“What do you mean, ‘it’s not real’?” asks Maria, peering in from the doorway.

“Telephone,” says their mother, one hand outstretched, the other smoothing strands of hair from Karen’s bloody forehead. She dials 999 and says in her staccato English, “Ambulance please! June Leung, 5 Clover Hill. Accident, bad fall. No, not me! My daughter.”

Karen loses two incisors and a molar and a little dignity. She gains a fat, pink neck brace and a swollen cheek covered with purple and yellow blooms. Maria hangs off the hospital bed frame with her gymnast’s arms, alternating her hands.

“I can’t believe you were that stupid,” she giggles. “Pretending to be Dragon Girl. Sleeping on a rope. Hahaha!”

Karen’s face hurts too much to scowl. But she is consoled by the doctor’s recommendation of home rest for a week, perhaps even two. That’s potentially two weeks off from school.

Out in the hall, Karen’s mother and father talk about the restaurant being shorthanded that week.

“I can still cover the lunch shift tomorrow,” says her mother. “She’ll be mostly sleeping anyway.”

“No, Jun-Jun, they can manage,” says her father, “Our little girl’s had a scare. We should both stay with her, at least for a day or two.”

“Ah Tin, you spoil her.”

“We have to take care of our girls.”

“Maria wouldn’t be this careless.”

Jun-Jun. Ah Tin. Karen’s parents reserve the use of their Chinese names for private debate over the girls, the business, the house, as well as for moments of intimacy—Karen knows this from years of pressing her ear against closed doors. They use their English names, June and Stanley, when speaking with English people, or when they have to fill out a form. In front of the girls, they address each other by their title or function—“Wife/Husband” or “Mother/Father.” Sometimes Karen observes these frequent transpositions without much thought beyond a vague admiration for her parents’ talent for adaptability. At other times—when a customer nonchalantly says “chink” in the restaurant they own or a neighbor peers over the garden fence as her father snaps the neck of a chicken—she feels a brief, nauseating unease at these interchangeable guises and how they might suggest to others that her parents are not actually who they say they are, resulting in some dreadful punishment.