More than double my age. Both short though Bello was just barely taller. So different except they were always together and even now I can’t picture them apart.
Bello stood thumbs-in-waistband, bouncing on the balls of his feet. So tense, secondbrother, like the clothespin holding space and time together. Like if he relaxed for a second reality would come flying apart. Floro didn’t bounce. Floro was poured out of concrete. Thick bull neck and prettyboy face. He lunged forward and grabbed me around the waist, flipped me upside down so my feet stuck up over his shoulder. “What you looking at, babysister? What, huh? Think we brought you presents?”
The world swung wildly. I could feel the sugar roll sliding back up my gullet. I clenched my teeth. Firstbrother smelled like grease and sweat and something strange, a cloying darkness that clung to my nostrils. “What? What?” Then he caught sight of the robot. “What do you know. Hailo’s finally playing with dolls.”
He dropped me. I stayed facedown for a moment, breathing in the warmth of the dirt. Waited til my ears didn’t ring. When I looked up Bello was right over me, bouncing, bouncing. His face was blank but he thrust out a hand to pull me up. I ignored it.
“You shouldn’t of left me.”
Bello’s eyes narrowed a shade. He wrapped his arms around his torso like maybe it would still his body but he kept bouncing. Silence, and then he nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
I stood up. I charged at him and rammed my head into his gut. Bello took it noiselessly, held me at arms’ length. “Hailo. Hey. We’re here now. We’re back.”
“What-ever. I’m not stupid, you won’t stay.” I twisted out of his hands. “You know you won’t.”
Bello took a deep breath. Chewed his lower lip. His eyes like embers burning up the things he couldn’t say. Apologies for what they had done to me. Forgiveness for what I would one day do to them. All he said was, “Probably not.”
“Hey bro, come check this out. This worth anything?” Floro beckoned, bent over the robot.
“Not for sale,” Scram blurted.
I scuffed a pebble at him. “Shut up.” It bothered me when other people weren’t afraid of my brothers.
Bello shook his head as he walked over. “Nah, they’re dropping all over the place. Cheap partydolls. Somebodies up there must be breaking some rules.”
We watched my brothers skate their hands over the robot. Scrunch up her shirt and prod her belly. Yank her hair and stare at the back of her neck. My scalp prickled. Bello lifted her severed wrist and flapped it at Floro. “See? They cut out the memory.”
“Huh, ladybot.” Floro sucked in his breath. “You been through hell.”
Then Bello knelt in front of her, tugged off the balloon skirt, and plunged his hand into the hole between her legs. His arm disappeared up to the elbow. His eyes got the blank look of someone concentrating hard on something he couldn’t see. “Ha, ha,” Scram said weakly. I didn’t want to be watching but I couldn’t look away.
Floro squatted near the robot’s head, fingers rapping a manic beat on the flesh of her neck. Her head trembled.
It must’ve only taken a minute but time felt like it was being shredded like Scram’s real leaf. Bello withdrew his arm. Shrugged and scratched his scalp. “Everything’s fried. Told you. Let’s go.”
They walked back to their scooters. Floro collared me as he went by, scrubbed his hand through my hair. “Come party with us tonight, babysister? We are taking it eas-ay tonight, you bet.”
Through the crook of his arm I saw Bello staring hard. He was either examining my bone marrow or he was a thousand miles away. Then he twitched and shook his head like he was unsettling flies. “We’ll be around for a while, kay Hailo? Maybe get you some new clothes.”
I wanted to press up against them. I wanted us to lie together in our pajamas while I traced my fingers over their scars. I wanted them to try and scare me. One more time. Go on, just try. But they kicked on their scooters and whined away toward the neighborhood.
In their wake we sat around picking scabs, drawing lines in the dirt. I didn’t want to look at anyone. The robot was gummy with dirt and other people’s sweat. In the distance a bus swooped down bearing tired bodies home from the recycling plant. Through the quiet there came a tiny raspy noise. Corry twitched, “What was that?”
