Page 7

CHAPTER 7 VI?T

When Viet finally came back to the dorms from The Green, Wren was back, wrapped up in his sheets like a burrito. He was alone, though Viet half expected to find his new friends taking up the rest of the room, sleeping on the floor. The room smelled sweet, like spilled alcohol. He thought of opening the blinds to let all the light in, wake Wren up, but he wasn’t at that level of petty yet. He just couldn’t stop hearing the word boring in his head.

After showering, Viet went back in to find the room was spotless—Wren, nowhere to be found. It was easy to avoid him until later that day, when Viet was back at his desk. His roommate returned as Viet read through an email from Lis containing information about the forensics club, including a mock exercise.

“I didn’t see you last night,” Wren said. His voice echoed as he searched for an item under his bed. “I came back from the party, but the room was empty.”

“I went out, then crashed on someone’s couch.” Didn’t really want to see you again.

“I was wasted last night. Can’t remember much. If me and the guys were being annoying, sorry.” He nervously glanced around, a tell that showed Viet he did remember. “I’m going to head out to grab a bite. Need anything?”

“I’m good. Thanks.”

Wren lingered, then left a second later. That’s when Viet realized that his roommate had left the room empty-handed.

The next morning, Viet was back at Toomey after finishing a run. Guzzling water, he pulled out the packet that Lis had emailed.

Five students were accused of vandalizing a campus building. He had to figure out who the culprit was, using only the information given to him and the list of items each student had on them during the police search: their AggieCard, their apartment keys, and spare change.

The four possible vandals were all art students who had access to the kind of paint found at the scene: Hasan, who was from Chicago, was an only child, and liked to row every day. Ethan, whose mother was named after a flower. Jane, who had two sisters with J names—one of them a first-year—who was part of the recycling club. The other, Esther, had founded the UC Davis chapter of Habitat for Humanity and liked eating Oreos and peanut butter.

The facts seemed random, and Viet was sure they were meant to throw him off, but aside from their bio, and the items they each were carrying, that was all he had to go on to “solve the case.”

Viet remembered Tate said he used to visit a cow for fun. When he needed to think.

Should he do the same?

Maybe he should finally meet the things responsible for the wonderful smell that drifted over to the dorms at random points in the day.

The cows at the Dairy Facility didn’t seem pleased to see him.

(Okay, but were cows pleased to see anyone ?)

Now a mile away from Laben Hall, Viet tried recalling what an orientation leader said about the facility. There were about a hundred cows and they used them for milk and for teaching purposes. Some were kept inside and others—the more gregarious ones? Viet wasn’t sure—were outside. The cows were currently fixated on a newly delivered feed. The man who provided the food didn’t spare Viet a look, which meant it wasn’t odd for students to just hang around.

If Viet had wanted to find a worthy staring contestant, he’d found the perfect partner. But talking to them felt questionable. A second cow stared at him, huffed, then walked away, like it couldn’t stand the sight of him.

A few minutes later, Viet ended up lying down on a patch of grass untouched by the cows. He was going to shower anyway.

It was nice. Staring at the sky, just watching the clouds pass. It made him forget about the weirdness back at the dorms. Classes piling up. This unsettled feeling he’d had since stepping onto the campus. Maybe it was just because he’d never been away from home this long.

His parents texted random tidbits of their lives back home, as would Viet. His mom sent a photo of a gigantic homegrown green opo squash a neighbor gifted her. She followed up with a pic—blurry, of course—of his dad enjoying said vegetable in a shrimp and squash soup. Meanwhile, his dad’s texts consisted of weather updates at Davis. They were mostly unnecessary, since he had his own weather app, but once, his dad said it’d rain, which prompted Viet to grab an umbrella before leaving the dorms. It poured the whole day.

Now Viet crossed his arms, weighing down Lis’s packet against his chest so that a breeze wouldn’t blow it away.

A minute passed. Or maybe it was an hour. Suddenly he felt something touch him. For one delirious moment, he thought a cow had escaped and was nudging him—but this was not a nudge. He was being shaken. He opened his eyes, and saw the silhouette of—

“Evie?!”

“Viet, are you all right?! Are you hurt again? Should I get someone?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” Viet shot up, then got to his feet, wiping off grass from his fitness shorts.

“Why were you on the grass? Here of all places?”

“I was… uh, napping?”

“Near the cows?!”

Her franticness made him laugh. “Yeah, I guess, near the cows. Just… following Tate’s advice.”

“Never do that.”

“Uh, nap on the grass?”

