Fighting Fish (Kris/Tao), Part 1/4

[warmboys]

Fighting Fish (1/4)
Kris/Tao
~9900 words
PG-13 (NC-17 eventually)
Kris is perpetually confused, and Zitao is the antidote.

For Joie, who is the biggest taoris fan I know and spams me everything I love ♥

NOTE: there are a lot of side characters here, including half the cast of Happy Camp (Wu Xin/Orfila, Haitao, He Jiong) and a small fraction of SMTown (Zhou Mi, Amber, Henry, to name a few). I'm sorry if the names get confusing ><; The primary focus is on taoris but I couldn't help dragging in other people along the way.

The road Kris found them driving down led to a cluster of tall apartment buildings, fenced in by two wideset tollbars, one for each coming and going. The man in the entrance booth wore a peaked cap like a police officer and didn't turn when the driver honked. He was preoccupied with a small television set, an old model with antennae, and a styrofoam box of dry noodles.

“Sometimes you have to slip them a couple bucks if you want better service,” Yixing had advised over the phone twenty hours ago. Despite having sat for the last forty minutes while navigating over mostly level ground Kris was still disoriented from the flight, but he managed to find his wallet in the front pocket of his smaller suitcase and fish out a couple newly exchanged bills. It was like learning how to count all over again. He bent into a slouch and knocked on the door of the booth, addressing the security guard as Uncle.

"I'll be in the third building -- apartment 508, Wu Yifan." Smoothly, he retrieved an unopened pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and slid his offerings across the table, where they made contact with the man’s lunch.

He eyed the gifts for a moment before breaking into a welcoming smile. It carried both the allure and permanent yellow staining of a chain-smoker.

"I didn't know Wu Xin had such a handsome little brother."

That must've been Orfila's Chinese name. Yixing had said something about that, too. He probably had it written down somewhere. Kris glanced down at his palm. Of course.

The elevators could be unreliable, warned the security guard, who went by Ah-Si. The fourth of seven children. He was too old to work at the factory now, he said, pinching at his skin to show Kris its fading elasticity. There were two elevators, and the one on the left was prone to spontaneous late-night breakdowns.

“Forget about your 1 a.m. ice cream runs,” Ah-Si said, guerilla-patting him on the stomach.

Kris was embarrassed, because he’d let his gym membership expire quietly last fall. His running sneakers were still collecting dust under the bed back in San Francisco.

“I would recommend taking the stairs. Five flights is nothing for a kid like yourself, am I right?”

“Kid” caught him off-guard. He was twenty-five; nobody had called him that in years. But the endearment carried a soft, weighty comfort, like it was okay for him to have lived a quarter of a century and come up empty-handed. Not a terrible way to be measured by, he couldn’t help thinking as he hauled his suitcase up the uneven stairs.

The peephole to 508 was flanked by two large glossy paper cutouts of a boy and girl in traditional red New Year’s garb, with the character for “fortune” hung upside down above them. He raised his knuckle to the door but it drew open before he could knock.

“Kris?”

He was being hugged.

-

Yixing had neglected to mention how attractive his contact actually was. “What are you talking about? She’s practically my sister.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that she’s-good-looking, man,” Kris whispered into the laptop mic. He wasn’t sure how well his voice carried in the apartment but he didn’t want to find out. The curtains framing the window of his room were lace-white, too flimsy for proper noise absorption. They allowed sunlight through as easily as a pair of paper ghosts. He was already dreading the morning. Even though he couldn’t be classified as a light sleeper, adjusting to a new location always took time.

“Don’t do it, Wu Yifan.”

Yixing made a guillotine motion with his hand and his neck. Out of the corner of the screen Ann was nosing her snout into his sleeve.

“Your pig is hungry.”

“This week’s lesson is in Patience.” Yixing picked Ann up and cradled her in his arms. He nuzzled the thin fur on her naked pink back. “Confucius said, ‘It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.’”

“She’s going to eat your face if you don’t feed her,” Kris said.

“Lu Ann is a vegetarian,” Yixing reminded him. As if in protest Ann let out a squeal and jumped onto the desk and then out of the screen. Yixing looked momentarily distraught before turning back to the webcam.

“Don’t hit on her if you want to live. By the way, did you meet Zitao yet?”

-

Dinner wasn’t a huge affair. “We’ve been meaning to get rid of these chive dumplings for months now. Oh, we kept them in the freezer, don’t worry. They’re not molding or anything like that. Zitao had a, a mammoth craving a few months ago and folded hundreds of them. Hundreds. We had to give some to the neighbors, though I have a feeling they don’t like us very much. We bought out all the leeks at the market. But look,” and she gestured into her pan, “Guess who’s stuck slaving over the stove while he goes out with his friends?”

Orfila was a bright-eyed chatterbox by nature. At first glance Kris had thought she might have been mixed, maybe with some Eastern European blood, but now he wasn’t so sure. The closer he looked, the more Chinese he found her, in the cadences of her voice, her physical mannerisms.

It could have been the dyed brown hair, which she wore up in a fashionable bun and left a few loose pieces curling at the neck. They danced up whenever the fan blew in this direction. Kris realized he was hovering, and made an effort to move.

“Do you need any help?”

“Oh, no, it’s fine,” she yelled over the whir of the range hood. “Actually-could you set the table? Just two-he called earlier to say he’d be late tonight. Don’t forget, I also made oxtail soup.”

Their relationship was curious, Kris thought as he grabbed two bowls, two soup spoons, and two pairs of chopsticks in one hand. It was probably too early to ask. He didn’t want to intrude. One of the bowls almost slipped, but he caught it with his index finger.

Later, Orfila stared at the assortment of bottles that newly adorned the bathroom sink as Kris scrambled to make them less conspicuous, hiding his eye creams behind the larger full-body lotion. “Wow,” she said, in English. “That’s-“

“I dated a Korean girl for five years,” Kris explained.

“Oh.” Orfila shifted her attention away from the jar of Snowise Whitening Cream to him instead. She really did have very beautiful, penetrating eyes.

“You’re one of those guys.”

“I’m not-“ Kris started as a reflex but caught himself because-well, it might have been true. He wasn’t sure that he wasn’t one of those guys.

