by Myriam Gurba
The final bell rang, and I breathed easy; my homework wasn’t due till Friday. Half the class, though, last names A through L, had to perform theirs. They were going to give “How-to” presentations about an activity of their choice. We had two weeks to prepare them and the talks were going to take all period. Procrastinators were wigging out, putting the finishing touches on their half-assed projects, looking at the relaxed suck-ups with jealousy. I leaned forward and wriggled out of my sweatshirt and hung it on the back of my chair. Waiting for Mrs. Kiku to finish roll call, I leaned over, picked a paperclip off the floor, and unbent it. Using the sharp end, I scratched “Just Drift” into my desk. That’s what I plan on doing my presentation on, drift racing. I think Mrs. Kiku will like it. The motor sport got its start in Japan.
“Konichiwa!” Mrs. Kiku said.
“Konichiwa, Sensei!”
“Abel Andres,” Mrs. Kiku called, and the choont7 walked up to the podium and everyone cracked up all through his presentation, “How to Make Tamales,” because there’s no Japanese word for “tamales” and it sounded funny, all that Japanese with “tamales” thrown in over and over. Shayla Arrington went next and did hers on playing tennis. That’s how most of the talks went, just instructions on how to play a sport or make a food or do household chores. Shayla brought in a tennis racket and tennis balls and wore her tennis skirt because Mrs. Kiku explained that those of us who brought in props would get one extra credit point per prop. Henry Wilson, who did how to bake a cake, practically brought in a shopping cart full of ingredients. I’ll bet he raised his grade from an F to at least a D.
Best presenter was Dantrell Jackson. He did “How to Krump Dance.” He brought in the DVD Rize to show the king of krump, Tommy the Clown who lives in Compton, and Dantrell also showed us a video of himself competing in and winning a krump battle. The crowning moment came when he got Mrs. Kiku to stand beside him to try to learn how to pop her booty, like a stripper. She couldn’t master the move but she was a good sport about it.
After Dantrell, this short little lesbian whose name I can’t remember but who looks like an anime character did “How to Change a Tire.” She brought a wrench and a dirty tire and some lug nuts but she apologized, “I can’t show you the crowbar part ‘cause the principal took my crowbar away.”
Dantrell asked, “You brought a crowbar to school?”
She grinned and nodded.
Dantrell was impressed. “That’s vicious!”
Mrs. Kiku tossed the lesbian two points for the missing crowbar. She believes in A's for effort.
The class kiss-ass, Daisy Lara, went last. She did “How To Get an A in Japanese, Level 2.” Someone coughed, “Bitch,” at the end of her presentation. With everyone done, we clapped and whistled, and Mrs. Kiku told us “Sayonara,” and the lunch bell rang.
“Sayonara,” I told her as I walked out the door and headed in the direction of the main building. I maneuvered my way through the quad, this time dodging lines of starving kids waiting to buy pizza at carts operated by short ladies with hairnets. I entered the main building by the trophy case and went straight to the office. It was pretty empty.
“Hi, Mrs. Ruiz,” I told the school secretary. She was drinking Diet Coke. She set the can down on her desk.
“Hi, Cassidy.”
“Could you please get Mr. Reyes for me?”
“Sure. He just finished suspending someone but I’m pretty sure he’s not doing anything now.” Mrs. Ruiz got up and walked to Mr. Reyes’ door. She knocked.
He opened. “Yes?”
“Cassidy Moran is here to see you.”
He poked his head out. “You want your flan back?”
I nodded.
He turned and opened a mini-fridge by his desk and got it out. “Here,” he said.
I walked around the counter and took the plate from him. “Thanks.”
“No more tardies. Okay, Moran?”
“Alright. Thanks again, Mr. Reyes.”
I turned and left and headed out the side door, going south, to the hot, dusty bungalow maze most people avoid at lunch. I arrived at my English teacher, Ms. Valdez’s, classroom, and walked up her carpeted ramp. She was sitting at her desk grading papers, smacking gum with her mouth open.
