Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  Then I see Zack and his irritating rattail, to the left of everyone, moving toward me. His eyes are locked on mine. I try to look elsewhere, but I know what’s going to happen before it does. He marches up to me and stops a few inches from my face.

  Still holding Magda’s hand, I look up into his dilated pupils and raise my eyebrows, wordlessly asking him what he wants. There is a slight hint of a smile before he rears back with his left hand and punches me square in the face. The full width of his fist connects with the center of my right cheek, sending an electrical shock into my eyes that instantly makes them tingle and water, prompting me to wonder how everything is so connected inside my head.

  He stands there looking at me. Magda is staring, horrified. His eyes are wild, alive, dancing with joy. He scans me for the impact of his attack, but I am doing my best to look unfazed. With a little smile, he says, “I bet you’re gonna cry now, huh?”

  I square off with him and say, “No. No way.”

  He laughs a little, spins around, and walks away. He reaches the front of the line at the same time as Karen and I know she has no idea what happened. If I ran to her now, in front of everyone, I’d be a pussy, so I suck it up. Tears start streaming down my cheeks. Poor Magda is worried about me, but she has no idea what to do. She draws herself up to her full height and signals to her friends that something is wrong with me, but no one can be bothered. I just want to disappear.

  Salty eye water and snot run silently down my cheeks and I’m trying to catch it all with my sleeve. I just don’t understand. What did I do him? Nothing! He doesn’t even know me. Why me? There is a piercing feeling in my chest as it dawns on me that someone hates me, for no reason at all, but he hates me.

  I watch as Andy smiles at him and they clasp hands behind Karen. The painful sensation sharpens with the notion that everyone is in on something with this new jerk that I am on the outside of.

  The aquarium sucks. I don’t want to be near anyone or have to do any talking. I trail behind the class all day and I don’t even bother to go near the gigantic tanks of sharks. We are a public school, so we can’t see the dolphin show, but I don’t care, I just want to go home. I keep my head down and do my best to dangle my hair over the lump rapidly forming in my cheek. I can feel it bulging. The skin is hot and tender to the touch. The kid can throw a punch.

  As we make our way from tank to tank, I keep an eye on this prick, making sure to stay far away from him. An anger burns through me that makes me want to throw him in the shark tank, or flip him upside down and stuff him in a trash can, or maybe bash his nose in, but I don’t think I’d win in a fistfight. His stocky neck tells me as much.

  At some point I notice that he is spending an odd amount of time with Barney, the other class oddball. Barney has absolutely no friends, because Barney is a bona fide nerd. He wears glasses that are constantly slipping and dinosaur fanny packs, and he has a watch that tells him when to pee. I stole that watch once last year because I thought it was stupid and to his detriment that he couldn’t figure it out for himself. I thought he might be lying, but he pissed his pants. I felt bad and gave it back, apologized to him and his mother, and swore I would never mess with him again. For all his nerdiness, he has a super kind heart, and he forgave me the next day, offering me some of his lunch. Since then we’ve been on tenuous good terms, but I’ve put in a lot of work making sure he knows I mean him no harm.

  Half an hour later, outside by the penguins, an arm goes around Barney’s fat shoulder and I pretend not to see. Zack leans in and says something to him and they both turn to look at me. I roll my eyes and pull my chin into my neck because I think it makes it look thicker and tougher and turn away.

  Barney is getting high off the thrill of having someone cool like him and he is turning into a monster in front of me. He no longer looks at me with eyes glazed over by the rich fantasy world of his mind, but with the growing ferocity of a child tempted by a crack at acceptance. I know how he feels. It’s a high you don’t see coming, when they first talk to you, but it takes no time at all to realize you would do anything to have it never go away, to stay in the inner circle forever. Making somebody else feel like shit is a very small price to pay, and I’d bet money that Zack is selling Barney on that right now.

  Everybody squeezes onto the train after lunch. Andy and I are the only ones not yelling or swinging or dancing around the car. All the adults that were already here have moved to other cars to escape the volume. Andy is on his knees facing the window. He’s talking to himself, counting the lights whizzing by. I’m in a two-seater at the very end of the car, keeping my head down. My cheek has started to chill out a little bit, but it still hurts like hell. Every time I look up, Zack and Barney give me the heebies, and Karen is too busy to come to my rescue, so I’m keeping to myself. So far, this year is not shaping up to be what I thought it would.