“I’m just kidding. I had a thing for Bae Yongjun, too, back when I was in college.”

“That was, what, last year?” Kris couldn’t resist saying.

Orfila laughed, not bothering to mask her delight. Her hair was down now, and she had removed all of her makeup, but Kris didn’t mind the eye circles or sun freckles dotting her nose, sprinkled across her cheeks. In another life, steered by a surer pair of hands, ones that dared to make fearless promises to strange women he’d just met, he might have found her irresistible.

“Zhang Yixing warned me about you,” she said. “I didn’t think he was being serious.”

-

He honestly had thought he would be buried in San Francisco.

In the winter her face puffed out again, and she would spend mornings agonizing over the extra unwanted roundness, barely detectable in the beginning until he spent enough time to see her the way she saw herself. It didn’t mean he loved her any less, he argued when she seemed affronted by his silent acquiescence. If anything, it should’ve meant the opposite. He was always almost-saying important things in a roundabout way.

“I really thought that if you spent most of your childhood and early adulthood hungry there would be a payoff later, you know? I guess God works in mysterious ways.”

Later he would miss her strange sense of humor, not being able to tell how serious she was. She invoked the lord’s name only on holidays and in front of people she wanted to impress, like their neighbors across the hall with the stroller a permanent folded fixture against their door. They didn’t have children. The wife wore a veiled pillbox hat to church every Sunday, and Jessica took exceptional care in writing out their Christmas cards, struggling with her long-lost cursive.

“We’re good people, too.”

Jess pressed her tongue against the envelope adhesive, a western practice Kris had always found borderline repulsive.

“Let’s repent for our sins,” he drawled, wrapping himself around her tiny, brittle waist. He rested his chin on the top of her head and took in the scent of her signature Dior perfume. Memories like this were why some days he still wondered why he didn’t marry her.

The months after he left his job they grew a chasm in the apartment. Watered it as if it were their own, with diligence. She was still in the office until late every night, while Kris suddenly had the entire day to make dinner. He became curious and nostalgic, like years of avoiding people he loved had finally caught up to him. He stalked his old friends online, backtracked through their Weibos, found Instagram accounts through emails accumulated in his personal Gmail, unread over the years. He even discovered Yixing on Renren, although the last post on his wall had been over a year ago.

Jess stopped talking to him. He stopped brainstorming creative answers to “How was your day?” He wasn’t taking up hobbies, just lurking on Skype all the time. She started going out on Friday nights again, in shoes that took Kris longer than a beat to not recognize. “Are those-“

“I got them on sale at DSW last week.”

“They look good, babe.”

Before he could stand up to hug her, she had already slipped out the door. Her heels clicked down the hallway and he found himself listening until he couldn’t hear them anymore.

Money wasn’t the issue, he told himself. She wasn’t like that. Besides, she made enough for the both of them and whatever children they could’ve had. But they weren’t going to have children now, or ever. He’d ruined it. He’d done something. He thought of ringing up his old manager, of possibly groveling and asking to be taken back. Maybe they wouldn’t even require him to grovel. Maybe they’d kept his cube open in an sincere display of optimism.

He shook his head. It was past two in the morning, Jess hadn’t come home, and he was approaching delirious. There was a reason he quit, even if he couldn’t remember it now.

They were drifting.

Another two months crawled by before they broke it off. By then he’d heard through the grapevine-a nosey childhood friend Jess had spent most of her life trusting too much and Kris had never been too keen on-that she was being courted by someone else, noncommittally, on the sly. A dentist, said the informant, tall, with, she stressed, nice teeth. The perfect, slightly horsey kind, almost like veneers, so you know he’d never embarrass you on a date with green leafy shit lodged between the cracks. And-get this, topped with a blinding Colgate smile, built for TV commercials.

“That’s enough,” Kris interrupted. “You really don’t slack off on the details.”

Taeyeon laughed into the phone, a nefarious tinkling sound. “Hey, you asked. Honestly, I didn’t think you guys would last as long as you did, knowing Sica.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was a pause, followed by a reticent “Well…” It curdled his stomach.

“Sica’s more of an explorer. Settling down with you… I’m sure your place is really nice, don’t get me wrong, but… sorry, I couldn’t see it. It’s centuries too early for that. For her. Maybe not you. Everyone moves at a different pace, so. Don’t-hey. Hello? Kris?”

In the end it was just Yixing and him, good, true friend Zhang Yixing who averted his eyes while Kris sobbed in front of his webcam and then said, “Come home, Kris. It’s gonna be okay. Come back to us.”

-

Home wasn’t Shenyang, Kris thought, as he lay freshly showered on his new bed in his new room and bore a slow arduous hole into the ceiling lamp above. The curved shade darkened with soft charcoal spots in areas which he guessed were either clusters of rolled-up dust or the carcasses of flies accumulated over the years.

The house had quieted, with Orfila gone to bed at precisely ten o’clock. She’d heard from endless magazines and celebrity interviews that sleeping early was crucial to skin repair and rejuvenation, especially if one wished to age gracefully. “But I’m preaching to the choir, now, aren’t I? I’ll bet you even wrote some of those articles. Wu laoshi.”

Kris had never needed to read a skincare article in his life, not when he was living with someone who’d handpick out the right type of lotion for his skin combination and explain to him, unprompted, the importance of regular exfoliation and not touching his face with unwashed hands. The first year they started dating Jessica had gotten him a loofah for his birthday.

“Do you know how hard it is to find a black loofah?” She’d demanded, possibly upon seeing his blank expression. And then, a little nervously: “That’s your favorite color, right? It goes with the whole metro goth thing you’ve got going on.”

Never had he been the target of such terrifying descriptors. “No,” he said. “It’s magenta.”

She started laughing, which set the stage for worse jokes to come. Bad jokes were in fact the only kind he allowed in his repertoire; they weeded out the friends who couldn’t bear a couple seconds of uncomfortable fake-laughing, which were friends that Kris wasn’t sure he wanted. Jessica passed the litmus test while they were in that uncertain early phase still, groping around each other, reading volumes into silences. He could tell she didn’t always know exactly when he was being funny or just being himself, and as someone who’d once had his sense of humor referred to as “incomprehensibad” he decided to assure her that black was actually probably his favorite color, if he even had one at this age. It wasn’t something he’d thought much about since approximately the second grade, when they had to go around interrogating their classmates for everyone’s favorite things and practice writing them down. What was intended as a handwriting exercise caused Kris no small amount of distress. They’d just moved from Guangzhou that year, and he was still having trouble connecting his ear to his brain, his brain to his hand. “R” and “th” sounds were the worst. So of course the first kid he interviewed had to be named something fucking impossible like Thora Roth. Thora’s favorite color was green, like her eyes.

