After Curfew

She meant to say it once and make it small.

Lu Jiayi — Lucy to the only foreign teacher who ever used her English name — is twenty-one, a junior in accounting, and very good at wanting things she does not let herself have. America, because it is big. A life that does not end at her parents' noodle shop. And a want she folded away at fifteen, in a county town where that kind of wanting had no word you could say at dinner.

Zhou Hao is kind. He brings her mother oranges. He is saving every fen for a shop of his own. He has never pushed her past what she can give. That, Lucy tells herself, should be enough.

Then welcome week brings Xia Nuo: eighteen, alone, a suitcase and a bag of peaches, a red string on her wrist and hair to her waist. Lucy walks her to the dorm and tells herself it is only the heat.

Aaron Hale is thirty-three, American, and done pretending Qingshui is temporary. He still teaches two days a week. He is not Lucy's teacher. He has not been for two years. What he is, by junior year, is the man who remembers the day she raised her hand and said she wanted America because it was big.

She tells him the dream so he will laugh. He does not laugh.

What follows is a fall and winter of closed gates, rainy river roads, and a city where everybody's aunt knows everybody's cousin. Lucy tries to be the person who still has a boyfriend. Aaron tries to be decent and fails on the same night he swears he will not. Nuo tries to stay on the edge of a story she is already inside.

After Curfew is a steamy, intimate novella about a young woman who wants two different kinds of love, and the small city that will not let her want them in private.