It was garbed in a lackluster coat of maroon, dark red. Blood red. It sat ignorantly: muscular, hulking, all body and no brains. And there, in the dimmed David McDavid car dealership center, it was nowhere near appealing to me; Blood red, as in violence, as in cacophony, as in immorality, as in…. the car crash. No, I wouldn’t pay the events of that morning another piece of mind, but the thought refused to elude my mind, the memory of bidding my friends farewell after school only to find a car waiting for me: a rental car.


“Red’s nice, then?” my mom nudged my dad. No, I thought, Red’s an ominous hint at how my future of transportation will plummet all the way to the elevation of the Dead Sea.


As if hearing my thoughts, my mom pinched my right arm, “Do you have any other suggestions, Jia?”


Normally, I wasn’t cantankerous, but it suddenly struck me that everything and everyone around me was a nuisance. The over-polished, flawless tiles I was standing on were too… perfect. The posters of sports cars, torn and curling at the corners, were not. I felt the urge to press them down forcefully with hot glue, so they’d never again stray from the paper-white walls, stretching and striving for the towering, dome-shaped ceiling. The friendly little pinch my mother had just given me was suddenly impertinent, and her diminutive hint of an Asian accent that had settled in on me ages ago was now just as irritating as the continuous clicking of a ballpoint pen. I willed my father to switch back to wearing simple black ties…. not this silly, decorative, festive tie that now seemed incredibly imbecile. I wanted to spit a haughty insult in their faces. I never wanted the car crash, but it had occurred. I never wanted a new car, but our old one- the only one I’d ever known- could not be mended. I never wanted an Acura, but here we were, at a David McDavid Acura Dealership, and yet my once dutiful mouth just refused to be candid. It suddenly became autonomous and was brave enough to mutter, “I like the red.”


My mother splashed her ostentatious signature across that contract, the “G” in “Grace” tipping out dramatically as always, and we drove the Acura SUV MDX home. The ride was different. It was tranquil, and for once, the clinks and clanks, odds and ends in the road didn’t send tremors through my bones as yellowing fields and farms dotted with cows and horses flew past, but I hated it. I’d rather have felt pain than to have not felt at all.


“It can’t be fixed, and even if it could have, the damage was so serious that we’d never have the money to fix it,” my mom had said about our old Toyota.

After about a week, my dad grew extremely prideful of that Acura. It still looked distasteful to me, sitting in our packed garage, embraced by torn overflowing boxes and cobwebs, its headlights glaring at me as if it were curious, asking me a question, “Why am I here?”. Why ARE you here? I thought. It ate up gas like a cheetah tore its meal into shreds, yet my father still loved it as much as it loved that gas, and that gas…. well, it just loved our money: money that we apparently “didn’t have” to fix the Toyota. My dad just held his head high and cruised around with all his work buddies in that idiotic vehicle with those captivated eyes. He liked being fraudulently wealthy, pretending to have that money that we apparently “didn’t have” to fix the Toyota. My dad eventually coaxed me into giving that Acura a name, and I settled on “Festus”. Festus meant “festival” or “happy” in Latin, the name of a humble mechanical dragon in my favorite book- The Lost Hero. I gave it such a name, not because I considered it Happy the Car but because it was simply a euphemism, or rather- comep used to conceal what it really was.
As much as I despised it, I couldn’t avoid seeing Festus’s coat of dark red. The basking sunlight outside pricked at my back, and I almost did visualize the rays as having sharp corners, as any child would draw them. It didn’t assuage the sunburn when I saw those gaping eyes of Festus upon my return. Nevertheless, I made it home to see my mother babbling away effervescently on the phone. I heard the words “Embassy”, “visa”, “coming”, and “America”. The general conversation was abstract, zipping back and forth in a knot of voices, but, with those words, it was enough for me to discern that my grandparents had made it! For the first time in their lives, they would be escaping the rooster-shape of the Chinese border, and when they did, I was once again jammed into the third row of Festus like a heap of old clothes. Don’t get me wrong, I’d been waiting for this moment since the last visit to the embassy failed, but somewhere in the abysses of my mind, the thought still wallowed: My family had money to travel overseas, money that we apparently “didn’t have” to fix the Toyota.


Today, however, I refused to let this haze of red mask my delight. I felt the adrenaline kick in as soon as I picked out the bright red coat of my grandmother’s amidst the placid blacks and grays mulling around near the baggage claim. Suddenly, the yards between my grandparents and sister and I dissolved, and I was crossing a mile a minute. I was overcome with euphoria. My heart beat so fast, it was doing everything in its power to check out of the prison bars.


