Sour Heart Page 6

  Typically fourth grade was too young for even pre–sex education sex education, but a woman with spiky blond tips and big pins all over her blazer informed us at a mandatory assembly that we had been targeted as a high-risk school and measures had to be taken to ensure for the future. She spoke to us spitefully, as if we were awful, terrible children, and used the words “at risk” several times without going into detail. What were we at risk for?

  After I told my mother about the assembly, she started to fret that there were too few white kids in my school. Am I at risk? I asked her. It’s a sign, she said and then trailed off to make a phone call to someone who must have needed her to finish her thoughts more than I did. Over half the kids in our school were black or Spanish, although every time I called them that at home Eddie would correct me, “It’s not Spanish. It’s Hispanic. And that isn’t even an adequate term because they comprise a lot of different cultures from different countries.”

  “Well, you’re His-stupid.”

  “Forget it,” Eddie said. “There’s no point in explaining anything to you,” but later, I went to his room and knocked on his door very softly and opened it a crack and stuck my head in and asked, “So what’s Francine then if her dad’s His-panic and her mom’s black?”

  “You could just say she’s mixed.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “Is that high risk?”

  “Get out,” he said, and for once I didn’t make a whole show of banging on his door after he had locked it behind me. Still, I didn’t know what the risk was—was it just obesity and junk food? Nearly everyone in my grade, except me and this really mousy, quiet girl Mande who I kept forgetting even existed, had more tits and more ass than my own mother. It’s the hormones, my father said, that they inject into the chips and the Cheetos.

  My God, my mother exclaimed. It’s in the Cheetos?

  Sometimes, when school let out, men walked past and hooted at groups of us standing around outside. “Nice ass, mami,” a construction worker once shouted at Francine when her back was turned to him and I pointed at him and said, “You talking to me?” and he said, “No, your friend with the nice ass,” and I said to Francine, “How rude can some people get?” but Francine just shrugged. “They’re all like that,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, pretending to know.

  During our weekly hour of pre–sex education sex education, Mr. Kosecki took the boys into the gymnasium and showed them who knows what while we stayed in the classroom with Mrs. Silver. She had us hold hands at the start of each lesson and say in unison, “What happens in this room stays in this room.”

  Then she’d bring out the question box she had decorated in glitter and gold stars to start off the hour. We were supposed to drop anonymous questions that we had about sex and being a woman/girl into the box, and at first no one did, but after the third class, the questions started coming in. Someone wanted to know why her one tit was bigger than the other and we all immediately turned around and looked at Fanpin Hsieh. Another girl wanted to know if it was possible to get addicted to the smell of your own vagina the way kids in first grade got addicted to eating their own boogers. Someone else wanted to know why she humped the couch after watching a VHS of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that her parents had left lying around. The week after that, someone else said she also went and saw her parents’ copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and humped her couch, but also what was “humping”? The week after that, four more girls in our class watched Lady Chatterley’s Lover and dry-humped their couches, and Mrs. Silver grabbed the question box and made a motion like she was going to throw it out the window but then set it back down on her desk. “If you aren’t going to take this seriously, we can spend the hour copying vocabulary words instead.”

  Francine and I had renamed it “tame education” from the very first diagram of a vagina that looked like a deluxe Polly Pocket opened on its side, and anyway, if we wanted to see a vagina couldn’t we just look at our own? Francine looked at mine and I looked at hers all the time. She was already starting to grow hair on hers—little curly black hairs all lined up around the center.

  Francine came over my house once or twice a week without telling her mom or dad, neither of whom cared anyway. They let her do anything and didn’t care when she came home, didn’t care if she walked home blindfolded or with her laces tied together: as long as they didn’t have to come pick her up, they were happy. I envied Francine and she knew it. Whenever she came over, we’d shut ourselves up in my room and tape a sign to our door that read, IF YOU LOOK LIKE A HAIRY APE, OR IF YOUR NAME RHYMES WITH SDKGLADEIGTONACBHDZZANGIE, DON’T COME IN HERE. The ape thing was Francine’s idea, and Sdkgladeigtonacbhdzzangie was mine.

  I liked opening and closing her vagina lips, pretending it was a regular mustached lip turned on its side.

  “Good morning, class,” I said in my ventriloquism-of-a-vagina voice, as I maneuvered her vagina lips to look like talking lips. “Today, we are going to talk about periods.”

  Francine loved my jokes and I loved hers. I didn’t have a single hair on my vagina, but in fourth grade it started to secrete fluid once or twice a day.

  “I thought I peed my pants again,” I told Francine.

  “Ew,” she said. “Don’t you know how to hold it in?”

  “But look, it’s not pee.” I showed Francine my underwear, the hardened crust of yellow discharge, and we both smelled it and pretended to faint. Sometimes, Francine stuck her index finger into my vagina, screaming the entire time she was sticking her finger in.

  “Oh my God,” she screamed. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my fucking God.”

  “Stop screaming, Francine.”

  “There’s swampland in there,” she told me.

  “So? You have a frozen tundra in yours.”

