Sour Heart Read online

  freed my heart

  lifting melting steel with old wings

  ancient pain wanders as free

  as a stream

  It’s just a fragment, she said sheepishly. I was about to reassure her that it was the finest fragment I had ever read but my father came in, pissed that I wasn’t asleep yet, so it had to be saved. All of it had to be saved, but it was okay—I was determined to take my time expressing myself. The rush and the urgency I felt before had calmed. I was eleven now, going on twelve, and I was going to take my time.

  Seventh grade started after Labor Day, and it was all set that I would go to middle school at I.S. 25 in Little Neck. I had to take the bus from my house in Flushing to Little Neck, get off at the Western Union, and walk ten minutes up a hill to my new school. My parents thought that our lives were changing, that I was finally safe. They had gotten me out. I was still alive, still a virgin, still a child—even though I no longer felt like it was a good thing to be as small and protected as I had been.

  My parents, who tried to account for everything, my parents who checked my coat pockets daily and checked my hair to make sure it didn’t smell like it had been near a boy, who checked my math homework to make sure I had solved each problem at least two different ways, who clipped out articles from The New York Times and made me first copy each article in its entirety and then summarize it in three sentences, then five sentences, then two paragraphs, and then finally three sentences, which sometimes meant my summaries were longer than the original article depending on which section of the paper I chose (though eventually they limited my choices to the world news, U.S. news, and business sections), my parents, who truly believed I was going to go to Harvard and live the good life that they were willing not to have so I could have a stab at it, my sweet, well-intentioned parents, no matter how much they tried to see and anticipate and prevent all the things that could hurt me, in the end, had no idea what truly frightened me.

  How was I going to be afraid of not going to Harvard when I was afraid to look people in the eye in the hallways at school because everyone in middle school was either in a gang or going to get beat up by someone in a gang, and guess which category I belonged to? Seventh grade was hard. I was lonely. I wondered how Fanpin was faring in her middle school, if she ever got her black belt in karate, if the other kids gave her shit for dressing the way she did, if she found someone else to torture or if middle school had rendered her powerless. For the first time, I wondered if she was scared.

  “You love your new school, don’t you?” my parents asked me.

  “It’s the same.”

  “The same? You call a twenty-percent dropout rate versus forty percent the same? You call standardized testing scores in the eightieth-plus percentile for more than half the seventh-grade class the same as half the kids are dope fiends and the other half drug dealers? That’s your idea of the same?”

  “Jeez, Dad. I just mean it feels the same to me.”

  “Well, try to feel harder.”

  “Honey,” my mother said to my father, “she’s feeling as hard as she can.”

  “Sweetheart,” my father said to my mother, “do you really think Mande is trying as hard as she can? Is she trying as hard as we tried to get her into this school? Is she trying as hard as spending the last two years filling out forty forms and making hundreds of phone calls and faxes and Xeroxes? As hard as conceiving this plan more than five years in advance?”

  I thought I was trying, but what did I know? What did my parents know? They were home most nights for three, sometimes two, sometimes one, and occasionally zero of the hours that I was awake, and what did they actually have time for in those three or two or one or zero hours other than cooking dinner and refrigerating it in case the next day was one of the days when I saw them for one or zero hours? Or arguing over who had run down this month’s savings to a measly sixty bucks when the goal was two-fifty, something that they had agreed on and very meticulously budgeted for? Or going over my homework to make me see how important it was to not just get a 99 in spelling, but a 100, and not just get a “Very good” on my English essay but a “This is perfect”? (“There’s no such thing as this ‘grade,’ ” I said, putting it in air quotes. “Perfection always exists,” my father said. “Just look at your mother.” “Ugh,” I said. Maybe perfection did exist, maybe it was out there, but it only lasted as long as a sneeze. In a day or a week or in another few minutes, my father would lose that moony look in his eyes, my mother would fall from his esteem, and they would be estranged again, enemies once more. He would grab her by her throat or twist her arm or hit her in the face until she was quiet. She would grab a knife from the kitchen and say that she was going to stab him to death and then herself, wouldn’t that be just great for everyone? I would hate him for hating her and then I would hate her for hating him. Then I would hate myself for not protecting my mother and then I would hate my mother for needing me to protect her, and then I would hate my father for causing my mother to need that protection, and finally, I would hate them both for insisting that the person who really needed protection was me, and if I had any chance of surviving, I would have to be better than perfect. What I wanted to know was if my own parents couldn’t even be satisfactory to each other, then why I was expected to be perfect?)

