Moondogs - Alexander Yates [14]
“Good morning, Shawn.” Monique looked right at him and he looked right at the wall. He hadn’t spoken a word to her since she forbade his going to the prom. Not hello, or good night, or can I please have so-and-so. The worst part was that she’d said yes at first—she’d assumed it was the local counterpart of one of Leila’s middle-school dances back home. Awkward and harmless, as long as the chaperones stayed on their toes. But a few days later Shawn came home with a rock in his ear. It was a gift from his date, the seventeen-year-old who was going to take him to the senior prom. Monique took away the earring and her permission faster than it took to slam a door, and by dinnertime she’d gotten hold of the girl’s home number and had an angry conversation with her father. Shawn said she was intentionally trying to humiliate him and she laughed. That made things worse. The hole in Shawn’s earlobe still hadn’t healed. It had been joined by a fuzzy top lip and tightly braided cornrows that Joseph wouldn’t dare say he hated. Wouldn’t dare, on account of the fact that Shawn and Leila were, as far as their parents could tell, the darkest children in their new, private school. And Joseph suspected an eagerness on the part of all those rich kids to engage in racial caricature. Such a matter, he insisted, had to be broached delicately. If at all.
“Good morning, Shawn.” Still nothing. “You left everything on in your room. It’s wasting electricity. And that lizard of yours looks like it needs to be fed.”
Joseph swallowed hastily so he wouldn’t have to talk with his mouth full. “And don’t forget, son, that you still need to find someone to look after it when we go back home.”
“I’m not going.”
“You’re going,” they said in near unison. Joseph leaned over his breakfast. The fluorescent kitchen light brought out the red in his eyes and the loose way his translucent skin seemed to hang. “You are going.”
“Nope.”
Monique sipped her coffee and held the mug up, pretending to look at it. “Lights. Air conditioner. Crickets for the lizard. Now.” She put the mug down hard and some coffee sloshed onto the plastic tabletop. Shawn nodded almost immediately. Then he poured himself more juice. He did this as though it had all been one motion and the nod was happenstance. He drank his juice slowly, got up and walked out to the den.
Joseph and Leila continued eating in silence. Monique took a bite of pancake and wished she hadn’t. They were thick and slightly hard, another attempt at what Amartina clearly thought was an American breakfast. Dinners were the same story. Over-salted pork medallions and grease-dripping fried chicken, usually served alongside mashed baking potatoes. Monique would have been happy enough with tapsilog for breakfast, and a sour soup or pancit at night, but her family vetoed Filipino food. She made up for it by taking lunch breaks at the embassy gym, but a year of this cooking was starting to show on the kids, especially Leila. It wasn’t that she’d gotten fat, but she still insisted on buying outfits for the year-ago version of herself. Monique walked in on her more than once taking apart some piece of clothing with a pair of art scissors. “That wasn’t free,” she said when she caught Leila destroying the elastic waist of a miniskirt. “You could just as well be cutting up the shopping money we give you.” Leila responded coolly that the skirt cost less than a dollar at Landmark, and that her mother could “bill her.” Monique played this conversation over and over in her mind. Sometimes