That night I went home and searched through the bathroom medicine cabinet until I found Mum’s box of tampons. I took one out of the packet and retreated to my room. After locking my door I sat on the bed and took the plastic sheath off the little white capsule. The tampon was smooth and I spent some time tugging on the string at the bottom until I figured out its purpose. After taking off my undies, I spread my legs, held the tampon against my vagina and pushed it in. It felt dry and slightly uncomfortable, but I persisted until my finger and the tampon were in all the way.
I got up and walked around. I couldn’t really feel it inside, but the string was annoying as it tickled my thighs. I sat back on the bed and tugged the string to remove the tampon and winced and moaned as the dry tampon chafed against my insides. After I’d tugged it out, I held my hand against my crotch until the pain subsided. When I got it out, the tampon was slightly swollen, but otherwise looked much the same. I vowed never to use a tampon again.
The next day Kayla and Sharon greeted me at the school gates with beaming smiles. They told me that Jeremy liked me and wanted to ask me out. ‘So we told him that you like him too. You do like him, don’t you?’ Sharon asked, noticing my shock.
‘Of course she does,’ Kayla interrupted. ‘She was smiling at him.’
The two of them stared at me as they waited for an answer. I wanted to tell them that I didn’t want a boyfriend, but I had already noticed the hierarchy in our little threesome: Kayla was the leader, Sharon her little follower, and I was expected to be the yes girl who went along with whatever they wanted. I nodded. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad; besides which, it was kind of nice to know that a boy liked me, even though I didn’t like him back.
At lunchtime, we gathered in the school courtyard. I was on one side with my girlfriends, he was on the other with his mates. His best friend, Caine, walked over. ‘Jeremy wants to know if you will go out with him,’ he said.
I nodded.
Kayla, answered for me, ‘Yes, she will.’
Caine returned back to Jeremy and gave him my answer. Jeremy smiled and we were nudged together, while our friends formed a crowd and watched. We exchanged awkward conversation. He put his hand around my waist and we acted the part of the happy couple. I’d never been this close to a boy and I didn’t know how to stand, or what to say. Soon enough he retreated back to his mates, and I went back to Kayla and Sharon.
‘What did you talk about?’ Kayla demanded when I returned.
‘He asked where I had moved from.’ It was slightly ludicrous that I now had a boyfriend who didn’t know the first thing about me.
‘You know what happens now,’ Sharon said. ‘Now you have to get on.’
‘What’s get on?’ I asked, feeling my heart race in panic. Did that mean he had to get on me? Did that mean we had to have sex?
‘That’s what we call kissing,’ Kayla said.
My panic subsided, but I was still feeling trepidation. Why was kissing called getting on? Was it regular kissing or was there more to it?
I was going through a growth spurt and ate multiple times a day, so at recess the next day I bought my favourite meal: a hamburger and chocolate milkshake and wolfed it down.
‘Yuck,’ Kayla said. ‘You’re going to have hamburger breath when you kiss.’
I hadn’t even thought about the mechanics of my new status or the expectations on me. The food I’d just eaten curdled in my stomach.
At lunchtime, Jeremy found me and we walked hand in hand to the oval, our friends walking behind us. Jeremy took me to the edge of the oval and we stood behind a bush. As Jeremy put his hands on my waist and bent to kiss me I heard our friends on the other side of the bush laughing and talking as they maintained our faux-privacy. I was in a ditch and he was taller than he usually was so I had to stand on tippy toes. As we began kissing, I took my cue from him and opened my mouth and joined it to his. Jeremy’s mouth was minty fresh. My friends told me later that he kept a toothbrush and toothpaste in his locker. We imitated a fish’s mouth as we mashed our lips together. Every few minutes he tilted his head to the other side and I followed suit by tilting mine in the opposite direction so our noses didn’t smack each other’s.
After a few minutes I opened my eyes and watched him. He had his eyes firmly closed as he sucked at my mouth. We kissed for so long that my calf began aching and cramping, but at least the discomfort was keeping the boredom at bay.
