Excerpt from Pool House by Mary Choi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It wasn't fair. Stevie had been beautiful too once but had outgrown it. Generals had been set up with agents. She'd even modeled briefly, earning $4,000 for a weekend, about as much as she makes now in two months, after taxes. At twenty, Stevie's features float vaguely in the growing puddle of her face. Her looks were watered down and her ratios have proven unlovely. She's got a face for background, she's heard Moon say to a friend. It's probably a blessing. She's also a foot taller than her mother with wide shoulders. If they were Russian nesting dolls, they would be separated by at least three sizes. Stevie did have good breasts, though, they were probably her best quality, but they lend a biological functionality to her appearance that makes her seem stolid. Moon shimmers with volatility. Frailty. In the heyday of her career, her choppy hair, flat chest, sickly pallor, and large darting eyes were a manic pixie dream. As zany and wistful as Faye Wong, only shorter. Even now, at almost fifty, her mother looks half her age with an ethereal, unreliable quality that screams to be looked after.

Watching Moon and this better daughter, Stevie fantasizes about walking out of the store and vanishing. Not caring where she winds up or what happens next, just going. But then, there it is. Moon angles her chin and the light dims in her eyes. It is sudden. The drop in interest as abrupt as falling blood sugar. Moon is bored. Or she has been offended. It doesn't matter. Stevie's seen it happen so many times that the choreography of it lives inside her body. Killing her a little each time to have the look turned on her.

So she swoops in for the rescue, Moon's eye brightening with relief, and she's introduced to Julie, a teacup Korean in a sheer dress, with one million razor-sharp teeth in her child-sized skull, and tiny marsupial hands that give off broad psychotic gestures. Julie, who'd received an MFA at USC, who'd written her thesis on Moon, and has inch-long, pencil-eraser nipples that exactly resemble her mother's.

"Now I run this diasporic Asian cultural fund," she tells Stevie, and Stevie tells her in the supercilious manner of someone on Moon's payroll, "I love that for you." Also, that they have to go.

"Can we get a picture?" Julie asks, holding out a phone. A nagging pressure builds in Stevie's forehead. The woman's phone is encased in an undulating rubbery glitter sculpture with tiny portraits of K-pop idols suspended inside. And even as it physically pains her, Stevie draws them away from the cruel backlighting of the refrigerated shelves, frames the shot, and shoots in bursts. Hundreds of photos with her mother and this woman.

* * *

At work, hours later, at Pee Wee's, a farm-to-table, fast-casual burrito restaurant that is the namesake of some baseball legend and the fifth fastest-growing food franchise behind Cava, Stevie's gloved hands send a warm parcel of burrito shushing down the stainless steel countertop on a tray. She scans the next ticket, reaches for a fresh tray and bowl, then checks the time. At Pee Wee's, she's surrounded by clocks. There is a digital one on the wall behind the line, others on the foot of the menu displays, on each ticket, again on the monitor of every register, and a regular analog clock with hands by the front door that only the older people on staff know how to read.

Her wrist shudders as her mother's winking cartoon avatar rises up from the screen of her watch. Incoming Call from Moon. Panic sails up from her asshole to her mouth. Her mother has been out of her sight for less than four hours but now she's convinced that Moon's dead. She's dead and someone from a teaching hospital has called the most dialed contact on her phone to see about harvesting her organs.

The call disengages and Stevie's gloved fingers move along independently of her, sprinkling exactly two ounces of charred chicken into the bowl, one palm cupped to corral the bouncy bits of protein from straying. Probably a butt-dial, she tells herself, annoyed, as another, more insulting thought flits through her head which is that they would never think to call Stevie first because Stevie is not even her mother's emergency contact.

Excerpted from Pool House by Mary Choi. Copyright © 2026 by Mary Choi. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.