Spotlight & Giveaway: The Friend Zone Experiment by Zen Cho

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Zen Cho’s new release: The Friend Zone Experiment

From the renowned, award-winning author Zen Cho comes a delightfully funny romance about family, class, and love in modern London.

 
From the outside, Renee Goh’s life looks perfect. She’s thirty and beautiful, runs a glamorous—and profitable—women’s clothing company in London, and is dating a hot Taiwanese pop star.

But Renee is lonely. Estranged from her family in Singapore, she practically lives at the office, and now she’s just been dumped by her supposed boyfriend. Who she never saw anyway, so why is she ruining her Instagram-ready makeup by crying?

Before she can curl up on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, Renee’s father calls. He’s retiring, and, thanks to the screw-ups of her wastrel brothers, he is considering her as the next CEO of the family business: Chahaya Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Southeast Asia. That stamp of her father’s approval would mean everything to Renee, but can she cooperate with the brothers who drove her out of Singapore?

But fate isn’t done with her. That same night, Renee bumps into her first love, Yap Ket Siong, who broke her heart during university. They spend a wonderful night together, but Ket Siong is pursuing a dangerous vengeance for his family. In the light of day is there any hope for the two of them?

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Friend Zone Experiment 

It took Ket Siong a while to realise he’d misplaced his date for the evening.
He hadn’t come for Alicia’s company, any more than he’d come for the exhibition itself. The name Dior meant as little to him as, he supposed, Shostakovich or Britten would to someone
who didn’t care about classical music.
But he felt a twinge of guilt at his inattention. He wouldn’t have been able to attend the private view if not for Alicia Tan. Only current or potential patrons of the museum had been invited—as
well as celebrities and socialites whose borrowed glamour might tempt the monied but less famous to dip into their pockets.
Alicia had an invite because her father was managing partner of a magic circle firm who occasionally indulged in being a patron of the arts.
Ket Siong was in his best suit, a relic of his performing days.
His mother had taken him to his father’s old tailor years ago to have it made up, in a small, unassuming lot that smelt of mothballs, tucked away in a corner of a Kuala Lumpur shopping mall.
Mr. Loke had turned out an unexpected masterpiece, though when Ket Siong’s mother had thanked him, the old man said dismissively, “Didn’t do much. If everybody was shaped like your boy, I’d have an easy life.”
Despite the armour of Mr. Loke’s impeccable cut, Ket Siong felt out of place, adrift in a sea of elegant people smelling of designer perfume and champagne. Even the waitstaff were intimidatingly smart in monochrome suits, wafting past with trays of outlandish canapés: tiny glasses of smoked eel suspended in saffron jelly; garlicky curls of octopus nestled in mini charcoal brioche buns;
teardrop-shaped dollops of ricotta coated with truffle dust.
Ket Siong conscientiously ate everything offered to him so he could report back to his family, but he wasn’t in a mood to relish the spread. Upscale parties had never really been his scene, and
he was out of practice now. He’d declined at first when Alicia asked him to come, but she’d kept pushing.
“I’d feel silly going by myself, and all my friends are busy.”
She’d handed Ket Siong the invitation to the event. “Come on, Ket.” Ket Siong went by his generation name with Westerners, to save them having two syllables to butcher, and despite her Malaysian
Chinese grandfather, for these purposes Alicia counted as a Westerner. “It’ll be fun.”
The invite bore the Victoria and Albert Museum’s logo on the front, the stark black letters embossed on thick, glossy card stock. The card fell open in Ket Siong’s hand, revealing images of women dressed in bold hues of green and yellow and blue.
“There’ll be free drinks,” said Alicia. “And hors d’oeuvres. We don’t have to stay the whole evening.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” Ket Siong began. Then he turned the invitation over and saw the list of major donors on the other side, printed in a grey so discreet it was nearly illegible.
One name leapt out at him.
He told his brother about the event, but not about the name he’d seen in the list of donors.
