1

FRIENDS, EVERYONE SHOULD OWN A PAIR OF LUCKY UNDERWEAR.Everyone.

Now, I'm not superstitious per se, but it's probably not a coincidence that in the two weeks since senior year started, every time I wore this exact pair of gray Rick and Morty briefs I've equaled or broken my personal best at the hundred-meter dash, my pet event. Sure, I did spend all summer training with the national sprint team, but I suspect the new breakthroughs I'm seeing have been aided by Messrs. Rick and Morty.

Too bad it wasn't another pair, though. This pair's a little old; they haven't always been gray.

Okay, fine, maybe I am a little superstitious. But only because I'm a prudent person and want to cover all my bases. It pays to be lucky; I should know. Going to my current school has taught me that luck is indispensable in life. For instance, if you are lucky enough to be born rich, you can have zero personality and still rise to the top of everything like fresh soap scum on water. The rest of us with just rich inner lives have to content ourselves with making it the old-fashioned way—with lots of effort and charm.

I sigh, plucking at the fraying hem of my shorts. Sometimes it's hard to be so rich in inner life; after all, it's impossible to rub your inner life in other people's faces.

There is a jolt of color darting across the adjacent field. I home in on the wearer, Royce Taslim, working out in the distance, the only one wearing neon-orange-and-black running tights. Why would anyone own, and wear, such bright-colored running gear? Flash, I think grimly, is an offense against taste and is possibly a sign of deep spiritual rot, if not malignant deviancy.

Royce Taslim is clearly rotten, despite that glossy-haired, tan-skinned facade. Deep inside, where it truly matters.

"Chan, are you tracking their times or daydreaming?" Coach Everett—the girls' coach—barks. Tall, lean, and in his fifties, Coach Everett was a former national junior title holder in the hundred meter in his youth and now, as he likes to remind us from time to time, one of the best coaches around, although we are not sure what around means, geographically and otherwise.

"Yes, Coach!" I say, holding up the iPad. As team captain, I am in charge of charting the team's and individual best times per practice session. I also have the "honor" of handling various routine tasks that Coach Everett has delegated to me, such as ordering sports equipment and team uniforms, mundane administrative work that brings no glory. Somehow, despite being a top-three nationally ranked junior sprinter with NCAA aspirations—every promising young Malaysian athlete knows that to bring their game to the next level, they have to be in the US collegiate system—I'm doing grunt work. I hear that my esteemed cocaptain of track-and-field, Mr. Neon-Pants Royce, does nothing of this sort. I guess the Taslim name shields you from drudgery.

"Good," Coach Everett says, marching past me to get to his seat by the track, already drenched in sweat. It's our lovely tropical weather here in Kuala Lumpur; even though the state-of-the-art running track in the Dunia American International School is partially covered, the temperature hovers around thirty-two Celsius in the shade and even higher on the adjacent field. Coach's temper is shorter on days like this. I make a note to kick extra butt in the hundred-meter dash, which is next.

I line up the track with my teammates Tavleen Kaur, Tan Qiu Lin, Lina Nguyen, and Suraya Ismail; get into the starting position; and wait for Coach Everett's signal. I turn to my teammates and give them what I hope is a smile. I've been told I'm not much of a smiler by my younger sister, Rosie, but you can't trust anyone under the age of twelve.

"On your marks!" Coach Everett shouts.

I slip into runner mode, a state of mind where I become hyper-focused and aspects of me are dialed up to eleven out of ten while other senses are muted. Anything that isn't running related fades into the background.

The electronic starting pistol fires and we take off. I take off. I transform.

I am not just Agnes Chan, wearer of Rick and Morty underpants, mediocre student, and largely unremarkable—even forgettable.

I am the Agnes Chan, track superstar, captain. Confident and well-liked, someone who has earned every right—if not more—to be where she is.

I cross the finish line ahead of my teammates, of course, and everyone on the girls' track team whoops and cheers—"Agnes! Agnes!" The electronic scoreboard tells me my time: 11.81 seconds on the hundred-meter dash—a new personal best. The high of my win mixes with a warm sense of camaraderie as the girls boost me onto Tavleen's shoulders. Yes, in spite of everything that's happened in my past, I can be a little lucky sometimes.

~

After track, I walk across the immaculate emerald lawn of the seventy acre campus of Dunia American International School, whose imposing buildings combine traditional Malaysian architecture with modern, state-of-the-art facilities, to the bus stop outside the school, earbuds in place. I thumb through my favorite post-workout track list of pop music, trying to find a song that matches my mood. The Hot Flashes—incidentally, my tongue-in-cheek nickname for the sprint team—are on a streak. We are going to crush the other teams in the upcoming interschool meet. Then my Malaysian teammates and I have the state championships followed by the biennial Southeast Asian Games in early February, where I aim to beat the times that won me last year's silver and bronze medals in the hundred meter and relay respectively at a recent national meet.

"I'm calling it now," I say out loud in defiance of my cultural upbringing and inherent superstition. "This is the Year of The Chan." If my senior year continues on the same trajectory as my junior year, then there is no stopping me.

I change my mind on music and instead select one of my favorite stand-up specials by the meteoric Canadian comic, Amina Kaur, to help me unwind during my long commute to the Ampang suburb where one of the unofficial Koreatowns of the city is located. 100%Kaur-nadian is a searing one-hour set just burning with brilliant observations on everything from cultural imperialism to making and trying maple taffy on what must have been dirty ice for the first time to bond with her cute crush and shitting herself for hours afterward. My four-hour shift at Seoul Hot—the Korean BBQ restaurant at which I have been working off the books for the past ten months—starts in an hour. I'll need the laughs to get me through what will be a brutal shift. My muscles are jittery with fatigue, so much so that I don't have the energy to avoid my nemesis, Royce Taslim, who is cutting across the lawn toward the school gates, smiling from the good fortune of being born Royce Taslim.

