The trip to Indiana to see Kevin and this concert was supposed to be fun. In hindsight, I don’t know really know why I genuinely thought it would be. Vacations with my parents are where fun goes to die.

Exhibit A: my first vacation to the east coast as a six-year-old consisted primarily of visits to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Multiple times. Within the space of a week. After that ordeal, I’d spent the next few years thinking my classmates were complete lunatics for enjoying vacations.

All things considered, I’d say this mini vacation had to take the cake for awfulness. It was mere hours into our trip to Indianapolis, and already Dad had worked himself into a very obvious show of passive-aggressive anger toward Alexander, which made the car trip super fun even without the added tension of the thin layer of jean fabric separating Alexander’s and my skin. When we finally arrived in Indianapolis after that long and excessively awkward car ride, Dad pointedly placed himself between Alexander and me the whole time we were checking into the hotel. Mere hours later, I had managed to get myself separated from my parents, without a cell phone, and completely, utterly lost and alone. All this on a trip to the grocery store. This is why I don’t go outside.

Okay, I might have exaggerated a little. I wasn’t completely alone on this trip. My luck wasn’t that good.

“You know, when you invited me to go to this weekend concert with you, I imagined there would be a lot more fun and a lot less of…us not having a clue about where the hell we are.”

 “Yeah, well, welcome to the Pang family vacations. And Alexander, you’re not really helping,” I sighed, tucking my scarf into my coat to protect against the bitter wind as we wandered past the sights and smells of Indianapolis. Though the busy city shone beautifully bright against the backdrop of the quickly darkening night sky, I found myself less admiring and more panicking as I racked my brain to try to remember where we came from.

Alexander jerked his thumb to indicate we cross the street. “Pretty sure we take a right here,” he said at the exact same time I mused, “I think we go left.”

I shot him a doubtful look. He rolled his eyes. “You just said that because I suggested the opposite.”

“Alexander Lin, don’t put me on your level. Just how childish do you think I am?”

“You literally just stuck your tongue out at me.”

I retracted my tongue back into my mouth. Old habits die hard. “Well, maybe you should say things that are less…tongue-sticking-out worthy.”

“I don’t even want to try to understand you sometimes.”

“Left. We definitely take a left here,” I said sharply when I noticed that the bushes we were passing looked distinctly familiar. Familiar as in objects we could have passed on our way to the grocery store…or objects we could have seen around the neighborhood all the way at home, but at this point I would take anything as a sign of divine guidance. “Yeah, go left.”

“…That is a brick wall.”

I paused and looked up, then tried to play it off casually. “You’re a brick wall.”

“You wound me.”

“Okay, new direction,” I announced. “Unless you have a magical shopping cart we can crash through the brick wall with.”

“Oddly enough, I did not think to bring mine with me.”

Alexander and I kept walking straight down the road for a while. In all honesty, I wasn’t that anxious to get back to the hotel room. If I were, then I would have stopped to ask for directions and we would have already been back. But I didn’t mind staying here a while longer. The city was so brilliantly lit at night, breathtaking and beautiful and alive. And there were no parents to drag me off to some dry campus tour or another.

I was glad I was here. And even though I would never have the guts to tell him, I was glad Alexander was with me. Dad had been completely against the idea of having a boy come along on this trip, especially a boy who he’d caught ‘sucking face’ with his daughter, but Mom had persuaded him until he finally caved.

Mom was strangely a better wingman than any of my girlfriends.

I snuck a glance over at Alexander, and his warm, dark brown eyes unexpectedly met mine. He gave me a little half-grin and then turned away, the back of his neck reddening a little. A flush crept over my cheeks. I tried to pretend I couldn’t feel the heat of his body next to mine as our coats brushed together, which only made my cheeks burn even more.

When I thought I couldn’t bear the silence or tension between us any longer, Alexander finally spoke. “I uncovered Nancy Pang’s weakness today,” he announced.

“Weakness? What?”

He snorted. “Don’t look so alarmed. I won’t leak this information to the press.”

“Oh, ha-ha, Alexander. How witty. But seriously. What weakness?”