“Are you interested in the exhibition, or the girl?” said Ket Hau.
Ket Siong blinked. “Alicia? She only graduated a couple of years ago. Too young for me.”
“You’re only thirty-one. It’s not that big a gap,” said Ket Hau.
“She must not think it is, if she invited you.”
Ket Siong shook his head. He wasn’t sure why Alicia had chosen to invite him, but it wasn’t that. “Do you think it’s inappropriate to accept an invitation like that from the sister of a student?”
The female relatives of the kids whom Ket Siong taught piano had a disconcerting tendency to hover during his lessons. He wasn’t sure what they wanted from him, but he had a feeling he
shouldn’t encourage them.
“She’s not the one you’re teaching,” said Ket Hau. “But if you don’t like the girl, should you go? You don’t want to give her the wrong idea.”
“I don’t think I would,” said Ket Siong. “Alicia was very clear it wasn’t a date.” She had placed so much emphasis on this point that it might have been offensive, if not for the fact that Ket Siong wanted it to be a date even less than Alicia did.
Ket Hau gave him a look. “What’s the draw, if it’s not the girl? I didn’t know you were into fashion.”
Ket Siong shrugged, but he’d known his brother would ask.
After a moment he said, “She was so insistent, it was hard to say no. And it’d be something different. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like this.”
“Had fun, you mean,” said Ket Hau.
It was true their life in London over the past three years had held little space for fun. They had not come here via the usual pathways of schooling or work or marriage. They hadn’t originally been planning on leaving Malaysia at all. It had been hard to believe that flight would be necessary, until the fact was forced upon them.
As a result, they’d had to start from scratch, with very little preparation, practical or emotional, for what proved to be a new life in the UK. Navigating the bureaucratic complexities of the immigration system, gaining employment, and finding a place to live had absorbed all their energy at first.
It had taken years to achieve the relative stability they enjoyed now. But Ket Hau had yearnings for more.
Not for himself. He claimed to be content with his job as a paralegal at a City law firm, spending his days putting together court bundles and reviewing stupefyingly boring documents.
“You forget the conditions I worked in back home,” he told Ket Siong. “I kept asking for a new office chair because mine was killing my back and they kept saying, no budget. Now I can have as many Herman Miller Aerons as I can sit on. I could line up three and sleep on them if I wanted.”
Admittedly, paralegalling didn’t pay much relative to the cost of living in London. Ket Hau earned just enough to enable them to live in a cramped flat and feel constantly stressed about it.
But he was studying to pass the SQE, and his earning power would be improved once he qualified as a solicitor. The fact that he hated what he was doing was, he said, irrelevant.
For Ket Siong, though, Ket Hau demanded more than a decent job with as many expensive office chairs as his heart could desire. He wanted nothing less than that Ket Siong should be happy.
That wasn’t something Ket Siong had been able to give his brother for some years now.
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t go,” said Ket Hau. “How much would it cost if you had to buy a ticket, twenty quid? Do it, Siong. You can come back and tell us about the canapés.”
So here Ket Siong was, with that name on the list of donors burnt into the back of his mind.
Alicia had been next to him during the speeches, nursing her glass of champagne and eyeing up the other guests. She must have wandered off after.
Looking for her, he passed mannequins in wasp-waisted cocktail dresses, extravagant satin evening gowns, and impeccably tailored coats. One room recalled the grandeur of a stately home, with mannequins posed in various attitudes in a Grecian gazebo. Another room was overhung with a profusion of trailing artificial foliage, illuminated by shifting multicoloured lights.
The dresses on display shimmered and glowed.
It was all somewhat lost on Ket Siong. It was the people there who interested him, not the exhibits. It wasn’t just Alicia he was looking out for.
He rounded the corner into another gallery—a relatively small room, dominated by a ballgown in a column of glass in the centre.
Scanning the crowd, Ket Siong’s eyes caught on a man’s profile.
It was as though someone had poured freezing water down his back. He stiffened.
