Publisher's Weekly Review
This emotionally involving debut novel explores themes of belonging using the story of the death of a teenage girl, Lydia, from a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio. Lydia is the middle and favorite child of Marilyn Walker, a white Virginian, and James Lee, a first-generation Chinese-American. Marilyn and James meet in 1957, when she is a premed at Radcliffe and he, a graduate student, is teaching one of her classes. The two fall in love and marry, over the objections of Marilyn's mother, whose comment on their interracial relationship is succinct: "It's not right." Marilyn gets pregnant and gives up her dream of becoming a doctor, devoting her life instead to raising Lydia and the couple's other two children, Nathan and Hannah. Then Marilyn abruptly moves out of their suburban Ohio home to go back to school, only to return before long. When Lydia is discovered dead in a nearby lake, the family begins to fall apart. As the police try to decipher the mystery of Lydia's death, her family realize that they didn't know her at all. Lydia is remarkably imagined, her unhappy teenage life crafted without an ounce of cliche. Ng's prose is precise and sensitive, her characters richly drawn. Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A teenage girl goes missing and is later found to have drowned in a nearby lake, and suddenly a once tight-knit family unravels in unexpected ways. As the daughter of a college professor and his stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, Lydia Lee is already unwittingly part of the greater societal changes going on all around her. But Lydia suffers from pressure that has nothing to do with tuning out and turning on. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting. Her mother is white, and their interracial marriage raises eyebrows and some intrusive charges of miscegenation. More troubling, however, is her mother's frustration at having given up medical school for motherhood, and how she blindly and selfishly insists that Lydia follow her road not taken. The cracks in Lydia's perfect-daughter foundation grow slowly but erupt suddenly and tragically, and her death threatens to destroy her parents and deeply scar her siblings. Tantalizingly thrilling, Ng's emotionally complex debut novel captures the tension between cultures and generations with the deft touch of a seasoned writer. Ng will be one to watch.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CELESTE NG'S DEBUT NOVEL, "Everything I Never Told You," is a literary thriller that begins with some stock elements: a missing girl, a lake, a local bad boy who was one of the last to see her and won't say what he knows. The year is 1977, the setting, a quiet all-American town in Ohio, where everyone knows one another and nothing like this has ever happened before. This is familiar territory, but Ng returns to it to spin an unfamiliar tale, with a very different kind of girl from the ones we've been asked to follow before. If we know this story, we haven't seen it yet in American fiction, not until now. The missing girl is Lydia Lee, apple of her father's eye, her mother's favorite daughter. A blue-eyed Amerasian Susan Dey, the most white-looking of her siblings in her mixed-race Chinese and white family, she is also so serious, so driven, so good and responsible, she seems the least likely to go missing. The mystery for the reader is not whether Lydia is still alive, or where she's gone - we learn on the first page that Lydia is dead, her body found at the bottom of the lake. We watch instead as the police come to the Lees' home to ask the uncomfortable questions - Was she doing well at school? Who were her friends? Did she seem depressed? Did she ever talk about hurting herself? - and her parents, sister and brother all find themselves unable to answer honestly. The mystery is why they can't bring themselves to tell one another, or the police, what they believe is behind her disappearance. The term literary thriller might make you scoff, but Ng has set two tasks in this novel's doubled heart - to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won't share. Take the moment Marilyn, Lydia's mother, confidently goes to search the diaries she has given her daughter every year for over a decade : "With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake. "The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter's life, unmarked. Nothing to explain anything." What is Lydia keeping from herself? This is the true conundrum, and we catch a glimpse of it when her father, James, reads an article about his daughter's death: "As one of only two Orientals at Middlewood High - the other being her brother, Nathan - Lee stood out in the halls. However, few seemed to have known her well." James finally starts to see his family as the town does: a living exhibit on the question of whether an Asian man and a white woman should marry, and the children he had hoped would be accepted as third-generation Americans seen instead as immigrants at birth, arriving from an America his neighbors can't yet imagine is possible. Ng has structured "Everything I Never Told You" so we shift between the family's theories and Lydia's own story, and what led to her disappearance and death, moving toward the final, devastating conclusion. What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind - a burden you do not always survive. ALEXANDER CHEE'S latest novel, "The Queen of the Night," will be published in 2015.
School Library Journal Review
