The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction by Violet Kupersmith Read Free Book Online Page B

little spike of fear to run through me. “Do you really mean that?” she says. “Would you really do anything for me?”
    “I would. In a heartbeat.”
    “Do you promise?”
    No. No, No.
    “I promise.”
    Tien’s smile widens. “Let’s test this, then,” she murmurs. “Look across the lake, toward the middle. Do you see the old tower there? On the little island near the center? It’s not very far away, is it? I bet even an old man could swim to it and then back without any trouble.”
    The intrepid American is already taking off his jacket: “Well, Miss Tien, I’m gonna do it for you.” He steps out of his shoes and lines them up so that the toes are facing the lake. People mill about on the shore, but no one sees and no one cares. As he goes to step into the water I make a move toward him, but Tien sinks her fingernails deep into my forearm andthe pain is so sharp it stops me from even making a sound. The American wades out five feet before he turns and calls to Tien over his shoulder.
    “Time me,” he says, laughing, before pushing off into the darkness with powerful strokes, the moonlight on his back.
    The girl and I watch him from the shore. Eventually she extricates her nails from my arm.
    “You made me bleed!” I cry.
    She either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. “It’s a shame,” she says cheerfully. “He would have made it, you know.” Without taking her eyes from the American in the water, she lifts her fingers to her mouth and licks them off one by one.
    “Why won’t he?”
    She steps delicately into the lake. I jump in after her. It is much shallower than I expected. “Why won’t he?” I ask again, more urgently. “Answer me!” Her black and silver dress is turning into moonlit ripples on the water, and her hands are covered in scales. She turns and gives me a triumphant smile, or maybe she is just baring her teeth.
    “Oh, Phi,” she says. “You’ve broken your promise.”
    I stop with my shirt still dry. She slips away until only her head is still visible.
    “Why not me?” I whisper to the lake because I have already lost.
    “How funny,” she says before vanishing beneath the surface. “Your father asked the very same thing!”
    And I find myself alone, standing waist-deep in the water.

SKIN AND BONES

    M RS . T RAN HAD BEEN CONSIDERING it for a long time, but she made up her mind for certain when she found her younger daughter Thuy in the kitchen, crouched like an animal in front of the open refrigerator, ripping off chunks of a leftover chocolate cake with her bare hands and devouring it. Calmly, Mrs. Tran took the cake from Thuy’s hands, lowered it into the trash can, then went and made one of her rare ten-cents-a-minute calls to Grandma Tran in Vietnam to make the arrangements. That very day she booked both of her girls round-trip tickets—Houston to Ho Chi Minh City, twenty hours with a three-hour layover in Seoul—leaving that very weekend and returning at the end of the summer holidays three weeks later. Thuy and Kieu’s father, who lived with his new wife and children in Atlanta, paid for the plane tickets because he owed the girls birthday presents. Mrs. Tran told Thuy and Kieu that the trip was a chance for them to rediscovertheir roots, but Thuy knew the real reason: Her mother was sending her away in the hope that she would lose fifteen pounds on a diet of fish and rice, maybe even more if she could catch a bug from the street food or dirty ice. Vietnam was Fat Camp.
    Kieu complained at first. She wasn’t like Thuy—
she
had friends and boys waiting to flirt with her and pool parties to attend in spangled bikinis. Their mother, however, was unyielding; Thuy couldn’t possibly go alone. Mrs. Tran would go herself but she couldn’t take all that time off work. Besides, Grandma Tran wanted to see both of her grandchildren—she was getting on in years and wouldn’t live forever.
    Thuy also suspected that her older sister—the skinny sibling, her