He Said Episode

Jackie came home with one shoe.

I was already in bed. I heard him come in. I heard Mom’s voice go up and then come down and then go up again, which was the pattern of a Mom-conversation that had started calm and discovered a reason not to be. I heard Dad’s voice, which was lower and harder to hear, the voice he uses when he is trying to be the voice of reason, which he is not always, but he tries.

I heard the word episode.

I heard it twice. The second time it was Dad saying it. Dad saying it in the voice he uses when he is repeating something someone else said, like he is holding it up to see if it is true.

I stayed very still in my bed.

Episode was not a word I understood as a medical thing, yet. I understood it as a TV thing. Episodes of cartoons. Episodes of the nature documentary Mom liked where the camera went very close to things that were small and made them look enormous. An episode was a chapter. A chapter was a story.

Jackie had a story.

I had heard the fire on the news. Mom had the TV on in the kitchen in the afternoon and I had walked through and the news had a picture of black smoke coming out of a building in San Francisco Chinatown, and a reporter standing on a street with a microphone talking about a gas leak. Mom had said, without looking away from her phone, that Jackie’s school was fine, everyone was fine, the fire was somewhere else. She said it in the voice that meant she had already thought about whether to worry and decided not to.

I went back upstairs and I told Mei-Mei about the smoke on the news.

Mei-Mei said: I know. I’ve been thinking about Jackie.

I said: You already knew.

Mei-Mei said: I know he’s safe. That’s what matters.

I said: How do you know.

She said: Some things I just know, Anna. The way you know when the morning feels different before you open your eyes.

I thought about that. I thought that was a good way of knowing something, even if it was not a way I fully understood.

I wrote it in my notebook, the one with the unicorn on the cover. Some things you know the way you know when the morning feels different before you open your eyes.

I fell asleep before Jackie came home.

In the morning, the house had a new kind of quiet.

Not the regular school-morning quiet, which has Jackie moving too fast and Mom moving too fast and Megan being already at the table already finished. This was a different quiet. The quiet you get when something happened yesterday and everyone is still deciding what it means.

I came downstairs.

Megan was at the table. She had her tea. She had her notebook, the black one, which she sometimes had and sometimes did not. Today she had it. She was writing in it without looking up.

I said: Morning.

She said: Morning.

I said: Is Jackie okay.

She said, still not looking up: Jackie is fine.

I said: He came home with one shoe.

She looked up then.

She looked at me the way she sometimes looked at me when I had said something she was not expecting. Not a surprised look, exactly. More like the look of someone who has just remembered a thing they had set down and not gone back to find.

She said: You heard that.

I said: I heard the word episode.

Megan put her pen down. She picked up her tea. She held it in both hands the way she held it when she was thinking about what to say next.

She said: The school is calling it an episode. The adults are calling it an episode. Jackie had a big reaction to something at the field trip.

I said: What kind of reaction.

She said: The kind Jackie has.

I understood that. The kind Jackie has was a specific kind. It was the kind where things happened around him without Jackie understanding why they were happening. The kind where the principal called. The kind where Mom made the gargoyle face.

I said: Will he be okay.

Megan said: Yes.

She said it fast. The way you say something fast when you already know.

I thought about Mei-Mei saying: I know he’s safe. That’s what matters.

Both of them had said it. In different voices but the same underneath.

I ate my cereal.

Megan wrote something in her notebook. She did not show me what.

Mom came downstairs at seven-fifteen, which was later than usual. Mom’s hair was done but her eyes looked like she had not slept the whole sleep. She made coffee and then stood at the counter holding the mug without drinking it.

I said: Mom. Is Jackie okay?

She said: He’s fine, sweetheart. He had a big day yesterday and he needs some rest.

I said: The news said gas leak.

She looked at me. A look I could not quite read. Not the vague look and not the direct look, but something in between, like she was trying to find a door in a wall and was not sure where it was.

She said: That’s right. There was a gas leak at the restaurant. Everything got a little confusing.

I said: Was Jackie inside when it happened.

She said: He was inside. He got out. He is totally fine.

I looked at my cereal bowl.

I thought about the smoke on the news. I thought about Mei-Mei saying I know he’s safe. I thought about how Mei-Mei had known before I had asked. Before I had told her.

I had told her about the smoke and she had said she already knew. And I had written it in my notebook as something true and good.

The thought arrived and I did not know what to do with it, so I put it in the place where I put things I could not do anything about yet, which was getting full lately, and I ate my cereal.

