When You Trap a Tiger, page 4
Kids get sick all the time. Sam always tells me, You kids are made of germs. (As if she’s such a grown-up). But she’s not wrong. Because grown-ups aren’t supposed to throw up. And Halmoni, especially, isn’t supposed to throw up. Halmoni is so glamorous, and this is so…gross.
Halmoni has always been the queen of sleep. She goes to bed at eight-thirty, sets her hair in curlers and wraps it in a head scarf, wears a face mask, and sleeps for twelve hours.
Nothing gets in the way of beauty sleep. Except, I guess, this.
A good granddaughter would help her. A good girl would bring her crackers and water and hold her hair.
But for some reason, I don’t move. As much as I try, I can’t force my legs to work, can’t make my hand push the door open.
I am not a good granddaughter.
I feel like I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have. Halmoni looks through the cracked open door and sees me. Too late, I try to switch on my invisibility—but Halmoni sees me. She always does.
“Lily,” she croaks. The curlers in her black hair look like scales. “I thought I hear you there.”
Her face is draped in darkness, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Is she upset with me? Angry that I’m sneaking around? Does she want me to leave? When I speak, I whisper, “Are you okay?”
She flushes the toilet and stands up, stepping forward, into the moonlight. The wrinkles around her eyes and lips are deeper than usual, but she looks healthy enough. If I hadn’t heard her throwing up, I wouldn’t have guessed it. “Of course I’m okay. My whole family is here. That’s even better than okay.”
“But…” My voice cracks. I clear my throat. “Are you—are you sick?”
“Oh, yes, Lily. Only a little bit. How do you call it? A little beetle?”
Sometimes I think she mixes up words on purpose, to make us laugh—to distract us. “A bug?” I clarify.
She nods. “Yes, little bug. But I am okay.”
I take a breath to calm down. Everybody gets the stomach flu, even halmonis.
Just a little beetle-bug.
“Why you up?” she asks.
“I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about…the tiger.”
She looks at me for three long heartbeats, then holds out her hand. “Come lie with me,” she says. “I tell you now. I tell you what I stole.”
Halmoni takes me into her bedroom, and I curl up under the covers with her. In the dark, I scan the room.
On her nightstand, as usual: framed photos of me, Mom, Sam.
Also on her nightstand, new: a row of tiny orange pill bottles. A whole family of them.
Before I can ask about them, she says, “I stole stories.”
I suck in air, trying to understand, but it’s a little hard. My grandmother. Stole stories. From magical tigers.
Not a whole lot of that makes sense.
“How do you steal a story?” I ask.
Halmoni is quiet for so long that I think maybe she’s changed her mind about telling me. But she’s just waiting, building suspense, and she takes my hand, traces my life line with her fingertip. She used to do this when I was little, to soothe me during the scary parts of her stories.
“Those stories come from a time before. Long, long ago. When tiger walked like man.”
I nudge closer to her, heart humming at those magic words.
“Those stories come from a time when the night is black. Only darkness. And in the darkness, a princess lives in a castle in the sky. The princess very lonely, so she whisper stories to the night. And those stories become stars.”
When Halmoni told us to reach up and grab a story from the sky, I always thought it was just a fun game. I never thought she meant it literally. “The stars are made of stories?”
“Yes, yes. Now listen.” She shushes me and continues. “The sky princess tell so many stories that the sky fill with light. No more darkness anywhere! And the people on earth, down in villages, they so happy. No more night.”
I look out the window at the inky black, and I shiver. No more night.
“Story magic was so bright and powerful that of course tigers want it. They go to very top of highest mountain, surround themselves with stars, and guard the sky.”
Halmoni continues, “And humans love those stories, too. But I don’t like some of the stories stars tell. Some of those stories…are dangerous. Some stories too dangerous to tell.”
I pause. “But how can a story be dangerous?”
Halmoni wraps her arms tight around me. “Sometime, they make people feel bad and act bad. Some of those stories make me feel sad and small.”
I bite my lip. The stories Halmoni told us always had happy endings. They were about clever girls and loving families and warrior princesses who saved the day.
“I hear my halmoni cry when she tell me sad stories, our Korean history,” she says. “I see my neighbors get scare. My friends get angry. And I think: Why do we have to hear bad stories? Isn’t it better if bad stories just go ’way?”
I swallow. That makes sense, I think.
“So one quiet night, I take jars from my house and carry them up the mountain, tracking those tigers all the way to the caves.
“I am the littlest girl in the littlest village, and I am sneaky. I hide outside the caves and wait until the tigers fall asleep, until their snores echo through the land. And then I get to work, grabbing the stars—the bad stories—in my fists, stuffing them into jars.”
It’s another thing that seems impossible—but maybe the world is bigger than I thought. Maybe there’s room for disappearing tigers and captured stars.
“You stole the stars,” I say.
“Not all. But…yes.”
I wonder what it would feel like to hold stars in my hands—if they would crumble like dust or shatter like glass, if they’d burn fierce and hot or sharp and cold.