Ms. Valdez is my favorite teacher. She’s a Mexican greaser girl, or I should say, lady, with chunky Bettie Page bangs and pin-up girl tattoos on her forearms. She dresses nice, more fashionable than most teachers and full-figured women, and she always wears bright red lipstick that makes her look paler than she really is. Because she’s weird and cusses, she’s one of the most popular teachers at Will.
On the wall behind her desk, she’s got a shrine dedicated to Morrissey, and on her desk, she’s got what she calls her “natural history museum,” a lacquered alligator head with glass eyes, a baby shark in a jar, a paperweight of a frozen scorpion. Mounted on the wall above her phone, there’s a taxidermied pheasant. She introduced him to us on the first day of school.
“Class, I’d like you to meet Seymore,” she said.
This girl asked her, “Why do you call that thing Seymore?”
“ ’Cause he can see you. Seymore’s always watching you.” She winked.
Ms. Valdez can get away with being such a freak because we’re at an “urban” high school. “Urban'”s code for “ghetto” and Willmore can be pretty dang ghetto if I don’t say so myself. Like, we’re the most ethnically diverse high school in America which pretty much means that there aren’t a lot of white people here and things get a little tense with gangs and with stupid Mexicans calling Blacks “mayates”8 and angry Black kids telling Mexican kids to go stand on the freeway and sell oranges, and everyone calling Asians “nips” when that’s really a Japanese slur and the people getting called it are probably Hmong, Cambo, Laotian, or Thai.
I’ve figured out that the way things work around here is that as long as a teacher can control us and there aren’t total race riots happening everyday, administrators look the other way when it comes to eccentricity. Ms. Valdez might wear tight black dresses with flaming skulls on them and fishnet stockings and necklaces with rhinestone spiders but everyone’s down with it cause she’s got us in check. Now, if she were to go teach in, say, Orange County, she’d have to chew with her mouth closed, buy a whole new wardrobe, and quit with the longshoreman talk.
I looked around. A fan stirred hot air and Ms. Valdez’s room wasn’t as full as it usually is at lunch. By the rear bookshelves, this boy who I think is autistic was playing an Asian guy at chess. Three light-skinned Black girls were huddled around a yearbook, whispering. This Filipino glam rocker, Damien, was sharing earphones with his best friend, this cute Black girl with clear braces, Portia. They looked borg-like, their heads connected by white wires, bobbing to the same beat.
“Hey,” I said to Damien. He popped out his earphone and looked up. Portia took out hers, too. I stared at Damien. He wore blue eyeliner that started at the tip of his eyebrow and descended halfway down the bridge of his nose. “Wassup with the makeup?”
“That’s my unicorn stripe,” he lisped.
Real diplomatically, I asked a question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while: “Are you a transsexual?”
He shook his head. “No. Just androgynous.”
A black boy wearing a do-rag popped his head in the door. He said, “Gimme two dollar, nigga,” to Portia.
“I ain’t no nigga!” she yelled back.
“Okay. Gimme two dollars, niggette.”
“Fuck you!”
“Ay!” Ms. Valdez screamed. “Knock it off!”
“You ain’t goin’ gimme no money?” do-rag asked.
“No.”
“Forget you then!” The boy left.
“Who was that?” I asked Portia.
“My sister’s friend. He’s dumb.”
“I wanna ask you guys something,” I said to Damien and Portia, “but first I have to talk to Ms. Valdez.”
They nodded and popped their earphones
back in. I turned and timidly walked over to Ms. Valdez’s desk.
“Ms. V,” I said.
She looked up and smiled. “Yes, Roberto?”
“Don’t call me that!” I groaned. “You know I hate being called that!”
“That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. But you know I go by Cassidy.”
“Okay, Ca-ssi-dy. How’d you get that name anyways?”
“The Partridge Family. Re-runs of it. My mom liked David Cassidy.”
“Poor you.” She took her gum out of her mouth and stuck it behind her ear. She grabbed a red apple and bit it and chewed and asked, “What can I do you for?”
“You know the junior thesis that was due last week?”