Jess nodded, smiling the whole time, and admitted when he was done that she couldn’t exactly relate. She’d lived in San Francisco all her life, except for the early childhood summers in Seoul that stretched between school years. “But I’m serious. You better use this loofah every day until you see mold. Trust me, your skin will thank me in another decade.”

That was a tough deal to reject. He held her gift to his chest and solemnly vowed that he, Kris Wu, would indeed use it every day, cross his heart and hope to die.

It was a promise that he kept easily until the month of their breakup, and by then the raggedy sponge had deteriorated into a relic, a painful insinuation of what he had lost every time he clambered into the bathtub. He threw it out with the Wednesday trash, after Googling whether or not it was recyclable. It wasn’t. Not many things were. Kris found himself at the peak of his poeticism during the first stage of this post-breakup era.

Downstairs, the slamming of the front door jolted him from his reverie. He heard a grunt, the kicking off of boots, and a set of heavy footsteps trudging up the stairs. Whoever they belonged to might have been a little drunk, like walking without dragging their feet was proving an impossibility. The other guy who lived here, he remembered suddenly. Huang Zitao.

He listened idly to Zitao stumbling into the bathroom down the hall and, when the door closed none-too-quietly behind him, the muffled sounds of him groping around, the turning on of the shower water, allowing these mundane noises to guide himself to sleep.

-

In the morning Orfila made pancakes, excited to have an excuse to finally use up the batter they’d bought last month, when, she raised her hand to cup the side of her mouth, as if recounting a big secret, “Zitao had another one of his menstrual cravings. That boy, I swear.”

“Sounds like he’s still growing,” Kris said uncertainly. He was trying to identify the building on the other side of the community courtyard, visible through the living room balcony. 11, or was it 12? Ah-Si had mentioned a mnemonic that he used to label the buildings without having to count them every time.

“I can hear you guys, you know.”

Slipping into the chair on the other side of the table, Zitao was taller than he’d expected, and darker, dressed in a gray button-down tucked into a pair of neat black slacks with an expertly ironed crease. The way he held himself suggested years of disciplined-something. Dance lessons perhaps. The shirt pulled taut across his shoulders, just a half-size too small to be the strict definition of professional, Kris thought in Jessica’s voice, a discreet mumble she adopted while they used to people-watch in Starbucks.

Zitao flashed him a quick, squirrely half-smile, and stuck out his hand. “Huang Zitao.”

Kris extended his own, but not without banging it against the table first. “Wu Yifan,” he said through the excruciating pain.

“Kris,” corrected Orfila, scraping her uniquely shaped pancakes off the pan. Zitao raised his eyebrows. “He’s American.”

“Canadian-“ Kris said. “Sort of. But yeah, you can call me anything. I don’t mind.”

“What does Zhang Yixing call you?”

Kris had to think about it. “That depends on how mad he is.”

“Normally, then.”

“Wu Yifan, I guess. Yifan.”

“Okay,” Zitao said, tinkering his fork against the plate. “Kris,” he said, the shape of the word forcing his lips apart to show a sliver of uneven bottom teeth. “Are you going to school with, um-“ he gestured towards Kris’ hair.

Kris ran his hand through it, on instinct. “Oh. Damn. I didn’t have time to dye it before getting here.” The whole decision to pack up his life and move halfway across the globe had been made so haphazardly that the previous night he’d looked into his suitcase with amazement at having packed not only his cell phone charger but also his razor and favorite brand of chewing gum. The charger was useless now. But this was how one did recklessness, he thought-with infinite foresight.

“It’s okay,” Zitao said quickly. “Principal He is really, really great. Really laidback. And the kids will probably love it. They expect all foreigners to be blond anyway.”

Zitao’s own hair was starkly black, blacker than Kris’ early-Kangta phase as a pimply-faced teenager when his dad got that job with Samsung, right before the divorce, and the whole family relocated to Seoul. It was the kind of black that greased easily and let everyone who saw you know exactly when was the last time you’d washed your hair. Zitao had honest hair, hair that couldn’t tell a lie, and, Kris noticed as he reached across the table for the orange juice, several piercings in his ear. Small punctures in the cartilage and the lobe. He must have left the studs out for the day.

Maybe Zitao noticed him looking, because the tip of his ears flushed a soft pink, and he ducked his head before inhaling the rest of his pancakes.

He was out of the door before Kris could say goodbye.

Orfila seemed apologetic. “He’s still a touch awkward, especially with strangers. You know how teenagers get.”

“How old is he?” Kris asked.

She did the math in her head, counting on her fingers for help. “Twenty-two this year. His birthday’s coming up in a few weeks, actually.”

Three years ago Kris had just graduated, was finishing up his first year of Teach for America in Knoxville, Tennessee, had spent more nights at his desk than the bed beside it. The bed he began using as a placeholder for dirty laundry. Still he’d been bursting with unexpired youthful enthusiasm, genuinely aching to make a difference.

“Is he working?” he wondered aloud.

Orfila rounded her mouth into an expression of surprise. “Did Yixing forget to tell you? Zitao’s a PE teacher. You’ll be working together.”

-

One couldn’t have guessed from a quick onceover that He Jiong was a multimillionaire-he came off as more like a well-kept museum curator, or a vivacious sprite. He wore a tweed suit and khaki-colored britches that stopped right above his argyle socks. Kris blinked before meeting the twinkle in Principal He’s eye.

“Mr. Wu,” said the principal, closing the door behind them. “Yixing has sung your praises well.”

Kris let out a nervous chuckle. He had the distinct sensation of going for his first job interview all over again, that first nerve-wrecking round of questions from the recruiter at Blackstone, even if most of them were behavioral and he could, in his sleep, turn each of his “three greatest weaknesses” into a tentative strength.