Kayla walked around the bush and interrupted us. ‘Fourteen minutes,’ she said, tapping her watch.
Jeremy smiled, satisfied that he’d achieved his personal best. He took my hand and we joined our friends. I felt like I had a clown mouth, our co-mingled saliva coating my cheeks and chin. I surreptitiously lifted my hand and wiped the drool with my sleeve.
‘You can’t do that,’ his best friend Caine said when he spotted me doing it. ‘You can’t wipe someone’s kiss off you.’
I turned red with embarrassment and looked at the ground.
‘It’s okay,’ Jeremy whispered, hugging me tight.
‘So how was the kiss?’ Sharon quizzed me the next day.
‘Wet,’ I said.
She and Kayla exchanged a look.
‘What do you mean?’ Kayla asked.
‘My mouth was all wet.’ I touched the skin around my mouth and chin.
‘I thought he’d be a good kisser because he’s had lots of girlfriends,’ Kayla said.
‘You mean it’s not supposed to be like that?’ I asked in surprise.
‘No.’ Sharon shook her head. ‘I loved kissing my boyfriend.’ She sighed as she stared into space.
‘Do you want me to dump him for you?’ Kayla asked.
‘Really?’ I asked, surprised she was so eager considering she’d been so quick to match make.
‘Sure. I’m sure your next boyfriend will be a much better kisser.’
True to her word, Kayla went to speak to Jeremy’s best friend and gave him the news. The next time I saw Jeremy in the corridor I wanted to run in the other direction, but he smiled and waved at me, letting me know he harbored no ill will. My short-lived romance left me with no negative after-effects, apart from a distaste of kissing.
Jeremy didn’t pine for long. Within a fortnight, he’d hooked up with another candidate and this girlfriend stuck around for a while. I developed a new method of repelling unwanted male attention by developing a crush on the most unattainable boy in our high school.
Over time everything settled back to normal, except for my friendship with Kayla and Sharon. Their viciousness was seeping through and since I was the lowest in the pecking order, I was always the one who had to act on their dares and was the butt of their jokes.
A few months later I walked over to Katherine, a girl I considered my friend. Katherine looked at me, waiting for me to speak. I hesitated, not wanting to follow through on the dare to kick her. I glanced over at Kayla and Sharon. Kayla was staring me down, while Sharon looked away.
My leg seemed to move of its own volition and I kicked Katherine in the shin. Katherine’s face tightened. I saw betrayal in her eyes. I wanted to apologise and beg for forgiveness, but I knew not to show weakness.
Katherine braced herself on the wall. She lifted her leg back and kicked me back, her chunky black shoe leaving dark marks on my shins. I knew in that moment that I had transgressed. We were both victims of bullying and Katherine was easy fodder. She was pretty, even though pimples covered her face, the white pus oozing out and looking like semen so that she was often taunted with comments like, ‘don’t you wash your face after getting cum on it?’ While Katherine, like me, had to take her licks when they came, she wasn’t going to take them from me.
Behind me, Sharon and Kayla were giggling, finding my whole performance hysterical. As I slinked back, my shins throbbing and my eyes tearing from humiliation and pain, Kayla shrieked with high-pitched laughter.
‘I can’t believe she kicked you back,’ Kayla said.
‘And you took it like
a chump,’ Sharon said, clutching her stomach as she laughed.
Later that month, Kayla had a birthday party and I felt the familiar spin cycle of trepidation and excitement in my stomach at the thought of spending a night with my friends. I had never participated in a sleepover and the only reason I could go was because Mum was in hospital and unaware of my plans, and my stepfather had given permission to end my pleading.
When I arrived, the house was full with all of Kayla’s friends already in attendance. We spent the night talking, watching movies and eating snacks. Eventually we exhausted ourselves and fell asleep in the early morning.