We strained but heard only the vanishing hum of the bus. The sun was backing down. The house frames combed long blue shadows through the dirt. Scram stretched arms over his head. “Probly my stomach. I’m going home.”
I didn’t move. Home sat in my mind like a hungry hairless animal. I fed it only when I had to. Just when I’d made up my mind to stand, there, again the noise, as though it were right by my ear. Leave Alone whooped, “It was her!”
He pointed at the robot.
The four of us froze and watched her. She was utterly motionless. Her head drooped. Her eyes bulged. The shadows of the real trees lay across her sunken belly. We stared until my neck pinched.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Scram said, kicked dirt at the robot and hiked off toward the neighborhood. The other two followed him, poking each other, shooting scared grins over their shoulders. I stood but couldn’t make myself leave. I decided to stamp the floor of the fort down flat. I swept out the real dry leaves that had fallen. There was a leaf on the robot’s chest. I flicked it off and my fingernail grazed her breast. Touching her curled my stomach so I forced myself to grab hold of her shoulders with both hands. I leaned down and rested my forehead against her forehead.
“What do you know?” I whispered to her. “You’re trash. You’re not going anywhere.”
The robot brought her handless arm up to pet my shoulder and murmured, “You smell so good.”
I would have screamed if I’d been a screaming-type girl—instead I just fell backward, gasping, my skin lit with fear. The robot’s arm fell down limp again but her face twitched. Her distended eyeballs rolled. Her lips flapped like they were trying to escape her face. Her shoulders twisted and the cloth we had draped over her fell away.
“Oh dear!” she giggled. “I seem to have lost my shirt!”
Her voice came from her head but not through her mouth. Full of all the sweet things I had never eaten. Her legs knocked against each other. I realized she was trying to cross her ankles. “I have been bad, haven’t I?” Her feet snaked back and forth. “You might have to punish me.”
Red waves were breaking over my brain. The world had narrowed to a dark alley with her lipstick prints on the walls but I could see light at the far end and I throttled toward it. Reaching back I groped for the cinder blocks the boys had uprooted. My fingers clutched at one as big as my head. I cradled it in both arms and stood, took a step toward the robot. The wires in her severed arm flexed and fluttered. I hoisted the ancient cornerstone over my head. My biceps screamed. “My!” Her eyes lighted on everyplace but me. “How strong you are!” And I slammed the block down on her face.
Her head collapsed inward. I threw my weight onto the block, crushing the circuitry of her brain. Like crushing honeycombs. I backed off and let the block roll away. Nose split. Lips all over her face. I squirmed my body under the block and heaved it up and again brought it down on her head. Her skin broke into rubbery fragments. Her eyeballs popped and dissolved. Her head a misshapen mass of pale plastic and wire. I ground the paste of her skull into the bark of the real tree.
Then I took the block again and smashed her sternum. I smashed her breasts into the dirt. I smashed her severed wrist until you couldn’t guess where arm ended and earth began. I smashed her pelvis and her kneecaps, grated away the fake softness of her skin until she was only a pile of parts, shattered wafers of circuitry and pulverized filaments. I smashed until my muscles wept, until I couldn’t inhale without shrieking. Then I collapsed on the mound of remnants, curled around the block, spat out a mouthful of slime. There was no blood. Course there was no blood.
<
br /> It was dark. The sky was starless but car lights zipped overhead. I stood up all shivery, turned and ran home. If you saw me then you might’ve thought I had no idea where I was going, but I knew with each step my foot was headed for the ground.
Up the curving staircase with the rotting boards, our room door was open. My brothers sat on the floor, winding the clockwork of their crazy. I stopped in the doorway to watch them, my heart thudding in my throat. Floro hugged his knees to his chest. Bello leaned against the wall, legs splayed out. Tabs trashed about them like fallen petals.
“—nothing left.” Floro spat out the words. “And what about us, think we’re still pink slick? Think we still ooze when they squeeze?
Bello rubbed a hand over his face. “Nah. We’re not dolls.”
Floro sprang up. “Want to find out?” He leapt to the other side of the room and came back holding a knife.