“Please sit,” said Principal He, sitting back himself.

Kris sat.

He watched Principal He’s steepled fingers as he described the job in detail-and his expectations for Kris. “These are not ordinary kids, you know.”

Kris nodded. Yixing had told him that they’d come from lower-income families, kids who didn’t grow up with computers or tablets or whatever new gadget had become ubiquitous to the everychild’s learning experience. He’d said that He Jiong had been very clear about the type of academy he was running.

“They require special attention,” Principal He continued, with a smile that didn’t expect reciprocation. “Attention that many of their families, due to financial and timely restraints, have had difficulty providing. Some of these kids have never been exposed to English outside of a few snatches on the radio. Jolin Tsai’s ‘baby’ this or ‘ooh yeah’ that.” He searched Kris’ face carefully. “You have to promise to be patient.”

Patience meant time, and the willingness to give it, to spend it with blind faith, eyes closed, trustingly. For once he didn’t associate it with languishing. Time was something he could afford-had waited a long time to afford. Confucius said, he thought, and bit back a laugh.

“I promise, sir,” he said.

Principal He looked pleased. “Good! Let’s meet your students now, shall we?”

-

Everyone asked about his hair, but no one seemed to care about the answer, they were too busy staring. Which was convenient, because he didn’t know how I was depressed for six months and thought dyeing my hair to look like a Japanese motorcycle gang member would make me happy again would hold up with thirteen-year-olds. Or That visit to the hairdresser was the highlight of my half-year heartbreak hibernation. He wasn’t planning on teaching them sarcasm or alliteration for a long while.

He had an open hour between two and three in the afternoon, and one of his new coworkers, a long-limbed transplant from Wuhan, showed him around the school. Zhou Mi was the only other teacher who gave him more than a clipped self-introduction. He asked, “No, where are you really from?” and “You’re not actually twenty-five?” and “Have you ever tried henna?”

Kris guessed it was the height. The height scared off a lot of people, always made him look meaner than he was.

“Here we have the grand gymnasium, pride of He Jiong’s Special Academy,” Zhou Mi was saying. They’d stopped at the bottom of a stairwell before a pair of swinging doors, and Kris placed his head in the rounded window, resting his chin on the curved rim.

It was smaller than could be called modest, roughly the size of three classrooms put together, with low ceilings and dull scratched up linoleum floorboards. The basketball hoops seemed to hang lower than the standard ones he’d find on a street court back home. Kris was seized by a momentary flashback from many years ago, the anticipation of his entire school steaming off the bleachers as someone, maybe coach, shouted at him, “Orange. Orange” with three seconds left on the clock. Shoot, he was saying, shoot, even though Kris wasn’t a shooter. Kris had a 50/50 chance of missing a free throw. The whole team groaned whenever he got fouled. Ugh, Jongdae would say from the bench, right before Kris shot him a death glare. Jongdae, who barely grazed Kris’ elbow, shot better free throws.

“And there’s one of our best teaching assistants, Huang Zitao,” Zhou Mi said cheerfully, mistaking Kris’ silence for something else. He squinted into the other window. “You can see how diligent he is, polishing up the basketballs for the next class to use, even though he teaches gymnastics. A very flexible lad. Wait ‘til you see his splits.”

Zitao was crouched over the ball rack with something in his hand, a rag cloth, and from where Kris stood he could’ve passed for a well-behaved student monitor, designated with cleaning duty. He couldn’t imagine the guy leading a stretching exercise, never mind commanding the attention of twenty students at once.

“C’mon,” Zhou Mi said, gesturing towards the next flight of stairs. “The best is yet to come. You see, there’s a secret teacher’s lounge for the elite instructors. Eons too early for you, sorry to say, but I like to give the newcomers something to look forward to…”

-

Yixing was reaching the turning point in his career where he no longer had a functional relationship with sleep. Sleep was the nagging mother-in-law, the accessory in his exciting music-producing lifestyle. Kris realized that now that they were in the same time zone the hours they caught each other on Skype seemed much stranger than back when he was still on Pacific time. He’d never bothered to do the math back then. Now when he signed on at 4 a.m. to find the small green icon next to “zyxwvu91” he knew for a fact it was time that Yixing should’ve been using for skin repair. At least Kris had the jetlag to blame.

“Talk to me, Kris. Wu Yifan. Talk to me before I lose my mind.”

Kris surfed away from the NYT Sports section, dragged the Skype image of Yixing back into view. He came across a lot more low-resolution now that he’d turned off all the lights. His face was blue.

“I’m here.”

“I know you’re there,” Yixing said morbidly, “but are you really there?”

Kris laughed. “What?”

"Isn't it weird to think-...never mind."

"Think what?"

"I was gonna say, isn't it weird to think at one point we didn't know each other?" Yixing leaned back in his chair, facing away from the camera. Kris heard the faint clicking of something in the background, like a stapler. "Think about it. At one point in our lives, I didn't know how bad you were at, like, being honest. At one point in our lives, I didn’t know exactly how much product you used in your hair every morning-"

"Wait," Kris interrupted. "Go back."

"Which part?"

"What are you talking about, 'being honest'?"

"Oh. It's just - it's nothing. But you're just not...”

“I’m not what?”

Yixing took a breath, as if weighing his options. “You're not good at looking at yourself,” he said finally. “I know you do it all the time, checking yourself out in store windows and reflective surfaces, but when it comes to introspective soulgazing shit, you back the fuck away like someone burned you… in another lifetime or something." He continued in a gentler tone. "It's not bad to think sometimes. Like, try to figure your own shit out. Trust me, I've been there."

Kris knew he had. Yixing, who draped his own human complexity all over his face.

"I'm not as deep as you think I am," Kris said, attempting a dry laugh. "I really don't have that much going on in here."

"Whatever you say, man."

Yixing had migrated away from the computer. Probably in the bathroom. Kris could hear the water running.

"So what's up with this Huang Zitao kid anyway? How'd he end up here?"

There was a pause, where the water stopped running and Kris imagined Yixing was toweling his hands dry. His voice was louder when he spoke again. "Zitao? Orfila took him in a few years ago, I think they were both lonely. I know she was."

"They had a - thing, then?"