“Follow Tate’s advice. He’s been corrupted by Kale and none of what he says should be trusted most of the time.”

He took her in. She was dressed in running gear—a pair of light blue shorts and a pale yellow tank. “Did you run here too?”

“Yeah, it’s a bit of a long run, but I stop by sometimes. To see the cows, and sometimes the goats too.” Evie paused. “Are we destined to run into each other? With you on the ground?”

His head must still have been stuck in dreamland because he couldn’t find the right answer. Just then, a cow moo ’d loudly.

She pointed to the pages beside him, now on the grass. “Lis would be so happy if she saw you now.”

“She’d be happy to know she’s torturing me. I can’t solve this case.”

“You do know that this is not a real requirement, right? You’re not going to be turned away if you get it wrong. Lis wouldn’t do that.” Evie smiled.

“Then why hand out a packet? Means she’s expecting something from me.” Viet narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you know the answer?”

“Lis tells me everything, and she’s told me all the answers she’s gotten over the last two years. Never the real answer, though. I guess just pick the most logical one and move on.”

“But I don’t have a theory yet.”

Evie did a standing quad stretch. “Just don’t put We are all guilty of something . Someone did that once. I think the kid was some smart-ass philosophy student.”

“Lis reminds me of Ali, you know. Linh’s friend,” he said.

“Oh yeah, definitely. Maybe that’s why we got along right away. That’s how you make friends: you encounter people who seem familiar.”

“You feel familiar.”

Yes, he was definitely still not awake.

She tilted her head, the end of her ponytail brushing her bare shoulder. “Me? I’m familiar?”

He backtracked. “Maybe it’s because you’re Linh’s sister. Maybe it’s because we’re from the same place.” He glanced down at the grass. “You want to sit? Or lie down?” Evie checked her wristwatch. “Unless you are on a schedule?” he joked.

“Hmm… I have less than an hour to run back, then I have twenty minutes to shower and twenty minutes to make breakfast, but most of the time I can do it in fifteen and—” She stopped, smiling sheepishly. “Everyone has some sort of schedule,” she finished somewhat self-defensively. “You must have one too.”

“Yep. In my planner this morning was Talk to cows. ”

Evie laughed. Finally she admitted, “You do look comfortable.”

Viet gestured to the patch of grass. After a second, she lay beside him with her knees bent. Her right ankle crossed over her left knee, it kept bobbing, didn’t stay still for a second.

“I feel like a kid.”

“Why?” Viet asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t done this in so long. Lie down and just stare at the sky. Feels like we’re… wasting time.”

“You seem like you have your act together. Don’t know why you can’t ‘waste time’ occasionally.”

She just shrugged. “I’ve been like this forever. I’ve always had something to do. Every time I wasn’t needed, I felt guilty.” Then, as if she didn’t want to make herself sound serious, she sighed dramatically. “Classic eldest-daughter syndrome.”

Viet remembered Linh used to be on the go too, but now that she was dating Bao, she relaxed more. It was difficult to imagine a more intense version of Linh.

“Sounds tough,” he eventually said.

A couple beats of silence passed. She probably didn’t want to elaborate; they were still strangers, after all. Then she started talking again, and the sudden fatigue in her voice made him turn on his side to properly face her.

She continued staring at the clouds. “For years, being the eldest daughter feels like being an only child. And I don’t mean it’s because we literally are in the world for a few extra years before our siblings are born. We’re expected to do something for the first time, then expected to do it well, no matter what. Being the most polite, get the best grades, things like that. And it’s lonely to—”

“Carry that weight,” he finished automatically. He felt that type of loneliness a lot.

“ Yes! That pressure!” Now Evie had turned on her side to face him. “So, imagine that for years and years you carry that weight. Almost get used to it. Then there’s this moment when you realize you don’t need to carry that burden anymore. I went home this summer and saw that my parents were finally okay with Linh becoming an artist. Even proud of her. They looked happier, lighter, and it was so strange because that’s totally not how it was when I went off to college.”

Evie raised her hands, looking at them palm-first. She lowered her voice. “A weight has been lifted, but I don’t really like that feeling.”

She sounded confused. Hurt. And that made Viet feel…

“You feel empty, maybe useless,” he said quietly. “When you were growing up, there was some comfort in knowing your responsibility. I have to do this, I have to do that. You’re defined by it. You let yourself be defined by it because there wasn’t really a choice. You were made to follow a path.”

We cannot afford to have passions. That was what Ba had told him all those months ago, when Viet had first broached the topic of his future career.

It sounded like Evie was on a path and now reached a dead end or a block, and there was no one but herself to figure out an escape.

