Free Planet Lolita by Charles Foran Page A

out. I crawled back across the floor before any emotions escaped my chest.
    He knocked, called my real name, and entered. For almost an hour I had lain on top of the bed waiting, teeth brushed and hair combed. Even my choice of clothes—Hello Kitty pajamas, now too tight and too pink—was because he brought them back from a trip to Korea. Manga had been good company, and though I’d cleared his bangs to smile into his marble eyes, and bopped his nose so he’d yip-yip, and
not
kicked him out after he farted, I’d also given warning. On seeing Dad, the pooch leapt to the floor.
    “On Facebook with your friends all night?” he said, glancing at the MacBook on the desk.
    “Facebook’s private, Dad,” I said too snappily.
    “Is it? Your sister told me she has close to seven hundred friends.”
    “I don’t have nearly that many.”
    “But the ones you have, they can visit your, what do you call it, profile anytime?”
    “If they’ve been invited.”
    “Right.”
    “You and Mom have never asked.”
    “No, we haven’t.”
    I waited, my heart almost in my throat, for him to ask to be invited. Could I say no? To her, easily. To him, much harder.
    “But you were right here with Manga, weren’t you,” he said instead. “Did that dog fart?”
    I dropped my gaze. “I was on FaceTime with Rachel,” I answered. He knew. Not about Mary being on my Facebook but about my being in Rachel’s old room, spying. I couldn’t do it again. Ever.
    “And how’s she doing these days?”
    “She’s a super-hot goddess.”
    “Is she?”
    “She and Greg are an item. His band is called Head Tax.”
    “Funny name.”
    “Their music is basically hideous. And he has three tattoos,” I said, picturing Guanyin pimpled onto her arm, “including one on his—”
    “Whoa, kiddo. Some secrets are for keeping.”
    I was trying to apologize! Not sure what to say next, I chewed my lip.
    “Everyone has secrets,” he added.
    “They sure do.”
    “Not only grown-ups.”
    “I love Rachel. And I’m definitely not telling you everything about her life.”
    “Good. Keep at it. And your mother—don’t tell her especially.”
    “If you say.”
    “Are you angry with me, Xixi?”
    “No.”
    “Are you sure? Because I’d be pretty surprised if you were.”
    “It’s about trust,” I said.
    “Okay.”
    “I trust Gloria.”
    “Ah.”
    “I trust her more than anyone.”
    “No kidding,” Dad said. Only then did I realize that he had yetto smile. His grin upturned the corners of his mouth, two parentheses per side, pure Cantopop glamour.
    “Should I leave you be?” he asked softly.
    “God is a restaurant,” I said to keep him.
    The smile rippled.
    “Serving promises and prayers.”
    He stretched out next to me. Unlike Mom, who couldn’t rest on her hip for long without it starting to ache, and who once actually fell off the bed, bruising her tailbone, we fit snugly together, two bamboo Kwoks sharing the family
kang
in the ancestral village in the Pearl River delta, now a dumpy little temple. Also unlike Leah, who turned squirmy at the hint of any real closeness, making me wonder if I had cuttlefish breath, Dad was happy to lie face-to-face, our eyes locked and our voices pillow whispers.
    His hair smelled like cancer, but I wouldn’t tell him. Not yet.
    “Do you remember when you said that?”
    “In Bangkok. I was seven?”
    “We’d visited Wat Arun, the great temple on the Chao Phraya, and were having lunch at the Ritz. You looked up from your noodles and said, ‘God is a restaurant.’ Not a question, a fact.”
    “What did I mean?”
    “Beats me.”
    “What else did I say on that trip?”
    “We were boarding a river taxi at sunset,” he said. “Two monks and a dog waited on the dock with us.”
    “The monks were wearing orange curtains.”
    “Saffron robes.”
    “And the dog was missing a leg.”
    “You patted it between the ears, even though your mother was worried it had a disease.”
    “The dog smiled