Catching Up to You

Chapter 7 - Can I Have $20 for Gas?

It was May 2016.

The air was dense with the sounds of MacBook keyboard clicking and pens scratching on note paper with final exams coming around the corner in the cafeteria. Trang had been counting down the number of early mornings she had to wake up groaning during her last streak of chocolate-covered espresso beans-filled all-nighters. Her attention would switch between her marathoning All-American Girl and notes for her Statistics and Econometrics exam, which was taking place in an hour. Finishing and hopefully, passing this exam would be her ticket to freedom.

Near the apex of her insanity, she felt that only some good ol' Margaret Cho humor could get her by with the dryness of the standard deviations and regressions. How she never heard about this show until her Asian American media and storytelling course, a class she aced with a breeze, she did not know. She saw much of herself through Margaret's character, Margaret Kim, always feeling like the black sheep in the family or in her parents' words, "acting like an American." And here she is again, winging her statistics exam like an American.

Then, her cell phone rang all of a sudden.

"Hello?"

"Hi con," spoke a soft, weak voice from the other line. It came from her mother.

"Mẹ? Is that you? Is everything okay?" Trang asked, in an almost-panicky voice. She felt like she just swallowed a pit. Something must be wrong, she thought to herself.

"Con đang học hạ?," her mother asked.

"Yes... what else am I going to do? Why are you calling me at 4 a.m. in the morning?" Trang asked, with her eyebrows still having enough energy to scrunch themselves together.

"Con..."

"Mom, what's wrong?"

"Không có gì. Con học đi. Good luck, con," she ended the call with a dramatic click.

"Mom? Mom?" Trang cursed at the timing of the call. Her mom didn't pick up her cell phone again after that. She tried her dad's cell phone, Linny's, and their home afterward, but all she heard from the other side was the neverending ringing.

At around this time of the day and year, she would be functioning with half of her brain awake but after that call, she felt like she could jog a marathon. Though Trang had arrived at the classroom on time, she had to run back to her dorm to retrieve a few black pens but she had forgotten to bring them with her the first time around. She was so tempted to check her phone that she would be willing to get caught by the proctor for doing so; she had a legitimate concern so she didn't see why it wouldn't be tempting. She just wanted to make sure that her parents were okay.

After Trang handed in her manila envelope with her answer sheets in them, she charged back to her dorm room and just when she was about to make another call, she received one from Linny.

"Hey, em! Is everything okay over there?" Trang held her breath, hoping that any news wouldn't involve a medical emergency room.

"Hey, jie..." Linny asked in her groggy voice; she must've just woken up. "Why did you call me at 4 a.m.? Sorry, I slept through it."

"You slept through your phone and the home's phone? Wow," she wrote on a sticky note, "BUY AN ALARM CLOCK FOR LINNY."

"Oh. I guess they didn't tell you..." Linny sounded more alert now. "Mom and Dad cut off the home phone line."

Trang's heart convulsed at the end of Linny's last sentence. She didn't want to ask any more questions but she had to now. With one hand tightly gripping to her chest, the sleep-deprived college student asked, "So, they've been back at it again, haven't they? For how long?"

"I'm sorry that I didn't tell you earlier. They told me that it was going to be a short-term thing, but I was planning on telling you after your finals. " She could hear Linny's voice trembling into near-sob and short bursts of hiccups in between.

"How long, Linny! How long have they been going to the casinos again?" Trang ran up the four flights of stairs to where her room was as she barraged her sister with one question after another. "What did they ask you? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I know! I'm so sorry! I should've told you," she hiccuped.

"It's okay... it's not your fault. Did they ask anything from you?" she asked.

"Well, they asked if I could give them a twenty for gas, which I gave them," she said.

A few seconds of silence passed through their call. Trang didn't know what to say in response. Her heart sank at the event of her parents' betrayal. She felt like she could cry, scream and throw up all at the same time and mostly, she wanted to sleep and forget that all of this just happened during a time when she should be purchasing fake flowers and glitter glue to decorate her graduation cap.

Suddenly, Trang shot up from where she was lying on her bed and went to her laptop to log into her bank account, after remembering that it was still set up as a joint account between her and her mother.

"They couldn't have taken money from her account, would they? They never had done that before," she said,

All of the colors were drained from her face when her most recent balance activity appeared.

-$10,000.

That was almost all of the money she had saved from all of her birthday li xi money, internship stipends, and work study.