  So I was fed and I was looked after and I was encouraged to be perfect and I was told over and over that life would always improve, that this was how anyone at all was supposed to live, by striving, by being perfect when you were young and it was still easy to be perfect because just wait, my father would say, just wait until you’re older, but I didn’t need to wait. I was young now and I found it so fucking hard. In the three or two or one or zero hours I saw my parents every night, I kept waiting for them to ask me new questions, like how many friends did I have at school, and was it hard to be the new girl, and did I ever feel lonely when I came home from school and had to wait to see if this was a night of three or two or one or zero hours with them, and how was I coping with walking all the way to the Q12 bus stop on my own? Did strange men on the bus ever approach me and try to ask me if I wanted to make several babies with them, etc., etc., etc.?

  At school, I crept around like a scared mouse, darting from one classroom to another when the bell rang, hoping not to accidentally be hit by a spitball or to open my locker to the smell of fresh dog shit or to look at someone I wasn’t supposed to ever make eye contact with. Someone was always trying to beat on someone and the most notorious of the someones was this ninth grader Soo-Jin. She was the leader of a Korean gang and she was a true knockout, the kind of beautiful that was unapproachable and heightened by rumors of her sadism. You wanted to stare at her but you couldn’t—it would get you jumped after school or worse. She made the word “feminine” look even more dangerous than it sounded. She wore a thick velvet choker with a little studded cross that dangled softly when she walked. Wherever she was, she was flanked by her two best friends, Eunsong and Eunice, who were only permitted to wear plain, thick, non-velvet chokers and never with a charm. They had stubby necks that reminded me of how my Barbies looked after I snapped their heads off and then screwed them tightly back in, whereas Soo-Jin’s neck was long, white, and clean. She was the kind of creature who could have been painted and kept in a fine art gallery if only someone was allowed to look at her long enough to memorize the sharp angles of her cheekbones and her finely plucked eyebrows and her lippy, pouty scowl that was more alluring than any smile I had ever seen on anyone else. She was a gangster with the face of a heartbreaker.

  Soo-Jin was never alone and that was how you knew she was powerful—she belonged to an order of teenage girls who would do anything for her without her even having to ask. She had adherents and the rest of us had friends we couldn’t count on. Besides Eunsong and Eunice, there were a dozen or so girls in her posse, and plenty more who tried to join but weren’t allowed in. I overhead in pre-calc that she “ate pussy like there was no tomorrow.”

&nbs
p; “Did you know,” I told Peggy after school when I was over at her house waiting for my parents to come pick me up, “that you can eat pussy?” I mumbled the word, ashamed by the possibility that I had been the one to make Peggy aware of it, as I sure as hell didn’t know that word when I was her age, and if she was anything like me then it meant I was her Fanpin. It was a horrifying thought.

  “My dad says that’s a racist thing people say to put down Chinese people.”

  “I’m not talking about cats. I’m talking about the hole you pee out of. You’re supposed to let guys put their thing in there and that’s what happens when you get a boyfriend.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “Yup,” I agreed.

  “Does God know about this?”

  “He knows everything.”

