Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by Sherri L. Smith Read Free Book Online

minutes.’ ” Ana looks at her watch, then at the model on the package. From brown to blond in less than twenty minutes. Ana can just imagine it, descending the staircase, her brown curls transformed into a halo of Sunset Gold TM .
    “Nai Nai won't say anything embarrassing, at least,” Ana tells herself. “She'll be dead from the shock.”
    She remembers Nai Nai's hints about taking her to Taiwan, and her stomach clenches. She puts the bottle down. It'll be hard enough walking around without her parents there to justify her existence. It's happened before, the “Aha, that explains it” look that flickers across some people's faces when they see Ana with her family. Add blond hair to the mix, and Ana'll be likely to end up in a zoo.
    She'll probably see that same look on Jamie's dad's face tonight. She can't imagine him fawning over her the way he did with Amanda. “Well, if all your friends are as
charming
and
blond
as this one! . . .” Ana smirks.
    On the front of the package, the pale Asian girl looks blankly off into the distance, a shiny cap of bone-straight, honey-colored hair making her look like an exotic mannequin. Ana stands up and looks at herself in the mirror. Her toffee-brown-skinned reflection stares back at her with its almond eyes and frazzled brown curls. Not exactly starting out with the same equipment. It goes beyond skin color and hair type. The model has single-lidded eyes, like Ana's dad's, with one smooth lid that ends at the eyelash line. Ana is double-lidded, like her mother's family. Chelsea freaked out when Ana pointed it out one day.
    “You know, this crease here”—Ana opened and closed her eyes a few times so Chelsea would see the fold she was talking about—“where beauty magazines tell you to put the second shade of eye shadow.” She ran her finger across the crease. “Some Asian girls will actually have plastic surgery to fold the skin there and make their eyes look rounder and more European. It's called blepharoplasty.”
    “More like barf-a-row-plasty. That's gross,” Chelsea said. Then again, Chelsea never wanted to look like anything other than a slightly taller version of herself.
    What would Chelsea think about this? Or Ana's mom, for that matter? After years of straightening her hair, Ana's mom went all natural right before Sammy was born. “Black women have been trying to change who they are from the outside for far too long,” she explained. “But it turns out, all hair is good hair. And being bald's fine too.”
    Ana laughed at the time. She was eight and the image of her mother with a shaved head was a weird one. Ana's mom went for twists instead, and occasionally braids. Ana's hair was straighter than her mom's, and she liked the curls it made. Sometimes. When her head wasn't damp and frizzy.
    Ana hesitates. She promised her mom she'd be down soon. Besides which, Sunset Gold TM is an awful lot like “Mandy” Conrad's natural color. Does she really want to look like Amanda Conrad?
    “She's such a cow,” Ana reminds herself. With a sigh, she shoves the hair dye to the back of the cabinet under the sink. There's a really good chance she'd just end up looking like a clown anyway.
    “So much for that.” She fluffs her hair in the mirror and then pulls the ends tight, trying to smooth it down. “Yep. So much for that.”
    Instead, she steps into the shower and transforms into a nonblond but much cleaner Ana Mei Shen.
    She pulls on her shorts and shirt and runs back downstairs to start Jamie's perfect dumplings.

8
    T he kitchen is a madhouse. Ana's mom has the hand mixer going on her cake, and her dad is halfway inside the refrigerator digging through the groceries. Grandma White is banging around in the cupboard under the stove where the pots are kept, and at the counter, Nai Nai is throwing handfuls of pork into a bowl while Sammy watches. All the noise together sounds like a bad elementary school marching band.
    “Hey, honey,” her mom says above the high