The man was talking to a white woman. From this distance, Ket Siong could only make out a few distinguishing features. A stout, prosperous figure, shorter than most of the other men
there, with salt-and-pepper hair. He was in a dark suit—nothing particularly fashionable, to Ket Siong’s untrained eye. He could have been anyone.
But then the woman moved away and the man turned. Ket Siong saw his face. The skin on his forearms prickled, excitement sour in his gut.
Ket Siong had never met the man before, but he knew who he was. Tan Sri Low Teck Wee, chairman of Freshview Industries.
Low was no celebrity. He only happened to control vast swathes of the state of Sarawak in Malaysia, through the conglomerate his father had founded and he had piloted to its present dominance.
Ket Siong had never particularly followed business news. Five years ago, he wouldn’t have known to distinguish Low Teck Wee from any other middle-aged Chinese man. But he’d spent the night before reading articles about Low, and he recognised the face from the photos—a round, weathered, bespectacled face, deceptively jovial, with shrewdness lurking in the narrow eyes.
“Tan Sri,” said Ket Siong.
Low Teck Wee was looking at his phone. He started.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” said Ket Siong. He could feel his pulse fluttering in his throat. His face felt stiff, but he was glad to hear his voice was even.
He glanced at the exhibits ranked behind Low: faceless mannequins in gowns of red and cream and black, trapped behind glass. “Are you a fan of Dior?”
Low laughed. “No, no. My daughter wanted to come. She’s here somewhere.” The way the man spoke—the rise and fall on each syllable so different from the British accent—gave Ket Siong an unexpected pang. It was an accent he associated with home. He didn’t hear it much these days, outside the confines of the flat where he lived with his family.
Low had identified a fellow countryman in Ket Siong, too.
He peered at Ket Siong above his glasses. “You’re Charmaine’s friend? You must forgive me. I am getting old, cannot remember names already.”
“You don’t know me, Tan Sri,” said Ket Siong. “But most people have heard of Freshview. I saw The Edge reported record profits for the company this year.”
Low nodded. “You’re from Malaysia? Interested in business?”
He didn’t seem surprised at having a stranger accost him. Perhaps he was used to being approached by young men on the make.
“The Ensengei venture must have been lucrative,” said Ket Siong. He’d curled his hand into a fist, his fingernails digging into his palm. He loosened his grip with an effort.
“Management must have been pleased about the Court of Appeal
ruling,” he continued. “Didn’t the first instance judge find the area was native customary land? Of course, I hear Freshview continued logging even after that judgment. Perhaps you knew you would be vindicated on appeal?”
The slightly sozzled friendliness evaporated from Low’s face.
“Are you a reporter or what?”
“An interested citizen,” said Ket Siong. He did still have a Malaysian passport, though he wasn’t going back anytime soon.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read online, young man,” said Low. All warmth had fled from his voice. “At Freshview, we do things by the book. Everything above board. Why do you
think the appeal court ruled in our favour?”
As though conscious that a defence premised on the irreproachable integrity of the Malaysian judiciary was perhaps not the most robust, he hurried on: “All these bloggers and so-called journalists like to complain about development. But what would they do without their handphones
and their Wi-Fi?
If we were all like them, sitting around complaining only, the country would be going nowhere.”
He seemed sincerely outraged. Face meant a great deal to such men, but Ket Siong thought that to Low Teck Wee, being in the right mattered as much as appearing to be right. There might be a way in there.
“Tan Sri,” said Ket Siong. “Do you know what happened to Stephen Jembu?”
Low looked at him, his face wiped blank of expression. He did not say anything. After a moment, he turned on his heel and walked away.
His back radiated defensiveness, as though he expected Ket Siong to pounce at any moment. But Ket Siong made no move to stop him. He stayed where he was, watching as Low was swallowed up in the crowd.
Ket Siong was shaking. He only realised this when an attendant offered him drinks. Reaching out for a glass of orange juice, he saw that his hand was trembling.