In the aftermath of 16-year-old Lydia Lee's death in 1977, the other members of the Lee family come apart and together as they reflect on their lives with and without her. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Although no literary prize can claim scientific objectivity for its judgments, one might be suspicious of a trophy given by Amazon. In their list of the 100 best books of the year, announced last week, the editors expressed hope that awarding the top slot to Celeste Ng's debut novel will help it become "the blockbuster it deserves to be", hints that saleability and marketing may be at least as important as literary quality. And, at first, such cynicism seems justified. Everything I Never Told You starts, as now seems to be statutory for almost all crime stories on page and screen, with a sudden disappearance: in this case, teenager Lydia Lee, who is soon found dead in a lake, drowned by either suicide or murder. The repeated word "gone" tolls through the prose like a funeral bell and you begin to congratulate the publisher for its impressive self-control in not simply retitling the book Girl, Gone in order to maximise its appeal. By the third of the 12 chapters, though, it is apparent that there is much here that might impress Pulitzer and Man Booker judges as well as the panellists of an online bookseller. The book opens in 1977, with chapters taking place in that year alternating with sections set in the mid 60s, when a previous crisis - also involving a missing person - struck the Lee family, which comprises James, a Chinese-American history professor at an Ohio college, his wife Marilyn, a Yankee-American medical school dropout, and their three children. The choice of a 70s setting is an indicator of the damage that modern technology and ideological progress have done to the plotting options of crime writers. Ng's narrative depends on Lydia having left little trace and misleading her parents about key friendships - feats nearly impossible since the advent of mobile phones and Facebook. The story-driving decisions made by the characters, meanwhile, are almost all driven by overt racism of the sort that mixed-race families would have faced then rather than the covert and coded bigotry that is more common now. "Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place" is a now-shocking headline in the newspaper coverage of Lydia's funeral. It becomes progressively clear that Everything I Never Told You refers as much to James and Marilyn's relationship as to the information Lydia has withheld from them. As the loss of their daughter puts pressure on their marriage, racial and cultural fissures appear. When Marilyn uses the Anglicised Chinese word "kowtow" during an argument, it has the explosively redefining effect that the term "spook" causes in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. It is a measure of the book's linguistic subtlety that, apart from that thoughtless allusion to stereotypical Oriental subservience, the only other significant Chinese term is char siu bau, a type of pork bun cooked for James by a woman in whom he dangerously confides because she has an aspect that his wife can never match. Ng brilliantly depicts the destruction that parents can inflict on their children and on each other. For reasons of their own, Marilyn is desperate for Lydia to become a doctor, while James's fondest hope is for his daughter to become an American and be friends with all the gleaming-toothed, white-faced high-school girls. Crucially, James's academic speciality is the history of the cowboy, which he selected as the subject of study most specific to the US. But Lydia, as we learn in scenes from the past, cannot see herself becoming the all-American physician of her folks' dreams. It is the pressure to do so that effectively kills her. Each of her family suffers some kind of identity crisis: her brother Nathan is off to Harvard, where his reception will not be uniformly warm. And does Nathan's conviction that their neighbour Jack knows how his sister died result from a belief that the boy is a murderer, or that he is a racist? Some crime devotees may find the novel short on twists and deaths; Ng is most impressive in the less generic novelistic skill of the piercing detail - a single stray novelty sock on the floor of a teenager's room, a toe smudge on a wall where a young couple made love decades before in a bedroom they had just painted. Everything I Never Told You ranks with acute novels of family psycho-pathology such as Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World and Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know. This offering from Amazon, it turns out, should not be discounted. Mark Lawson's The Deaths is published by Picador. 292pp, Blackfriars, pounds 8.99 To order Everything I Never Told You for pounds 6.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Mark Lawson Caption: Captions: Piercing detail . . . Celeste Ng The choice of a 70s setting is an indicator of the damage that modern technology and ideological progress have done to the plotting options of crime writers. [Celeste Ng]'s narrative depends on Lydia having left little trace and misleading her parents about key friendships - feats nearly impossible since the advent of mobile phones and Facebook. The story-driving decisions made by the characters, meanwhile, are almost all driven by overt racism of the sort that mixed-race families would have faced then rather than the covert and coded bigotry that is more common now. "Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place" is a now-shocking headline in the newspaper coverage of [Lydia Lee]'s funeral. It becomes progressively clear that Everything I Never Told You refers as much to [James] and [Marilyn]'s relationship as to the information Lydia has withheld from them. As the loss of their daughter puts pressure on their marriage, racial and cultural fissures appear. When Marilyn uses the Anglicised Chinese word "kowtow" during an argument, it has the explosively redefining effect that the term "spook" causes in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. It is a measure of the book's linguistic subtlety that, apart from that thoughtless allusion to stereotypical Oriental subservience, the only other significant Chinese term is char siu bau, a type of pork bun cooked for James by a woman in whom he dangerously confides because she has an aspect that his wife can never match. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parentsblonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor Jamesolder brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydiaa promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nathto slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Ng's debut is one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters, even as each yearns for the unknowable truth. "Lydia is dead," the novel opens-blunt, unnerving, devastating. She's only 16, the middle of three children of James and Marilyn Lee, a mixed-race couple married years before the ironically named Loving v. Virginia finally invalidated U.S. antimiscegenation laws in 1967. They're initially drawn together by their differences: James, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants, finishing his Harvard PhD; Marilyn, the only Radcliffe undergraduate determined to become a doctor, a gifted scientist among unbelieving men. When they bury their daughter in 1977, the Lee family-already fragile before the tragedy-implodes. James detaches, Marilyn seeks refuge, brother Nath blames, and youngest Hannah silently watches all. Each will search for a Lydia who doesn't exist, desperate to parse what happened. -VERDICT Ng constructs a mesmerizing narrative that shrinks enormous issues of race, prejudice, identity, and gender into the miniaturist dynamics of a single family. A breathtaking triumph, reminiscent of prophetic debuts by Ha Jin, Chang-rae Lee, and -Chimamanda Adichie, whose first titles matured into spectacular, continuing literary legacies. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Celeste Ng one Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia's physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks. Driving to work, Lydia's father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest Ohio's Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia's brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, Lydia's sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes, sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It's she who says, at last, "Lydia's taking a long time today." Upstairs, Marilyn opens her daughter's door and sees the bed unslept in: neat hospital corners still pleated beneath the comforter, pillow still fluffed and convex. Nothing seems out of place. Mustard-colored corduroys tangled on the floor, a single rainbow-striped sock. A row of science fair ribbons on the wall, a postcard of Einstein. Lydia's duffel bag crumpled on the floor of the closet. Lydia's green bookbag slouched against her desk. Lydia's bottle of Baby Soft atop the dresser, a sweet, powdery, loved-baby scent still in the air. But no Lydia. Marilyn closes her eyes. Maybe, when she opens them, Lydia will be there, covers pulled over her head as usual, wisps of hair trailing from beneath. A grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she'd somehow missed before. I was in the bathroom, Mom. I went downstairs for some water. I was lying right here all the time. Of course, when she looks, nothing has changed. The closed curtains glow like a blank television screen. Downstairs, she stops in the doorway of the kitchen, a hand on each side of the frame. Her silence says everything. "I'll check outside," she says at last. "Maybe for some reason--" She keeps her gaze trained on the floor as she heads for the front door, as if Lydia's footprints might be crushed into the hall runner. Nath says to Hannah, "She was in her room last night. I heard her radio playing. At eleven thirty." He stops, remembering that he had not said goodnight. "Can you be kidnapped if you're sixteen?" Hannah asks. Nath prods at his bowl with a spoon. Cornflakes wilt and sink into clouded milk. Their mother steps back into the kitchen, and for one glorious fraction of a second Nath sighs with relief: there she is, Lydia, safe and sound. It happens sometimes--their faces are so alike you'd see one in the corner of your eye and mistake her for the other: the same elfish chin and high cheekbones and left-cheek dimple, the same thin-shouldered build. Only the hair color is different, Lydia's ink-black instead of their mother's honey-blond. He and Hannah take after their father--once a woman stopped the two of them in the grocery store and asked, "Chinese?" and when they said yes, not wanting to get into halves and wholes, she'd nodded sagely. "I knew it," she said. "By the eyes." She'd tugged the corner of each eye outward with a fingertip. But Lydia, defying genetics, somehow has her mother's blue eyes, and they know this is one more reason she is their mother's favorite. And their father's, too. Then Lydia raises one hand to her brow and becomes his mother again. "The car's still here," she says, but Nath had known it would be. Lydia can't drive; she doesn't even have a learner's permit yet. Last week she'd surprised them all by failing the exam, and their father wouldn't even let her sit in the driver's seat without it. Nath stirs his cereal, which has turned to sludge at the bottom of his bowl. The clock in the front hall ticks, then strikes seven thirty. No one moves. "Are we still going to school today?" Hannah asks. Marilyn hesitates. Then she goes to her purse and takes out her keychain with a show of efficiency. "You've both missed the bus. Nath, take my car and drop Hannah off on your way." Then: "Don't worry. We'll find out what's going on." She doesn't look at either of them. Neither looks at her. When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had started and set her hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first time. Marilyn didn't think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her daughter had become. The thought that flashed through her