  “Oh,” she said. It was yet another thing my parents didn’t know to warn me about and the more I thought about it, the more it excited me. That night, I got under the covers and tried to pray but couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of my vagina as a lollipop, something sweet, something to desire. I wondered who, if anyone, would ever desire me in the way I desired to be desired. So far I had only ever fended off Fanpin, whose desire for me was a cancer and a stain, but maybe if I were truly desirable, if more people wanted me the way she had wanted me, I would have developed some real muscle, some real grit. Maybe it was all the better that I wasn’t beautiful. After all, I hadn’t even been decent-looking when I had to resort to violence to defend myself against Fanpin’s advances. What would I have had to do if I had been a knockout like Soo-Jin?

  My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, grant me strength, I prayed in an attempt to resist the image of Fanpin’s nine-year-old face appearing before me, asking me to pretend-sleep next to her with her crotch pressed up against my butt. Doesn’t this feel nice? she used to ask me. Watch over me in my hours of darkness. Protect me in spirit as well as in body when I sleep. Stop moving around so much, she used to say every time I wiggled away to keep some distance between us. I will forever honor you. I am wholly yours, your humble servant through whatever trials and tribulations that may test me. This isn’t right, I used to say. My mom says I can only do this with my future husband or with her. Please help me to confront tomorrow with unwavering faith and without fear. Whenever I mentioned a boy Fanpin would snap, even if it was an imaginary boy who was supposed to grow up and woo me into marriage one day. She’d say, Well, who told you to be such a little mommy’s girl? And who says you have to get married to a man? She was wild and I was meek. Even in her total wrongness she would get a thing or two right, like how my parents were more naïve than I was if they thought what they had was something I would want one day. Please, I begged God, show me the right way to live. I didn’t dare utter Fanpin’s name though her presence was smeared all over my prayers—she had given me a structure and a vocabulary to speak to God all those years ago when I didn’t know if I was doing it right, and now, speaking to God how she spoke to God, I felt simultaneously distant from Him and too close to her. She had wormed her way into my devotion. She had entered the part of me that was supposed to be only available to Him. Dear God, I’m sorry…I have to say it the way I want to say it. Look, I need a sign. I know I’m not supposed to, but I need you to tap me on the shoulder when I’m walking to my first-period class. I need you to drop a leaf on my book bag when I’m waiting for the bus. I just need to know you’re really there. I’m sorry, I know that’s wrong. Only the faithless rely on signs and symbols. Only the selfish ask for their prayers to be answered directly. I know it’s wrong to demand of you. I know, I know, I know. But I’m so lost. I’m afraid every night before I go to sleep and I’m afraid every morning when I wake. Is it normal to wake up disappointed I’ve survived another day? Sometimes I think it would be better not to wake up at all, never to have known what it was like to have lived a life. Is it too late? Will I always know this life? I can’t imagine beyond this world there is another. I want to believe in your kingdom and your bounty but I can’t imagine it. I want to move on, but to what? To where? Most days I can’t imagine a tomorrow until it’s already yesterday. Am I supposed to just keep waiting? Why did you create life? Is it so wrong to wish you had never made me or my mother or my father or their mothers and fathers and all the mothers and fathers who came before them? All I’ve ever known about any of them is how much pain they went through…and I’m just supposed to go through it too? Well, forgive me if I don’t fucking feel like it. If I don’t want to be a story my children rant about to their children when I’m dead. Forgive me. Fucking forgive me. Good night.

