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Because it’s easier to imagine her now.
unusual stiffness to her words.
He didn’t even clean himself up, yet none of these ten thousand cops saw a damn thing.”
“Paul said there were some live ones here too, crammed in her guts.”
Cora wants to argue, not because she’s particularly loyal to the police, but because she wants this to not be her problem. The police never found Delilah’s killer, after all, so there’s only so much faith she can give them. She wants to believe in a world where the police always catch the bad guys, where they get thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, where the survivors can mourn and move on and learn to be happy again. But only children can believe in that world.
“Your uncle doesn’t pay me enough to keep quiet about something like this,”
Or worse, I’ll turn into gore porn for weirdos who spend all night on Reddit reading about how another pretty Asian girl got chopped up, and then nothing I did before in my life will matter at all, just the death that I didn’t choose.
I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human. Because
you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either.
because I’m tired of scrubbing Asian women off the walls. I’m so fucking tired.”
This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with Blood Buster.
All that anger should be hers.
thought that she could do anything meaningful never even occurred to her.
she thinks maybe the scent of alcohol will purify the air if she uses enough of it.
She’s already untethered and the reporter isn’t even here yet.
he called them Chinks and wouldn’t stop following them until Harvey met them outside the bar and loudly asked who their friend was.
Cora thought the man might push them both in front of it, and even now at the bar, her hands are still shaking.
So she takes another shot, waiting for the first ...
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Yifei glances pointedly at Cora’s collection of used shot glasses, and Cora feels her judgment, but at least Yifei doesn’t embarrass her by saying anything out loud.
A smile creeps across his face, and something about it turns Cora’s next sip sour.
Cora can see the exact moment the reporter regrets talking to them.
“Yes,” Yifei says, staring the reporter down, like this is the most obvious thing in the world.
“You accost us outside every crime scene and you don’t even believe what we say?”
Harvey says,
“You’re an expert?” the reporter says, picking up his pen again. Yifei barely hides her scoff behind her glass.
Delilah is standing by the entrance.
Delilah is like this because of me,
no, that’s not exactly true. It’s because of someone else too.
the alcohol makes it easier to ignore the creeping threat of shadows behind her.
Cora lets out a sharp laugh. “Why, because it’s normal for Chinese people to keep bats for pets?”
not when she’s standing in a bar in the middle of a goddamn pandemic just to beg a white man to listen to her.
“If you hit it with enough force all at once, it bursts. My sister’s face hit the express train through Broadway and burst like a fucking melon. Her mom begged them to put her head back together for the funeral, but eventually they had to tell her that there wasn’t anything left, that her whole head was just gone,
I wonder if my sister’s head is still down
there somewhere in the tracks...
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bothered to get it back because we’re just fucking bat eaters,...
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We can’t just look for white men. You should have looked harder,
they have to go on, us being Asian.
Every day I clean up their brains and blood and I know that a white man coming for me...
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But it doesn’t matter if we’re uncomfortable—we don’t get to look away. We’re dying and no one can hear us.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but she doesn’t know who she’s talking to.
“You want fish?” Yifei says to Paisley in accented English, whipping out a bag of sardines from the fridge and waving it in Ryan’s face. “I cook for you.” “Ugh, no,” Paisley says, shaking her head. “Who the hell eats fish at midnight?”
She and Ryan hurry into their room and shut the door, and the smile drops off Yifei’s face. She shoves the fish back in the fridge.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Cora doesn’t know what to say. She lets the couch eat her.
Yifei’s eyes go wide, but she obeys.
but as tears burn her face she can’t seem to care, because at least then someone will watch her sleep, keep the lights on.
slip it to her as if she doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Yifei just groans and goes to a cabinet, pulls out a bottle of vodka, and pours herself another shot. “I told you to burn the fucking joss paper,” she says.
You fucked around with a hungry ghost?”
“You believe me?” Cora says, throat dry, clutching the edge of the couch.
Yifei hands him the bottle and a mug, which he fills too high and drinks too fast.
