Nightlife ✓

10 | mirror

"DID MOM SEND YOU AN article about the Miss Universe winner who is also a NASA astronaut?"

Olivia chuckled over the phone. "No."

"Great. Just me then."

I crossed one sock-covered ankle over the other on my mattress. With my head on my pillow, I could crane my neck back and see all the family photographs on the wall above my bed. Even though they were upside down and foreshortened, the scenes remained familiar.

Mao Mao when he was just a kitten. Dad taking us four kids fishing. Mom in China with Thomas and Olivia—the oldest two. Me and Kevin in our kindergarten play—Gretel, and breadcrumb, respectively.

"When did she send you that?" Olly wondered.

"This morning on WeChat. No other context—"

"—as usual."

"As usual," I snorted in agreement. "But it's not like I needed context."

It wasn't unexpected. Sometimes Mom would DM me random things with no preface. The benefits of herbal medicine. Videos of some ninety-year-old man from the mainland who cooked a massive amount of food in his rural village. Women who juggled it all while looking like supermodels.

Twenty-five years old, the winner of multiple beauty pageants, with a liver built for colossal G-forces. I would have asked Mom why the hell that article applied to me, but I knew why.

"I heard her voice nice and clear in my soul. Look at this woman. Why are you not her?"

"It's okay, Kris. She's just worried about your future."

"But she shouldn't be. I've sent my primary applications to a long list of Med schools, and I've gotten secondaries from Icahn already. My professors were falling over themselves to write me letters of recommendation, and my grades this semester are nearly perfect."

Olly quipped, "Nearly perfect?"

I chuckled. "God, you're right." Nearly perfect. "Mom must be distraught."

After Olivia's laughter reduced to seriousness, she told me: "I know Mom is intense right now, but your future is still very tenuous. I'm married. I have Pippa. A steady job. Mom officially considers me too boring to worry about."

"No, not too boring. Too perfect. You're a doctor who married a respectable Chinese man, and gave her the first grandchild. You are the perfect daughter."

My sister was ten years older than me. Olly lived with her husband in a small loft in Manhattan. She had done the Pre-Med route, and now she was a GP at a family clinic, doing very well for herself. My oldest brother Thomas was twenty-six, and had also done the Pre-Med route, and he was currently doing his placement in Texas.

"You think it's getting easier for Kevin?" I asked Olly. "Honestly."

Unlike our two oldest siblings, Kevin hadn't done the Pre-Med route. He never went to university. He still lived at home at age twenty-two. Mom was heartbroken about that, but she couldn't voice those anxieties because his steady job helped pay the bills. Kevin was the black sheep, the receiver of passive-aggression, the person I did not have the courage to be like.

The best older brother.

"I'm not too sure. I need to talk to him more," Olly admitted. "But I do know it gets easier, faster than you might think."

"If you say so."

"I do."

"Fine. In the meantime, I will reply to Mom saying that I'm working on my zero-gravity training."