I woke sometime during the night to a tingly, cold sensation on my skin. I touched my arm and felt something sticky and shrieked with panic. I heard giggles in the dark.
‘Shhh, you’ll wake my parents,’ Kayla said.
There was a click and the lamp beside her bed came on. I blinked my eyes in the bright light and saw that the girls were sitting around me. Kayla held a toothpaste tube in her hand and I looked down and saw the smeared blue streak of it on my arm. I started crying, caught off guard in the state between wakefulness and sleep, impotent rage and sadness filling me.
‘Don’t be a cry baby,’ Kayla said. ‘It’s just a prank.’
I saw the disgust and embarrassment on the faces of my friends. I had violated our friendship by not being a good sport. ‘I’m not crying because of that,’ I lied. ‘I was dreaming about my Dad and it made me cry.’
Like most female friendships, our connection was predicated on the age-old rituals of secret telling. Soon after becoming friends, I’d confessed to Sharon and Kayla my life story, including my father’s death and my mother’s medical condition. I had also earned my popularity because I was able to bring friends home during school lunch breaks when Mum was in hospital and my stepfather was visiting her. My friends asked for coffee.
The only coffee my parents drank was Minas freshly roasted coffee that my stepfather ground using a hand grinder. I made them coffee in the traditional Bosnian fashion by spooning six teaspoons in a džezva, Bosnian coffee pot, on the stove and served it on a tray with fildžani, small demitasse cups. I demonstrated how they needed to drink the coffee by breaking off some of the square sugar cube and placing it in my mouth and then sipping the coffee. Sharon and Kayla followed suit, scrunching up their faces as they tasted the bitterness of the coffee. After that I served English breakfast tea only.
I had learned to bridge the gap between us by concealing my differences and so now as I pretended to cry because of a dream about my father, I felt relief as Sharon hugged me.
‘Poor thing,’ Sharon said over my shoulder.
I saw Kayla’s sour face before hiding my face in Sharon’s hair. Sharon took me to the bathroom where I washed my arm and face. I returned to Kayla’s bedroom where all the girls rallied around me, and fell asleep feeling comforted and loved.
The next morning we went to a swimming pool. I watched in envy as my girlfriends donned bikinis that emphasised their curvy bodies, while I put on my red and black one-piece suit. We followed Kayla out to the swimming pool and arranged our towels and bags on the green grass beside the pool. We didn’t worry about sunscreen and none of us had brought any, although Kayla had brought a zinc tube that she used to draw patterns on our body so that we would have tan line shapes after the day. She drew a smiley face on her stomach, a big heart on Sharon’s back, and a star on my thigh.
‘All right, let’s go in,’ she said, and ran toward the edge of the pool, leaping into the air and holding her knees to her chest as she hit the water.
The rest of my friends followed suit, while I gingerly walked to the ladder and slowly submerged myself. Kayla and the girls kept swimming into the deep end, while I clung to the edge. I had learned to swim as a child and could keep afloat comfortably, but I’d had a scare a few months ago when I’d gone to the sea with a family friend. I’d walked into the water, enjoying the feeling of the squishy sand in my toes, and had stepped into a depression, the water suddenly reaching my neck. As I tried to take a step back to safety I’d lost my footing. A wave crashed over my head and I went under, struggling to scramble back to the surface. As I flailed in panic I swallowed water, and the coughing fit sent me back under. I could see the sky above me, but I kept sinking, my hands reaching for something to hold, but there was nothing.
Suddenly arms reached for me and the husband of my family friend carried me out, where I coughed up the water, my throat feeling scratchy and sore. I didn’t risk going in past my knees for the rest of the day, and now that I was in the swimming pool I wasn’t going to risk going in any further than my waist.
Sharon came to keep me company and we leant our backs against the side of the pool as we talked.
‘What are you doing over there?’ Kayla demanded, as she swam over from the deep end.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Come over here.’
Sharon went to her, and I took a step toward them, but as soon as the water pressure hit my chest and I struggled to breathe, the familiar panic took hold and I returned to the shallow end.
