For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  My angel wings were elaborate, eighteen pointed ovals, one wing sloping out of each of Adele’s shoulder blades. She shrugged and the wings shifted. When she showered that night, the soap foam would run black.

  Soon there were boxes at the foot of Adele’s bed marked Home and Away, like opposing teams. While Adele was in the bathroom getting ready to go out—writing 18 in lipstick on the mirror and wiping it off with her arm—I went into Adele and Helen’s bedroom. I started pulling things out of the Away boxes. Helen stayed at her desk and didn’t stop me, which I took as tacit blessing.

  Helen lived at her desk. She ate handfuls of dry bran cereal and drank coffee that was dark as river silt. Already the seed of the woman she would become was visible, the woman who would crush multivitamins to a powder with the back of a chef’s knife, who would believe eating disorders were things that happened to young girls; grown women could not be too thin. I moved Adele’s winter sweaters into a Home box. I threw some books onto the ground. I flung her sneakers across the room, then followed them with a long volley of balled-up socks and underwear, the panties blooming open midair like juggling scarves. I counted them as I threw: eighteen pairs of socks and eighteen pairs of panties. I pulled out a tangled string of fake pearls and put it on over my head.

  I paused briefly at a thin photo album. Open to a random page, it showed Adele as a child, her stick legs in a yellow sundress. Almond eyes wide with invitation. It had been worse then: She made grown men sweat, made their thoughts dribble from their temples. Made them question what kind of men they were.

  When the box was light enough, I dumped the rest out onto Adele’s bed. I rolled on top, right in the center of the mess, a makeup compact digging briefly into my back. I pulled it out from underneath me and snapped it open. In its tiny mirror, there was just a small circle of the center of my face. I fluffed blush onto my cheekbones, trying to sharpen them into Adele’s high angles.

  Bouncing near me on the mattress was a pot of violet eye shadow that made me think of an eye forced open. I brushed it onto my eyelids. I wet my thumb on my tongue and smeared the shadow into an opaque layer, all the way from the tear ducts to the outside corners.

  “Don’t mess with her makeup, Peter,” Helen said, as though that were the worst of the things I’d done. She tapped a pen against her lips. She made no effort to stand. “You look insane.”

  I peered into the compact mirror again. I thought I looked lovely.

  I popped open Adele’s clear plastic umbrella with a border of roses at the bottom and held it over my head, like I was in a bubble. I heard the bathroom door open. I sat up, crossing one leg over the other above the knee, keeping my back primly straight. Adele stopped in the doorway. She took in the sight of her things strewn across the room and the miniature version of herself. I announced, “Now you can’t leave.”

  Adele pried my fingers gently from the umbrella. For a moment, she held it so easily it seemed to hover. Then she pulled it shut. The umbrella went back in the box.

  She scooped clothes off the floor in piles. She shoved the Away box up against the edge of the bed, and, in a few sweeps of her arms, everything tumbled back in again—rumpled, disorganized, but back in the box. I couldn’t believe how quickly my plan had unraveled. She gave me an uninterested, affectionate pinch on the shoulder and left the room.

  Adele and Helen were once offered a ride home by a stranger. Helen was twelve and Adele was thirteen, the more interesting age.

  The man was not entirely a stranger, Adele would later argue—a friend of a friend’s father. She still remembered him as handsome, wearing a white jacket with large lapels like a preacher on TV. Unsustainably clean.

  He gestured to them from the window. She remembered noticing his neatly trimmed fingernails. There was a fine rain. Adele got into the car. Helen refused, so Adele gave her the umbrella. Helen watched the car disappear through a watery blur of pink roses. She thought Adele would never come home, and she couldn’t make herself feel bad about that. When you behave that stupidly, there are consequences: maybe the river would be dredged for bodies two weeks later.

  Helen and Adele arrived home at the same time. The coughing gray Lincoln Continental stopped at the house next door and Adele stepped out. One leg and then the other, like a movie star. Smiled and waved at the driver as he pulled off. Helen told herself that she was glad Adele wasn’t murdered, that she hadn’t wanted to tell the news cameras that she was the smart one, the one who didn’t get in the car, the one who knew it was better to squish down the sidewalk in waterlogged shoes than risk getting strangled by a pervert. She watched Adele wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

  I ran from the bathroom back to Helen’s post. The one thing Helen and I had in common was our lack of friends. Bonnie sometimes disappeared to other little girls’ houses, and Adele had a wide territory through town. She could be anywhere.

