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work to help them—and expect them not to change. But my
leaving made the changes easier for them. Now they live in Bulacan
and I haven’t seen them since the airport."
    "Do you regret going away for so
long?"
    "It wasn’t long. Didn’t feel like
it. And I can’t regret anything. I have NV Park now, kind of, so
it’s worth it."
    Ethan nodded, and busied himself
with making his own little duck roll. "This is great duck," he
said. "Doesn’t taste...ducky. I usually don’t like it."
    I watched him bite into it and
chew, not so slowly, slightly sloppily, in that less than graceful
way that real people eat. "I told you so."

Chapter 7

    This is it, Moira. Stop playing around.
    The job applications to employers
in three different countries were all ready and sitting in my
outbox. They’d been there for several weeks now. I had made "Hi! So
I’m looking for a job!" phone calls to some friends, because by now
everyone had at least one friend or family member in Hong Kong,
Bangkok and Phnom Penh (such was my small world), and they had
responded by giving me leads. If I wanted to, I could be an English
editor in one country, an NGO program assistant in another, and an
advertising copywriter in another.
    My flatmate Allie told me that this was going to be
a problem. She was against my leaving, period, and insisted that I
was going through a phase and if I stuck it out six months longer,
I’d get over it. Like she did.
    What did I want to be, though? I
hit "send" on all nine draft emails, and let the universe decide
for me.
    The other new thing about my email
was that Ethan was starting to send me some. It started with a
simple web link to a review of the place that served the
coffee-flavored cotton candy we tried (they called it "bitter and
sweet and right and wrong"), and then a review of the band playing
this weekend in NV Park’s central plaza because we saw the poster
and didn’t know who they were (apparently they were "the best local
pretty boy musician-dancers currently not that there’s much
competition").
    I replied for the first time with,
"Let’s skip the dancing pretty boys. Unless you really want to see
them. I don’t mind being your cover story."
    In the meantime, I needed a job. The not-real
kind.
    Based on my calculations, I had enough money to live
comfortably until Megan arrived. But if I was going to move to
another country for the Real Job, I needed some startup money.
Plane tickets, spending money, new clothes, all of that needed to
be funded.
    I didn't like asking my parents for it. As I just
learned yet again from dealing with my mother, my plans would have
a chance of surviving if they were involved in no way at all.
    And then, a reply from Ethan: "I
would rather eat ducky duck."
    Of course.
    NV Park was right next to a business and commercial
area, so I figured I’d take a look around and see what was nearby.
Got out of bed bright and somewhat early at ten-thirty. As I waited
for the elevator, my beautiful neighbor Lucille came out of
10C.
    Lucille was gorgeous. Not just in
the "everyone’s beautiful on the inside" sense, but also in the
objective, attention-grabbing, in-your-face kind of way. She had
the height, hair, and posture of a beauty queen, and maybe she was,
and I would have recognized her if I had been more into that. Even
I felt fluttery just looking at her. She seemed nice, too. I got
her name when we rode the elevator together once before, and she
introduced herself in an easygoing way. She had been wheeling a
small piece of luggage at the time.
    She was doing the same thing right then.
    "Leaving again?" I said, as we
stepped into the elevator together.
    She smiled, and sighed, and
shrugged. "Yes, always."
    There were three other guys in the elevator and I
could see that they all tried to figure out how to look at her
without looking at her, and that was funny.
    It was a Saturday, apparently. Car and human traffic
was lighter than usual, but apparently NV Park was one of