Excerpt from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"How do you not get the shit kicked out of you, man?" Ky had asked Denny a year earlier when he took home first place again across all subjects except PE. Ky was home for a weekend to celebrate Tết. Their mother had put them to work scrubbing and squeegeeing the ground-floor windows so that their townhouse would be sparkling for the Lunar New Year.

"I don't think people get beat up for being nerds these days," he'd said.

"Yeah, right."

"Well, you didn't get beaten up when you were in school."

"That was different," Ky said as she picked dried bug spatter off the windowpane.

"How?"

Minnie, Ky had wanted to say. In year two, when a group of white girls had pulled back the corners of their eyes every time they passed Ky, Minnie had threatened to shave the ringleader's head. For a whole month, every time they saw the blondies at the canteen or during assembly, Minnie would pantomime head shaving. Once she even mimed shaving her eyebrows, which made the lead blondie cry. That was Minnie at eight. By the time they reached high school, Minnie was a walking DO NOT DISTURB sign that shielded Ky from having her hair pulled, her ankles tripped, her seat spat on.

"I dunno," Ky said. "I guess I just stayed out of people's way."

"Same," said Denny, removing his rimless eyeglasses from his nose. He'd picked out a pair similar to Ky's because he'd heard her say that rimless eyeglasses were sophisticated and made people look more mature. Ky thought they made him look like a child tax accountant. He held his glasses by the temples and tried squeegeeing them. "I just don't rub it in."

"What do you mean?"

"Like ..."—Denny raised his eyeglasses to the light, made a face upon seeing that they were now even dirtier than before—"there are other nerds that get beaten up, but it's not because they're nerds. It's because they go out of their way to make everyone else feel dumb."

Ky felt a phantom shove against her back. She knew Denny wasn't calling her out—it wasn't in his nature—but he might as well have been.

"That's very mature of you," Ky said, swallowing hard. "Also ..."—she cocked her head at Denny's grimy glasses—"that's gross."

"I know, I thought maybe the squeegee would work—"

In her Melbourne apartment, Ky hugged her phone's answering machine to her chest, no longer questioning her comprehension of Vietnamese. She called her father, peppered him with questions: What happened? How did it happen? Who was with him? What did they know? Her father had told her to just come home—they could talk about it later. She sat for a while as the cheese on her pizza congealed. When it resembled a Frisbee more than food, she threw it out and was struck with the urge to clean. She fished through her laundry basket for dirty underwear, filled her bathroom sink with water and Cold Power, and submerged her clothes, shaking her hands under the surface to create bubbles. She took off her own rimless glasses—the ones she bought because she thought they made her look mature, worthy of being taken seriously—and rubbed them with alcohol wipes. She needed to shower, too. As she stood naked in the tub, water pounding her back, she was overcome by a need to scrub the tub. She squatted down low, sponge in hand, rubbing creamy globs of tile cleaner into the bathtub and tiled walls, then used her arms as an extension of the showerhead: the water hit her shoulders, ran down her arms, and dribbled off her fingers in the directions she pointed.

Her mother had taught her to clean the air of germs using a steam bath of vinegar. She had never explained the specifics, though, so Ky poured a liter of vinegar into her teakettle, turned on the stove, and waited for it to boil. As her apartment took on the aroma of sweaty feet, she simultaneously felt she couldn't breathe and like she was being turned inside out. There was so much that she wanted to say—to Denny, to her parents, to anyone who would listen. Apologies, explanations, painful observations that she knew revealed volumes of truth. The words in her head rushed to arrange themselves, colliding and falling in a panic, and in her desperate attempt to speak, she found that all her body would permit her to do was gasp. Each time she opened her mouth, air, then not enough air, over and over again, until the room fell dark and everything went quiet, and it was just her, alone, hiccupping through cries that didn't sound like her own, blanketed by steamy, sour air.

Excerpted from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien. Copyright © 2022 by Tracey Lien. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.