Kimchi & Calamari(6)

“Sophie’s watching ‘Monster Bashville,’ and she knows it scares me,” Gina cried as she pushed her glasses back against her nose. “She is not nice.”

“Don’t be scared. You know those mangy-looking puppets aren’t real.”

“They’re creepy. Sophie always gets her way. She’s so mean!”

Besides their long brown hair and hiccups, my sisters are as twinnish as tiramasu and tortellini. Since the first time Sophie flung a spoonful of yogurt ten feet from her high chair, we knew she would grow up to be a win-at-all-cost woman warrior. Gina, on the other hand, gets her thrills from playing dress up and singing and dancing to Disney tunes. She’s a whiner, too. But a cute whiner.

Like right now, as she hugged Eeyore and moaned about her wicked sister.

“C’mon, let’s go downstairs.” I yawned as I passed my desk, where my social studies folder caught my eye. Ugh. When was that monster due? I wished I could be one of those kids to whip out papers last minute, at the buzzer, without worrying. But I wasn’t.

I grabbed the folder. “I’ll be your bodyguard and you help me write my essay. Deal?”

“Deal,” Gina said with a thumbs-up.

In the family room we stepped over Sophie, who was sprawled in front of the TV. I turned on the computer.

“What’s your essay about?” Gina asked loudly over a commercial.

“Me, me, me, me,” I sang like an opera star.

“I know where we can get pictures of you, Joseph.”

“I don’t need pictures. I need words, lots of them,” I said, but Gina had already pulled down a mini-album from the bookcase and handed it to me.

She pointed to the label: TWINS’ SECOND BIRTHDAY. “This one looks important.”

I opened to a picture of my family in the backyard. Dad was holding Gina and I was holding Sophie. Mom was standing between us, dressed in spiky heels and squinting from the sun. Gina and Sophie wore matching polka-dot dresses and sparkly paper crowns.

I looked at my eight-year-old self. Stocky, with a crew cut and ears sticking out like coat hooks. And tan. It’s silly how people call Asians yellow when my skin gets brick brown in summertime. Next to Dad, who’s six-two and all muscle, I looked like a little puffer fish. I used to tell Dad that I wanted to grow up tall and strong like him. But he’d always answer the same way: “You’re built like a fireplug, son. No one messes with fireplugs.”

“How come you’re not holding me?” Gina demanded, looking over my shoulder.

I shrugged. My sisters keep score of everything, from the number of squirts of chocolate syrup in their milk to how many times they get to sit by the car window.

Gina brought out a few more mini-albums. We looked at everything from Mom and Dad’s honeymoon photos to a picture of us three kids in the backseat of the van, holding Frazer after his hip surgery. Soon Sophie got bored with TV and hopped up beside us to look, too.

The more I stared at the pictures, the worse I felt about the essay. My parents have always acted like I was their firstborn—Italian just like them—and on most days it didn’t bother me. But mirrors don’t keep secrets and, like Mom’s shop, our house is covered with mirrors. How many mornings had I jumped out of bed and stared into the dresser mirror, wondering who I looked like and who that person was? How many nights, while I brushed my teeth, had I studied my reflection, a face utterly unlike my sisters’ or my parents’? Probably a million. And every time, I thought about that story of the emperor with no clothes. Was I the butt-naked emperor of Nutley, New Jersey, being duped into believing that I was Italian inside and out, because everyone was afraid to speak the truth?

I picked up my folder, pulled out the essay assignment, and reread it. Yikes! Dad always says the devil is in the details. The last line said the essay was due in nine days. Usually Mrs. Peroutka gives us over a month for writing assignments. How had I missed that?

Quickly I grabbed the phone. “Joseph here, desperate to hire an Internet consultant.”

“Sure,” Nash answered. “Everything okay?”

“My essay is due sooner than I thought, all fifteen hundred words.”

“I’m on it, Joseph. Anything special you want me to research about Korea?”

What did I want to find out, anyway? Enough to fill an autobiography. Or to help make my déjà-vu dream make sense. For years I’d had the same weird dream: me walking along a dirt road with other Koreans, but I didn’t know who they were. I was pulling a red wagon, but I never knew where I was going. Everything was always fuzzy—especially faces.

But for now I had to stick with getting the essay finished. “Stuff about the city of Pusan. In Korea, back fourteen years ago when I was born, I guess. And if something comes up about a baby being found, that’s even better.”