Ms. Valdez took another bite and got lipstick all over the white of her apple. “Mm-hmm. The one you didn’t turn in?” she answered, her mouth full.
“Yeah. I’ve got it right here.” I pulled it out of my backpack.
“I don’t know, Cassidy. That shit’s a week late.”
“But I brought you this tasty flan!” I blurted and placed it on her desk by a dry sea urchin.
Ms. Valdez busted out with Santa Claus laughter. “Kid, you sound like Napoleon Dynamite going, ‘I caught you this delicious bass.’ Kudos to you, Cassidy! Just for having the balls to bribe me, I’m gonna accept it one week late and I’m only gonna dock ya ten points. The maximum grade you can get on this is ninety out of a hundred.”
“Can you grade it for me right now?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“That’s cool, that’s cool,” I said, backing away.
I started to turn around, but Ms. Valdez said, “By the way, what’d you do your thesis on after all?”
I grinned. “Catch-22.”
“Yeeeees,” she coaxed.
“I argued that Yossarian’s a homo.”
“How’d you support that supposition?”
“Easy! The first line in the book is about him falling in love with a dude. Love at first sight, man!”
“Fair enough. I’ll let you know by Friday what your grade is.”
“I did the math. This’ll bring my grade up to 60%, won’t it? Even if I fail the thesis?”
“Yeah. This,” she touched my paper, “will ensure you pass. Hell, it might even bring you up to a C if it’s any good.”
“Awesome. Okay, see you later, Ms. Valdez.”
The bell rang.
“See ya, Cassidy.”
I walked back to the borg. “Hey,” I said. “So, the question. Did you guys do your history homework?”
“The worksheet on Chapter 25?” they asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“No.”
“Damn. I was going to ask if I could copy it.”
Damien and Portia unplugged their earphones, grabbed their bags, rose and the three of us left Ms. Valdez’s together, dragging ourselves north, across campus, to fifth period, US History. It’s right upstairs from Mrs. Kiku’s and we hate that class. Everyone hates it because the teacher, Walker, is an uptight little bitch. He thinks Bush is God’s gift to America and every Monday, we do what he calls “Update: Iraqi Freedom.” Walker leans against the podium and tallies how many people we’ve killed over the last six days in the Middle East while he guzzles black coffee. All the excess caffeine makes him paranoid and he wears Chester the Molester glasses and Lee jeans and hiking boots and he suffers from Napoleon Syndrome–he’s barely five one. Dude spends way too much time hanging out with Hispanic female students during tutorial and his version of US History is an embarrassment. When we did Vietnam, he skimmed over the anti-war movement and only devoted one sentence–one sentence–to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia.
I know about the mess that happened over there cause I like reading about war and stuff. Sokhun told me gory details about the Khmer Rouge and my mom’s sister, my punk rock Tia9 Shelley, has the Dead Kennedys’ single “Holiday in Cambodia” in her vinyl collection. When I listened to it, I heard Pol Pot’s name for the first time and Sokhun told me about how he was a communist dictator who created his own time cycle starting at year zero and he set up these re-education camps which were basically the Cambodian version of the Holocaust where you got sent to work or die. Sokhun’s mom and dad almost went to one cause they wouldn’t stop being Buddhists and Sokhun’s dad wears glasses. According to Pol Pot, glasses were a sign of subversion.
Her parents escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand where her oldest sister was born and then they came over here like a lot of Cambodians did. Sokhun told me that Long Beach has the highest Cambodian population outside Cambodia and it’s obvious driving down Anaheim Street. All you see is Cambodian shops and restaurants, pho noodles and straw flip-flops. It’s Little Phnom Penh.
Me, Portia, and Damien waited in the hallway, trying to kill time before we had to go into Walker’s and Portia saw her twin, Alexis, pass by. “What we doin’ today in history?” she asked her.
“Watchin’ a video.”
“ ’Bout what?”
“Ronald Reagan.”
“Ugh!” Damien wretched.
The bell was thirty seconds shy of ringing so the three of us walked into class and took our seats.