It was an awkward embrace. The collision sort sent a searing pain up my shoulder, but it didn’t matter. The corners of our mouths were upturned like never before. It hardly angered me when my grandfather meticulously slid each suitcase inside Festus’s trunk with precision, careful to preserve every odd, ugly limb on that car. My sister leaped with excitement at its voice-command features, its excellent sound system, and its spacious interior. I watched as Festus swam into the watercolors of the sunset. I had never thought of it this was before, but was gliding with an impossible grace, and for a moment, it was almost believable that we were sailing on a sea of colors, and I begged that these colors would paint my monotone life into something brighter, something greater. And it suddenly occurred to me that Festus was the one to do these things, to bring us joy, to unite our family, to plunge us deep into this maze of colors where my grandmother was rocked softly to a deep sleep. For a moment, I believed he was Happy the Dragon. For the first time, the name was no longer a euphemism. It was a name that really meant something.
Try as Festus might to splatter the most vivid and ethereal shades onto that canvas. Try as he might to illuminate a placid life with the brightest of paints, but paint is still paint, and what lies underneath is a separate tale told.


It was around evening-time, the sun perched high at its peak, the cement under my bike nipping slowly at the rubber wheels. Somewhere in between the creaking of my bike wheels and the inharmonious bickering of the wind that enveloped me, I thought I felt vibrating against my right leg. Vibrating. My phone would have belted out the familiar chorus of O-Zone’s hit single “Numa Numa” unless.... unless it was my mother. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to her a word in advance of my plans to go bike-riding. I tightened my right palm- now perspiring in uneasiness- around my phone. It refused to settle- zzz- and this is when the most agonizing thought struck me: I’d completed absolutely no homework before I’d shut the door behind me. Zzz. I watched as my mother’s countenance surfaced before my eyes. I pictured her entire face darken by three shades, her eyebrows fighting to come together, executing every impediment in between, and the corners of her mouth fighting to escape their wrath, turning downwards, more... and more.... and more. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.


I tightened my chokehold on that phone and brought it to my right ear, against my will. The burning of the sun-basked phone against my sunburned cheek didn’t exactly help assuage any tension. My mother was angry. She was enraged. But not at me.


The order skidded out somewhere amidst a clattering of glass, a heated rivalry, and the choking back of sobs. My mother’s voice sounded like she hadn’t had a sip of water in days. I could almost feel the chafe of nails, her hoarse voice, trailing down the side of my cheek in which I’d pressed the phone, “JIA, COME HOME NOW! CALL THE POLICE!”


I felt the tar give away under my bicycle wheels, and suddenly, I was gliding downwards on an inclined marble surface, a mile a minute, or so it felt. Someone broke in, I thought, my entire family’s lives are at stake. I visualized the sharpened blade of an Excaliber hunting knife and the spitting image of my sister’s beady eyes, welling up in tears, reflecting off the blade, and I saw behind her the punctured wood of our door, a waterfall of splinters descending with undisturbed grace. Undisturbed grace. That must be what the invader felt as blade contacted livid flesh, veins rupturing. Then the last splinter fell, drifting slowly, laying down quietly beside a pool of maroon. Maroon, The color of Festus. FESTUS, I thought,please let my family escape this terror in Festus.


My hand slid onto the doorknob and jerked it open.


“JIA, CALL THE POLICE!!!”


“If you call the police, I’ll make sure no one in this house is alive before they arrive,” a voice bellowed, with unnatural composure. I felt my knees buckle underneath me. Where had I heard the voice before? Lifting my head slowly, peering out in between strands of hair that had clouded my vision, I was disoriented, because the voice belonged to now robber, no terrorist. The voice belonged to my father.


His clenched fist came as a blur of paints on a pallet, and it caught me by surprise. It landed inches from my left temple, and his second punch skidded to a halt as my grandmother gated herself between my dad and I.


“CALL THE POLICE!!!”


I couldn’t. My mind was backfiring, playing all the wrong tapes in my head, all the wrong memories. I seemed to slip into an alternate dimension in the past, and suddenly, I was back on that deteriorated plastic slide in the decrepit park, giggling about over some old joke with my father. Then he was handing me a bouquet as I hopped off the stage effervescently after the talent show. He was driving me to cello lessons. He was cooking up mashed potatoes, and I breathed the scent of Sichuan’s spices into my lungs. He was photographing my art at the state exhibit. He was beaming down at me, there for me since my birth. No he wasn’t. He hadn’t been there. He’d been in Belgium, in Japan, in Australia, in Britain, in Korea, in Argentina, but he hadn’t been with me.


