The bizarre thing is that in almost any other family, my mom would be the favorite child. The success story you brag about at events like this one. Good grades, good house, good career, happy marriage. Unfortunately for her, my aunt just happens to be one of the youngest and most esteemed professors in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford and a Grammy-nominated composer on the side, because being good at just one thing is too primitive. The family legend goes that she’s so accomplished she caught the attention of NASA, who wanted to send her into space, but she declined because she was too busy. Like, too busy for the moon.

“Hey,” I say when my aunt turns toward me with an expectant look.

My mom tugs at my wrist harder than she typically would. “You don’t say hey like you’re bumping into a friend at the mall. You say xiaoyi hao,” she hisses.

“Xiaoyi hao,” I amend, but I seem to have already failed some kind of test. And I fail it again when my aunt asks me something in Chinese. I look helplessly over at my mom, who answers for me in a strained, high-pitched voice, then waves me off to a table in the corner.

It’s the kids’ table, I realize. Piles of candy have been laid out around the crimson rose centerpiece: chocolates in the shape of hearts and peanut brittle and strawberry swirls and pink marshmallows. There’s even the corn-flavored jelly candies I remember from my childhood, as artificially sweet as they are bright yellow, yet so good I could never stop eating them.

A few of the kids have started digging into the sweets already, the shiny wrappers crinkling in their little fists. As I sit down in the only empty chair left, I recognize two of them as my very distant cousins, but everyone else at the table is a complete stranger—

No.

My gaze catches on the person next to me, the only boy here who’s also seventeen, and I feel my heart drop.

It can’t be him. It shouldn’t be.

Yet there he is, with his dark hair falling like silk over his forehead, the angles of his face so finely rendered it’s almost a taunt to contemporary sculptors, the softness of his lips a lie. He looks like he hasn’t smiled once in the two years since I last saw him. He’s definitely not smiling right now. His eyes are pinned on me, and though they’re the exact same shade of brown—the kind that turns to liquid amber in the light, and black onyx at night—there’s something different about them. Something heavier and melancholy.

“Hello,” he says, and his voice is different too. Low. Leveled.

I never thought I would hear it again.

I prayed I would never have to.