"What-no, no. No. Actually... no. I doubt it.” Yixing poked his head back into the frame. A toothbrush dangled from his lips, toothpaste foaming between them. “They're practically siblings by this point. He's been mostly single but I know she's had guys on and off. She thinks of him as more of...an abandoned cat, I bet."

"I bet," Kris echoed. Zitao as a lost kitten, left on the side of the road. Scowling and licking his wounds dry. It wasn't too hard to imagine.

-

They spent the weekend building the cake. Building, because “baking doesn’t express the blood, sweat and tears that went into this labor of love,” Orfila explained, brushing aside a piece of wayward hair with the back of her arm. She was wearing gloves, and some of the frosting had gotten on her bangs. Kris would’ve picked it off if his own hands hadn’t been sticky with the cake batter residue.

“If he asks, this was store-bought,” she reminded him. “You have no idea how big of a crybaby he used to be. Nowadays he pretends to be cool, but he used to love my cakes. Now he’s always, ‘don’t bother, Wu Xin.’ What if I want to bother? What if I know you secretly want it too?”

They waited until just past eleven, Kris pretending to be absorbed in the soccer game on TV while Orfila painted her toenails in front of her laptop, perusing the news while keeping one eye on the clock. Zitao didn’t show up at ten-thirty, and then he didn’t show at eleven-fifteen, and then Orfila announced, with a wistful note of resignation, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight. Tell that boy happy birthday if you see him in the next hour.”

Kris took out the garbage at half-past eleven, and spied, across the garden, a familiar silhouette leaning against building 12, lit up against the backdrop of patio paver lights.

“Happy birthday,” he said when he was within speaking distance. Zitao raised his head, and Kris saw the metallic shine of the earbuds in his ears. He wore the expression of someone who’d been caught doing something illegal, eyes a little wide, mouth ajar, and quickly tried to adjust back to neutrality, but not before Kris had seen it, processed his guilt.

“I didn’t want her to make a big deal out of it,” Zitao preempted with a shrug, and then scrummaged for something from his back pocket. His hand emerged with an open pack of cigarettes, which he nudged toward Kris, who shook his head. With another shrug Zitao shook the carton until a cigarette popped out. He held it between his lips and found a lighter in the inside pocket of his leather jacket, cupped around it while clicking the metal switch. Once, twice; nothing came out. Kris heard him mumble a curse, low at first and then again, louder. Ta ma de. He clicked again, and eventually Kris got tired of watching.

“Lemme,” he said, reaching over. A small flame sprung from the lighter, curling into early wisps of smoke as it made contact with the butt of the stick. “Thanks,” Zitao said, his nose inches away from Kris’ face. “Er.”

Kris stepped back abruptly, cleared his throat. “I think Orfila likes making a big deal out of you. She thinks of you as family.”

“Orfila?” Zitao stopped his fingers. “Is that what you call her?”

“Yeah. Sorry, I got used to it. It’s how she signed her emails to me back before I got here.”

“Yeah, she likes whipping out little English phrases sometimes. I swear I’ve never heard anyone call her by her English name. It’s a joke.” Zitao paused, shooting a sidelong glance at Kris. “I mean, it’s fine if you do it. I’m sure she gets a kick out of it.”

Kris dug his hands deeper into his pockets. It was hard to tell if Zitao secretly hated him.

“It’s not even my birthday,” Zitao continued.

“What?”

They’d gotten his birthdate wrong at the hospital, Zitao explained, even though “May” looked nothing like “September.” Growing up everyone around him agreed he had the character of an autumn baby, if not dead-of-winter baby. His uncle joked that he should’ve been born in a blizzard, a dark blemish in the snow, a child of ice. “I guess I was a prickly teenager,” Zitao said.

“You’re alright,” Kris said when he was finished, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Zitao barked out a short laugh, releasing a puff of smoke. “You don’t even know me. I mean, we just met.”

“Yeah, well. I’m sure you’re a decent kid.”

“Kid,” Zitao repeated. “That’s rich. You’re, what, twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-five,” Kris said. Why the fuck did everyone always guess older? “And sorry. You just have this aura of like, youth. It’s not a bad thing.”

Zitao fell silent, and Kris wondered if this was a hint for him to leave. The conversation wasn’t supposed to go this way.

"You know, a lot of people don't love what they do,” said Zitao, suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

Zitao took a slow, languid drag and exhaled with too much control to be unpracticed. His smoking habits must have accrued gradually over the years. Like small tokens of wisdom, Kris mused silently. Like an aging biker’s increasingly eccentric tattoos.

“Do you really want to be a teacher?”

The question was a loaded gun, but Kris had supplied the bullets. He thought back to those two long years in Knoxville, to yelling into a sea of blank, apathetic faces. He’d moved there with so many plans, ideas to help reform the education system, and for the first few months had entered the classroom every morning with the kind of buoyancy unique to certain privileged recent college grads, the same sort of naïve confidence he recognized in the other teachers his age. The next two years depleted him of everything he’d ever believed in. You couldn’t revise the system bottom-up when the top was rotting, he knew now. The system needed more than a trim. It needed a fucking upheaval, to be turned upside-down, change shaken out of its pockets. And the men in suits, the ones who sat back in their armchairs and signed off papers and smoked each other’s imaginary masturbatory Cuban cigars, needed sense throttled into them, but there was no one to do it. He sure as hell couldn’t do it.

The force of his residual bitterness surprised even himself. He struggled to regain footing before replying. “I don’t know. Do you?”

The deflection was expertly dodged. "What did you want to be as a kid?" Zitao pressed on.

What Kris wanted to be as a kid was a whole other story.

He remembered two things from fifth grade: angry rounds of Pokemon on the school bus and Britney Spears’ perfect oval-shaped belly button. The first time that music video aired on MTV he and his buddies had gathered around the television like they were holding some kind of ritual. They were learning not to give a shit about listening to pop music as long as the girl was hot. At the halfway mark Henry had ejaculated in his overalls. The rest of the year they substituted his name for “pee.” “I gotta go Henry real bad.” “If I don’t Henry now I might explode.”

"Eminem, maybe,” Kris said. “Hey. It's not that funny."