Annoyance spread over Kayla’s face when I didn’t obey her command. She smiled and called our friends towards her. I felt a portent of danger and quickly climbed up the ladder and out of the pool. I was lying on my towel, pretending I wanted to get a suntan when they all came and stood around me.
‘Let’s go.’ Kayla grabbed hold of my arms.
The other girls grabbed my other limbs and tried to carry me to the pool.
‘No, stop,’ I begged. ‘Please, don’t.’
‘Stop being a baby,’ Kayla shouted, her face red from the exertion of carrying me.
As I caught sight of the pool edge I fought like a cornered animal, kicking and pushing them away. I stood and looked behind me. The girls were watching me with anger. Sharon was rubbing her leg where I’d kicked her and Kayla looked down at the drops of blood on her arm where I’d scratched her.
Kayla walked to me and shoved her face into mine. ‘Why are you being such a spoilsport?’ she demanded.
I was mute, unable to speak from terror. Kayla slapped me on the face, the sound of her palm hitting my cheek with a loud smack. I heard one of the girls giggle from behind us. ‘Fuck off, you dumb bitch,’ Kayla hissed.
I grabbed my towel and bag of clothes, running to the pay phone next to the change rooms where I called my stepfather to pick me up. He drove me to Kayla’s house where her mother let me into the house so that I could collect my belongings.
‘What happened?’ he asked as he drove me home.
‘Nothing. I just got sunburnt,’ I lied.
By the end of the year I was worn out by the relentless bullying rained down on me. At my urging, my parents enrolled me in the school on the other side of the tracks.
I saw Sharon only once after I changed schools. We passed each other as we walked in opposite directions on Main Road after school. She made eye contact, by accident, and then quickly looked away. I was relegated to someone she used to know. I walked on, my head high and my back straight.
WENDY CHEN
Wendy Chen is a Sydney-based, Chinese-Australian writer. This story is a work of fiction inspired by Wendy’s interest in historical fiction, Chinese cultural traditions and the stories of Chinese-Australian migrants at the time of Federation. Wendy writes, ‘Often, the only narrative we’re presented with in respect of minorities throughout history is that they were outsiders and victims of exclusion. I was interested in actually exploring their personal experiences, in terms of the resilience of these people throughout the years of the Immigration Restriction Act in Australia. These stories can give us a new perspective on history, and reflecting on them reveals to us that they are still relevant today.’
Autumn Leaves
Chinatown, Melbourne
May 1902
When I used to think of my father, the first thing I always remembered was his voice — the gentleness it sooth
ed me with. In the quiet before our herbal store opened, Ba would murmur to himself as he sorted items into their correct jars and drawers. He would patiently explain how to prepare the medicines, instilling me with confidence rather than doubt. And when he shared stories with me before I slept, his voice would become as even as my heartbeat, pulling my mind and breathing with it.
But in the year after he passed away, when I was fifteen, his voice became distorted within my mind. All I had were shapeless possibilities of what he could say, and endless questions which couldn’t be answered by the echoes he’d left behind.
Our only photo of him stood on a small, dark brown cabinet, beside our dining table. He wore a dark suit and tie, and stood at the edge of the group pictured — the precious first photo the Melbourne Chinese Association had taken together with their own camera — and his eyes, deep with thought, peered into the distance. I was dusting the frame again when my mother emerged. She’d tied her hair back, and was wearing the same sort of plain jacket and skirt as I was dressed in — this made it easier for us to blend in when we were out amongst other Australians.
‘You should finish preparing those herbs before we go, Jing,’ she said gently. ‘Ah Lam will be here soon.’
I gave her a trembling smile. It would be my first time seeing my father’s grave and the cemetery again since his funeral. In some ways, knowing Ba was buried nearby made it easier to go on. Yet, when I remembered how we’d failed him by not sending his body back to his home village, a heavy pain would settle at the back of my throat.
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