During his first three days back home, Luke doesn’t say anything to Ares and their father.
Or, barely. He remains quiet when Ares shows him the way to his old bedroom, where everything has been preserved, a time capsule of Luke’s old science posters and car models and the faded teddy bear with the plaid shirt and missing eye. The only time he speaks is to ask Ares whether he has a spare toothbrush.
Ares isn’t sure what he’d thought would happen. Tears? A brotherly embrace? Staying up late and sharing a drink? He considers offering Luke a beer—technically illegal, but he was younger than his brother whenhe’dstarted drinking—or an apple juice, but maybe Luke would find that too childish now. In the end he plays it safe by getting Luke a glass of warm water, which he accepts wordlessly.
There may not have been tears, but there was far more talking in Ares’s imagined version of events. Sentimentality. Instead he feels mostly a lingering sense of awkwardness, like whenyou find yourself sitting next to the only other person your age at an adult gathering, and the silent expectation is for you to become friends by the end of the night. But what to say first? How to cover all that ground and distance, the regret, the loss, the relief? And what if his brother still blames him?
“Give it some time,” Chanel tells him on the phone after her checkup appointment. Luke is sleeping, his snores soft through the walls, but Ares keeps his voice down just in case, the doors closed. The thin red bar in the corner of his screen warns him he only has thirteen percent of battery left, so he finds himself sitting cross-legged on the floor while his phone charges, playing absently with the wire. “He must be in shock.”
He can hear the gargle of hospital noises in the background. Doctors coming around to check patients’ vitals. Beeping of monitors. “Yeah, you’re right, I don’t know. It’s stupid, but I just thought things would be... different.”
“Well, you’ve both been through a lot,” she says gently. “If he doesn’t feel like talking about it yet, maybe you can do something together.”
“Do something?” he repeats.
“Like an activity. Something fun that you both used to enjoy. It might help him open up to you, or at least remind him of how things used to be.”
He thinks about this for a moment. “Hey, you know, you give pretty good advice.”
She laughs, low and lilting, and he feels a warm jolt of pleasure. “You just realized?”
So on Thursday, he takes Luke down to the arcade. Frommemory, the place was packed on the weekends, you had to wait in line for every game, but tonight they’re one of the few people here. A family, the father collecting tokens while the mother holds their drinks. Three teenagers younger than he is. A couple on a first date, probably, judging from how often the girl keeps checking her lipstick using her phone’s front camera mirror, how the guy’s carrying himself with a forced kind of confidence, trying to teach her how to play pool.
“Want to play Street Fighter?” he asks Luke.
Luke gives a quick nod, and it feels easier like this, performing the series of motions the game naturally requires of them without much thought: piling their bags and jackets on the machine behind them, holding the tokens out to Luke, slotting them into the machine, hands finding the buttons, picking their fighters. Luke goes for the same character he always used to, the one with flame-red hair and long claws.
Then the game starts, and he slams his hand down, urging his fighter onward. Memories float up from the Cave, flashes of broken bone and blood drying on walls. What a relief, to be away from all of that now, to fight without getting his knuckles dirty in the safety of the arcade, his brother beside him.
He lets Luke win the starting round, and for the first time, his brother smiles. The same dimples, even in the sharper face. Looks more like a child this way, different, but not changed completely.
“Again?” he offers.
“Okay,” Luke says.
They play five more rounds, and he makes sure to win two ofthem, so Luke won’t suspect he’s going easy on him. Then they wander over to the adjoining food court, where he buys them a bucket of fried chicken wings dusted with cheese powder. Together they sit by the window, and Luke wipes his hands, picks up one of the wings but doesn’t eat it yet. Just blinks at Ares. Swallows. At last he asks, “Are you... mad at me?”
“What? No,” Ares says, so surprised he can’t even think of anything else. “No. Why would I be?”
“I should’ve come back,” Luke says quietly, staring down at the table. “Or I should never have left. But at the time, running away seemed like the best thing to do, and on the first night... I was hungry and cold and I bumped into this group of boys who were, like, maybe a year older. They seemed really cool and we got to talking and I told them I didn’t have anywhere to go, which was a stupid thing to say, but itfelttrue. Then they asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, and I did, and... that’s when they brought me to Long Ge.”
Ares listens with horror, gut churning, everything he’d wondered about in the past three years unfolding before him.
“Long Ge said that if I wanted to be really independent, live on my own and not burden anyone, I needed a job. And he could get me one at his company. He offered me a contract, and it seemed legit, like, this serious adult was giving me this opportunity, and I was just glad he was going to give me money. I had no sense of what was a lot and what wasn’t; I mean, I realized after, but then it was too late. Long Ge, and the men around him—I was so scared of them. I didn’t want to do anything to upset them, and they said that if I tried to leave,they’d not only chase me down, but they’d make you and Dad suffer as well.... I had no idea how to get out of it. I—I know I should’ve been smarter about it.”
“We could’ve helped you,” Ares says. “You were just a child—that’s exactly why men like Long Ge target people like you. Because you don’t know any better. Of course you don’t.”
“Well, you did help me, didn’t you? In the end,” Luke says, and nibbles at the end of the chicken wing. Brushes the cheese powder from the corner of his mouth. “I just didn’t want anyone to see me like that. With the wrong group, a failure.”
“You’re not a failure,” Ares says firmly. “You didn’t fail anything. I was the one who... I should never have said it. None of it would’ve happened if I hadn’t said it.”
“It’s okay,” Luke mumbles. “I had a lot of time to think about it, you know. While I was gone. And if I’d been you, if our dad had treated me that way... not that he didn’t care about you. I’m sure he did, even more than he realizes.”
“He doesn’t care at all,” Ares says. Not with resentment or accusation. Just one of those hard facts about life. You wished it wasn’t the case, but, well, what could you do?
Luke shakes his head. “That’s not true. Or else why would he have asked you to come to Beijing? After all those years growing up in America with your grandparents?”
“To babysit you,” Ares says. “To cook for you, to protect you. Better inside help than outside help. Even though every time he looked at me, I know—I know it just reminded him of my mother.”
