Ma says the beginning of our bad luck was buying a house in a neighborhood owned by stars with no hands. At night, in replacement of wishing upon them, she warns us about the leading cause of death in the United States – half-swallowed ambitions, chewed twice before being ushered from the body and left as roadkill on the cement block of our streets. There are people stupid enough to eat anything, Ma laments, and we know she means the people who steal our plums before they’re ripe and must be chased away with brooms and accents raised as high as telephone poles, who park next to our cars despite blocking the empty space with trash cans. We receive potholes like rain, and other people’s mail with every south-blowing wind. Sometimes we receive packages, Lululemon and fish oil pellets. Ma says this could mean two things: that we are a destination for all things unwanted, or that there is another Chinese family living somewhere among these suburban trees.
Sometimes Trina and I play find the Chinese family after dinner, when both of us have already finished our homework, although Trina doesn’t fully understand my passion for scavenging feng you jing out of drain pipes. I tell her there are no mosquitoes in Nevada. That 99 Ranch closed down last month, so it must be imported. On good days, we find rabbit candy wrappers on park benches, and haw flakes in restroom stalls, and once, the sound of a rice cooker’s chattering lips against a darkening window. Trina is a white girl, the neighborhood stray I collected dancing on cardboard. She doesn’t find anything, so I try to explain. This is childhood, I say, meaning how the backgrounds of dreams are always populated by shapes instead of names, just blurred enough so you can’t make out details.
But we never find anything living. Later, Ma says it isn’t the house, it’s us. She knows because the stars followed her on a business trip to LA, where they were especially prominent, because all the stars in LA wore acrylic nails and rhinestones. Still, when she looked outside her hotel room, her stars were naked, fingerless. Ma says she was excited to return home, even though the city still hasn’t fixed the potholes created by vultures and squirrels scavenging sustenance in our failures, fermented underneath our tires. At night, I see her bargaining with the stars, exchanging paper notes, metallic-alloy shopping lists, New Year’s resolutions tacked together by promises to learn better th sounds for her thes and thats, but her stars have no hands and no way to receive requests for wishes.
On Wednesday nights, Ma takes me to the arcade where we practice receiving gifts from claws, how to act, how to smile, how to win the jackpot from the fishing machine. Habits take at least six months to form, she explains, which is why we must practice now. When she isn’t looking, I practice cheating instead, which always returns better results, feeding the machines leftover lao gan ma instead of coins, chasing each shot of spice with sesame oil. By our eleventh visit, the security guards have memorized my name and the shadow of my guilt along the carpet, but I trade their silence for plums, candy wrappers, Trina’s voice, a roll of bundled Chinese words — exotic exports, things they could never find themselves.
After school, Trina comes to find us in the arcade. We are always losing when she arrives, always wearing our losses on our wrists like cufflinks. Ma says Trina is a bad luck charm, but I think it is more that Trina is taking all the good luck with her, leashing it against her ankle like toilet paper. Trina never says anything, only watches us struggle, like this is some kind of zoo, but I don’t mind being seen. When Ma isn’t looking, I show Trina the spot on the floor where I hid vermicelli in the carpet, the mole on my belly that Ma once claimed was a magnet for evil, which is why my periods always hurt more than other girls my age. We tried to have it removed twice – once after Ma lost her first job, and the second time after my father left, but both times the mole returned, a destiny we could not shake. Maybe it’s just a mole, Trina says, but I know better. Fate whispers through earth in tiny pinpricks, like how Trina’s eyes never dull even in arcade lighting, like how her lips bow like cupids in opposition. Maybe they’re just stars.
On good days, when both our mothers are asleep, Trina and I go stargazing in the parking lot of the Arby’s, the only place where the stars don’t trade a portion of their glow for human gossip. I am always too shy to stare directly at their faces, but Trina basks in the glitter of their rings, their singular acrylic nails, like concubines in some historical drama. Trina only watches cdramas because I changed all of her channels one time during a sleepover, which is why she can never be cheated with lao gan ma or other Chinese imports, which is why her house is full of snacks she cannot name and a heritage she can see but not touch – I coil her name between my fist. What do you know about stars? I ask her, our lips both bloodied by Arby’s burger sauce. Enough, she says. Enough to understand why you hate them. Why you can’t look up. But I can look at her, so I do, her eyes two lozenges of brown. I think about Ma, who would never eat processed food because fast food was death^2 – food both cooked and fried. Trina eats plums even after they fall on the ground. Trina enjoys slipping. I wished for this, Trina adds, which is funny because I wished for it too. But the stars don’t listen to me, only to her.