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...