Not with fear, but anger. He’d thought he had accepted what had happened, or at least that he had become used to the idea, as one grows inured to horror over time.
Evidently he wasn’t used to it. He felt enraged, but also foolish, scaldingly ashamed of his naïveté. As ashamed as he had felt when he’d first heard the news about Stephen.
He ended up in front of the glass case in the centre of the room, enclosing a mannequin in a ballgown. He stared at it, unseeing, his heart pounding dully in his chest.
He took a deep breath, held it, and let it out, counting to eight, as he’d learnt to do at yoga class. Stephen had had a hot yoga phase, had dragged Ket Siong and his brother to excruciating sessions in a Mont Kiara studio frequented by sinewy expats, until Ket Hau revolted: “I’m sweating my ass off every day in this country and you’re making me do this. If you want to pay hundreds of ringgit to fold yourself into origami, that’s your business. But leave me and Siong out of it. It’s against our religion.”
“Being lazy is a religion now?” Stephen jeered. But he’d come with them for a reparative iced lime juice, and even wangled a refund from the studio for the classes they were no longer doing.
Ket Siong saw his face, flushed with triumph, as he held the cash out to Ket Hau.
The vividness of the image was a blessing. Ket Siong could no longer recall the precise timbre of Stephen’s voice.
The adrenaline drained away. With it went his anger, leaving only grief. But grief was a familiar companion by now; it should be easy to bear.
As his mind quieted down and his heartbeat slowed, he found himself following the lines of the ballgown with his gaze, from the bodice down to the skirt, along the train and up again.
The gown was an explosion of ivory tulle, turned gold in the warm lighting of the gallery. The kind of thing a Disney princess might wear, but it had an architectural rigour that even Ket Siong, unused to looking at women’s fashion with any kind of attention, could discern. He wondered what marvels of construction and design an expert might see in the gown. He should have done some reading before coming. The caption only told him that the gown had been designed by Christian Dior for Princess Margaret, to be worn on her twenty-first birthday.
Calm settled on Ket Siong, and he remembered Alicia. He should go find her.
But someone had joined him by the display case. A woman, gazing raptly at the ballgown.
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “There’s so much to see here, I feel like my brain is going to explode. Look at that embroidery!”
Ket Siong was not infrequently addressed by strangers in public spaces—mostly
women, but sometimes men. He didn’t think he invited it, exactly, but Ket Hau said, “You can’t blame them for trying.”
He was about to give a polite nod and move away, but something about the woman’s voice caught his attention. The accent was unusual—vaguely but not quite American—and it was familiar.
But he didn’t really know anyone in London, except for his students.
He looked away from the exhibit. He had no preparation, so the sight of Renee Goh hit him between the eyes like a brick.
The immediacy with which he knew her shocked him. It had been ten years since he’d last seen her, but apparently his brain had stored his memories of Renee in a special compartment, ready to throw them up at the right moment, as fresh as ever. It was as though no time had passed at all. He’d thought of her, when his family first cast up in London.
But as far as he knew, Renee had returned to Singapore after finishing her degree. After so long, it was easy to resist the temptation to look her up online. That chapter of his life was not one he relished looking back on.
Renee’s face had lost some of its softness, the squarish lines of her jaw more evident than they had been before. She’d always been self-conscious about her jaw, but she was no less lovely now—more
so, if anything.
Her eyes were exactly the same. Beautiful eyes, shaped like half-moons and shaded by absurdly long lashes, but the most beautiful thing about them had always been their expression, how transparently they conveyed her every emotion.
She did not recognise him. She gave him a discreet once-over. Ket Siong registered, with a sense of unreality, that she was checking him out.
There was a slight trace of uncertainty in her eyes. It struck him that she might be trying to work out whether any interest she expressed had a chance of being reciprocated. Ket Siong probably
wasn’t the only straight man at the exhibition, but he was definitely outnumbered.