  When we pull into West Fourth Street, Karen tries to keep us in line, but it’s impossible. Kids stream out through the turnstiles, screeching and tumbling over each other. I have fallen behind everyone and I’m keeping my eyes on the galaxy of gum stains on the ground.

  As I start on the steps toward the street, I should see it coming, but I don’t. A foot juts out from next to me, and I trip, falling onto my face. I see the side of Zack’s sneaker bound up past me. My face is on the corner of the concrete step with my swollen cheek on the filthy ground. Then another shoe comes out of nowhere and actually steps on my head. He doesn’t put his full weight into it, but enough for the corner to jab into my face and make it feel like it’s on fire. I yelp and make a grab at his ankle. He stumbles up the steps past me. I jump to my feet, praying that no one saw what happened. The last thing I want right now is sympathy. I see Barney’s chunky butt waddling up to the top of the steps where Zack is waiting for him. The two boys high-five as I spit on the ground.

  The entire walk back to school I don’t bother counting cracks. I don’t care who falls down the stairs or gets hit by a bus, or has a piano fall on them out of the sky, unless it’s Zack and Barney. I know that Barney got duped by a scumbag, so I’m not as angry with him, but I want to scalp Zack’s rattail off. My face is swelling and red. I’m angry that my hair isn’t long enough to cover the apple forming in my cheek. I don’t want any questions, and no one asks any.

  Back at school, I make it up the stairs, through the classroom to my book bag, all the way through Karen’s speech, and to the end-of-the-day bell without anyone saying anything.

  Backpack hugged to my belly, chin propped on it, I’m squatting near the door when the bell clangs. I beeline it to the back stairwell and run down the few flights to my secret spot in the gym where I know no one will bother me. It’s a person-sized nook between three walls covered in puffy blue padding, a box with one open side, and when I sit on the ground with my back to the wall I am essentially invisible. Everyone is spilling into the gym to play or read or get picked up by their parents. I know my ma won’t be here for another twenty-five minutes.

  I pull my knees into my chest and press the not-deformed side of my face into my JanSport, cupping my palm over the tennis ball that has grown under my skin on the other side. Overjoyed to finally be alone, my brain is playing a movie in front of my eyes: the walk to school, the dog shit I almost jumped into when I hopped a hydrant on Bleecker, the half-eaten semolina loaf balled up in my cubby that will be stale by tomorrow, rattails, salmon-colored T-shirts, the first punch, the overwhelming new burden of someone’s hatred.

  I don’t know where to put it all, and I feel a kind of puffed-up deflation. My emotions are wound tight, pushing to the front of my body, ready to explode and yet completely locked away. I want to cry and scream but nothing is coming out. I don’t understand. My mind wanders to Cordelia, the little girl who had something burst in her brain and died on the spot in this gym last year. It was a huge deal. There were posters all over the school. Every mother cried and she will forever be this sweet little spirit that everyone remembers fondly. In a
morbid corner behind logic, that seems like a desirable outcome to my life.

  I stay like this for a good half an hour, pretending I don’t hear the cacophony around me. Eventually, a clawing feeling comes over me, a sense that I am trapped in this godforsaken place until my mother comes, and I pull my head upright to search for her, scanning the gym for her distinctive silhouette.

  At the other end of the gymnasium, dribbling a basketball, I can see Zack, making new friends like it’s his job. What he lacks in height, he makes up for in personality. Too bad I’m the only person he’s decided he hates.

  Then, like a mirage coming into focus, the wobbling figure of my mother appears. Sweeping through the room like a warrior Viking, in a floor-length black trench coat, carrying two bulging plastic bags and limping severely, she rises over the sea of little people like a spear, moving toward me at a clip. I shift my weight and stand to my feet, swinging my backpack on and pulling my hair in front of the offending side of my face. She strikes me as irritated as she approaches, but I am trying not to look at her.

  “Let’s go, my bud . . .”