“Get out your homework and pass it up,” Walker said.
The bell rang and Walker walked from the left side of the room to the right, collecting papers from the first person in each row. When he was done, he counted. He made a pissy face. Only five people did his worksheet. He shook his head with disgust and carried the little pile to the inbox on his desk and set it on top. Then he turned and walked to the podium and straddled a little shelf on the bottom of it with one foot. Walker leaned against the stand and gripped the sides and said, “Today we’re watching a video about one of our most charismatic leaders, the fortieth president, and one of my personal heroes, Ronald Reagan. Hopefully, as you watch, you’ll understand why he ranks right up there with Ike and Bush.”
Somebody chirped, “Kennedy!” in a helium sucking voice. Walker was not amused. Same voice chirped, “Clinton!”
Walker folded his arms and his mouth settled into an angry line. “Thanks to your classmates’ immature behavior. We’ll all be staying one minute extra after the bell.”
Portia whispered, “Fuckin’ Rasheem!” and reached around and shoved the boy sitting behind her. He just giggled.
Walker turned out the lights and hit play and I put my head down. The VCR, our babysitter, was going to sing us a lullaby. The last thing I heard before conking out was, “…one for the Gipper!”
Portia was shaking my arm. Drool coated it and left a snail trail across my desk.
“Cassidy, c’mon! Your girlfriend’s waitin’ outside!”
Sokhun! My eyes opened. My head shot up.
“Oh! Shit!”
I wiped my mouth, fixed my glasses, grabbed my backpack and jammed outside. I saw Sokhun from the back first, standing by the drinking fountain. She was wearing her white Vans with the pink skulls, jeans, and a blue shirt. She had her Roxy bag slung over her shoulder. She turned around. Her face was pink, like strawberry ice cream, like the skulls on her shoes. Too much crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did your mom and dad find out your sister’s gay?”
She shook her head and her soft hair brushed her shoulders.
I started to get seriously worried. “What’s wrong then?”
She shook her head again. She folded her arms. “We can’t talk about it here.”
“Okay. Let’s go then.”
We both started walking. I had no idea where we were going, but we turned the corner by the girls’ bathroom and walked down the stairs at the end of the hall and headed out the exit beside the cafeteria. We crossed the lawn, cut through the pines, passing the auditorium. We crossed the street and walked past the 98¢-and-Up store and stopped at the corner. Delightful Donut loomed behind us. I could smell the dough boiling in the grease. We still hadn’t said a word.
“Sokhun. What
’s wrong?”
She started to cry.
“Please? You’re scaring me.”
“Can we sit down?”
“Okay.” I started walking towards an empty pink table.
“No! Let’s go behind.”
We walked around back together. Sokhun squatted next to a dumpster. It smelled sweet and rotten from the donuts in the trash. Sokhun was creeping me out. I knew she was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear, something no guy wants to hear.
“I’m pregnant.”
There. That was the big secret. I knew it from the minute I heard her voicemail but ignored it like maybe if I didn’t think about it, it’d go away. But here was the proof, her confession swirling in the air. I had to face it. I couldn’t pussy out. I had to be a man about things, even if my example wasn’t the best. My dad, Roberto, left when I was three. My mom told him to pick us or meth and he picked meth. That’s a tweaker for you.
I want to be a better man than him. I reached for Sokhun’s hand.
“Sokhun, it’s your body. You have the right to choose what you wanna do. I’ll support you. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
“Good. Because I already know what I wanna do.”
“What?” I expected her to say, “I want to get an abortion.”
She said, “I’m going to induce a miscarriage.”
“You mean get an abortion?”
“No. I mean we’re going to do this ourselves.”
I felt sick. “How?”
“I’ve already started. I’ve been drinking this tea since yesterday. It’s made of tansy. It’s supposed to make me have my period and miscarry. I’m already getting weird cramps.”
“What’s it made of? Where’d you get it?”
“It’s tansy tea. Tansy’s just a flower. I got it at an alternative medicine store on 4th Street.”
