“Are you Communie?” Ma asked herself in English.

The book made it clear that there was only one correct answer: “No!”

Whatever Annette called herself, I knew that if you said yes to this question, you would have trouble with your U.S. citizenship. We weren’t natural-born Americans like her. They could still throw us out.

Having spoken to Annette about my problems at school earlier in the day, I realized that I needed to talk to Ma as well. Before we went to bed, I told her the whole story.

She held her head high on her slender neck and her eyes blazed. “My girl would never cheat.”

“They are worried because they think I might have, before.”

“If you’re as straight as an arrow, you’ll have to beg for a living,” Ma said with a sigh. She was quoting a Cantonese expression about the dangers of being too honest. “Do you want me to talk to that teacher?”

“No, Ma.” I didn’t mention the language barrier. “No one can convince her that I’m innocent except for me. I have to pass her exam.”

A week before my big oral examination, Annette decided I needed to relax, and despite my protests that I should study in all of my free time, she insisted she was taking me to Macy’s. Since our initial bra-buying expedition two years before, Ma and I had returned there a few times to buy new underwear for me, but we always felt so uncomfortable that we got out as fast as we could. It was hard for me to see how this trip would be relaxing, but as always I let myself trust Annette.

I constantly had to lie to Ma when I did social things with Annette, because Ma found nonschool things to be unimportant and she was afraid that something dangerous would happen to me when I was out. Plus, I knew that if I told her what we did, she would feel the need to return the favors.

This time, I stayed a bit behind Annette. She went up to each of the perfume ladies and stuck out her round wrist with confidence. I followed. The spritzes of perfume were cold against my skin. Then we put our noses up against our own and each other’s arms, although we could have smelled each other from the other room.

After we’d been to all of the perfume ladies, we circled the glossy white counters, picking up the test bottles and spraying each one on a new spot. It became hard to find an exposed piece of our bodies that hadn’t been sprayed: we started with our wrists, moved up our arms, then did our necks and collarbones and chests as well. Annette and I giggled like mad, and I felt as glamorous as the ladies in the posters by the time we said good-bye.

When I showed up at the factory a few hours later, though, Matt looked up from the steamers. Then he started convulsing with laughter while he waved his hand in front of his nose.

I was aghast. Despite the enormous clouds of steam, he could still smell me.

I doubled back to the bathroom and scrubbed off as much as I could but it was impossible to remove it all. When I approached Ma at our workstation, she said, “Ay yah, ah-Kim! What have you done?”

“Annette had a bottle of new perfume with her. She let me try some.”

“Some! You must have taken a bath in it!” Luckily, Ma didn’t pursue it any further.

But that night, as I bent over my books, I could still smell the lingering perfume on my clothes and wrists, and I felt surrounded by the warmth of Annette’s friendship, by her confidence in me. I wondered if that had been her plan all along.

I’d gotten my working papers and Mr. Jamali gave me extra hours at the library. I was actually paid for this time since my work was beyond what I was required to do for my scholarship. I made sure I only filled up some of my free time slots during the day so I could help Ma at the factory as much as possible after school. I had opened a bank account in Ma’s name and we put everything extra there for college.

I had mostly lost my interest in makeup. It wasn’t that my looks didn’t concern me, because they did, but I just couldn’t fathom ever being popular or beautiful. I didn’t understand how that all worked. No matter what colors Annette put on my face, I realized I was still the same underneath. I was also so busy, working at the library and the factory, trying to keep up in my classes, doing papers and homework and tests. Even aside from the upcoming oral exam, I was always worried I would come across something I couldn’t handle. If I didn’t understand an assignment or a topic in class, Ma couldn’t help me. She had never been good at school, only in music, and with the added confusion of the different methods and language here, it became impossible for her to be useful. Ma had told me that Pa had been a brilliant student, with a talent for both languages and science, and that I’d gotten my intelligence from him. I used to take comfort from that, but now I just wished he were here to help me.

All I wanted was to have a break from the exhausting cycle of my life, to flee from the constant anxiety that haunted me: fear of my teachers, fear at every assignment, fear of Aunt Paula, fear that we’d never escape. In the library one day, I picked up Car and Driver instead. Paging through the photos of glossy convertibles, I felt something open up in my head. Car and motorcycle magazines became my escape. I wanted just to ride a Corvette into the wild night and not have to fill out the income taxes for Ma, not have to be responsible for everything that was in English. I was always afraid I had done something wrong and an inspector would appear at our door, demanding answers to questions I didn’t even understand.

One day at the library, I was leafing through an old copy of Cycle that Mr. Jamali had given me. An article about a particular motorcycle caught my eye. I didn’t understand at first why this model seemed so familiar but then I recognized the Indian head on the gas tank. It matched the toy replica Park always kept with him.

Later that afternoon at the factory, I looked for Park. He’d wandered away from his mother again, as he often did, but as long as he didn’t cause anyone else any trouble, people tended to ignore him. He was standing next to one of the sewing machine ladies, staring at the spinning wheel at the end of her machine. He seemed hypnotized by its whirring. As usual, he was holding his Indian motorcycle.

“Scares me to death,” the sewing lady said to the one sitting next to her, never pausing in her work. Each piece of clothing was a blur as it raced through her machine. “Wish he’d find someone else to watch.”

“As long as it’s not me.” The other lady laughed.

“Glad I don’t have a boy like that. He has the white disease.” She was calling Park retarded. I felt annoyed at her remark, but then wondered if Park could actually have a deeper problem than simply not being able to hear.

It was more to startle them than anything else that I called, “Park, I have an article on your motorcycle.”

To my surprise, he turned around with an eager look on his face. Both sewing ladies froze.

“Here,” I said.

He grabbed the magazine, brought it inches away from his face and turned it around and around, rotating it around the picture of the bike.

I gently pried the article out of his hands and read him the beginning:

“The 1934 Indian Chief is a true classic, featuring Indian’s famous headdress logo on the gas tank. The company’s enormous factory in Springfield was called the Wigwam…”

When I finished reading, both Park and the ladies were staring at me. Whispering to each other, the ladies turned back to their sewing. I handed the magazine to Park.

“Matt can read you the rest later.” I waited to see if he would respond.

A slow smile started in the corner of his mouth. It took time to cross his face, as if he wasn’t used to smiling much. He looked almost handsome, and very much like Matt.