Chapter 8 — Like Twins
1309 Words
Nobody could quite explain how it happened.
One summer afternoon a quiet boy with no friends sat alone on a bench eating someone else's chocolate. By the time school started in September he and the girl next door were walking through the gates together like they had been doing it their whole lives.
Like twins, people said.
It was not far from the truth.
That was three years ago.
Three years of walking through the same gates. Three years of shared lunches and stolen snacks and homework sessions that ran too late. Three years of Wei Chen following Li-Mei into social situations he would never have survived alone, and Li-Mei showing up to every basketball game without being asked.
Three years.
And not one single day where either of them considered doing things differently.
They were in the same class.
This was either fate or coincidence — Li-Mei had decided it was fate and Wei Chen had decided it was convenient and neither of them had any intention of changing it.
They sat beside each other without discussing it. It simply happened — the way most things between them simply happened, without negotiation or announcement, as naturally as breathing.
They did homework together every evening. Either at the restaurant where Mama Chen would bring them snacks without being asked, or at Wei Chen's house where his mother would do exactly the same thing. The two mothers had developed an unofficial agreement — wherever the children studied, food appeared. It was simply the rule.
They studied together before every exam. They walked to school together every morning. They walked home together every afternoon. They ate each other's lunches without asking — Li-Mei always stealing whatever Wei Chen's mother had packed that she found interesting, Wei Chen eating whatever Li-Mei left behind without complaint.
If Li-Mei had a social event — a neighbor's gathering, a school function, a street celebration — Wei Chen was going. He did not always want to go. But Li-Mei would appear at his door with the particular expression she wore when something was not optional and he would find his shoes and follow her out.
He had stopped arguing about it sometime around October.
It was simply easier. And if he was being honest with himself — which he rarely was about this particular subject — he did not actually mind. The world was less overwhelming when Li-Mei was standing next to him in it.
Basketball was different.
On the court Wei Chen became someone slightly different from the quiet boy who walked close to walls. He was good — genuinely, naturally good — and he knew it the way people know things that live in their bodies rather than their minds. He moved with a certainty on the court that he rarely showed anywhere else.
But he always played better when Li-Mei was watching.
He would never say this out loud. Not once. Not ever. But it was true and it had always been true and Li-Mei — who noticed everything — had noticed this too, though she kept it filed quietly away without comment.
She came to every game.
Not because anyone asked her to. Just because she knew.
The popularity arrived without invitation.
It was the combination of things — the basketball, the quiet confidence that had been slowly replacing his shyness, the face that had grown from boyish to something that made girls across the classroom suddenly find reasons to ask questions they already knew the answers to.
Wei Chen did not particularly notice.
He noticed numbers. He noticed plays on the basketball court. He noticed when Li-Mei was upset before she had said a single word about it. These were the things that occupied his attention.
Girls leaving notes in his bag did not occupy his attention.
Gifts left on his desk occupied his attention even less.
His system was simple and completely unconscious — anything left for him by someone who was not Li-Mei got handed directly to Li-Mei. Chocolate, snacks, small trinkets, handwritten notes that he had not read — all of it passed from his hand to hers without ceremony or explanation.
Li-Mei accepted these transfers with the cheerful efficiency of someone who had grown used to receiving the tribute meant for someone else.
"Another one," she would say, unwrapping whatever it was.
"Mm," Wei Chen would say, already looking back at his textbook.
Dinner at either house was always an event.
Not because anything dramatic happened. But because two people who spent the entire day together somehow always had more to say the moment food appeared on the table.
One particular evening Mama Chen had made Li-Mei's favourite dish — a rich fragrant stew that filled the whole restaurant with warmth. She set it on the table and went back to the kitchen to bring the rice, instructing both of them firmly not to touch anything until she returned.
She was gone for approximately ninety seconds.
When she came back the serving bowl was significantly emptier than she had left it.
Both Li-Mei and Wei Chen were sitting with identical expressions of complete innocence.
Mama Chen looked at the bowl.
Then at Li-Mei.
Then at Wei Chen.
"Which one of you?" she said simply.
Silence.
Then Li-Mei pointed at Wei Chen.
Wei Chen turned to look at her with an expression of pure betrayal.
"You ate more than me," he said.
"I did not."
"You had three portions before I had one."
"That is completely false."
"I watched you."
"You were not watching me you were reading."
"I can do both."
Mama Chen set the rice down quietly and went back to the kitchen to get more stew. She was smiling before she reached the door. She did not let them see that.
The argument continued for the duration of the meal — escalating from the stew to a full historical accounting of every previous food related injustice they held committed against each other, going back approximately two and a half years.
By the end of it neither of them could remember who had eaten more.
But neither of them was willing to admit that either.What nobody outside their small world fully understood was that beneath all the laughter and the stolen lunches and the sibling arguments about stew The neighbors who witnessed these arguments through the open restaurant windows found them deeply entertaining. Old Mr. Huang from across the street once told Mama Chen with complete seriousness that watching Li-Mei and Wei Chen argue about food was better than anything on television. Mama Chen had agreed without hesitation. Li-Mei and Wei Chen had built something with genuine substance.
Li-Mei had a gift for numbers that revealed itself so quietly and so completely that it seemed like it had always been there. She could look at the restaurant accounts and find the error in seconds. She could calculate the week's earnings in her head before Papa Chen had finished counting on paper. She tracked inventory, noticed patterns, caught mistakes before they became problems.
Mama and Papa Chen had started trusting her with the store accounts when she was thirteen. By fifteen she ran them without supervision — neat columns of numbers in a small notebook that never once had an error.
On the evenings when Mama and Papa Chen had an important ceremony or gathering to attend they left Li-Mei in charge without hesitation.
And Wei Chen — who had no particular gift for accounting but a very particular gift for showing up whenever Li-Mei needed an extra pair of hands — would appear at the restaurant door within minutes of them leaving, roll up his sleeves without being asked, and help until they returned.
Nobody asked him to.
He just always knew, he knew the system of the restaurant like the back of his hand .
- Writer
