to keep this confrontation subtle, under wraps, the children took notice and cut short their song. Oh, well, she thought, let them hear. This was for their own good. Who knew what damage he’d done already? Who knew what horrible words he’d spat at these delicate souls? Who knew how much weight loss had already been hindered thanks to this bully of a man-child?
A dozen sets of eyes darted between the pockmarked administrator and the moon-faced heiress.
“What, are you sent from the public manners bureau?” Zhao spat. He made no effort to keep his voice down. “And anyway, those ‘human beings’ are here to lose weight. I’m only trying to encourage ‘thin behavior.’ That is my job.”
“You wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for me.” Kelly narrowed her eyes. “And whether you like it or not, I’m in charge here now, I’m your boss, and—”
But she never finished her sentence. A bell’s shrill ring sliced through the thick afternoon air, and the voices of all the campers formed into a collective bellow: “Luuuuuuuuunch!”
“Take cover!” Zhao shouted, and yanked Kelly across the courtyard and into the nutrition classroom’s doorframe. The ground trembled and then full-on quaked as a hundred pairs of thick legs raced down the stairs, bolted across the courtyard, and streaked toward the cafeteria. Kelly squeezed her eyes shut and jammed her fingers into her ears. An iPad-sized chunk of plaster shook loose from the corner of the ceiling. Zhao shielded Kelly’s head with his arms. The plaster shattered against the floor, narrowly missing them both.
A moment later, the rumbling stopped. The air fell still. Kelly opened her eyes and removed her fingers from her ears. Peace and silence had been restored.
“Shall we?” Zhao asked.
Realizing she’d been holding her breath, she exhaled deeply. Her stomach rumbled; all she’d had for breakfast was a small bowl of muesli. But despite her empty stomach, her soul swelled with satisfaction—she’d stood up to Zhao, put him in his place, established herself as the alpha wolf. With numbskulls like him, a few harsh words were usually all it took.
“We shall,” she said. She walked with rapid, determined, triumphant steps toward the cafeteria.
LEADERSHIP IN SEVENTEEN EASY STEPS: LEARN TO MANAGE OTHERS BY MANAGING YOURSELF
LEADERSHIP IS THE CORNERSTONE OF EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT… SO IT went, and so went a line in one of the many self-help e-books Kelly downloaded during her era of freedom and stability. She arrived at age fourteen in Los Angeles, no friends, no social life, nothing but incredibly fast Internet. She sat inside, air-conditioning blowing and blinds shut, as the sun rose, sweltered, and set outside. She ate granola bars, drank massive quantities of Mountain Dew, logged on to chat rooms, logged out of chat rooms, obsessively read fan fiction, obsessively wrote rude comments about aforementioned fan fiction, turned the computer off and watched endless episodes of Blind Date on TV, turned the computer back on and sparked short-lived affairs with shooter RPGs, Napster, strangers’ LiveJournals, fetish porn, and The Sims. Finally, she landed on the wide world of web-based self-and professional-improvement. Finally, she was home.
Upon completing the exercises and self-inventories in a number of e-books, Kelly concluded that it was not simply “bad luck” or “fate,” but her own failure to establish herself as a dominant player in her myriad relationships (father-daughter, mother-daughter, goose-human, et cetera) that had placed her in her current predicament. Shut in her new bedroom, hunched over her Toshiba desktop computer, she also learned that it was never, ever too late to change. Armed for the first time with any semblance of self-awareness and with techniques to help quell her anxiety, Kelly decided to undertake an experimental project to henceforth establish herself as the alpha wolf in all of her American relationships.
August melted into September, and after weeks of careful plotting and strategizing, she set forth with her leadership crusade, first taking on the Los Angeles Academy for Wealthy Young Ladies. Although her tactics for exuding dominance (including: hacking teachers’ blogs and other online accounts to post and send sexually provocative information, photographing classmates through the cracks in the bathroom stalls for blackmail purposes, and periodically setting pet-store-purchased gerbils loose in the locker room) didn’t win her any friends, the other girls (who, during the course of their high school careers, were so incredibly vicious as to drop a bucket of red paint on one leather-jacket-wearing classmate’s head in a politically correct reenactment of Carrie, to somehow change one classmate’s submitted Yale essay to read only “I has special needs thanks you to read this,” and to purposefully run a Mercedes SUV over another classmate’s foot in an In-N-Out Burger parking lot) left her be save for a few unfortunate albeit unoriginal Asian-stereotype-derived nicknames. Kelly, no stranger to bodily harm and sabotage thanks to the goose, was relieved not to suffer through such physically violent incidences here. A few stupid words she could deal with.
With her status securely locked in at school, Kelly soon spread her wings, pursuing in the “real world” other minor conquests, which most notably included intimidating Prada and Coach store employees into giving her unheard-of discounts, intimidating bouncers into allowing her access into twenty-one and older nightclubs, and intimidating a chiseled Tommy Hilfiger model into giving her his cell phone number and that of his coke dealer.
But the home front was where Kelly waged the real war.
Papa Hui had hired a nanny to accompany Kelly to America and to serve as her live-in guardian. This “nanny,” a twenty-four-year-old peasant named Aunty Minnie, had no actual training in education or child care. She was the daughter of one of Papa Hui’s drivers, and the old man told her to take the job or lose her father’s. But it wasn’t all blackmail. There was also a hefty salary, an extended stay in the United States, and the prospect of landing a Hollywood husband who would finance the breast implants she so desperately wanted/needed—this sugar daddy dream existing despite a bespectacled boyfriend who worked as a computer repairman back in Shanghai.
Kelly, unwilling to follow orders from such a sorry character, systematically executed a number of carefully planned tactics, including but not limited to: forwarding flirtatious e-mails (both real and fabricated) to and from other men to Aunty Minnie’s boyfriend in China, planting duck hearts procured in Chinatown in Aunty Minnie’s “delicates” drawer, paying a foster kid she met at the public library to rob Aunty Minnie at knifepoint in the front yard, emptying a bottle of vinegar into Aunty Minnie’s blueberry juice jug, and threatening to report Aunty Minnie to the authorities for not having her “papers in order,” the punishment for which, Kelly informed her, was indefinite detainment at Guantánamo Bay, where phone calls were not permitted and where immigration offenders were forced to help the authorities torture terrorists (Kelly remained proud of herself for spinning this particularly convincing tale).
Within a matter of well-played weeks, Kelly earned free run of the house—if she craved dumplings exactly like Grandma used to make, Aunty Minnie would dress up just like Grandma—gray wig, dentures, and all—and make them. If Kelly needed someone to complete her homework for her so that she could play Dance Dance Revolution at the mall arcade for hours, Aunty Minnie would circle multiple-choice answers until the sun came up. If Kelly needed an advance on her allowance, or someone to arrange the purchase of Adderall, or most frequently of all someone to just leave her the hell alone and get out of her damn way, Aunty Minnie was her girl. And if Kelly, on her eighteenth birthday, needed someone to leave America, return to China, marry a wiry computer repairman-boy with thick glasses, and never speak of her trying time in America or of the spoiled socio-path who robbed her of her chances of riches and foreign citizenship and of the desire to ever bear children of her own, well…
WHERE’D THEY GET THIS COOK? A PRISON?
KELLY AND ZHAO REACHED THE FRONT OF THE LINE, WHERE THE COOK plopped a ladleful of steamed vegetables and a second ladleful of some unidentifiable gelatinous material onto their plates.
“Yum,” said Kelly. Facetiously, of course. Zhao grunted.
There wasn’t enough space around the few shoddy tables to seat all the campers,