Alexander burst out laughing and lightly flicked my forehead, leaving the tiny patch of skin he touched feeling like it was on fire. “For all of your seemingly endless talents, you, Nancy, have a terrible sense of direction,” he informed me.

“Do not,” I said automatically, and wished I could take back. Was my comeback mode set on Kindergarten-level today?

“And you sounded so confident about your sense of direction earlier, too.” He smirked and put on a high pitched voice. “‘Mom, it’s just to the store next door. We’ll be back in time for the concert’. Well, you forgot to mention the part where we accidentally travel halfway around the planet, and that you’re not sure we’ll be back in time for retirement.”

I shot him a dirty look, though it was half-hearted. “You know, your true sarcastic colors are coming out all of a sudden, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

Alexander patted me on the shoulder. Shivers traveled down my back from the spot he touched. “No, you’re right, I’m being an ass. I’m sorry.” He paused. “Wait, no, I’m not. This is too fun. Why don’t I do this more often?”

“I’m so glad you’re having fun while we’re completely, utterly lost in this foreign city.”

“Relax, Nancy,” Alexander said, patting me gently on the back and causing shivers to travel down my back. “So we have no idea where the hotel is. So we’re lost in Indianapolis. So what?”

I watched my breath puff out in front of me on the street. “So now we grow excessive facial hair and die abandoned and homeless on the street.”

“That was a really wild escalation of events.”

There was a short silence while we passed another street full of unfamiliar buildings. “Think it’s about time we give up and ask for directions?” I asked after another gust of wind rattled me to the bone. I had to say the city was not nearly as appealing as it was at first anymore. Indianapolis, I was beginning to realize, was like your standard popular high school girl: pretty on the outside, backstabbing on the inside. And I was not sticking around for the cliché climactic novel moment when the popular high school girl finally revealed the ugly within.

Alexander didn’t respond. When I looked up, I realized he was no longer walking beside me. “Alexander? I’m not waiting around for you—” I stopped mid-sentence when I realized that Alexander had a) ignored my half-hearted threat entirely and b) waltzed right into a music store without a word to me.

“Great. We’re still lost and the guy thinks it’s a convenient time to play the bongos?” With a sigh, I ducked my head into the store, nodded toward the storeowner before I realized he was snoring, and made my way past rows of violins and violas, searching for a mop of black hair bobbing among the instruments. “Alexander!”

“I’m here by the keyboards,” I heard him call back faintly. He played a few keys.

“May I ask…how this has anything to do with anything?”

Alexander played a few warm-up chords. “Follow your heart, Nancy.”

“Oh, solid advice. I was just thinking that finding a map would make this getting home thing entirely too easy,” I said sarcastically. I scooted around a table of classical piano books to find Alexander sitting in front of a sample keyboard, his forehead slightly wrinkled in concentration.

“Song suggestions?” he prompted when I sat down next to him.

“‘Home’,” I said pointedly.

“Too bad. I don’t take song suggestions.” Before I could say another word, Alexander pressed his fingers to the keys and began to play. His hands danced over the keyboard to an unfamiliar but beautiful tune, easily reaching complex chords, as if his fingers were made to play the instrument. Even the storeowner stirred enough in his sleep to give an enthusiastic snore.

When he finished, Alexander closed his eyes for a moment and then stood up like nothing had happened. “Okay. Let’s get going.” He looked at me expectantly when I didn’t move.

“O…kay?” I managed to spit out in my surprise.

He held out his hand to me, his fingers inviting me to take them. “Unless you want your parents to assume the worst and have all of Indianapolis’s police department out on a manhunt for us.”

“What—of course not,” I said absently, still very confused by and yet strangely attracted to Alexander’s keyboarding abilities. I took his hand. He lifted me to my feet with a little too much power, causing me to stumble into him and his arm to wrap around my waist.

Face flaming, my immediate reaction was to pull away, but Alexander held me firmly to him. When I looked up at him, his face was turned away and the back of his neck was all red again.

“Um…Alexander?”