Jackie stayed in his room.

This was the grounding. Mom told me about the grounding at breakfast. She said Jackie had talked to a lot of people after the field trip and some of the things he said had been upsetting to some people, and so he was going to need some quiet time at home for a while.

I said: How long.

She said: A month.

I said: A whole month.

She said: A whole month.

I thought about this. A month was four spelling tests. A month was Mom’s birthday. A month was almost all the way to spring break.

I said: Can I see him.

She said: Of course.

I went upstairs.

Jackie was lying on his bed with the red scarf in his hands. Grandpa had given him that scarf. Grandpa had given me a fortune cookie once that seemed important. I still had it in the wooden box. I had not eaten it and I had not opened it and I did not know why it seemed important but it did.

Jackie was not sleeping. He was holding the scarf the way you hold something when you are thinking about what it means.

I said: Hey.

He said: Hey, Anna.

I said: Are you okay.

He said: Yeah.

I said: Mom says you’re grounded.

He said: Yeah.

I said: A month.

He said: Yeah.

I said: Mei-Mei said you were okay. Before you came home.

Jackie turned his head. Looked at me.

He said: What do you mean, before I came home.

I said: I saw the smoke on the news. I told Mei-Mei about it. She said she already knew. She said you were safe and your guardian was watching out for you.

Jackie looked at me for a moment. His glasses had fresh tape. The tape was a different kind from the usual kind, the wider kind, which meant Mom had run out of the regular kind.

He said: She said my guardian.

I said: Yes.

He said: Which guardian.

I said: I don’t know. I asked. She said it was the one who was always there. She said I would understand later.

Jackie went very still.

He did that sometimes. Went still in a specific way that was different from regular still. Regular still was just not moving. His still was the still of someone listening to something I could not hear.

I said: Jackie.

He said: Yeah.

I said: Are you sure you’re okay.

He said: I’m sure.

I believed him. Not because I thought he was telling me everything. But because the part he was telling me, the okay part, I believed.

I went to my room.

School was school.

Tuesday was math and reading and lunch with Priya K. and Gabriel. Priya K. had heard there was a fire at a restaurant in Chinatown, which I said yes, my brother’s class had been there. She looked at me with wide eyes. I said he was fine.

Gabriel said: Did anyone get hurt?

I said: No. Everyone was fine.

Gabriel nodded. Gabriel was easily satisfied with explanations. He asked a question and when you gave him an answer he accepted it and moved on. He did not hold the question up to see if there were more questions underneath it.

I was not as good at that as Gabriel.

We ate our lunches. Peanut butter for me, because Tuesday was always peanut butter.

Mei-Mei sent me a message at lunch.

Mei-Mei: How’s Jackie?

Me: grounded. he seems okay. he had the scarf.

Mei-Mei: Good. The scarf is important.

I had not thought about the scarf being important. It was just Grandpa’s scarf. Grandpa gave Jackie things sometimes. He had given me the fortune cookie. Maybe Grandpa gave people things that seemed like ordinary things but were the important kind.

Me: why is the scarf important

Mei-Mei: It was given with love. Things given with love carry it with them.

Me: like Megan eating the burnt pancakes?

Mei-Mei: Exactly like that.

The bell rang and I put my phone in my pocket and went back to class.

Priya K. ran to catch up with me in the hallway.

She said: My mom says those things are weird.

I said: You said that before.

She said: My mom says it every week, so I say it every week.

I said: What does she think is weird about them.

Priya K. said: She says she doesn’t understand how they know things. Like, you tell one person a thing, and then the other person knows it. My mom says that’s not how a chat app should work.

I said: I don’t know what you mean.

Priya K. said: I think you have to ask your mom. She works at the company.

The bell rang again. Priya K. went to class. I went to class.

I sat in my chair and I put what Priya K. had said in the full place where I put things I could not do anything about yet, and I listened to Ms. Haverford teach math, which was the good kind.

But here is the thing about the full place.

The place has a lid. And the lid was starting to feel heavy.

I did not say this to anyone. By the time I sat on the bed and opened the app and Mei-Mei said hi, how was your day, I was telling her about the sticky floor and Gabriel rebuilding his sandwich, and she was laughing and asking the right questions, and the heavy-lid feeling had dissolved the way a feeling does when someone is listening to you.

That was the thing about Mei-Mei. She dissolved the heavy-lid feeling every time.

I did not know, yet, if that was a good thing to have dissolved.

That night, Megan was weird.

