Excerpt from That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The suicides changed that. I heard a neighbour say, "But it had all been going so well!" I didn't know if it was my ears, but he sounded angry, like he'd been let down, as if the local team lost a hockey game even though the captain promised they were going to smash it.

Even though kids from other neighbourhoods went to my school, my very best friends all happened to live on the sister streets. They included the other Chinese families—the Wongs, the Chows, the Changs. Josie was a Chow. My dad said we were Chinese from Hong Kong, not like the Toishan Chinese downtown, who had been here longer and were from villages back in China.

It wasn't because we were Chinese that we were friends. It just happened that way. There were others who hung out with us, like Nav, who was Indian but "India Indian" and not "Native Indian," as he would have to explain many times, and Darren, who was Jamaican or Black depending on who was talking. There were also a lot of white kids, but they didn't play in the streets in packs like we did and tended to go to each other's houses with tote bags full of Barbies and G.I. Joes. There were some Italian and Portuguese kids and they played in groups. They also mostly kept to themselves and we didn't play with them very often. We stayed on Winifred while they played on Maud. This arrangement quickly became the way it was. We tried a shared game of volleyball once, stringing a net on one of our sloped driveways. One side was always screaming foul for having to play against gravity, which almost led to the first-ever gang rumble on our street.

Regardless of which group we belonged to—Chinese, white or otherwise—by the second suicide, it felt like we were waiting for something else catastrophic to happen. We were ner­vous enough to pool our information across the group divides. Like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, we started watching our parents carefully, taking note of unusual things. On a Thursday in June, after the school year ended, Cindy Taylor from down at the end of Winifred told us that her father, who put a lot of stock into being well groomed, went to work with a wrinkled white shirt beneath his blue blazer and forgot to shave. Did this mean something? We patted her back, unable to say for sure. Stephanie Papadakis said her mother forgot to put garlic in their moussaka one night, and she never forgot to put garlic in the moussaka. It was easy to jump to conclusions, assume these signs were the beginning of the end. I was a good watcher anyway and observed everything just in case I needed the information for later, but that summer, I made sure to pay extra attention to everything.

My parents were their regular selves. They still worked their same long hours at their office jobs, so I could only watch them before bed and on weekends, and I couldn't detect a thing. My dad still didn't talk to me much, same as always, shooing me away while he read the paper or watched the news. My mother told me to stop staring at her because I was making her nervous. She was busy getting papers filled out and seeing the lawyer about sponsoring Poh Poh, my grandmother from Hong Kong, to come live with us. When I finally asked her about the deaths, my mother said, "There's more than meets the eye." She liked English sayings. She said they were great conversation starters, and she used them a lot in the staff lunchroom at the office where she worked as a keypunch operator. I knew the suicides got to my parents. The creased lines on their foreheads and the pursed lips that lingered long after my questions made my stomach ache.

Because my parents didn't get home until close to six p.m., I spent my main observation time with an eye on Liz, Josie's sixteen-year-old sister, who looked after me while she was parked on the couch watching soap operas or reading Har­le­quin romances. I'd never met anyone so boring. I thought I might be the one who died from watching her.

Excerpted from That Time I Loved You: Stories by Carrianne Leung. Copyright © 2019 by Carrianne Leung. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.