You Never Picked Me and In the End, I Didn’t Pick You
TheEx’s family had a New Year’s tradition of popping fireworks until midnight and then eating fresh saimin together at the dining room table. It’s a tradition established long before me and will continue with the next person theEx decides to share New Year’s Eve with. This year while I lit sparklers and drank champagne with my friends, I remembered those years I spent with theEx on New Year’s Eve with her family.
Long before theEx was, well, theEx, she was just known as Linda. I went with her to family functions and helped her mom wash dishes after her relatives left. On New Year’s Eve, I’d sit with her family at the dining room table and slurp through a bowl of fresh saimin.
Her brothers filled a stack of hollow bricks with fireworks in front of the house while Linda and her teenage sister, Jamie, wrote their names in the air with extra long sparklers. Linda’s mom sat in a broken lawn chair, poking their lopsided grill with a stick to keep the fire going.
“Let’s play a game,” Jamie mused, dropping her sparkler into a bucket of water and watching it fizzle out.
“Okay,” Linda answered, practicing a cursive “L” in the air.
“This is a ‘this or that’ game. I’ll say to things and you have to choose one,” she explained.
I sat off to the side and crushed pop-pops under my shoe. Linda pulled up a chair next to me, tossing her sparkler into the bucket. “Okay, go,” she said.
“Okay, if you had to choose one person to save, who would you choose?” Jamie asked. She paused for dramatic effect and then continued, “Mom or Hitler?”
Linda laughed, open mouthed and wide, as if caught by surprise. “Mom, of course!”
“Okay, that was too easy,” Jamie replied, playing with the lighter. She lit another sparkler and shook it near Linda’s leg, white sparks bouncing on the pavement.
She pulled away, shooting Jamie a dirty look. “Okay, next.”
“Mom or Dad?” Jamie asked without hesitation. I knew the answer; Linda’s father was barely in the picture. He was merely a stack of giftcards scribbled with “from Dad”, sometimes “from Mark” when he wasn’t paying attention when signing.
“Mom,” Linda answered. She turned to me. “Do you want something to drink?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m good.”
She kissed my cheek and leaned into me. “It’s almost midnight,” she whispered. “I love you.”
I crunched a pop-pop under my shoe. “I love you, too.”
“Hey! We’re not done playing!” Jamie pouted, pointing the fiery sparkler in Linda’s face. She hid in my shirt collar.
“Kristel or Mom.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Both!” Linda called out with a laugh, but Jamie wasn’t smiling.
“No, you can’t do that. That’s not how the game goes.”
Linda stood up, walking to where her brothers were still blowing up fireworks and just about anything they could fit into their stack of blocks. “I’m making my own rules,” she answered in that baby voice she used to talk to her family.
She grabbed Linda’s arm. “No, Linda. You have to choose one. You can’t save both. One will die and the other will live. You have to pick one.”
I tried not to look at either of them, but I could see them out of the corner of my eye. Linda’s mom had gone in the house to start boiling the saimin noodles and Linda’s brothers were busy filling the cement blocks with newspaper and smoke bombs.
“Mom,” I heard Linda say. I turned to see if she had called out to her, but I quickly realized it was answer.
“Good choice,” Jamie gloated, slapping Linda on the back. “You have to choose your family.”
I could feel Linda’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t stand to look at her. She didn’t have to answer. She didn’t have to give in to her sister, who played the game just to watch my reaction.
“Kids! Saimin!” Linda’s mom called out from the kitchen. The boys dropped the lighters on the sidewalk and raced each other into the house.
“Ready to go?” Linda asked, reaching for my hand. She smiled at me, in exactly the same way she had when she said, ‘I love you’ earlier. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just tired.”
“Come on, let’s go eat.” We went inside and her mom handed me a steaming bowl of fresh saimin. Linda saved me a seat next to her and I spent the meal trying not to cry in my soup.
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