“CALL THE POLICE!!!”


And this time, I did. The hallway filtered through me, and for a moment, I felt like an apparition, ghost-like, nearly dissolving and melting past the door, straight to my room.


“Do you live in a culdesac?” I remember the voice had said, almost with genuine pity.


“Yes”.


Within five minutes I saw a plethora of red and blue lights, glancing off Festus’s luminescent overcoat, sliding in next to him. I helped my grandparents rid the once-flawless tile kitchen floor of the broken china fragments that polluted it. My father was questioned that evening, I remember, but he was not arrested. The fact, however, mattered as much to me as a plastic bag drifting in the wind. He didn’t need to be. The rest of my family scurried into Festus, and with his curious eyes, he guided us off into the Westin Hotel. I was told the outbreak had involved child support regarding my parents’ soon-to-be divorce. I leaned my head against Festus’s beige interior, the soft rumbling humming me to sleep, but when I woke up next morning and scrolled casually through my call logs, there it was, the three ominous digits of “911”. The number is engraved into the memory of my phone to this day, not to retain my fathers actions, not to retain the police lights, but the forever incase the day that that grotesque blood-red car became my treasured companion.
This treasured companion blossomed into something much greater… in a place much too wrong, and in a time much too late. It was around 9 at night, and the darkness had dropped its black mask upon us. Sometimes, I ponder whether it was the loss of those colors, that sunset, Festus’s colors, that snapped our luck. My mother was humming to the carefree tune of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite”, drifting from the radio.
The memory impales me as it returns. I took note of my mother’s lips rounding to the words of the song. Singin’ eyo, gotta let go. The taillights of a truck broke the water on “let go”, an appropriate time I suppose, considering the events that fell next in line. Festus’s wheels scratched the cement as the car in front neared us. There was hardly a ripple in the atmosphere, as I assumed the truck was just backing up, but then the mish-mash of a spectrum came sailing towards us. For a moment, there was no truck at all, just a trail of light emanating from…. what? I knew not. The cheeseburger in my right hand was pulverized a bit more each time my heart beat, and it threatened to bend its cage posthaste. The lids of my eyes shut tight. My friends, my family, my beloved car, beaming eyes and warm embraces, the smell of gingerbread during Christmas, the waltzing of golden flames reflecting off my grandmother’s spectacles swam before my eyes. My free hand grabbed desperately at Festus’s handles, but the collision came too abruptly, my hand still clawing the air for a limb, a ledge, a foothold, an aperture. My head slammed the back of my seat in a violent frenzy as my seatbelt slid across my throat, carving into it. I widened my eyes both in trepidation and relief, aware of the fact that my life had not been evanescent.
My mom’s impatient, suddenly churlish voice singed the air, “GET THE LICENSE PLATE NUMBER!!!”
The truck vanished in a cloud of dust, illuminated by its prism of light that it took with it. It was too late.
I clambered out of the vehicle, trying to navigate those eyes of Festus, curious, enthusiastic, bubbling with life. I’d mentioned before, paint is just paint, and what lies underneath is a separate tale told. I forgave Festus for his apparel of blood red. It was damaged, a massive dent, engulfing the front of Festus, complete with springs of which I could not tell and wires of which I could not name. There was not light in his eyes. There was pitch blackness, devouring us, devouring everything, but I hoped- I hoped with all my might- that somewhere underneath that sheet of darkness, those eyes had not lost their brightness, the fire had not died. What lie underneath was still there…. It had to be.
What of the white truck that had hit us? Were its passengers an unruly hoard of alcoholics, clinking their bottles and throwing back their hair after the hit and run? Would they nail it into their parents’ minds that they had been the prey, and we had been the predators? The police should have been the predators. They should have hunted them down and unveiled to their parents the genuine depravtiy of their children. They should have been shoved behind bars, their protruding fangs knocked out of their jaws and their curling talons yanked out of their nail beds… one by one…. One by one. They should have. But they didn’t. Festus had traded his life for ours.
“We were going to have to give him up anyways,” my mom came forth, placing a hand on my right shoulder, “Even if this hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have had the money to keep him, not after the divorce.”
Money, the word echoed through my head, it was always about money.
“How about we get another car? A nice little Toyota? Silver. Just like the one we use to have.” My mom pitched in in a conciliatory tone, trying to sound as compassionate as the matter permitted.
My eyes welled up in tears. Enveloped in that gloom of night, my mother could not have seen me, but even if she had, she’d never have understood.
“No,” I said, “I want Festus back.”