Zitao was laughing so hard he was crying. His shoulders pulled up and down as if he were convulsing. Kris moved to shake them, to make him stop, but upon first contact Zitao drew back with a sharpness that left him stunned, almost hurt. His head made a sharp cracking sound against the wall where he'd backed into it.

"I didn't mean-" but he didn’t know what he was supposed to be apologizing for. "Sorry," he said anyway, and took a small step back.

Zitao licked his lower lip from where he'd bit into it. A thin sliver of blood slid from the cracked skin. He rubbed his shoulder, and the look on his face was strange, undeniably sad for a moment, then just as quickly blanking out.

"I don’t like being touched.” He lowered his head and didn't look at Kris when he put the cigarette to his lips again.

"Oh," Kris said. He nestled his hands in the scabs of lint filling his pockets. "To be honest, I'm not great at physical contact either."

"Really?” Zitao didn’t bother to hide the incredulousness in his voice. “I would’ve taken you for a hugger, with those elephant trunk arms."

"Me? Hell no. I hold on for two seconds max and then get the fuck out of there."

"What about sex?"

Kris looked over sharply and saw a different version of Zitao, trying distinctly not to laugh. Something inside him relaxed, like a knot coming loose. "That's different," Kris said, caving in to the laughter himself. "All day and all night, baby. As long as you like."

-

“Did you play basketball? I played too. Mostly I just let them bounce off me before they bounced off the other person and then out of bounds because--” Zhou Mi slammed his fist on the table, all the while maintaining a complacent smile, “-our possession again.” Kris was beginning to suspect that the only thing he and Zhou Mi had in common was being able to see above the heads of most people on the street.

“But they’re looking for a coach for Team Gold this year’s Spirit Day and I can’t do it because I’m technically ‘injured,’” and here he paused to regard the word with disdain, “in a way that would handicap my team.” He gave Kris a meaningful look.

“You’re injured?”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it. Just years of yelling at tiny tots have finally caught up to me.”

“What?”

Zhou Mi was smiling still. It was like his face had been stuck on the “generically pleasant” dial since birth.

“I’ve lost capability of one of my vocal cords. Oh no, stop. Don’t look at me like that. I’m talking fine right now, aren’t I? I just can’t yell or go to KTV-I mean, I can go to KTV and rattle the tambourine and still have a great time. That’s fine. I just can’t yell out calls and game plans and that’s going to be necessary for Spirit Day. But otherwise I am totally okay. This is me, completely able to project my voice over a small distance.”

“Over a small distance,” Kris repeated. “How did it happen?”

Zhou Mi wagged his finger. “Let’s talk about you coaching this poor coachless basketball team.”

Zhou Mi was a social philanthropist, pushing Kris into the spotlight where he didn’t want it. But he meant well. “I’ll do it,” Kris said. “Wait, what do I have to do?”

-

Yixing had mentioned Orfila’s name when detailing out the job in Shenyang because she was in the habit of taking in strays, “not,” he amended quickly, “to say that you’re lost or anything like that.”

“You can say that. It’s okay,” Kris said.

“No.” Yixing was sticking to his story. “I mean, her place is just really cozy and relaxed, and she doesn’t ask too many questions. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable with you moving to China friendless and alone.”

“Don’t want my blood on your hands, huh?”

“Your mom would murder me,” Yixing had reminded him. “My blood would be on her hands.” Once in middle school he’d come over for video games and Kris, after forfeiting the third round, finally lost it altogether and threw his console at the wall, except it hit his mother’s favorite vase in the process, toppling onto the floor and smashing into a million bits. In a panic they’d swept up the broken shards and dumped them in a trash can a few blocks away, believing that distance would cover up the crime, but it was still the first thing Mama Wu noticed when she got home, her eyeballs bulging and her voice reaching unprecedented decibels. She chased Kris around the house with a plastic slipper until he pleaded guilty, at which point the ridged end of the slipper came down on his naked bottom three brutal times-a spectacle of motherly rage Yixing witnessed while trying to disappear quietly and unobtrusively into a corner of the room. In retrospect this incident had without a doubt brought the two boys closer together, as Yixing now knew the tallest and most handsome boy in school, with his ramrod spine and growing collection of love confessions every spring, still submitted to spankings by his mother. He’d even seen the twin Mongolian spots on his best friend’s butt cheeks, and the unique fact that Kris hadn’t even outgrown those baby blue bruises paved the way for a friendship between equals. Yixing had blackmail material now. Kris had no choice but to be friends with him forever.

“Don’t bring my mom into this,” Kris had said in his most convincing imitation of Chow Yun Fat.

If Yixing had mentioned Zitao, it was only in passing. Orfila was another mentee of He Jiong’s and an older sister figure to Yixing, but Zitao was just a kid she’d known-Yixing called him “the other resident,” not bothering to name him until Kris asked.

It made sense now. Zitao was rarely home before Kris, and most nights he stumbled into the apartment long after Orfila had gone to sleep, groping around the kitchen loudly enough that Kris could hear him over his headphones. The times Kris had brought it up with Orfila, casually slipping it into a conversation over breakfast, she’d waved her hand and chalked it up to his “rebellious teenage phase,” saying that he liked to stay out late with some of his old high school buddies, probably trying to pick up girls at a bar downtown and failing. Failing, Kris knew, because Zitao came home late for a weekday but not late enough that anything interesting could’ve happened beforehand, nothing beyond a quickie in the bathroom of whatever seedy bar he’d been hanging out in, but even then Zitao didn’t seem like the type. Kris couldn’t imagine him turning on the charm, feeding a girl drinks and lazy line after line until she felt loose and bold enough to offer to blow him or something, whether he’d planted the idea or it’d sparked autonomously in the back of her own mind from the moment she’d seen him come in the door with his group of friends, run her eyes down the general idea of chiseled shoulders and bulging biceps under his button-down, maybe checked out his ass right as he turned to sit down on the stool by the bar. Zitao had a striking, if not exactly universally good-looking face, but his jawline was as sharp as a switchblade, and he looked like he worked out more than Kris. And he was tall, which girls always appreciated. Kris couldn’t imagine him having a tough time with the female crowd but there was a general darker aura about him, almost a visible stormcloud hanging over his head. Whatever problem he had probably wasn’t physical.