She was staring at him now.

“What?” he asked.

“Let me guess. You’re either the oldest or an only child.”

“Only child.”

“Knew it. So you get what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, believe me. I do. You feel guilty and guilt’s not easily shaken off. But that doesn’t mean you should sit with it because then you’ll be stuck, forever unchanging. I think growth comes from realizing that you have the right to choose your own purpose, and if you have something to look forward to in the future, the guilt won’t seem as heavy.” He felt the urge to say more—dive into his parents’ disapproval of the career he imagined for himself—but they didn’t have all the time in the world. Plus, it felt easier to hear someone else talk.

As if reading his thoughts, Evie said, “This is way more than what I expected to talk about on a beautiful Sunday morning.”

Viet wanted to change the mood. “I mean, if you want, we can go back to small talk for another”—he pretended to check a watch and threw out a random time—“seventeen and a half minutes. Does your schedule allow for that?”

“Ha ha. What about you? Let’s talk about why you’re here, alone, on such a gorgeous day. Trying to answer a forensic science question.”

Well, that just sounded… sad, he wanted to say. Then Evie asked, “Do you really like forensics that much?”

This was what he had wished his parents would ask. But they never did.

Forensics wasn’t what TV made it out to be, sure. And it wasn’t like he’d gotten into it because of those shows—it only exposed a bit of it, and the rest of what he read online, in books, had tipped him toward the side of possibly pursuing the field as a career.

“There’s this guy from the late nineteenth, early twentieth century,” Viet said. “People think of him as the Sherlock Holmes of France because apparently he helped come up with how we study fingerprints and things like that, but his most important contribution was this idea that ‘every contact leaves a trace.’ At a crime scene, everything the criminal touches, they’re leaving a piece of themselves. And they take a piece of the crime scene with them.

“We’re lying here in the grass, leaving behind dead skin. As you were running, you were leaving footprints. Your hair—” It was splayed out on the grass, absorbing the sun. If he reached out, touched it, it might burn him. “While you were running, pieces of it fell out. Before, when you were brushing it too.”

“You’ve really thought a lot about this, haven’t you?”

“Twenty percent of my brain’s reserved for forensic science. But the rest is empty. You know, just whistling wind.”

The cows moo ’d, like they were agreeing with Viet.

They both laughed.

“So, you like the idea of… what? Being able to trace something to its source,” Evie asked.

“I like the idea of solving puzzles. Breaking things down to their simplest form. The things that don’t seem significant but really are. Through forensic science, you’re not only tracing the criminal, the person who committed the crime, but you’re tracing the last moments of the victim, too. That’s kind of reassuring, in a way. You want to comfort the victim’s family members with the truth of what happened.”

“The way you put it—it makes sense. That it all comes from a place of hope and want. I get why you like forensics so much.”

“I mean, not going to lie. It also looks cool. I was Dr. Spencer Reid one time for Halloween.”

“Hey, I was just watching Criminal Minds yesterday at my boyfriend’s apartment.”

“Romantic,” he said. The skyscraper. What was his name again?

“Ha ha.” Evie finally stood up and glanced around. “Want to run back together?”

“Right, your schedule,” Viet muttered as he reluctantly went to his knees, then pushed himself up slowly.

Evie started doing butt kicks in place to get her blood flowing. “That too.”

They took off. His limbs screamed, his heart begged for him to rest, but at least Viet wasn’t alone in this feeling. Evie breathed in, he breathed out, and their feet hit the pavement at the same pace.

They stopped at another open field. The sun shone directly over people picnicking on green lawns—maybe that was where most of the room and board money was going.

“Hold on—I want to text a pic to my sister,” Evie said, pulling out her phone. “It might inspire Linh’s painting.”

Sister. Viet stopped. The word appeared in his mind, and then images and more words rushed in.

The vandalism, the suspects, all art students, the things they had with them, Chicago, Ethan, mother named after flower, Jane had a sister—

“Of course.” He dug the pages from his pockets and flipped to the page for the suspect, Jane. He scanned her biological facts again. Two sisters with J names—and one of them attended the school. What if only one of them had been caught?

He looked at the contents next, scanning Jane’s AggieCard—and then he saw the answer. The name read Jade , not Jane , and there could be many reasons, but he bet it was because they’d vandalized the building together, and when they split apart, they somehow mixed up their cards. And Jane must have had Jade’s when she was caught. The names were so close in sound, which no one had noticed.

“It’s her.”

Evie smiled at Viet. “See? The answer was right in front of you.”