mind wasn't How did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? Nath had pulled up and wobbled and tipped over and toddled right in front of her, but she didn't remember Lydia even beginning to stand. Yet she seemed so steady on her bare feet, tiny fingers just peeking from the ruffled sleeve of her romper. Marilyn often had her back turned, opening the refrigerator or turning over the laundry. Lydia could have begun walking weeks ago, while she was bent over a pot, and she would not have known. She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she'd felt as if she'd found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia's cheek and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter's small body. Now Marilyn sips tea and remembers that surprise. The high school's number is pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator, and Marilyn pulls the card down and dials, twisting the cord around her finger while the phone rings. "Middlewood High," the secretary says on the fourth ring. "This is Dottie." She recalls Dottie: a woman built like a sofa cushion, who still wore her fading red hair in a beehive. "Good morning," she begins, and falters. "Is my daughter in class this morning?" Dottie makes a polite cluck of impatience. "To whom am I speaking, please?" It takes her a moment to remember her own name. "Marilyn. Marilyn Lee. My daughter is Lydia Lee. Tenth grade." "Let me look up her schedule. First period--" A pause. "Eleventh-grade physics?" "Yes, that's right. With Mr. Kelly." "I'll have someone run down to that classroom and check." There's a thud as the secretary sets the receiver down on the desk. Marilyn studies her mug, the pool of water it has made on the counter. A few years ago, a little girl had crawled into a storage shed and suffocated. After that the police department sent a flyer to every house: If your child is missing, look for him right away. Check washing machines and clothes dryers, automobile trunks, toolsheds, any places he might have crawled to hide. Call police immediately if your child cannot be found. "Mrs. Lee?" the secretary says. "Your daughter was not in her first-period class. Are you calling to excuse her absence?" Marilyn hangs up without replying. She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater. She checks every room, opening every closet. She peeks into the empty garage: nothing but an oil spot on the concrete and the faint, heady smell of gasoline. She's not sure what she's looking for: Incriminating footprints? A trail of breadcrumbs? When she was twelve, an older girl from her school had disappeared and turned up dead. Ginny Barron. She'd worn saddle shoes that Marilyn had desperately coveted. She'd gone to the store to buy cigarettes for her father, and two days later they found her body by the side of the road, halfway to Charlottesville, strangled and naked. Now Marilyn's mind begins to churn. The summer of Son of Sam has just begun--though the papers have only recently begun to call him by that name--and even in Ohio, headlines blare the latest shooting. In a few months, the police will catch David Berkowitz, and the country will focus again on other things: the death of Elvis, the new Atari, Fonzie soaring over a shark. At this moment, though, when dark-haired New Yorkers are buying blond wigs, the world seems to Marilyn a terrifying and random place. Things like that don't happen here, she reminds herself. Not in Middlewood, which calls itself a city but is really just a tiny college town of three thousand, where driving an hour gets you only to Toledo, where a Saturday night out means the roller rink or the bowling alley or the drive-in, where even Middlewood Lake, at the center of town, is really just a glorified pond. (She is wrong about this last one: it is a thousand feet across, and it is deep.) Still, the small of her back prickles, like beetles marching down her spine. Inside, Marilyn pulls back the shower curtain, rings screeching against rod, and stares at the white curve of the bathtub. She searches all the cabinets in the kitchen. She looks inside the pantry, the coat closet, the oven. Then she opens the refrigerator and peers inside. Olives. Milk. A pink foam package of chicken, a head of iceberg, a cluster of jade-colored grapes. She touches the cool glass of the peanut butter jar and closes the door, shaking her head. As if Lydia would somehow be inside. Morning sun fills the house, creamy as lemon chiffon, lighting the insides of cupboards and empty closets and clean, bare floors. Marilyn looks down at her hands, empty too and almost aglow in the sunlight. She lifts the phone and dials her husband's number. For James, in his office, it is still just another Tuesday, and he clicks his pen against his teeth. A line of smudgy typing teeters slightly uphill: Serbia was one of the most powerful of the Baltic nations. He crosses out Baltic, writes Balkan, turns the page. Archduke France Ferdinand was assassinated by members of Black Ann. Franz, he thinks. Black Hand. Had these students ever opened their books? He pictures himself at the front of the lecture hall, pointer in hand, the map of Europe unfurled behind him. It's an intro class, "America and the World Wars"; he doesn't expect depth of knowledge or critical insight. Just a basic understanding of the facts, and one student who can spell Czechoslovakia correctly. He closes the paper and writes the score on the front page--sixty-five out of one hundred--and circles it. Every year as summer approaches, the students shuffle and rustle; sparks of resentment sizzle up like flares, then sputter out against the windowless walls of the lecture hall. Their papers grow half hearted, paragraphs trailing off, sometimes midsentence, as if the students could not hold a thought that long. Was it a waste, he wonders. All the lecture notes he's honed, all the color slides of MacArthur and Truman and the