Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail Read Online Free PDF Page B

is lengthening. She sleeps all morning and spends her afternoons shopping and preparing elaborate dinners. She cooks things Rooey liked—curry pork, eggplant Parmesan. I’ve come to find comfort in this, and for oncein my life, I eat everything on my plate. Mom is the opposite. Once, after filling our plates with salmon ragout, she sat down and stared at the table’s empty seats, two of them now, as if she were expecting guests who were running late. I had no words to offer up; I shoveled down the over-salted food and sat there as long as I could stand it, then stood and cleared her untouched plate.
    While Rooey looked just like Dad, I resemble no one. My face is a little of this, little of that, like a meal thrown together last-minute. When we ran into old friends of my parents’, they would make a fuss over Rooey. “A carbon copy of Dean,” Mom would say, mussing my brother’s blonde, moppy curls. Then they’d turn to me and joke about the milkman.
    School was my redemption. In high school I was a member of the National Honor Society, vice-president of the Ecology Club, and a varsity swimmer. When Rooey and Mom came to my swim meets, they’d always sit in the same place, at the top of the bleachers, laughing and eating Reese’s Pieces. Tearing through the water on the final leg of a race, I would think of them watching me and swim harder, muscles screaming, knowing that if I won, I would for a moment be the focus; I would fill that tiny space between them.
    At the wake, I talked about taking Rooey for driving practice last Christmas. For a kid who liked cars so much, he was a horrible driver. He made a joke out of it. Before leaving the house, he’d preface everything with, “Allah willing.” It was an expression he picked up from a movie. “When we come back from driving, Allah willing,let’s get Mom to take us to Culver’s.” “Allah willing, I’m gonna parallel-park this baby, hard .” It was a testament to Rooey’s good nature that he was able to mock himself, I said; even more than that, though, he never seemed to get discouraged. He had confidence in life; he never whined. The part about “Allah willing” got a laugh.
    What I didn’t talk about was how mad I’d been when Mom told me I’d have to give Rooey my car when I moved out. The Nissan had been a hand-me-down from my grandparents, and I’d had it less than a year. I never had a car when I was his age, I argued. It wasn’t fair .
    But Rooey solved the problem—he didn’t want my car. He wanted an old Thunderbird, and he got a job helping Roger, a Buddhist hippie guy who lived down the block, in his metalwork shop to earn the money for it. He was a hard kid to resent, and for that, I have to admit, I resented him even more.
    ROOEY’S DOOR HAS BEEN CLOSED since I got back from Hawaii. Mom’s not ready to open it yet. “It’s too much of him at once,” she told me, crying at the mere mention of his name. But me, I can’t get enough. I’ve been coming in here every night. I lie in bed and wait until the sleeping pills I stole from Mom kick in, then creep over the cracked parquet to his room, my feet instinctively avoiding the creaky spots that, when we were little, would give us away as we snuck into the kitchen for a handful of Reese’s Pieces from the green jar.
    The room is stuffy and smells vaguely of peanut butter.When he was in grade school, Rooey insisted on painting his walls to look like outer space; I painted Jupiter and Neptune, and Rooey did the rest, except Earth, which Mom did, and after the paint dried Rooey etched our tiny trio in ballpoint pen where he approximated Indiana to be. There’s a tiny chip of paint missing where my head once was.
    I flop down onto his bed and try to imagine what it was like to be him.
    Rooey had something of a girlfriend, though we never called her that; she was just “his friend.” Lily. Her parents came here from Japan right before she was born, and gave her a name neither of them