“Let’s just stay like this,” he whispered, pulling me closer. I considered resisting, but my body refused to listen to my brain. Against my better judgment, I leaned into Alexander’s sturdy shoulder and snuggled a little against him. He felt like warmth and safety. I couldn’t stop my body from tingling from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

“If you were playing the keyboard to impress me, I was…not…impressed,” I lied after a while.

“Got it.”

“We’re still lost and stuff.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“This isn’t my answer to…you know…your confession.”

“Mm-hmmm,” Alexander murmured. Just when my heart had been beating fast enough for long enough that I thought it was just going to give out, he pulled away and coughed, avoiding my gaze. He indicated the door. “Shall we?”

Alexander held the door open for me as I stepped back out into the freezing air. There was an awkward moment while we both pointedly didn’t look at the other, but then Alexander broke the silence. “Sorry for the random detour, but don’t you get the strangest urge to play on keyboards whenever you see them?”

“Uh, not really?”

“Huh. What about casting fake magical spells whenever you hold a chopstick?”

“That I can relate to.” I couldn’t help but laugh a little as I followed Alexander down the street. There was no one else quite like him on the planet; that much was for sure. “What do you have, the eyes of a frickin’ hawk? How did you even see that keyboard way in the back of that store?”

“You don’t always have to see something clearly to know it’s there.”

“Thank you, Plato. Do you happen to have an equally wise saying about two lost travelers who need to get back to the adults so they don’t miss an all-important concert tomorrow?”

Alexander grinned. The wind picked up and touseled his hair, in a very cute way. “Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact. The saying goes: I had a phone with a GPS on me all along.”

I stopped and turned on Alexander. “You had what with you?” I demanded, though truthfully I wasn’t all that angry. “And you said nothing while we chased ourselves around this place in circles? Why?”

Alexander suddenly looked down at his feet, then across the street at a building, then up at the sky. Anywhere but at my face. “Yeah,” he admitted in a bit of a mumble. “I just forgot until now.”

“You did not.”

“I…just found it in the snow?”

“You’re going from bad to worse.”

“Fine, fine. I just…well, I thought…” He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled a little uncertainly. “I thought we’d get to spend more time together this way. I didn’t really…well, you know your parents are there and…I just…didn’t want to go back.”

Wow, I didn’t think he would actually say it. I tried to respond eloquently. “Um.” Note to self: work on responding eloquently.

“Yeah,” Alexander said. Also very eloquently.

A blush had blossomed onto my cheeks…yet again. Bashful could take reddening lessons from me. And tomatoes. Before I could decide how to respond to Alexander’s words, the shouts of two familiar voices reached my ears.

Mom and Dad were waving and yelling at us frantically from down the street, and they did not look happy.

*****

 “For the millionth time, Alexander and I weren’t doing anything,” I sighed as I lay sprawled across the hotel bed, checking my laptop for emails. “I know he didn’t give you guys the greatest impression ever at our party, but he’s not the kind of guy who does things like that.”

“How do you know?” Mom mumbled from under her face mask as she vainly tried to talk and not move her mouth at the same time. She cursed loudly.

“Oh, mother,” I fake-gasped. “Do you talk to grandma with that mouth?”

Ignoring me, she got off the bed and went over to the sink to reapply her mask. “Just out of curiosity, how well do you and Alexander know each other now?” Mom asked innocently.

I shrugged.

“Are you acquaintances?”

Another shrug.

“Friends?”

Yet another shrug.

“Betrothed?”

“Okay, I think that’s about as much of girl talk as I can handle for now, Mom,” I interrupted, “and the rest of eternity. More importantly, do you think Dad has killed Alexander in the next room over?”

“Oh, your father wouldn’t go that for,” Mom assured me. Then her eyebrows furrowed as she seemed to reconsider the idea, which ripped her mask again. “Probably.”

“Great.” Alexander had gone pale when my parents explained the living situation to him. Apparently he was none too thrilled with the idea of sleeping within strangle-hold reach of my ol’ pops tonight. Couldn’t for the life of me tell you why.

