Excerpt from Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When he got home, Jack told Annabel about the drill. "Guess what? We practiced hiding from school shooters. Marco Martinez barfed." She ate his stories up, with the serious fascination children reserve for adults crying in public, or animals mating. "Oh, I never saw a real shooter," she said.

"That's enough," their father said, herding them to the refrigerator for ice cream.
Annabel refused to sleep by herself again that night. To release herself to sleep was to allow Māma and Daddy to abandon her to a dark and dangerous world. One parent tucking her in was no longer enough. Her wailing reminded Jack of his first months in America, when his father's nightmares had kept him awake. They lived in a one-bedroom in East Plano then, an apartment half the size of his grandparents'. Think of it like another plane ride, his mother told him. A means to an end, not a place to call home. But from the mattress in the living room, Jack could spy, past the bent plastic of a window blind, switchgrass taller than him. Beyond that, the illuminated sign of a dry cleaner that had been in business for more years than he'd been alive. There was a story in the loose spring by his foot, the stain under one corner of the mattress. A chapter he was living, even as his parents prepared for the next one. When his father sometimes yelled out from his parents' bedroom in the middle of the night, he did not utter a word, in any language, that Jack could understand. He could only hear his mother on the other side of the door, pleading for him to stop.

Now Jack left the door to his room open and listened as his mother assured Annabel, the way she'd assured Jack in those first months, that there was nothing to see. Nothing under Annabel's bed, nothing in the closet, nothing in the mirror, nothing in Daddy's hands, nothing in Daddy's head. Annabel pecked a cheek that was nothing more than a surface for her lips to touch. She took a gulp of nothing air. When she finally stopped crying, there was no sound of footsteps shuffling back downstairs. No reason for his parents to take their leave. The only way Jack could imagine their bodies fitting on his sister's bed was with his mother's elbows prodding Annabel and half of his father's body splayed over the side.

Excerpted from Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han. Copyright © 2020 by Simon Han. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.