  Her words stop short of telling me what dance class awaits.

  “What is that?”

  Not even twenty seconds have elapsed. She takes my chin in her hand and pulls my face upward, busting the evidence of my inferiority from its cavern of self-pity, into the fluorescent glare of impending vengeance. Her eyebrows contract into themselves and something enters her crystal eyes that reminds me of hot oil.

  “There’s an apple in your cheek.”

  A new concept enters my mind, one I can’t believe I haven’t thought of before; my mother, the all-powerful dragon banshee who has sworn to protect me, is my most valuable weapon. I can win any battle with her on my side. Chin pointed out at a ninety-degree angle, I tilt my eyes toward hers and I realize what might happen. She speaks through clenched teeth, in a voice so calm it unnerves me.

  “Who did this to you?”

  My arm shoots out, pointing toward the basketball courts.

  “His name is Zack! He just walked straight up and punched me in the face! C’mere, I’ll show you.”

  In a flash I have her hand in mine and I’m pulling her through the gymnasium. Kids move past us in a kind of slow motion, like they’re Hula-Hooping and jump-roping in molasses. I am high on anticipation.

  Zack is center court when I point him out. He sees me first and flashes a shitty smile that he will regret. Not stopping to put down her omnipresent plastic bag purses, my ma lopes toward him. Standing under her, he barely comes to her ribs, and she looks down into his stunned face and says, “Are you Zack?”

  He nods, confused. Dropping her bags on the linoleum floor, Ma grabs him by the shoulders. She presses her hands together and lifts him clear off the ground until his face is level with hers. Terror overwhelms him as he stares at her.

  She starts to shake him. With every jerk her speed picks up, and now she’s rattling him back and forth like a rag doll, like a maraca. His head snaps back with the every word she says through clenched teeth.

  “DON’T. YOU. EVER. EVER. TOUCH. MY. KID. AGAIN. NOT EVER. EVER!”

  I think he is going to crap his pants. My whole day has turned around. I have never loved my mother more. I am gasping and hopping at the edge of the court. It flashes through my mind that this is probably very, very illegal and maybe she’d better stop, but I’m not going to be the one to say anything.

  Everyone in the gym is watching now as she puts him down. Immediately he starts to cry and runs away. Without breaking her poise, she picks up her plastic purses and gestures at me to follow. I scamper after her like a James Brown song is playing on my spine.

  We stride down the front steps of the school as giddy as robbers leaving a bank, serious faced and charged up. Not until we hit the corner do I let out a shriek. I leap into the air and high-five her. She smiles for a second, then clenches her big hand into a muscular, scary fist, and says, “NOBODY fucks with my BUD!”

  THE NEXT DAY, Zack keeps his distance. He looks like a wounded puppy. Everybody is hesitant to get close to me, too; maybe they fear the thrashing Zack got, but I don’t even care. As long as he’s not punching anybody, none of it matters.

  I feel as though I am part of some secret club with my ma that involves staying away from everyone else, because we are dangerous bad-asses and they all know we mean business.

  After school we go into a bathroom on the second floor because it’s more secluded. Sitting on a stool by the sink, I’m watching my ma apply lipstick in the mirror. She’s wearing her big trench coat again and her plastic bags are on a stainless steel shelf under the mirror.

  There is an overweight woman in spandex pants and a black T-shirt at the mirror opposite Ma’s back. We are talking about the audition I’m going on in an hour. It’s for something directed by the daughter of somebody famous named Arthur Miller and it’s important. Suddenly I am aware that the woman has turned around and is staring at the back of Ma’s head. She looks furious, and it takes her a minute to gather her words. She gives me a nasty look, then says to my Ma: “Are you iO’s mother?”

  Without turning around or stopping the application of her lipstick, my ma says, “Yeah, what about it?”

  “You assaulted my son yesterday!”

  The look on Ma’s face is one of pure disgust, as though this woman has squirted something rancid into her mouth.

  “Psh. I didn’t assault anybody.”

  “You have absolutely no right to lay your hands on a child.”

  “Little prick. Somebody needs to set him straight.”

  “Your freakish child is out of control, attacking my son, and then you! If you ever go anywhere near my children again I am going to report you to the police!”