A while passed in silence. I logged onto Facebook to see that Alexander had spammed me on Messenger with increasingly panicked pleas to save him from my father, which I laughed at and promptly ignored. Then I began steadily making my way through a novel I’d been reading for the past few days, which was a nice way to unwind. I hadn’t had time to really read since before high school had started.

Still, though, I found that I couldn’t fully concentrate on the words in front of me. There was something nagging me in the back of my mind, and it wouldn’t go away until I faced it head on.

“Mom.”

“Yes?” she said from her spot on the carpet, where she’d begun doing her nightly yoga. ‘Yoga’. I don’t want to sound judge-y, so let’s put it this way: Mom liked to put her own little twists on the exercise. By doing them all wrong.

“Um, I have something to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“So, like, about my…you know the thing that happened recently?”

Mom shot me a blank look over the tops of her knees. “Honey, that makes no sense. Your Mandarin is getting worse than Kevin’s.”

Ouch. That was a rude awakening. I decided to get it all out in one go, like peeling off a band aid. “Are you and Dad still mad about me not getting into Harvard?” I said quietly.

There was a silence. Mom paused in her workout and sighed. “Oh, Nancy.”

“You’re still mad? I knew it. I’m sorry. I thought—”

“No, no! I’m not mad.”

“You’re not? Really?” I said doubtfully. Some part of me felt hopeful, though. The other part thought this was some kind of sick, twisted trap. “I mean, I kinda screwed up big time.”

“No, you didn’t. The admissions committee did. They’ll regret not letting my wonderful daughter in,” Mom sniffed. “My Nancy is too good for Harvard, anyway.”

Though part of me still thought this quick turnaround was too good to be true, a huge grin of relief spread across my face. At least Mom didn’t think my college rejection was the bane of her existence. “Does Dad feel the same way?”

Mom looked at the clock. “Oh, it’s almost midnight. Time for bed,” she announced quickly, avoiding the question. Smooth, Mom. Real smooth.

I sunk into my sheets and planted my face into the pillow with a deep sigh. Mom didn’t have to say it. I already knew. Dad still wasn’t over my Harvard rejection. 

“Don’t worry,” Mom said after she turned the lights out. “Your father will come around.”

“Yeah, and then he’ll happily give Alexander my hand in marriage,” I said sarcastically. “And then he’ll stop butchering the English language, too.”

“You never know.”

“Mom,” I groaned. I did know. I knew Dad would never, ever stop messing up the English language.

“Sleep well, Nancy. Tomorrow’s a big day for your brother and all of us.”

Right. Tomorrow, I’d see my lunk head of a big brother for the first time in months. And he’d be on stage living his dream, the dream no one had really ever believed he’d achieve.

It was strange. When he was in the Pang household every day, Kevin had always seemed so down on himself. He had never thought he was good enough. So Mom, Dad, and I had also sort of adopted the idea that he'd never be good enough. But in the months that he'd been away, I had come to realize that Kevin was a special guy, the kind of guy who could make it out there. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but there was no doubt about it. And if I was honest, there was nobody who I wanted to see succeed more than my stereotype-defying brother.

I’ll never admit it, but that night, I think I drifted off to sleep with a smile.

*****

A/N - I HAVE RETURNED FROM THE DEAD. For good, I hope. Sorry, life and college matters (like finals and stress and tears and food and more food and procrastination on this story) got in the way of this chapter being written in a timely manner. Thanks so much for still supporting me and this story despite the randomness of my uploads. I promise I'll get to the next chapter a lot quicker, like within 1-2 weeks! Hold me to it, people. I'm actually super pumped to write it because it's gonna be a huge one, yay! Look forward to the next chapter :)

Also, quick poll: how would people feel about a romance/coming-of-age novel about Jenny from 'Heroes Deep Within'? I have a very skeletal foundation of planning done for it so depending on reader interest, I could start it after I finish TMOL (very soon!!) or work on it after I finish Roborider instead. What do you guys think?

Oh yeah, and please comment/vote if you enjoyed! That stuff is motivational as heck. Thanks!!