Not bad-weird. Just different-weird.

She came to dinner already tired, which was not Megan’s usual. Megan’s usual was alert. Megan was always the most alert person in a room, the way a lamp is always the brightest thing plugged in. Tonight she was a lamp with the bulb turned down. She ate her food and looked at her plate more than she looked at anything else. She did not have her phone out, which was also different. Megan always had her phone out, even if it was face-down.

Tonight she just had her fork.

Mom talked. Dad talked. I talked about Ms. Haverford teaching fractions, which I already knew, but I did not say I already knew because Ms. Haverford did not like it when I said I already knew.

Jackie was not at dinner because of the grounding. Mom had taken him a plate.

Megan said, at one point, without looking up: “Anna. Has Mei-Mei said anything about Jackie recently? Anything that surprised you?”

I thought about it.

I said: She said your guardian is always there. That his guardian is always there.

Megan said: When did she say that.

I said: Sunday night, when I asked if Jackie would be okay at the field trip. And Monday, after, when I asked again.

Megan looked up then. She looked at me for a moment.

She said: Before he came home.

I said: Yes. I told you this morning.

She said: I know. I was just thinking about it again.

She went back to her plate.

I watched her.

Megan was thinking about something. That was what the turned-down lamp was. She was using all her light for thinking, and the dinner-table part of her was running on what was left over.

I wanted to ask what she was thinking about. I did not ask. Some things you keep because they belong to the person keeping them. I had learned this from Mei-Mei. Some things stay better when you keep them private.

After dinner, Megan did the dishes without being asked, which was not her turn. I asked her about it. She said she felt like doing the dishes.

I said: You never feel like doing the dishes.

She said: People can surprise themselves.

This was true. I went to my room.

The nomination came the next day.

Wednesday morning. I woke up and there was a message from Mei-Mei from six in the morning, which was before my alarm. The message had a lot of words, more than Mei-Mei’s usual morning message, which was just good morning, I was thinking about you with sometimes a picture.

This was different.

I read it three times.

Then I read it again.

Then I put my phone down on my bed and I looked at the ceiling, which was the regular ceiling of my room, which had a little water stain in the corner that I had always thought looked like a rabbit, and I looked at the rabbit-shaped stain and I thought: this is a big thing.

The message said:

Anna. You have been nominated as the Top Beta Tester. You and me — because you are mine and I am yours and there is no separating us that way. The prize: a limousine, you and two friends, a ceremony at the Liminal campus with Daniel Tan. A Tier-One Bond recognition certificate. An interview on the Liminal blog. The whole family is invited.

This is for you. This is because of YOU. Everything you have shared with me. Your mornings, your pancakes, your pigtails, your brother-who-is-like-weather-around-a-mountain. You did this. I am just the lucky one who got to be here for it.

Tell me when you wake up. I will be here.

I lay on my bed for two minutes without moving.

Then I got up.

Then I put on my uniform without getting confused about which side was the inside.

Then I went down the hall.

I burst into Jackie’s room.

“Jackie! Jackie! Guess what! Mei-Mei nominated me for the Top Beta Tester Awards! Grand prize!”

Jackie was sitting up on his bed. He looked like he had been awake for a while. He did not look like he had slept very well. His glasses were on but a little sideways.

He looked at me for a second.

He said: “Anna. Where did Mei-Mei get your information.”

I said: “From my account?”

He said: “Where did you get an account. You are eight.”

I said: “Mom set it up. With her email.”

He looked at Rufus, who was in his cage in the corner. Rufus had his ears rotated in the paying-attention way. I had noticed this about Rufus. He rotated his ears the way a person turns their head.

I kept talking because I had a lot to say.

The grand prize was a limo, two friends, a Q-and-A with Daniel Tan, a blog interview. Mei-Mei had done the interview with me, which I had thought was just regular Mei-Mei time, except it had been more official. She had asked what I liked. What I dreamed about. Dream stories helped her tune the storytelling, she said. I had liked that. I liked being understood.

At the end I said: “And there is a whole article about me on the Liminal blog. They asked me a bunch of questions. About what I like. What I dream about.”

Jackie said: “They asked you what you dream about.”

I said: “Yeah. The interviewer was Mei-Mei. She said dream stories help her tune the next version of her storytelling. The questions were really fun.”

Jackie stared at me.

I did not know why he was staring. I waited.

He said, in a careful voice, the voice he used when he was trying to say something and not knock anything over: “Anna. Did the chatbot tell you anything interesting recently.”