Despite working at the same school, Kris rarely saw his housemate, in or out of the apartment.

But he heard him. The walls were as thin as Kris had predicted and some nights he lay in bed willing himself to fall asleep and his body, in its stubborn betrayal, would refuse, continue its stiff vigilance while in the next room began a low rumble of words, like a conversation but with steadier rhythm and he’d realize Zitao was listening to some song, probably with his headphones in, and rapping along. Maybe he thought, seeing the light off, that Kris was already asleep, or maybe he didn’t think anything. Maybe Kris-the new lodger, this nobody foreigner-wasn’t even a blip on his radar. The last thing he’d concern himself with after an eventful night out with friends.

Zitao had okay flow. By now Kris was too embittered by the insomnia and his own pessimistic daydreams to be impressed but he found that he didn’t mind listening to Zitao spitting out the verses to Chinese songs he didn’t recognize, that, if he were being honest, the rise and fall of Zitao’s intonations stirred something in him he thought he’d forgotten long ago.

-

Zhou Mi, it turned out, had already drawn out diagrams of their game plan and outlined all of Kris’ coachly duties. “Don’t forget, ‘rubber duck’ means pick and roll. And I’m thinking we might have to flagrant foul their point guard-“

“I thought this was a game,” Kris said. “And that Spirit Day was about having fun and bringing people together.”

“Of course,” Zhou Mi said. “But Spirit Day is also about crushing your opponent’s Spirit. We need to crush Team Red’s collective spirit, show them our kids are boss.”

“So… what you really wanted when you recruited me was a figurehead. For your voice.”

“I knew I picked the right guy,” Zhou Mi said, clasping a firm hand on Kris’ shoulder before turning back to the kids on the court and blowing on his whistle to signal the beginning of their next drill.

The school was bustling for the next two weeks, frenetic with anticipation. Students painted emblems of the different clubs onto banners and lay them outside the classrooms to dry. The smell of acrylic haunted the hallways into afterschool hours. From the windows of the cafeteria Kris saw Zitao leading a marching exercise in the courtyard, moving his arms in a straight line up and down as they walked the perimeter of the barbed wire fence.

“Is he like this at home?” Zhou Mi set his tray down on the table. He was nodding toward Zitao. Kris didn’t know how Zhou Mi knew they lived together. Word must have traveled fast.

“Like what?”

“Mysterious, I want to say, but that’s not it. Bridled? Like a well-kept pony.”

Kris gulped down a mouthful of rice and shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s not at home that much.”

“Really?” Zhou Mi’s hand paused on his cup as he studied Zitao’s figure in the distance. “He doesn’t ever come out with us, so we all assumed he was just a loner. Frankly, I’m surprised to hear that.”

“We” referred to the faculty, Zhou Mi went on, who made a point of making monthly outings where gossip would be divulged-Yilin had revealed at the last one that she was pregnant with her second child, a privilege she and her husband earned on account of being both only children themselves. But, Zhou Mi complained, she didn’t believe in sharing the baby's gender, in the same way that she’d kept her son's a secret as well, up until Haitao saw photos on her Weibo and-still not being able to tell; all babies seemed ambiguously sexed out of the womb-read the captions of his name underneath. Everyone knew she was hoping for a girl this time, a daughter she could spoil with her home cooking and, later, closet of vintage dresses and pantsuits. “Pantsuits,” Zhou Mi repeated dubiously, raising his eyebrows. “I guess you never know what’ll be in style by the time her daughter becomes old enough to pull a Lourdes on her.”

“A what?”

“Madonna’s daughter, also known to raid her mother’s closet for vintage gems.”

Kris made a sound in his throat to signify that he understood. Hearing Zhou Mi talk about their colleagues made them sound like nice people, although they hadn’t reached out to him. Maybe it was his fault for not having reached out to them. Normally, he realized, he didn’t have to. In his twenty-five years of life, for the most part, people had gravitated toward him, wanting to be his friend, some even content to walk in his shadow. Kris didn’t often think about it, but he’d had groupies in high school and fell effortlessly into several non-overlapping social circles in college. He rarely was able to remember how he’d met someone because more often than not, they’d met him first. He forgot names the second after shaking someone’s hand; it wasn’t until the two-year TFA stint that he brute-forced the art of putting a title to a face-thirty of them, small and round and pointy and freckled.

Zhou Mi sipped at his tea. “Come to the next one. We’re thinking of going out for drinks after Spirit Day, which ends around five.”

Kris said he was looking forward to it, and he meant it. He needed a reason to get out of the apartment, forge relationships with his new coworkers, massage some blood into his legs again, maybe allow himself to become attached to something that wasn’t his laptop.

-

The apartment was empty when he got back. Orfila DJed weekday afternoons, on a station that played contemporary pop songs with the occasional older ballads, some quivering Jacky or tremulous Andy for the 5 PM nostalgic housewives. Orfila slipped in a Korean song every now and then when she thought she could get away with it. “K-pop’s a gray area,” Orfila had explained. “Not everyone wants to listen to music they can’t understand the lyrics to.” Kris personally had not paid attention to song lyrics since his sophomore year of high school, when he’d almost made Yunho a mix CD. It was one of those things, a weird hatchling crush, steeped completely in admiration. Half the team had fallen for Yunho, his unselfish plays on the court and insistence on treating the junior players to meals off the court. His far-reaching magnanimity was the biggest trademark of his personality, but Kris remembered him most for the way he never acknowledged Kris’ foreignness, as if it didn’t register or he didn’t care enough to address it. Either one was alright with him. Yunho had said to him his freshman year, “You’re a shoo-in for captain someday,” back when he still suffered from a careless dribble and the symptoms of a sudden growth spurt, which included a change in depth perception, not being able to recognize how far your own limbs extended. Not being able to control them even when you did. But Yunho had looked at him like he could see something Kris couldn’t, and it was like being given an invisible set of wings, something that promised of greatness in spite of your present inadequacy. Someone amazing had faith in him. How could he himself then not?