Their eyes were glassy. A tendon flexed in Bello’s foot. Floro knelt and laid the blade against Bello’s lip like a steel mustache. “How about I slice your lips off?”
Bello grinned against the knife edge. “You are such a clown.”
“You think? You think I’m joking?
“You’re always joking. Ha ha ha.”
“Funny, yeah sure. Here’s a good one. Fill a body with plastic, what do you think happens? Huh? We’re the punch line, littlebrother.”
“Okay,” Bello shrugged, “for real you want to find out? Here.” He thrust his fist out between them. “Cut off my hand.”
I stepped into the room. They didn’t turn to me but Floro waggled the knife hello. “There’s a patty on the windowsill for you, Hai,” Bello called. With his other hand he reached out and pulled Floro’s knife to rest on his wrist. “I’ll show you. Cut off my hand.”
I curled up in the window to eat, the frame digging into my tailbone. The yards outside were going shut-eye dark. I sent the fibrous lumps of patty efficiently into my stomach. Food has always seemed like the least pleasurable thing you can still yearn for. In the dark corner Mom was in her chair, plugged in. I didn’t look at her. I watched my brothers across the room. They crouched together, staring at Bello’s wrist like angels would pour out of it. Floro’s hand trembled. Silence clogged everything.
Floro did a dismissive psh. “You’re a plastic person, littlebrother. Like the dolls, like the rest of us.”
“Not yet. You’ll see. You coward. It’ll bleed.” Enough hope in Bello’s voice to break a window. “I know there’s some left.”
Oh, my brothers. The ones who taught me not to be afraid of hate. In the dim room they glowed blinding like green balls of fire. Bathed in this light of theirs I could feel a new kind of love. The kind that gives you X-ray vision, that lets you see into the future. If they didn’t slit each other open they would die protecting me.
Floro’s hand trembled again and Bello snapped, “Do it.” If he were a fuse he would be lit, if he were a particle cannon he would be firing. “I’ll strangle you if you don’t.”
“Yeah? You’ll strangle me if I do.”
“How’d I strangle you with one hand?”
“Ha!”
“Ha!”
They laughed like they were heaving cinder blocks at each other. The knife pressed a shallow valley in Bello’s skin.
The green fire lit them up, showed me what they would find. Sparks and wires, filaments and honeycombs. Inside Floro too—I could see the petal-thin cogs of his brain. The tik-tok mice running, running, turning the wheel of his lungs.
The pressure would burst my eardrums. There was too much of this, always the same thing. I got up and brushed by them on my way out, left them frozen, straining against, against.
I settled cross-legged on our stoop and rested my chin on my hands. In the darkening even the burbs look pretty, the way a shipwreck is beautiful at the bottom of the ocean. The houses swim black-black out of the blue-black night. If I raised my eyes I could catch the blinking of cars flying overhead. Red-white, red-white, though a star-spangled sky. I watched for a moment and then turned my eyes back to the houses. My arms ached from lifting the block. I wrapped them around my skinny chest and felt something warm pulse through me. Not happiness. More like satisfaction. Funny how dropping something heavy can feel just like clutching something close. We in the burbs—we didn’t need any kind of robot. We had all been pushed out the car door. We fell the thousand feet, we hit the ground, we got up and kept going.
Teacher
What we were doing that week was subject-verb agreement. I showed the students pictures of Grayson and Hayley picking strawberries or flying a kite. “If Grayson were talking, would he say, ‘I flies the kite’ or ‘I fly the kite’?”
Thompson raised his hand. “Ms. X, Ms. X, I got a question! What’s the red things?”
“Duh, strawberries, idiot,” said Alisha. Thompson said he ain’t talking to her, big tits. Alisha stabbed a pencil into the back of his hand.
“Ms. X, Ms. X, Ms. X!”
“Yes Nacai?”
“Uh, like, is there a drug, like, it keeps you acting like you’re on the drug, even when you’re not on it no more?”