You know how some people walk like they have a spotlight on them, and they never, ever have dandruff or trip over their shoelaces? That's Taslim. Mr. Benignly Perfect. Wearing a black Supreme hoodie, jeans, white Onitsuka Tigers, and the smile of a guy who knows that at the end of the day, somebody other than him will be washing the underwear that I hope, hope right now is sticking stickily to his sweaty butt. It's not jeans weather, my friends, but trust Taslim not to have gotten the memo.

Taslim falls into step beside me, and we do that chin-jerk thing at each other. We cross the lawn and filter out of the imposing gates to where the car pickup area is in silence. I try not to blink excessively at the sight of him, because I read somewhere that blinking can be construed as a sign of anxiety—or was it attraction? And there is absolutely no reason Taslim can cause me anxiety, or attraction, none at all. Sure, he has raven-black hair that offsets his large almost-amber eyes, and I suppose he's tall and muscular, but take that all away and what do you have? A skeleton; yes, we're all just walking skeletons under all that skin and hair. Besides, winning the genetic lottery isn't something to admire in a person, and neither is generational wealth, although some may beg to differ.

But the thing that really puts me on guard when it comes to Royce is his unbearable polish. Everything about him is so on point, from the way he speaks to his outfits. Yawn, but also—ick. You never know where you stand with people like that. Still waters run deep, etc., etc. Unlike Royce Taslim, with Agnes Chan, what you see is what you get.

"Chan," he says pleasantly.

"Taslim," I say, a dismissive beat later and two decibels louder. Because anything he can do, I can do better.

He raises an eyebrow and mimes the removal of my earbuds, even though I'd discreetly put the special on pause the moment I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I sigh and remove them. We come to a stop beside the pickup lane.

"Good practice?"

"Phenomenal," I say. I'm on a personal quest to improve my vocabulary and have taken to using a thesaurus for fun. "I've just had the most marvelous session. Yourself?"

"It went well," Taslim, who is Indonesian and speaks with a hybrid Indo-British accent, thanks to years of private tutoring, international schooling, and breathing in the fortifying fumes of money, says. "I broke a state record, unofficially, of course." He is the school javelin throw champion—but last I heard, he's not headed to the NCAA because he doesn't qualify, despite his being an interschool champion in Malaysia. Only the truly gifted get to compete at NCAA level. This knowledge keeps me warm at night—well, figuratively. It's always hot in Kuala Lumpur, it being an equatorial city.

"I, uh, br—shattered"—I scrabble for some kind of new personal achievement and come up with nothing—"the national record for the hundred-meter dash today, unofficially, of course," I lie smoothly. I was still three-tenths a second off the national record, but hey.

Taslim nods. I decide I dislike how his thick, gleaming brows resemble furred em dashes. "I guess that means we're on track to lead track and field together again?" he says. We'd been cocaptains at school for two years now.

Did—did he just pun at me? Surely not dull-as-dishwater Taslim. Anyway, even if he did, puns are wasted on him, because he makes everything—what's the antonym of cute?

Unappealing. Unattractive. Especially unattractive. Dassit.

"Mayhap we are," I say coolly.

"Pardon?"

"Possibly," I snap, coloring.

"Nice," he says.

We stare at each other, me predatorily, him bushy browly. There is no love lost between us—well, on my side at least. Taslim probably isn't even too bothered by the fact that we're one of three shortlisted athletes competing for the title of Student Athlete of the Year, an award set up by our school's alumni organization for graduating seniors that comes with a cool scholarship prize of RM20,000 and a lifetime membership to a popular gym franchise here. It's prestigious, and I could use that money for college and other things. Taslim doesn't need that money, and I hate that Taslim is in the running for the title and my only realistic competition for it—the other kid doesn't count because she's barely district-level, a token nominee, really.

It's been this way ever since I transferred to Dunia four years ago: Taslim and me, duking it out for sporting supremacy.

At the corner of my eye, I see his ride: a black Rolls-Royce Cullinan rolling up to the pickup point, the windows tinted for ultimate privacy. Even in a school filled with expat children—of diplomats, politicians, chief this-and-that, medical and legal professionals—that have drivers picking them up, the SUV is flashier than most, attracting stares from the jaded rich kids. When it arrives at the pickup point, a bodyguard jumps out and opens the door for Royce, in case, you know, he hurts his wrist doing that.

"Wow," I mutter, not entirely under my breath.

"Is something wrong?"

"I'm allergic to show-offs," I reply, giving him a pointed look.

He nods, a sympathetic expression on his face. "Must be tough, in this school."

"Oh my God, stop it!" I say, stamping my foot on the ground.

"Stop what?" Royce says, glancing around.

"This! Whatever this faux-nice persona is. I'm your only competition for Student Athlete of the Year, so treat me with the distaste I deserve and reserve for you," I say to Royce impatiently.

Royce stands stock-still. He'd probably never been called out in his life. I steel myself for the explosion that must come. There's a long silence, almost as loud as the roar of blood rushing through my head. "I don't see you as competition, Chan," he says at last. Something in his voice flattens out. "I'll see you around."

Not his competition? How absolutely insulting, as though I am beneath his consideration. "Wh-what?" I sputter in rage. "How dare you! Don't you walk away from me, Taslim," I sputter, running after him. "Don't you—"

He turns, and his eyes widen. "Agnes! Watch out!" he shouts, lunging toward me.

But it's too late.

I feel it before I know what has hit me, literally—my luck, finally running out.