Halmoni continues, “I seal jars up. Then I tiptoe away from cave, so soft, hush-hush. Before I leave, I think, I be extra safe. I make sure they don’t follow. So I take rocks from the forest, one by one, and stack them at the mouth of the cave, until they make a wall. Big, heavy wall. Until the tigers trapped inside.”
I shudder, imagining the tigers clawing on the other side.
“I think: No more bad stories. No more. I never want to hear them again, so I run away, away from my little village, across the ocean, cross the whole world, to a new place. Where I am safe from sadness.” Halmoni’s voice starts to fade as she gets sleepier. “I steal the stars, and I lock them away.”
“How did you know?” I ask, as I press my warm toes against her cold ones. “How did you know you’d be okay?”
“I don’t. But I believe in me. When you believe, that is you being brave. Sometime, believing is the bravest thing of all.”
“So everything turned out fine?” Halmoni never talked much about how she came to the United States from Korea, and I never thought to ask.
She is quiet for so long that I think maybe she fell asleep. Then she says, “Nothing last forever, Lily. Tigers break free. The tigers very angry. Now they coming for me.”
From the living room, I hear a creak, and I tense—but it’s probably just Mom, shifting in her sleep.
Halmoni presses her lips to my head, and her words blur together and she falls into dreams. “They hunting me now. They don’t stop hunting.”
My dreams are filled with tigers. When I wake up the next morning, I lie next to my sleeping halmoni, thinking about her story. Questions thunder through my mind.
What stories did she steal? I’m curious, and part of me wants to hear them, even if they’re dangerous.
But I have more important questions, like: Did I really see a tiger? If so, I’m pretty sure it was the one that’s hunting Halmoni.
We have to do something about that. We can’t just wait. We need a plan to protect ourselves.
There’s no chance I’m falling back asleep, so I slide out of bed and pad out of her bedroom into the living room.
The clouds block the sun outside and paint the house gray, and the living room is so silent that I’m surprised to find Mom sitting on the couch.
She’s turned slightly away from me, body curled around a half-full mug of coffee. The steam dances and floats up to kiss her face, but she doesn’t notice.
I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Mom so still. She’s always moving. Right now, I feel like I’ve captured a precious moment. I want to take it and hold it close to my heart.
She’s staring out the living room window, but there’s nothing to see except the vague outlines of trees and a few houses in the distance.
I step toward her, and the floorboard yelps.
She flinches. Hot coffee sloshes in her mug, threatening to spill over. “Lily! You scared me. You’re so quiet, always sneaking up on me.”
“Oh,” I say. It’s not like I meant to sneak up on her. “Sorry.”
She just smiles. “How are you? How did you sleep?”
That’s too complicated to answer, so I nod in response.
And I guess a nod is good enough for Mom, because she doesn’t push it. She plunks her mug on the coffee table as she stands—and when she does, I notice she’s dressed nicely, in a button-down shirt and work pants. “Are you hungry?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “What are you wearing?”
“I’ve got a job interview this morning,” she explains, as she clatters around the kitchen.
We’ve only been here for one night. Most moms would want to settle in and unpack, but of course my mom’s already got an interview lined up. She worked as an accountant back in California, and she worked a lot.
“But I have time to make you something,” Mom continues. “You really should eat. How about leftover rice cakes?”
“No thanks,” I say. “I was actually wondering about—”
“You sure?” she asks. “They’re good heated up. Did I ever tell you that Halmoni used to sell her rice cakes when we first moved here? Everyone loved them.”
I step forward. “Really?” Mom rarely talks about when she was a kid.
“What about tea? Would you like some tea? I can get you some.” Mom opens a cabinet, then stops, hand hovering in the air. “Right. Halmoni moved the mugs to the other side. It was different before.” She grabs a mug from its new home and starts making a cup of tea, even though I don’t really want one. I don’t like tea.
“Mom…,” I say, hesitating, trying to sound as casual as possible. “Did Halmoni ever tell you stories when you were little? Stories that seemed impossible?”
Mom frowns. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. But I was never a big reader like you. I liked to get outside and play, so I didn’t really have the patience for stories.”
“Oh.” I get a feeling that happens sometimes, like something’s wrong with me, but I push it aside. “But did she tell you stories about her childhood and stuff?”
Mom’s eyes get faraway, like when she was staring out the window. “She never talked about her time in Korea much. I know she grew up poor, in a rural village miles away from Seoul. I know she lived alone with her own halmoni. I know her mom moved to the States when she was very little. Halmoni tried to find her when she moved out here herself—when I was just a baby—but I don’t think she ever did.”
“I meant more like…” Except how do I even explain this? Did you ever find stars hidden in jars? Did tigers ever chase you? “Never mind.”
Mom takes a breath and plasters a smile on her face. “Anyway, you should meet some kids in the neighborhood. I have some high school friends with kids your age. I can set up a playdate.” Mom does this when she wants to change the subject—just abruptly switches topics and acts like we were talking about it the whole time.
I don’t bother explaining that “playdates” expired about six years ago. And I don’t explain how hard it is to make friends.