  The whole point of Francine sticking her finger in my vagina was so she could taunt me later when I had forgotten that we had spent an entire afternoon digging around in each other’s vaginas, and when I least expected it, she would suddenly put her fingers up to my nose.

  “Smell it,” she said, “smell it, smell it, smell it.”

  I always told her no way. “Not unless you smell your own.” Sometimes, I’d stick my finger into her vagina, and she’d stick hers in mine, and we’d cautiously smell our sticky fingers and then we’d cross our arms over each other to give the other person a good, long whiff. I thought my vagina smelled a little bit like my feet in the summer when I wore sandals, but also like these fried anchovies my parents ate on top of porridge in the mornings for breakfast.

  “You better wash it really good for Jason,” Francine said to me. “Or else he might dump you.”

  “Whatever. I’ll dump him first.”

  Whenever Francine or anyone else mentioned Jason, I would get this horrible feeling of dread in my stomach, a suspicion that there were still so many things I had to learn and each new thing I encountered reminded me of how far I had to go to catch up to everyone else. I wanted to be special but sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was special or if I was special, and even though they were the same word, one singled you out for deep admiration and envy and the other guaranteed you were doomed and worthy only of pity. Was I soooo special to be the first girl in fourth grade to have a boyfriend or was I soooo special to have a boyfriend so perverted he uncontrollably soiled himself in his sleep? The more I thought about it, the more I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t even been a month and I already wanted to dump his ass. Who got wet dreams in fourth grade? I stayed up all night playing Bubble Gum Bubble Gum in a Dish just so I wouldn’t fall asleep and have regular, dry dreams.

  I wanted to live a dreamless life in my unconscious and be full of dreams in my conscious life. Also, I hated having nightmares. I hated how, even if you were lucky enough to never have anything terrible happen to you the entire time you were alive, and even if every single thing you wanted was within your grasp, and even if you were the luckiest girl on earth who all the other girls aspired to
be and all the boys liked and all the adults found charming and sweet and full of potential, even if everything went right for you and there was no chance of slipping off that path, you still had to contend with your nightmares, how they intruded on you while you were sleeping when the point of sleeping was to skip past the next eight hours so you could get back to living your ridiculously good life that you couldn’t wait to wake up to every morning if only you didn’t have terrible nightmares that made you feel like your body was detached from itself, like you had floated up into the sky and were now looking down at yourself, at everyone who secretly pitied you, who laughed at you and threaded flowers in your hair not to make you look beautiful but because they knew you were horribly allergic and wanted you to sneeze and suffer all day, and worst of all, you hated how your dreams made you think that the vision of yourself that you saw when you were forced to see yourself the way other people saw you was the real you, which was a confused little girl who wanted someone to pay attention to you, to show you how to be a person because actually, if you really really looked long enough, if you really really didn’t look away, you’d see that you weren’t just a confused little girl desperate for attention, but a child who was in real danger of becoming someone no one would want to know, and even worse than that, what you feared the most was a day when no one could hear you cry for help, a day you must have been heading for your whole life because there had always been something about you that made it seem like you didn’t need any help, which was why your mother reminded you so often of all the other needier, more deserving people in the world, and why your father had to be someone who you only saw a few minutes a day, which, your mother never failed to remind you, was ultimately for you and your brother and you were supposed to be perfectly grateful for it, but all it really felt like was growing up without a father, and it was terrifying—all of it—but especially the moment when everything flashed before you in these dreams where you were crying out and no matter how long or how loudly you cried no one heard, no one came to you. It made you feel helpless because no matter how many times your mother told you dreams were not real life, you could not forget what you saw and what you felt. So there was no rest and there was no escape. There was a version of you that was too selfish and there was one where you weren’t selfish enough and you were constantly waking up from one into the other and that was why you weren’t sure if you were looking down at yourself or you were looking up at yourself and which one was the real you and which was the dream? There was no telling. I’m sorry, I repeated in my head. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I stumbled around the house saying “sorry” until I crashed into my brother’s door.

  Help me, I mouthed and he looked at me like I was a spiderweb he was about to destroy just by waving his hand. “Well? Why’re you standing there? Gone retarded again?”

  I snapped out of it and went for a classic shadow. “You must be talking to yourself, retard-boy.”

  “I always knew it was a mistake when Mom and Dad fought for you to be placed out of special ed.”

  Whenever Eddie was getting the best of me and Francine wasn’t there, I had to drag myself to the living room where Frangie sat, drinking soda and watching TV—or sometimes watching nothing at all, because she was weird like that—and I’d ask her to help me come up with a plan to get back at Eddie.

  “Frangie, help me beat up Eddie,” I said to her after Eddie made up the lie about me getting out of special ed.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “What if you go buy a wolf and train it to eat Eddie for lunch?”

  “Where am I gonna get the money, stupid?” I said to Frangie. “Stupid,” I said again. “Just wish you weren’t stupid. And anyway, like a wolf would want to eat Eddie. That’s like putting throw-up in front of a wolf. A wolf wouldn’t eat that.”

