Guilt clamps down on my stomach. This whole time I was fantasizing about all the money going into my bank account, Chanel’s life has been unraveling.

Still, she doesn’t know that I know. The smart thing to do—the safe thing to do—would be to just leave it as that, act like nothing’s wrong and spend the rest of my night catching up on homework. Let her grieve and rage however she wishes. I’m sure she has plenty of friends to comfort her anyway.

But as I stare at her sad, hunched-over form, all alone in the dark, an old memory ambushes me: a few months after we first moved in together, she’d found me lying facedown on the bed, uniform still on, my Chinese test shredded to pieces around me. A hideous 87.5% scrawled across one of the torn corners. We weren’t close-close even then, but she’d plopped down beside me as if it were the most natural thing in the world and cheerily mocked every question on the test until I felt more like laughing than sobbing.

My heart wavers.

“Hey,” I blurt out, taking a step closer even as I curse my own mouth. “Um... Are you all right?”

Chanel glances up at me from her cocoon of blankets. I half expect her to brush the question off, or maybe simply stay silent until I get the message and go away, but she replies quickly, with surprising violence, “Aside from the fact that my dad’s a total asshole? I’m great.”

I try to hide my shock. I can’t imagine ever calling Baba something like that, not with all his lectures on filial piety and respecting my elders no matter what entrenched in my very bones.

“Sorry,” Chanel says, maybe sensing my discomfort. She tugs the blankets higher over her face, so her words are muffled when she explains, “It’s just been a shitty day.”

I hesitate, then go to sit down on the floor beside her and ask, as if I were auditioning for Side Character Two in a high school drama, “Do you want to talk about it?”

She snorts, though it sounds a bit like a sob. “Aren’t we already talking about it?”

“Right,” I say, feeling dumb. Part of me is already regretting this conversation, but another part—the part that once hoped Chanel and I might become best friends—doesn’t want to just leave it like this either. “I guess we are.”

“I just. I don’t get it.” She sighs, blowing a stray, slightly wet strand of hair from her eyes. Picks up her phone, scrolls through another photo, then slams it down again with such force I almost jump. “I. Don’t. Get. It.”

I decide to stay silent.

“It just doesn’t make sense. My mum never did—I mean, this whole time, she’s been busy preparing for his birthday. Can you believe that? She’s booked his favorite restaurant, and his favorite band, and she even had a qipao tailored just for the occasion, and he’s...” She tightens her grip on her phone, knuckles white. “What was he thinking? Why?” Then she turns to me, like she’s actually hoping I might have an answer.