Amidst The Stars

Falling Apart

  Their mother's cooking of a full meal, it turned out, wouldn't end after that evening. Nearly every night afterwards, their mother continued to cook for them. Every meal was a surprise — it could be congee one night, real, not-frozen dumplings the next. Vicente stopped going to school hungry, and Yao's dark circles faded by the day.

  Even the arguments stopped. Their father changed to be strangely subdued, never shouting at their mother. She never yelled back, either. There was no more of Leon crying himself to sleep or Ling hiding under her desk while clutching her stuffed animals. For a whole three months, things were peaceful.

  But the peace was only the calm before the storm.

  At the end of June, when the siblings received the results of their final exams and their report cards on the last day of school, the time of peace ended. Their mother returned home without the cheerful greeting they'd become used to, instead going straight to the kitchen to start making dinner.

  While trying to sort out the mess of worksheets and notices in his folder, Vicente heard the familiar sound of chopping. He rifled through his papers one last time and got up from the kitchen table, heading for the kitchen counter where their mother was mincing a stalk of ginger. He tapped her on the shoulder. "Mother?"

  She scraped the small pile of pureed ginger off the chopping board and into a dish.

  "Mother?" Vicente repeated. "Can I help you cook?"

  She reached for a sprig of spring onions and began cutting them up. Vicente went back to the kitchen table. Leon, who realised that their mother wasn't paying attention to them, resumed his search for somewhere to hide his report card.

  "Hide it under your pillow," Vicente suggested, watching Leon try to wrap his jacket around his report card.

  "Then I'll see it every night." He pulled his report card out and stared at the window. "Should I just throw it out?"

  "If you throw it out, someone is going to find a crumpled-up report card with Leon Huang wrote all big and clear on the top and bring it back up. Then Mother will see the D you got in math."

  Leon crossed his arms. "At least I passed."

  Those were his thoughts when he saw the C+ he got in French and the B- in English, but Vicente decided not to say it. His little brother went back to brainstorming. "I could wash it down the sink."

  "You'd block the sink, and we'll have to dig little bits of your report card up from the sink-hole-thing." No, it couldn't be called a sink-hole, that was a sort of hole that opened up in the middle of the street to swallow people. "From the drain, I mean."

  "Should I set it on fire?"

  "I don't trust you near fires."

  "You were the one who nearly melted our frying pan!"

  "That was one time," Vicente defended. He made a big show of covering his ears and went back to trying to organise his mess of a folder.

  Yao chose that moment to march into the kitchen, holding his own report card, and found Leon trying to jam his card up his shirt. "I'm gone for fifteen minutes, and I come back to you trying to wear your report card?"

  "There's no report card," Leon fibbed. "I never got a report card."

  Vicente added helpfully, "he got a D in math and doesn't want Mother to know."