“That sounds like PCP, Nacai. Now, if Grayson were talking to Hayley, would he say, ‘You pick the strawberries’ or ‘You picks the strawberries’?”
“I think that’s what my dad’s on,” Nacai said.
In the pictures Grayson and Hayley were always colored with brown skin, for cultural sensitivity.
The curriculum master plan indicated that it was time to distribute the mid-unit assessment, so I did. Devin put his head on his desk and moaned like an old bear.
“Devin, I need you to fill out this assessment so I can know if you’re making adequate progress.”
“My tooth hurt,” he said, and moaned again.
“That’s third person, Devin. What ending do you put on the verb?”
“My tooth hurt cause I don’t go to the dentist. Cause my mom don’t sign up for benefits with the clinic. Cause the clinic open hours when she has to drop my baby sister off at Kiddie Kollege, and she goes once with my baby sister, and they say they don’t let you bring children in the benefits office, so we don’t go back.”
When they turned in their assessments they got a hug from Ashton, our Innovation and Evaluation Intern. Ashton had a spreadsheet, and he recorded each child’s name and the duration and intensity of the hug. The goal was to quantitatively determine whether hugs were a worthwhile motivational strategy. Nacai handed in his assessment with only one question bubbled in, and grabbed Ashton around the waist. “Five . . .
six . . . ,” counted Ashton. “As a college student, Nacai, buddy, I gotta ask you to let go.”
Part of Ashton’s internship contract stipulated that he begin all of his sentences with ‘As a college student . . .’
Nacai didn’t let go. Ashton peeled his arms away. “As a college student, I can tell you, the scale doesn’t go past six. Nacai. The scale stops at six.”
Next week we would start verb tenses, which they sorely needed.
It was time for my performance review with the Vice Principal. “Your assessment results were lackluster,” he said.
“It’s been seven months since I liked myself,” I told him. “I don’t think I know how to tell the truth anymore.”
“What you need to do,” he said, “is create an environment more conducive to learning.”
“Sometimes when I speak, I can’t hear the words. All I hear is the sound of worms pushing up through wet earth.”
The Vice Principal frowned. “There is nothing in our standards-based approach that covers the sound of worms.” He leaned forward in his plastic chair. “Let me give you some advice. If I were you, I would maximize instructional time, and minimize misbehavior.”
He waited until I had written this down; then he stood up and shut the door.
On the back of the door was a poster that said, IF YOU BELIEVE, YOU CAN ACHIEVE. “That curriculum cost us a lot of money,” he said. He was close enough that I could feel his breath on my face. “We should discuss how you can provide us with adequate returns on our investment.”
When I got back to the classroom I found the substitute sitting at my desk making origami boxes. The class had dog-piled Ashton. They were pulling his hair and jumping on his stomach and lying down on him. “As a college student,” he gasped out, “I am really not okay with this!”
“He said he was gonna leave us,” Alisha told me. “He said he wasn’t gonna be here next year.” She wrapped her body around Ashton’s ankles and tied his shoelaces together.
I could barely see Ashton under them. His feet kicked futilely. I let out a whoop and leapt on him too. The class cheered. Their bodies writhed all around me. We tore up Ashton’s spreadsheets. I took his clip board and cracked it in half over his head. “Something is wrong here!” Ashton yelled. “Something is hideously wrong!” I told him if he kept starting sentences like that, his stipend would be withheld.
Alisha was the only one who received an “Adequate” on her assessment. I asked her to stay after class so I could give her a “Super Job!” sticker. She looked at it so intently I thought maybe she was praying. Then she said, “It’s hard to be convinced of the necessity of verb tenses when our situation exhibits so little possibility for change.”
I said, “Education is the number one predictor of economic mobility.”
She picked at the sticker and whispered, “When I’m born, I am poor. Today, I am poor. When I die, I am poor.”
“When I was little,” I told her, “I thought that people who desired to do good things would accomplish good things. I thought that the best way to rectify evil was to notify the authorities. I thought there was nothing you couldn’t understand if you were willing to ask questions.”
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