  “Helen, help.” Helen looked up and saw me frantically rubbing my eyes, purple- and pink-stained, as wide as raccoon markings. “It won’t come off. It won’t come off! Dad will be home soon!”

  Helen watched my agonized dance as I hopped from foot to foot like I had to pee. Her face said I hope you’ve learned something. She ushered me back to the bathroom. She knelt to get into one of the cupboards, and her seventeen-year-old knees cracked.

  “Here.” She handed me a tub of cold cream. “Put it on top of the makeup, then wipe it away, then wash your face again.” I spread a thick layer over my entire face, leaving holes for my eyes. A Halloween mask. Helen crossed her arms. “Why did you put it on?”

  I was too busy dunking my head under the tap to answer. Water flooded in and out of my nose. “You want to look like her,” she said. I didn’t deny it. “You’re too young to understand how pathetic she is. How badly she needs people to like her.” I pressed a towel to my face and inspected it in the mirror for blush and shadow. My skin was dried out from the scrubbing. “You look at her and you think that beauty is all that matters.”

  My face was clean. Colorless and uninteresting as Helen’s. Everyone could see that Adele was the superior creature: the ticket-seller at the Luther, the man who drove her home and left Helen standing smart and unwanted on the curb.

  The night before Adele was supposed to leave, I was determined not to sleep. I sat up in bed, convinced there was some way I could stop it from happening. I’d hidden her bus ticket in the pantry, but that was only a stopgap.

  I heard Bonnie shifting in her bed. “Hey, Peter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The cranes aren’t birds, are they.”

  “No.”

  We sat in the dark, both of us picturing giant white birds sleeping in construction yards. Their heads were tucked under their wings, beaks harder than steel. Who would give us these visions? Who would take us to black-and-white films, let us draw on her back and wear her clothes? When Adele left, all beauty would pass from the world.

  The sun seemed explosively bright when I woke up, though our bedside clock said it was only six o’clock. I got dressed without waking Bonnie. Her leg hung off the edge of the bed and twitched as she slept.

  I stepped silently through the hallway and the living room. Adele’s boxes and suitcases were lined up by the door, the stacks varying in height like siblings in a family portrait. They were the symbols of her leaving. They were the agents of her leaving. I was going to bury them in the ground.

  I decided to start with the heaviest box I could carry, leaving the easier boxes and the wheeled suitcases for later, when I was tired. I carried it as far as the backyard before I had to flop down. I took a moment to breathe then dragged it into the trees, digging my heels in the dirt.

  Adele would be able to dig them up later, once she’d been convinced of her mistake. The boxes were sealed with tape. The contents would stay clean. I was doing her a favor.

  In the copse of spindly birches, some of them dead but still standing, the trees were too far apart to provide much cover. I left the box b
etween them anyway. I went back to get the metal snow shovel from where it hung behind the house. It was heavy. Another body to drag.

  It took all of my strength to lift the shovel up and drop it, point down, to the ground. It bounced off the hard earth. There was no way I could dig a hole here, let alone one deep enough to contain the Away box. I slid down and rested against the shovel, picturing the boxes and suitcases waiting by the door, their passive victory.

  As my breathing slowed, I became aware of the sound of moving water—a slow, babbling flow. I left the box and shovel and climbed the slight slope. I caught sight of a narrow tributary below me, a stream that flowed into the larger river that went through town, the one with the bridge that didn’t like to be cold.

  Maybe the dirt would be softer closer to the stream. More like mud.

  I couldn’t lift the box this time, so I shoved it up the ridge. Once it was over the hill, I gave it one solid push so that it rolled down to the river’s edge. I threw the shovel after it and stumbled down to them. The box was dusty and streaked with mud, the corners crushed inward, making it more like a ball.

  I started to scrape at the bank with my shovel. It didn’t really make a hole—the dirt just broke away and crumbled into the river.

  “Peter!”

  I looked back. A figure stood on top of the ridge, the eastern sun behind. Even in silhouette, I knew it was Helen from the threat of her stance. She edged down the hill sideways, arms out like a surfer’s.

  I sat down, defeated, putting my butt squarely in the mud.

  Helen stopped in front of me. She looked at the shovel. She looked at my tired face, my stained clothes. At the dirty, still-sealed box now with only the Aw of Away legible. She watched the box tensely, as though it were a wound-up jack-in-the-box.

  She knelt down. Mud and water got into her sandals. With both arms, she thrust the box into the stream.