  —

  I found out wearing yellow and black to school was like wearing a sign that said KICK MY ASS REALLY PLEASE DO IT when some kid in the hallway between eighth and last period made this motion like he was going to punch me right in the vagina but instead released his forefinger from his curled fist and pointed at my shirt—a garage sale gem I found one afternoon with Fanpin. It was fifty cents and she bought it for me because “that’s what best friends do.” I let her spoon me when we got back to her house without putting up much of a fight as thanks but never once wore the shirt in front of her—I didn’t want her to think I was flirting back somehow. Now that I was in seventh grade and had the faintest contours of something resembling a pair of breasts, I wanted to be less timid, I wanted to be noticed by the right someone. If I was going to be truly delicious and succulent, I would have to expose myself a little, whether that meant showing a sliver of tummy or opening my mouth to speak. The plan was to dig up all my old elementary school shirts and wear them as shrunken baby tees, but I chickened out the first week of school and hid underneath big-ass sweaters that went down to my knees. I was so invisible kids walked right into me as if I were air. After enduring several days of a freakish September heat wave, I finally convinced myself to forgo the sweater and for whatever godforsaken reason, I chose to wear Fanpin’s gift to me—a pale yellow ringer tee with black lettering that said, MY SUN IS A STAR!

  “What?” I asked the kid who was pointing at me.

  “You’re just begging to get fucked up. It’s almost funny.”

  I was one of the last to know but eventually I knew too—I was in colors verboten to everyone and anyone except Soo-Jin. Just about anything could make you the target of Soo-Jin’s wrath, including: standing next to her, walking past her too quickly, walking past her too slowly, waving your hands near her, talking too loudly or too softly around her, looking at her, brazenly wearing a shirt that you thought was just you wanting to wear something so that you weren’t naked, but, in fact, was something that deeply, deeply pissed the shit out of her and would be the reason for why you later had your ass beat.

  There was a story that had been going around to scare incoming sixth graders (which I, of course, was the last to know because I transferred in at the beginning of seventh) about how this one sixth grader was stupid enough to look at Soo-Jin the wrong way, and Soo-Jin grabbed her by the neck and said, “You think you can look at me like that and get away with it, you titless piece of shit?” The girl apologized and apologized but Soo-Jin was still pissed, so after school she and her gang followed the sixth grader down the street and tied up her hands and feet with thick rope (and at this point of the story, whoever was hearing it for the first time was already spooked because what were ninth graders doing with ropes thick enough to be used as lassos?). They asked her, “Do you want to be untied, bitch? Do you think you’re sorry enough that we should let you go?” And the girl said, “Yes, please. Please. I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. Please untie me.” To that Soo-Jin said, “Okay, but first, there are a few things,” and the girl said, “What things? What things? What things?” so desperately and so many times that Soo-Jin had to shut her up by punching her in the mouth and knocking out her front teeth. Soo-Jin and her girls dragged this sixth grader into a Honda Accord that belonged to some high school senior who was so in love with Soo-Jin he gave her the keys to his car to try and win her ove
r, not knowing she had something else in mind. They waited in the car, listening to the radio until it was dark. One of Soo-Jin’s girls was instructed to go back to make sure the coast was clear, a task she took seriously, hiding out behind the dumpsters until all the lights in the building were shut off.

  “I saw the janitor lock the main doors and drive off,” she reported back to Soo-Jin, who turned to the sixth grader and asked, “Ever been over there after dark?” pointing at the empty asphalt-concrete parking lot surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, where the music teachers parked because it was closer to the band and chorus rooms. The sixth grader shook her head.

  Soo-Jin kicked her out of the car and said, “You’ll see.” It was at this point of the story that the person listening wondered: What was the worst thing a ninth grader could do to a sixth grader? Was it a marker of adulthood to be able to imagine true horror? Then again, if the worst imaginable thing was something that had already happened to someone not so different from ourselves, then who among us was safe? What if there was something even worse that we could not imagine?

  There was. There was much, much worse.

  Soo-Jin walked over to the fence and scaled it in thick gardening gloves, uncoiled the barbed wire from the fence, climbed back down, and laid the barbed wire on the ground. She had her girls strip off the sixth grader’s clothes and then she had them stand aside and watch as she slapped the sixth grader across the face with the barbed wire. Then Soo-Jin whistled through her teeth as she wrapped the barbed wire around the sixth grader as if she were decorating a Christmas tree. When she was done, she stood back and asked the sixth grader, “Do you still feel like looking at me?”