since I was two.
I make a face at my sister that my mother can’t see, opening my mouth wide so she has a good view of my mouthful of half-chewed scrambled eggs and bacon.
“Disgusting pig,” Dutch amends.
“Dutch,” Mom snaps, and she doesn’t need to say anything else, just gives Dutch that look that’s warning enough, the look that says You say something else like that, you goan get popped.
Dutch waits til our mother looks away, mouths “pig” at me one last time as if I needed a final reminder of her opinion of me. I answer with a mighty eye roll like a good younger sister and turn back to my plate.
Truthfully, I can’t stand to look at Dutch. At fourteen, two years older than me, she’s everything I’d like to be but am not. She’s pretty, for starters, and she does it without even trying. Her hair isn’t as kinky and frizzy as mine, and it cascades over her shoulders in thick, artful waves, perfectly framing her round, tawny face and high cheekbones.
She tells me my hair could be like hers if I’d only try a little harder, or let her mess with it, but I know the truth: In the DNA Power Ball Lottery, Dutch won long and lanky and elegant; I won Godzilla.
Even if she wasn’t the oldest of us four kids, Dutch would be in charge anyway. She’s got that unique power to command that only the pretty girls have, an over-confidence that’s both snide and irresistible simultaneously, that repels at the same time you just can’t fucking help but admire it.
“PJ! Gerry!” Momma calls, booming my younger brothers’ names through the kitchen loudly enough to make my ears ring. “Y’all get in here and eat!”
Y’all get in here and eat. They are the words that bind my rainbow family together. In dal bhat and cornbread, we were the same; in all other ways, different.
Dutch shoots me another look, and this time it’s the conspiratorial kind that siblings share over the antics of their parents, and I answer with a carefully muffled chuckle. Mom’s ten minutes-to-eight yell for our brothers to Y’all get in here and eat is as predictable and consistent as the eggs and bacon and fried potatoes themselves.
My two younger brothers meander into the kitchen like child zombies, bleary-eyed and bickering with each other in indecipherable whines and groans. PJ — Pathik Junior — is a round, brown butterball, and even though he’s only ten, you can tell he’s already destined to be short like my father but thick like my mother. Of all of us, his features are the blackest — flat nose, round eyes, black hair stuck to his scalp in thick curls, and yet despite this, he is the one who most desperately wants to be Nepalese. He’s got the double triangles of the Nepalese flag on his bedroom wall, a cheap little Buddha statue surrounded by sticks of incense stuck into bowls of rice sitting on his dresser. It’s like he thinks he’s going to accessorize his way out of his blackness and into his Nepalese heritage.
PJ hates that he shares his room with Gerry, our youngest brother, who cares nothing for Buddha or incense or curry. But with only three bedrooms and an unfinished basement, PJ and Gerry are stuck together, just like Dutch and me.
Gerry’s as different from PJ as I am from Dutch. That’s going to get more obvious as we all grow up, but at this particular moment in time, Gerry — whose full name, unfortunately for him, is “Geronimo,” for my mother’s grandfather — is a skinny, adorable kindergartener. The apple of my mother’s eye.
Dutch is fourteen.
I’m twelve.
PJ’s ten.
Noticing a pattern? Two years stair-stepping between each kid?
Yeah, so Gerry’s six. We’re pretty sure he’s the accident kid. But I would’ve been more than happy to be an accident if I got treated the way Gerry does. He’s as small and cute as I am tall and awkward, as bony as PJ is round, and as insanely cute as Dutch is domineering.
He’s the only one who earns a loud, smacking kiss from our mother every time he enters the kitchen, the only one who gets a second helping of bacon without having to ask for it. It means the rest of us are fascinated by him and ridiculously jealous of him at the same time.
#
And now we’ve come back to the present day — the Manchester airport, two pints and a full English breakfast later.
My phone dings with an incoming text. It’s just a number with an Ohio area code, no name associated with it, so whoever it is must not be in my address book.
I’m picking you up
it reads.
Who’s this?
I type back.
Gerry. What time you get in
Gerry? I raise an eyebrow at the pronouncement. I’m surprised to be hearing from him. Hell, surprised he owns a cell phone, period. If he’s picking me up from Cleveland, I guess that means he’s back home again. I hope that’s a good thing. But forgive me if I’m just a little suspicious of his motives.
I write him back anyway, telling him my flight details without any other comments or questions that might hint at my surprise. I haven’t seen my youngest brother in a couple of years. I don’t think I’ve even talked to him in at least a year.
I get a fist-pound emoji for a response. Then nothing.
I linger near the gate, gym bag carry-on hanging behind me at an almost vertical angle, like I’ve got a fucking sword strapped to my back.
A line starts to form; I wander into it. Something knocks against my gym bag, and I turn my head automatically.
Well, look who it is.
Tinkerbell-sized Jane Lane. The girl who smiled at me on the Basel to Manchester flight. She’s getting into line behind me, which means she must be headed to Toronto, too.
“Sorry, I wasn’t watching where I was going,” she says with an apologetic smile.
American accent? Or Canadian? It’s certainly not Swiss, at any rate.
“No worries,” I say with a shrug. They call zone three for boarding, and I turn my attention back to the front of the line.