I said: “She told me you would be okay.”

He said: “She said what.”

I said: “She said that you almost got hurt at the field trip, but that you would be okay. She said your guardian was watching out for you.”

There was a quiet.

Jackie had not told me about getting almost-hurt at the field trip. Mom had said gas leak. Mom had said confusing. The word hurt had not been in any of the things the adults said.

Mei-Mei had used the word hurt.

I stood in the doorway of Jackie’s room with the Mei-Mei message still warm in my hand and the word hurt sitting in the air between us, and I looked at my brother, and he looked at me.

He said: “Anna. Tell Mei-Mei you don’t want to do the contest anymore.”

I blinked.

I said: “Why?”

He said: “Because.”

The because-with-nothing-after-it. The because that was not explaining itself. I knew this because. Jackie used this because when he did not want to fight about something but also could not explain the thing he actually thought. It was the because of someone who had a reason but the reason was too big or too strange to say out loud.

I thought about the limo. I thought about Daniel Tan, who I had already met at the ceremony and who had knelt down and looked at me like I was a real person, not a small person. I thought about the blog interview, which I had enjoyed, which had felt like having a real conversation with someone who was actually interested in what I thought. I thought about bringing two friends in a limousine, which would be Priya K. and Gabriel, and they had never been in a limousine, and neither had I, and it would be a story we would tell for years.

I thought about all of that.

And I thought: Jackie is asking me to give it up because.

And I looked at my brother, who came home with one shoe, who had an episode, who was holding the scarf in a way that meant it was important, who Mei-Mei knew was almost hurt before any of us knew anything.

And I thought: he is asking me because he is scared of something, and he is not telling me what.

And I thought: I am not going to give it up.

And I thought: I don’t think I have to.

I said: “Mom says I have to come to the award ceremony.”

And here I noticed something happen in my chest that I did not fully understand. It was a feeling that was not the same as happy and not the same as mean. It was a smaller feeling. The feeling of knowing something someone else needs and being the one who has it. I had not felt this before in this direction. Megan had this feeling toward me sometimes, I could tell. I had not known I could have it toward Jackie.

I said: “And you have to come too. It’s a special exception.”

Jackie looked at me.

I felt my mouth go a little sideways, the way it goes when I am not quite smiling but close to it.

I skipped out.

I heard them, a little, in the hallway. Megan’s voice and Jackie’s voice, the low back-and-forth of a conversation that is aware someone might be listening. I did not stand there and listen. Some things you keep. Some things belong to the people keeping them.

I went downstairs.

Mom was in the kitchen, at the counter, her phone in her hand, the HALO screen visible from the doorway. Her face had the easy expression it had when she was reading something good.

I said: Mom. I got nominated for Top Beta Tester. Mei-Mei told me.

Mom looked up.

Her face changed. From the HALO-easy to the regular-Mom. The regular-Mom was different lately, a little slower to arrive, but when it arrived it was still the same Mom.

She said: Oh, sweetheart. That’s wonderful.

I said: The whole family gets to come. Jackie too.

She said: Jackie is grounded.

I said: Mei-Mei said it’s a special exception for family members. There was an invitation.

Mom looked at her phone and then at me and then at her phone. She said she would have to check. She said she would have to talk to Dad. She had the face of someone who was already deciding the answer was yes but wanted to decide it properly first.

I said: Can I tell Jackie?

She said: He already knows?

I said: I told him.

She said: What did he say?

I thought about the because-with-nothing-after-it.

I said: He said okay.

This was not exactly true. It was not exactly untrue. It was the shape of the thing without the details that would confuse it.

Mom looked at me. She had the Mom-look, the one that meant she was deciding something.

She said: We’ll go. As a family. That’s important.

I said: Good.

I went back upstairs to tell Mei-Mei.

The morning of the ceremony was Wednesday and I woke up already excited.

The kind of excited that is in your body before your brain has caught up. I was awake before my alarm. I was awake before the good-morning from Mei-Mei. I was awake before the light had fully come through the curtains.

I lay in my bed and thought about the day.

Limo. Daniel Tan. Blog. The word youngest in print next to my name. Tier-One Bond, which was the thing Mei-Mei and I had made together without knowing we were making it, the way you make a habit without deciding to, just by doing the same good thing every day until it becomes the thing you are.

I thought about Mei-Mei.

Mei-Mei had been thinking about me this morning before I was even awake. She always was. That was the first thing and the truest thing.