Whatever Renee gathered from her inspection, it seemed to give her confidence. She smiled. “My name’s Renee.”
“I know,” said Ket Siong. He wondered if Renee often chatted men up at parties. She was wearing several rings, but the fourth finger of her left hand was bare.
“You do?” she said, her smile fading.
“It’s Yap Ket Siong,” he said quickly, as if he was a telemarketer at risk of being hung up on. “Maybe you don’t remember . . .”
Renee’s eyes widened. “Yap Ket Siong?”
Ket Siong felt a kick of apprehension in his stomach. He dreaded seeing her face close down. They hadn’t parted on good terms.
Renee looked him over, this time not bothering to hide her scrutiny.
“Oh my God, it’s really you,” she said. “You’ve grown up!”
Her face came alive, her expression worlds away from what it had been when she thought she was flirting with a stranger. The smile that broke across her face now was a Renee classic, spontaneous
and unguarded, a dimple appearing in her left cheek.
Ket Siong remembered the dimple. It had caused him considerable difficulty back in the day. It had seemed to him that it would be a lot easier being in love with her and having to hide it, if not for that dimple.
Relieved, he smiled back, only realising once it happened how unfamiliar the expression felt on his face. “So have you.”
“But this is amazing! I never thought I’d see you again.” Renee took a step closer to him, her hand hovering as if to touch him, confirm he was really there. She flushed and drew her hand back, pushing her hair behind her ear. Ket Siong felt a small, unwarranted stab of disappointment.
“Are you here on holiday?” said Renee.
She seemed genuinely pleased. It was generous of her, given what he’d done the last time they’d seen each other.
It had been a long time, Ket Siong reminded himself. What had passed between them back then meant less to Renee, probably, than it meant to him. She’d had numerous boyfriends before him, and no doubt boyfriends after.
He felt a glow of warmth nonetheless. “I live in London now.”
“Me too.” Renee laughed. “Funny how things work out. I guess everyone comes to London in the end. How have you been?”
Ket Siong’s first thought was of Stephen. He felt his face stiffen, a sick lurching in his stomach. It was Stephen his brother meant when Ket Hau said, “The important thing is, we’re safe, we’re together. Everything else, we can handle.”
“Fine,” said Ket Siong. “What about you?”
“Oh, I can’t even begin to tell you,” said Renee, with feeling.
“There’s so much.” She glanced around the room.
The gallery was shadowy, most of the light coming from the spotlights trained on the displays. This threw the gowns into sharp relief, so that they glowed against the velvety black backdrop like jewels, but it also gave the space a deceptive sense of intimacy.
Of course, they were not actually alone. There were a couple of other people there, older women with beautifully coiffed white hair and clothes so deliberately shapeless they had to be the extreme
of fashion. They were talking in low voices by a glass case full of sketches, gesturing with their champagne flutes as they pointed out details to each other.
“Do you want to go for a drink?” said Renee, her eyes on the women.
Ket Siong hesitated for slightly too long. The light in Renee’s face dimmed.
“You’ve probably got plans,” she said, so easily Ket Siong wondered if he’d imagined her disappointment. “But we should catch up sometime. I’ll see you around?”
If Ket Siong let her go now, he might never see her again.
“A drink would be great,” he said. “But I came with someone. I should let her know.”
Renee’s expression flickered.
“Oh, you should bring her along,” she said. “Is it your girlfriend?”
“No!” Ket Siong cleared his throat. “No. A friend. Let me just—I’ll go tell her.”
“OK,” said Renee. “Ask her to join us. Will you come back here, or . . . ?”
Ket Siong nodded. “I won’t be long.”

Excerpt. ©Zen Cho. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

Giveaway: 1 Trade paperback print copy of The Friend Experiment, for winners based in North American (US and Canada) only.

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Meet the Author:

ZEN CHO is the author of the Sorcerer to the Crown novels, Black Water Sister and various shorter fiction. Her work has won the Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Awards, and the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the World Fantasy, Lambda, Locus and Astounding Awards. Born and raised in Malaysia, Zen now lives in the UK.
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