As I listen to her speak, I get that feeling I often do when analyzing Shakespeare for Mr. Chen’s English class; that the words should mean something, but I have no idea what. Yet unlike in English, I can’t just bullshit my way through the answer with pretty prose.
“So...are you telling me this is a curse? Or a gift?”
“I think,” Xiaoyi says, screwing the Buddha foot back on, “that depends on what you make of it until it goes away.”
“And if it never goes away?” It’s not until I’ve spoken the words aloud that I realize this is my greatest fear; the permanent loss of control, the rest of my life fragmented and ruined, forever at the mercy of those unpredictable flashes of invisibility. “If I’m just...stuck in my current condition? What then?”
Xiaoyi shakes her head. “Everything is temporary, Yan Yan. And all the more reason to seize whatever’s in front of you while it’s still there.”
4
“I have a plan.”
Henry jerks his head up at the sound of my voice, trying—and failing—to find me in the dim light of his dorm. Faint confusion touches the space between his brows as he sets the dumbbell in his hand down on the desk, still scanning the room for me. As he does, the clouds shift outside his window, and a stream of pure, silvery moonlight spills in around him. Sweat drips from his midnight curls, darkening the collar of his tight-fitted tank.
I feel a hot stab of irritation. Who the hell works out at four in the morning? And who looks this good while doing it?
“Alice?” he calls, his voice quiet, slightly uneven from exertion. “Are you...”
“It happened again,” I say by way of explanation, as I step around his bed and stride toward him. Pat his arm to let him know where I am. His skin is warm beneath mine, the muscles underneath tensing instantly at my touch.
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “Couldn’t you at least knock before—”
“The door was open,” I speak over him. “Besides, this is important.” I grab the mini notebook from my blazer, flip it open to the right page, and hesitate. Just for a moment—enough for me to feel the notebook’s weight in my hands, to realize the significance of what I’m about to trust him with. The risk of it. But then I remember the jagged scar running down Mama’s palm, the hundreds of thousands of yuan I need and don’t have, the threat of leaving Airington looming over my future like a sharpened axe, and I unfreeze. Press the opened pages into his hands.
As soon as it leaves my fingers, the notebook must become visible to Henry, because his eyes widen. Then he focuses on what’s been written in my tiny scrawl, all the highlighted numbers and color-coded tables and detailed lists I spent most of my weekend working on, and his eyebrows arch.
“This looks like a business proposal,” he says slowly.