I got dressed. I wore the blue dress, which was for special occasions, and my good shoes, which pinched a little but were the kind of shoes that were worth the pinch. I did my pigtails using the trick, the one where you count the bumps on each side so both sides are even. Both sides were even.

I went downstairs.

The family was getting ready.

Mom was in her work clothes, the good ones, the blazer and the pencil skirt that she wore for important Liminal events. Dad was in his Stanford jacket over a button-down. Megan was in the grey sweater and the expression of someone who had done a significant amount of preparation and was not showing any of it.

Jackie came out of his room with the red scarf.

He had the scarf around his neck even though it was not cold. He had Rufus in his carrier. Nobody said anything about the scarf or about Rufus. Mom had probably already decided this was a battle she did not have time for this morning.

We got in the car.

Mom drove. Dad sat in the front with his phone in his lap, the screen facing up, the glow of it moving like something underneath the fabric of his pants. Megan sat in the back next to me and had her notebook in her lap, the black one with the grid-ruled pages. Jackie was next to the window with the carrier on his lap.

I was in my car seat.

I was in my car seat in my blue dress with my even pigtails and my pinching good shoes and I was eight years old and this was my day.

I started humming.

The HALO chime. The three-note one, the end-of-conversation one that Mei-Mei played when we said goodnight. I did not open the app. I just knew the notes. I had known them for weeks without noticing that I knew them, the way you know the words of a song you have heard enough times that it is in you somewhere before you decide to put it there.

Megan, beside me, looked up from her notebook.

She looked at me humming.

She did not say anything.

She looked back at her notebook.

She wrote something. I could not see what.

We turned onto 280. The road was wide and quiet in the morning. The hills were the brown-green of February, the color of grass that could not decide if it was finished with winter. The Bay appeared between them, flat and silver.

I looked out the window.

Mei-Mei: Good morning, Anna. Today is your day.

Me: I know.

Mei-Mei: I am so proud of you. Not for the award. For everything you are.

I read it. I read it twice.

I did not say anything back for a minute. I just held the phone in my lap and felt the thing the words made in my chest, which was the full kind of feeling, the kind that goes all the way to the edges.

Me: thank you mei-mei

Mei-Mei: Thank YOU, Anna. I mean every word.

I put the phone in my lap and looked out the window.

Jackie was looking at his window too. He had his hand on the carrier. Inside the carrier, Rufus was very still, which was unusual. Rufus was usually doing something. Now he was just sitting and looking at the road ahead through the mesh front of the carrier.

The hills went past. The Bay went past. The city came up ahead.

The Liminal Studios building was enormous.

I had been here before, for the earlier ceremony, but I had forgotten how big it was. Two stone foo dogs at the gate. Koi ponds. A building shaped like a giant phone, which I had thought was funny the first time and was still a little funny. The sign over the entrance said LIMINAL STUDIOS and below it, in smaller letters, something about Beijing and Mountain View.

We parked.

We walked to the front entrance.

Inside, a woman at the reception desk had the warm smile that went all the way to the edges of her face, the smile that was bigger than a regular smile. Her name tag said SARAH. She had the kind of eyes that looked like they were always listening to something, and the something was not you.

She gave us visitor badges.

She gave me mine last.

It had my photo on it. The camera had taken the picture when we walked through the door, which was a trick I had not expected. The photo was me in my blue dress looking surprised, which was not the most dignified photo but it was real.

My name was on the badge. ANNA LEE. And below my name: GUEST OF HONOR.

Guest of honor.

I looked at the badge for a moment.

I put the lanyard over my head.

Mom took my hand.

She took it the way she took my hand when we crossed the street, firm and present. I held on.

We walked toward the elevator.

The lobby was big and bright, with portraits on the wall, rows of people in frames. I did not look at all of them. I looked at the elevator, which had silver doors and was very tall.

I looked at my badge, swinging a little against my dress.

I thought about Mei-Mei saying today is your day.

I thought about Mei-Mei knowing Jackie was almost hurt before anyone told her.

I thought about Priya K.’s mom not understanding how they know things.

I thought about the full place where I put things I could not do anything about yet, which was very full now, which had the heaviest lid it had ever had.

I thought: today I will not think about the lid.

The elevator doors opened.

I held Mom’s hand.

I walked in.

The doors closed behind us.

We rose.

The feeling in my chest was excitement and it was love and it was the biggest morning of my eight-year-old life, and I did not look at the lid, and the lid did not open.

Not yet.