  You have crossed into an invisible no-fly zone, lady. You are now in aggravated enemy territory, and you just took your foot off a land mine.

  Ma looks down at her bags. She sucks her teeth and caps her lipstick. She turns around and, facing this offensive woman, scrapes together everything in her throat and hocks it onto the ground at her feet.

  “Fuck you and your aerobics pants, your fat ass, and your monstrous children. Tell your dickhead son to keep his hands off my kid.”

  With that, she gestures toward me and sweeps out the door. I scramble off my stool after her, leaving Zack’s mother fuming and cursing in castrated mom-speak in the second graders’ bathroom.

  I WISH I COULD SAY that’s how it ends. I wish I could report that Zack Sanders had any sense of self-preservation. The near-whiplash incident slowed him down, but only for a bit. Within a month, he was back to top shithead form. Now the morning trip to school feels like a daily plank walk.

  The confusion about my gender is just too easy. He preys on my vulnerable weirdness. As a result I’m becoming more introverted. The constant ridicule in front of my classmates is exhausting, and he encourages everyone to be physical in their search for answers. He realized he hit the jugular with a relentless stream of variations on my most dreaded question: WHAT ARE YOU?

  At recess, Zack gathers his posse in the bathroom so I’d have to push past them to go, so I have given up peeing. It was a stressful process before, but this makes it completely impossible.

  I’ve become obsessed with not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, and my neurotic suspicion games have accelerated to a new level. If I get to the bottom step before the subway comes, Zack will get run over. If I make it to the top step before the door closes behind my neighbor, he’ll die.

  The unvented anger eventually turns inward, eating at me, creating a violent fantasy life that overtakes my thoughts. Trudging to school in the dead freeze of winter, I dream of stripping Zack to his underwear and making him run the streets barefoot. Feeling helpless, I sit on my stoop and contemplate stringing him upside down and pouring honey into his nose. I think about how he’d squeal when I stick thumbtacks between his fingers and under his nails. Eat an entire plate of fudge and then p
uke your guts out, you bullying bastard. I think about making him eat a shit milkshake. That one might have been my ma’s idea. She always defaults to making her enemies ingest feces.

  NINE STEPS TO THE bathroom during morning writing time. Four to the stall. Nine steps back to the classroom. Two steps to my cubby. Mine is in the middle of three rows of wooden squares stacked on top of each other.

  I am reaching for my black-and-white marble notebook when it hits me, a thud and a pain in my left forearm. Smack. I don’t know what happened. I look down. There is a pencil sticking out of my flesh. I feel my eyebrows go up. I just look at it, the offending object. What is it doing there? I look up and Zack is standing in front of me, arms crossed, smiling wide. I am confused. It takes me a long time to cry out. I only let go and scream when I remember about lead poisoning.

  Chapter 13

  Budapest

  Budapest, Hungary, April 1994

  I’M STANDING IN THE DOORWAY OF THE CAFETERIA AT A THEATER in Budapest. Balding men are clustered around wooden tables, wearing vests and sucking on cigarettes held between thick fingers. They are boisterous and loud, their jokes echoing from the high ceilings, punctuated by the sound of skin slapping skin when they hit each other at punch lines. Like sausages on legs, they are rotund in every way. These men are the lifeblood of this place and all theaters like it across Europe. They operate the lighting, build the sets, make castles fly into the rafters, and point spotlights at opera singers. Yelling in Hungarian and gulping steaming black coffee, they embody the weathered scent of long hours of physical work.

  Rehearsal is shut down because Ma is arguing with Yanik over money. She thinks he should be paying us more. We’re getting a salary for the both of us as if we were one actor. He says they can’t afford more. She says fuck you, it’s a four-country tour. Now it’s a lockout. I came downstairs to get a sandwich, but I’m stuck at the entranceway, clutching my forint coin. My heart is in my throat. I am across the world from my home and I don’t speak a lick of Hungarian. I can feel how thin the thread is that winds me back to my ma and our friends, easily severed if I make the wrong turn or go out the wrong door. Then I’d really be lost, in a place where I would have no idea how to find help. Something about this forest of potbellies implies danger.