The breaking point came on Chinese New Year. We celebrated it alone in our dark, rented home, sitting around the plastic tablecloth that now served as the table, passing around a plate of those frozen, store-bought dumplings we’d heated in the microwave.

Mama had taken one bite of the dumpling and gone very still.

“What is it?” Baba asked in Mandarin, peering over at her with concern. “Does it taste that bad?”

She said nothing.

“Because we still have a few cups of instant noodles left,” Baba continued. “I could boil the water now—we might even have an egg—”

Then Mama’s face crumpled. Her voice cracked. “I—I want real dumplings.”

“What?”

“I want to go back,” Mama whispered, her dark eyes misting over. It terrified me, seeing her like that. She hadn’t even shed a tear when she was stabbed. “I want to go home.”

Understanding passed over Baba’s face like a shadow. He reached across the tablecloth and put one hand over hers, covering up the half-healed scar. “I know,” he said quietly. “I know.”

We flew back to Beijing a few weeks after that, our first and last shot at the American Dream over, the chapter unceremoniously closed. But I never stopped thinking about the sacrifices my parents made, the pleading look on Mama’s face when she said it, almost like a child—I want to go home—and how the only reason they left home in the first place was because of me.

Even now.

I relive every moment of those final bitter months until my brain threatens to melt in my skull and my eyelids begin to weigh a thousand tons.

And right before I drift off to sleep on my desk, what I think is this:

My parents didn’t work this hard for me to only get this far.

10

“You’re stress pacing again,” Chanel observes from her dressing table.

I’m not just stress pacing—I’m the textbook definition of anxiety right now. My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat, and my mouth tastes like ash. Ever since I messaged Evie Wu on Beijing Ghost this morning, telling her I’d be willing to help her cheat, my nervous system has been on the verge of breaking down. And I hate it, truly. I hate everything about this.

But I need to honor my choices.

“You also look like you’re going to throw up,” Chanel adds helpfully.

“I won’t,” I tell her, just as my stomach lurches. I fight back the rising swell of nausea. “I mean—oh god, I hope not.”

“Hey,” she says. She tears open a new face mask packet, dabbing the excess foam on the pale insides of her wrists. “Not to be super gross, but like, if you were to throw up...do you think your vomit would be invisible as well? Because technically it’d be outside your body, but if it was also produced by—”

“Chanel?” I interrupt.

“Hmm?”

“Please stop talking.”

She manages to stay quiet for a full minute, pressing the mask onto her skin, before she says, “Will you at least tell me what kind of task you’re doing today that’s so—”