maps of Guadalcanal. Nothing more than funny names to giggle at, the whole course just one more requirement to check off the list before they graduated. What else could he expect from this place? He stacks the paper with the others and drops the pen on top. Through the window he can see the small green quad and three kids in blue jeans tossing a Frisbee. When he was younger, still junior faculty, James was often mistaken for a student himself. That hasn't happened in years. He'll be forty-six next spring; he's tenured, a few silver hairs now mixed in among the black. Sometimes, though, he's still mistaken for other things. Once, a receptionist at the provost's office thought he was a visiting diplomat from Japan and asked him about his flight from Tokyo. He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone knocks: his teaching assistant, Louisa, with a stack of papers. "Professor Lee. I didn't mean to bother you, but your door was open." She sets the essays on his desk and pauses. "These weren't very good." "No. My half weren't either. I was hoping you had all the As in your stack." Louisa laughs. When he'd first seen her, in his graduate seminar last term, she'd surprised him. From the back she could have been his daughter: they had almost the same hair, hanging dark and glossy down to the shoulder blades, the same way of sitting with elbows pulled in close to the body. When she turned around, though, her face was completely her own, narrow where Lydia's was wide, her eyes brown and steady. "Professor Lee?" she had said, holding out her hand. "I'm Louisa Chen." Eighteen years at Middlewood College, he'd thought, and here was the first Oriental student he'd ever had. Without realizing it, he had found himself smiling. Then, a week later, she came to his office. "Is that your family?" she'd asked, tilting the photo on his desk toward her. There was a pause as she studied it. Everyone did the same thing, and that was why he kept the photo on display. He watched her eyes move from his photographic face to his wife's, then his children's, then back again. "Oh," she said after a moment, and he could tell she was trying to hide her confusion. "Your wife's--not Chinese?" It was what everyone said. But from her he had expected something different. "No," he said, and straightened the frame so that it faced her a little more squarely, a perfect forty-five degree angle to the front of the desk. "No, she isn't." Still, at the end of the fall semester, he'd asked her to act as a grader for his undergraduate lecture. And in April, he'd asked her to be the teaching assistant for his summer course. "I hope the summer students will be better," Louisa says now. "A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography." "Well, this isn't Harvard, that's for sure," James says. He pushes the two piles of essays into one and evens them, like a deck of cards, against the desktop. "Sometimes I wonder if it's all a waste." "You can't blame yourself if the students don't try. And they're not all so bad. A few got As." Louisa blinks at him, her eyes suddenly serious. "Your life is not a waste." James had meant only the intro course, teaching these students who, year after year, didn't care to learn even the basic timeline. She's twenty-three, he thinks; she knows nothing about life, wasted or otherwise. But it's a nice thing to hear. "Stay still," he says. "There's something in your hair." Her hair is cool and a little damp, not quite dry from her morning shower. Louisa holds quite still, her eyes open and fixed on his face. It's not a flower petal, as he'd first thought. It's a ladybug, and as he picks it out, it tiptoes, on threadlike yellow legs, to hang upside down from his fingernail. "Damn things are everywhere this time of year," says a voice from the doorway, and James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning through. He doesn't like Stan--a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he's hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . . "Did you want something, Stan?" James asks. He's acutely conscious of his hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa's shoulder, and pulls it back. "Just wanted to ask a question about the dean's latest memo," Stanley says, holding up a mimeographed sheet. "Didn't mean to interrupt anything." "I have to get going anyway," Louisa says. "Have a nice morning, Professor Lee. I'll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt." As she slides past Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she's blushing, and his own face grows hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James's desk. "Good-looking girl," he says. "She'll be your assistant this summer too, no?" "Yes." James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip, walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley's grin, to feel Stanley's slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along the spines of James's books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this moment, for that last second when Stan's leer was the worst problem on his mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption that at first he doesn't hear the anxiety in Marilyn's voice. "James?" she says. "Could you come home?" The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don't even know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister's room. He expects talcum powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the policemen just look: at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the rounded pink lid of Lydia's perfume bottle, as if cupping a child's head in his hand. Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves. "What does that mean?" Nath says. " Most? What does that mean?" Excerpted from Everything I Never Told You: A Novel by Celeste Ng All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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