Some people, friends just stick to them. Like Sam. Even though she’s mean sometimes, she always has a cloud of people around her. She has infinite texts to respond to. But I’ve never been a sticky person.
I’ve had a few friends, and a group of girls I hung out with for a while. Sam said they were also QAGs—quiet Asian girls, like me—but eventually they just floated away. They were never mean or anything, but they just forgot to invite me to things. Like they forgot I existed.
They didn’t stick.
And I guess that’s okay. That’s just my invisibility.
“I’m heading to my interview now,” Mom says. “But you should get out of the house. Get some fresh air. Maybe go to the library? You might meet some reader kids there. And you love libraries.”
I like libraries, I guess. But I don’t know where she got the idea that I love them, especially when I used to hate the one across the street.
When I was little, I refused to enter it. I’d sit on the steps while Mom and Sam went, and I’d wait for them to bring me picture books.
Mom didn’t understand why I was so afraid, because the library looks like a cute cottage, placed right in front of the forest. The door and window frames were painted in bright, colorful patterns.
But I told her: It looks like the gingerbread house from “Hansel and Gretel.”
I guess she’s forgotten about that.
A flash of annoyance flares up in me, but I shove it down. “Yeah, okay.”
Mom looks relieved. “That’s great, Lily. You’re the best. Have I told you you’re the best?” She sets the tea in front of me and ruffles my hair. “Have fun at the library, okay?”
She leaves, slamming the front door behind her, and I sip the tea I don’t really want. It burns my tongue and tastes like earth, but it sends fire down my throat and wakes me up.
And I’m angry. Because sometimes it’s like she has this whole other Lily in her head. An Almost Me that doesn’t match the Real Me.
I don’t like tea. I don’t love libraries. And what if I’m not the best? How would she know? It’s not like she’s paying attention.
I get up to pour the tea down the sink, and the swirl of brown water thrills me. It feels reckless and wasteful, but in a good way.
I drop the mug in after it—only with too much force. The mug cracks.
For a moment I stare at the crack, and something opens inside me—something big and gaping, a black hole that’s a little too scary to look into.
As quickly as it came, my anger leaks away. I don’t know what got into me. I take the mug and bury it in the trash, all the way at the bottom of the bin, where nobody will find it.
Then I change into jeans and a striped T-shirt, and I braid my hair without bothering to brush it. I pull on my raincoat and head across the street to the library.
I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m not afraid of “Hansel and Gretel.” I’m not afraid of fairy tales.
And I don’t think I’ll find any “reader kids” there, but maybe I’ll do some research.
If a tiger is hunting my grandmother, I’ll find a way to protect us.
The steps leading up to the library are lined with cracks, the windows are tinted, and the roof sags, just a little, like it’s tired. It’s hard to imagine this is the same gingerbread library I was afraid of as a kid. All that magic has faded.
When I reach the doors, I tug once, then again, and just when I’m wondering whether it’s locked, the building finally lets me in. Inside, it smells like mildew, but it’s warm.
An older man, sitting at the front desk, looks up from an ancient computer. Thin wire-framed glasses perch on his nose, and a thick white mustache twitches between his pink cheeks. If he weren’t frowning so hard, he might look a little like Santa Claus.
“May I help you?” he asks, in a way that says he doesn’t really want to help me. He crosses his arms over his chest, wrinkling his cable-knit sweater.
So, no evil witch, but a grumpy Santa is pretty close.
“Um, that’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m just looking.”
He stares at me, and I’m not sure what to do. For a second, I wonder if I’m not allowed in the library. But that’s ridiculous. It’s a library.
“You have a card?” he asks.
I’m not sure what he means at first. “Oh, right. A library card. Um…no.”
I step up to the desk, even though he kind of scares me. His bushy eyebrows knit together, and he seems to be waiting for something, but I’m not sure what he needs.
“I’m Lily,” I tell him. “Lily Reeves? My hal—my grandma lives across the street. I just moved in with her.”
His eyebrow quirks up, and he nods once, in what might be approval. He’s still frowning, but less so. “You’re Ae-Cha’s granddaughter,” he confirms. “I’ll put your card under her account.”
I thank him as he types my information on his clacky keyboard.
“Good woman,” he says after a few moments. “Shock to this town’s system when she moved here, that’s for sure. But I owe her. And Joan—your mother?—followed her everywhere.”
“Oh,” I say. I’m not sure why he owes her. I’m also not sure about Mom following Halmoni everywhere. I try to picture that, but I can’t do it. They’re just too different.
He scans a red library card and hands it to me. “Goodbye, then.”
“Oh,” I repeat, taking the card and slipping it into my pocket. “Um, actually, I’m wondering if you have any books about tigers?”
He frowns, moving to the computer. “Is this a summer school project? Or a personal interest?”
“Personal?” My mouth says it like a question.
He grunts. “Not very often that kids these days use the library. They think you can find everything on the web.”
“Yeah,” I say, because I’m not sure how else to respond. I’m guessing most Kids These Days don’t have a magical tiger that’s hunting their grandma, because I don’t think Googling magical evil tiger would get very good results.