  “I wish I could be a jellyfish,” Frangie said to me, fidgeting with the clasp of her corduroy overalls.

  “Why?”

  “Cause then it would be easy to sting people.”

  “Wow,” I said, shaking my head at Frangie, and then I considered it for a moment. “Actually, yeah. Me too.” I patted Frangie on the head the way my father did sometimes when he got home early enough to tuck me into bed. “Let’s go get a stick and poke Eddie in the butt with it until he buys us candy. Wanna?”

  —

  A few days after everyone found out about Jason’s wet dream, I went to school and Francine wasn’t there. I missed her and felt dizzy and thought I was going to barf, so I asked Jason to walk me home after school.

  “I’ll show you my coin collection,” I told him when we were in front of my house even though the only coins I collected were the chocolate ones that I had to beg my mom to buy at the supermarket.

  When we got inside the house, I yelled out to whoever was home, “Leave me and my boyfriend alone,” and then grabbed Jason and pulled him into my room.

  “Put it inside me,” I said to him, just to test it out.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m not really allowed to have anyone over except Frangie. Don’t you have to be home?”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one who asked me to come here.”

  We looked at everything in my room except each other. “Say the thing you like best about me again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your favorite thing about me.”

  “I guess that you’re my girlfriend.”

  “No,” I said, “the other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “If I say it then it doesn’t count.”

  “Everything has to count?”

  “Duh.”

  We sat in silence again. “It’s kind of the same,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “Having a boyfriend and not having a boyfriend. Actually maybe it’s more bad now.”

  “Rude.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can’t you just beat it? Scram? Bust out? Leave me alone? Go away? See you later, alligator? Bye-bye, American pies?”

  “You don’t make sense and you’re bossy,” Jason said.

  “You act dumb and also, you’re dumb.”

  After he left, I closed the front door behind me and sighed. I suddenly wanted my mom to come home so I could tell her that I had a boy over even though I knew she was already burdened with so much, and the level of care she could devote to something like this was probably so low in the grand scheme of all the things she had to care about that it would annoy her more than anything, which wasn’t the same thing as caring. And anyway, even though my mom tried to tell me what to do, the fact was she rarely came home before seven at night, and there wasn’t enough time for her to find out what I did while she was away, especially since she often had more work to do once she got home because people sometimes paid her to make their ugly clothes look nicer. She had an old sewing machine that we got from a Salvation Army and it was mostly good except sometimes the needle would break into her finger and then it was days and days of her clutching her swollen, bruised finger, crying that this life was going to kill her, and I would follow her around and blow soft kisses at her finger, which irritated her because my breath was too hot and the hot air, she said, made everything worse. So it was best to leave her alone even though that meant I had to be alone and miss her without letting her know it because it stressed her out to know. Didn’t we understand that the only reason me and my brother and all the people we housed in our home weren’t already dead was because she, and she alone, carried all our burdens on her shoulders? Um, thanks? I said sometimes to let her know I kinda understood, but that only angered her more, which was how I knew I was useless to her, and that scared me because it meant I really was related to Frangie, someone who made everything worse, someone who was so helpless that she sucked the energy and life out of the people who had to look after her, and no way was I going to be a Frangie, no way was I going to be a hangers-on in my own home to my own family, no way was my mom ever going to wish
I had never been born the way I wished Frangie had never been born. I vowed never to be my family’s charity case.

  My parents promised me everything was going to change once my father finished school and got his degree in business, which wouldn’t be long now because my father was a superhuman who broke world records in things that no one kept records for, like most accelerated course of study in business while also working forty-plus hours a week delivering Chinese food for this twenty-four-hour place that hired him because my father was a MACHINE who could ride regular bikes like they were motorbikes and he made record-breaking time delivering General Tsao’s chicken to people who lived on the Upper East Side and probably didn’t know there was never a General Tsao in China. Ha ha ha, I said when my father told me this, even though I hadn’t known it either. In the movies I saw on TV, Chinese delivery guys brought cartons and cartons of fried rice and spring rolls and fried wontons to men who lived in their robes and were surrounded by beautiful women who had the kind of tits you wanted to use as shelves. And in these movies, they always had buck teeth and started every sentence with “me likey” or “me no likey” and had high-pitched voices and stomped around with their arms flailing up and down, and even though I could laugh at anything, I never laughed at that.

  So things were going to change but I just had to wait…with Frangie and my dumb brother. At our house, Frangie would sometimes talk to herself in the living room. Once she put on my mother’s push-up bra and clothes and makeup and asked me to stuff socks in her underwear so that she could have a porn star’s ass (“What’s a porn star?” I asked, and Frangie only smiled knowingly so I slapped her on the mouth and said, “That’s not a good look for you”) and she walked out of the house like that and strutted around downtown with the face of a ten-year-old girl and the ass and tits of a twenty-year-old. She was like the world’s most confusing-looking slut.

  My brother was even more of a waste than Frangie was. He had gotten a girlfriend not long after I started dating Jason—this girl who already looked like a woman, like she could be someone’s mother—and they hung out in his room most afternoons. He put a flag up on his door whenever she was there.