***

Waking from a deep sleep, I turn over and check my cell phone for the time, but the screen stays black no matter what button I press.

“Shit,” I say, “It’s dead.”

Nearby, construction lights and the florescent glow from other people’s homes flood in through my curtainless window. I can see well enough to find my adapter and plug my phone into the outlet next to my bed. After a few minutes of charging, the screen reads 3:04 a.m., but my body is still stuck 12 hours behind in a different time zone. Just two nights ago, I could hear my parents talking on the phone in the other room, telling somebody about the time difference and reading out our new address, line by line.

“50 Chempaka Kuning Link,” my Dad said, “Kuning is the Malay word for yellow.”

I sat on my bedroom floor for the last time, wanting to shut my door to block out their overly excited voices, but I was too nauseous to move.

 

My stomach growls and reminds me that I had been too tired to eat dinner after my cold shower. I throw on a sundress, the first thing I grab from my open suitcase, and walk to the kitchen. Mama’s already up and reading on the back concrete patio outside the kitchen that overlooks our neighbors’ patios on all sides. She doesn’t notice me until my bare feet are right in front of hers. Looking up to turn a page, she jumps when she sees me staring at her.

“Oh, you scared me, baby! Can’t sleep too?” Mama says.

“I just woke up. I’m starving. Do we have anything to eat?” I say.

“Your dad went to the store before he knocked out to get a few things. He’s still snoring in there. I can make you some peanut-butter-sugar toast points,” she said, her Southern drawl sticky as the tropic air.

Waiting outside, I sit on the concrete floor of the patio and look up. The sky isn’t dark enough to see stars from all the city light pollution, but I spot an airplane and watch its tail light blink and disappear, blink and disappear, until flying out of sight behind a cloud. I wonder where the flight’s going, and if any of the people onboard will want to be anywhere but where they are as badly as I do right now, in a sundress at 3 in the morning about to eat peanut-butter-sugar toast points outside with my mom in the miserable heat that only exists this close to the Equator.

 

“Remember the first time I made these?” Mama asks, coming back outside with a plate of tiny triangular toast slices.

“Our first night in South Africa,” I say, “When we ate on the front porch and the monkeys crossed the street and walked up to stare at us through our front gate,”

“Every time I eat peanut butter I think of those monkeys and of you asking if we could let them in.” She laughs. We eat until the toast is gone, too hungry to make conversation, honoring the tradition of our first night in a new home with mouths full of bread and silence. Mama uses her finger to scrape up the gooey globs off the plate.

“I’m going to try to go back to bed,” she says, “Make sure you shake the crumbs off your dress before you come back inside.”

 

The next day, Mama proposes we take our first bus ride as a family. We walk to the bus stop on the main street that’s just a few minutes from our front door. Dad hands me a blue card with “EZ-Link” inscribed on it.

“This is your bus and train pass,” he says to me, “I’ll show you how to use it when we get on.”

“Where are we going again?” I ask.

“Tampons Mall,” he says, thinking he’s fucking hilarious.

“Greg, stop. It’s Tampa-NEEZ,” Mama overemphasizes the pronunciation.

 

It’s a Saturday afternoon. Malls back in America are normally packed on weekends, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Riding down the escalator, I can’t see a single centimeter of the aisles on either side of the mall, just a mass of shiny, black-haired heads moving like waves on a dark sea. I pull my hair into a bun, hoping to somehow make its blonde sheen a little less obvious, and the escalator feeds us into the crowd.

 

After thirty minutes, we half walk and are half pushed, into the grocery store we’ve been looking for on the mall’s six floors. The shopping cart requires a gold dollar coin to loosen the chain that connects it to the other carts, so Dad has to go inside to get change for a $2 bill. As we’re waiting, a lady pushes past me to get to a cart, knocking my shoulder back a little.

“Sorry,” I say automatically, turning to make eye contact.

She seems completely unaware of my existence, running her cart’s wheels over the front edge of my flip-flop.