Yixing had made the mistake of demonstrating the first week Kris arrived how to bypass the Great Firewall. Kris dicked around for half an hour before signing into Facebook, navigating to the familiar photo of Jess posing against an ivy-laden brownstone, a shoot one of her NYU friends had coaxed her into the winter she’d visited him in Manhattan for a week. She was looking down at her boots and even if most of her face wasn’t visible you could tell she was smiling. Her squad of platonic male friends had come with the territory, in the way that beautiful girls were almost never alone. He’d gone the willfully oblivious route; he really didn’t care, as long as she was his. Jessica was the one who picked their fights, and even then it’d been done sparingly, and with all the trappings of a staged performance, like they needed to convince each other that this, too, was a staple of a healthy relationship. The pushing and pulling, the glorified makeup sex. This was how people grew. Jessica was a Rihanna fan. A lack of conflict was always a greater concern. “You talk to that girl more than you talk to me,” she’d said about Amber, after one of their monthly skype sessions. Amber was still in Taiwan, dating this dead ringer for Yoko Ono. She’d posted on Instagram a photo of their latest purchase: matching bikes, orange and black, captioned with “our new babies!”

“Really?” Kris stared. “Are you actually-“

And she’d said, “No,” grinning, leaning in to gently lick into his mouth, splaying a hand over his chest. They were an awful pair of performers, he’d thought, kissing her back.

He was half-hard by the time he scrolled to a photo of her with the new boyfriend. He saw what Taeyeon was saying about the guy’s teeth. Taecyeon Ok worked as an IT consultant at Verizon, had been for three years now. Facebook told him he and Jessica Jung met in September 2012, a year after Kris had gotten the nerve to ask her out and then, later, for it to be exclusive. So they’d already been friends for four years before-the opportunity arose. Maybe patience was one of Taecyeon’s strengths.

He tabbed out of the page, opened up a bootlegged DVD rip of a video Henry had sent him a couple months back, in the thick of his depression. Cheer up man. It was an amateur porno, a threesome shot in someone’s dorm room. A Georgetown poster hung in the back, next to a stack of baseball caps, shot glasses lined up on a wooden panel. The whole thing had a weird homey quality that Kris appreciated, which was probably why Henry had sent it to him.

He lay back in his chair and jerked himself lazily until completion. It’d been a while and he didn’t take long. He wiped off with a tissue, fell asleep and didn’t wake up until dinnertime.

-

“I’m going for it,” said Wenjia, the most ambitious kid on the Team Gold. Zhou Mi flipflopped between loving and hating her because she was about as volatile with the ball as Carmelo Anthony was with his public image. They prayed she wouldn’t be their fourth quarter Lebron.

They were done by two points, with eleven seconds on the clock.

“Are you sure,” Kris enunciated slowly. “We could drive to the basket and aim for winning in overtime.”

“No,” Wenjia said, impatiently. “No overtime. I have badminton after this.” Badminton started at 3 PM, and it was already 2:47.

“Okay,” said Zhou Mi, who had been sitting on the bench gripping his head in his hands for the past five minutes, since Jin on Team Red lobbed the pretty alley-oop to the other kid who was about a head taller than Zhou Mi himself. “What a monster,” Zhou Mi had cried into Kris’ shoulder.

“Okay,” he said again, with an unmistakable glint in his eye. “Bring home the gold, baby.”

Wenjia rolled her eyes into the back of her head, but she nodded and squared her shoulders. Held the ball in the crook of her elbow against her side while waiting for the clock to start again.

She passed the ball to Guan Xin, who passed it back. They had the monster kid up against her; it was going to be tough finding an opening. Kris bit down on a knuckle. Wenjia drove left, monster boy followed. Seven seconds. Zhou Mi’s hyperventilating was about as subtle as a Shakespearean tragedy.

She passed it to Xujun, who made to shoot-the posing worked, as monster kid temporarily ditched his post to double-team the sole boy on Gold. Xujun threw the ball back to Wenjia, and she jumped, her feet just centimeters behind the line. Her ponytail swished.

The ball hit the rim and then, impossibly, rolled in.

“Just a game my ass,” Zhou Mi was shrieking and hugging Kris, and then everyone was hugging them, and even Wenjia looked briefly emotional as she pulled her badminton uniform over the gold jersey. It didn’t make sense but Kris was tearing up, crying a little as he pulled the kids closer to him, whispered in Zhou Mi’s ear that he wasn’t supposed to be yelling, that that was the whole point of Kris even being there.

-

Yilin pointed an accusing finger in Kris’ face. “We thought you thought you were too good for us.” She was leaning on Haitao, and one of her eyes kept winking shut of its own accord. One sip of Qingdao beer was all it took. “You are pregnant,” Zhou Mi had hissed, moving the bottle to the far corner of the table, which Kris used to refill everyone’s glasses. This much he remembered. He was the youngest, after all.

“One sip,” she’d whined, in a girlish affectation that made everyone laugh.

Kris’ hand stopped now over Liu Chao’s glass. “I-I don’t think that.”

“She thought you’d turn out to be another Taozi,” said Liu Chao, who taught math. He was probably the youngest after Kris and Zitao, but he spoke to the other faculty with a level of familiarity that made him appear more mature. He draped an arm around Zhou Mi’s chair. They looked as close as brothers.

“I would’ve given him everything, but that child-why has he forsaken me?” Yilin wailed into her cup, which Zhou Mi had switched for 7-Up while she wasn’t looking.

“Yilin was a theater geek back in her university days,” Haitao whispered in Kris’ ear.

“You tried, darling. We were there,” Zhou Mi told her soothingly, placing a hand over hers.

“She really took to Zitao when he first got here," Haitao continued. "Wanted to be his mentor, take him under her wing. But that kid… maybe he was shy, but he never really warmed up to her."

“He’s probably afraid of women,” Liu Chao snickered.

“I’m not just any woman!” Yilin said. “I am the mother of a-a boy. I know how to deal with-with-“

Her head fell with a clunk onto Haitao’s shoulder.

“I think she’s just nervous about when her son grows into an adolescent and she’ll have to deal with her own Taozi,” Liu Chao said.

“He’s an adult,” Kris said, and everyone looked at him. Liu Chao held his gaze for a fraction of a second, one that intoned clearly, In the same way as you, but then it was over, and Zhou Mi was saying, “Alright, let’s get this one home,” swathing Yilin’s fur coat over her shoulders.

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