  The box sank down with a sucking blomp, then bobbed up again. Only the top was visible, like an iceberg. The box moved leisurely with the current. When it struck the rocks along the bank slightly farther down, not very hard, the tape came loose from the sodden cardboard. The flaps popped open.

  Helen and I watched as Adele’s possessions flowed away and the box buoyed more and more easily to the surface. Glossy paperback covers jumped like iridescent fish. A coveted leather jacket floated on its inner lining, looking like an eel, sleek and menacing. Everything migrated slowly downstream.

  I felt numb, more conscious of the wet seat of my pants than anything else. Helen extended her hand to me. I took it and she pulled me up. We walked back to the house. At the back door, Helen took off her sandals and wiped her bare feet on the mat. She lined up her shoes neatly. I kicked my sneakers off and left them where they landed.

  Adele was standing with her boxes and suitcases by the front door. She paced a small circle. The house still had the anticipatory air that it had when my parents were sleeping, their authority latent. Adele’s face—eyebrows knit in confusion, not accusation—made me realize what we’d done. I started to cry.

  Adele opened her arms and I rushed for her knees. “I just wanted you to stay,” I mumbled, muffled by the bottom of her nightshirt. Even then, I knew my eight-year-old tears were crocodilian. I knew what I was saying: I don’t care if you’re happy, as long as you’re here.

  I could feel Adele and Helen meeting eyes over my head. Helen stayed a safe distance away from our embrace, her head held high and her stare blank.

  Adele’s stuff washed up on the riverbank a day later. Someone phoned the police, thinking there had been a drowning, that all those clothes implied a body. It was in the local paper.

  Another family would have reported what had actually happened, saved the town from speculation. Ours ignored it. The explanation was too complicated, too private. I had guilty nightmares. In my dreams, policemen stood at the edge of the river, carefully skimming the water with butterfly nets. They moved as gingerly as archaeologists, gathering pieces of a teenage girl’s life. They ignored their radio and the screams of real crimes.

  Adele went to study at the University of Western Ontario, in another Ontario town that sprawled through strip malls and industrial lands, hardly different from the one she’d started in. Helen left a year later. She went to UCLA on a cocktail of scholarships and bursaries that just covered her first year.

  On a weekend, she drove by herself to Santa Monica. She bought a sandwich and sat on the Venice Beach boardwalk, laughing reedily at artists hawking sketches, musicians in the costumes of their subcultures thrusting tapes at passersby, the deluded parade of people who thought they’d make it one day. Helen went to California like a gold-rush miner, expecting to find a place where dreamers were ground underfoot by the hard-working, the wise. She would return wearing a suit of gold or she wouldn’t return at all.

  We drove as a family to drop Adele off at the bus station. The buses picked up from a long strip like an airfield. She wore impractical traveling clothes: high heels and a cinched blazer, both in electric blue. Her hourglass figure shimmied away with the distinct ticktock of her shoes on the asphalt. Bonnie and I held hands as we watched her go. We were the same height, had the same baby plumpness, the same sweaty palms. At a certain point, we couldn’t tell if Adele was walking toward us or away.

  I have no memory of Helen’s leaving. If it was by plane, train, or bus. If we said goodbye. I have only memories of events that took place before she left and memories of events that took place after. It was as though when she left, she vanished in the night, unnoticed.

  3

  Thursdays

  EVERY DAY BUT THURSDAY, Bonnie and I came straight home from school. We did our homework at the kitchen table. Bonnie turned my threes into birds and sideways pairs of breasts. I watched the back of our mother as she shelled shrimp in the sink, her spine rigid and visible through a cotton shift. She inhaled sharply as she cut her finger on a spiky leg. She lifted her finger high enough for me to see the drop of red falling into the bowl of naked shrimp, and then she went on. Their briny gray juices got into her wound, and she went on. We would eat her blood for dinner.

  The doorbell rang. My mother jumped as though slapped awake. She went to open the door. “Yes?”

  Bonnie climbed over me to see who it was, and I followed. We strained to see past our mother.

  The woman at the door was pale and thin and seemed to quiver at the edges, like she was made of water. She had limp red hair. Her freckles were a handful of sand tossed in her face. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Lisa Becker. I live down the block.”

  My mother stayed mostly behind the door. “Did you just move in?”

  “No, we’ve lived here for a few years.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, I, uh . . .” Mrs. Becker seemed to have forgotten why she had come. She glanced around for an explanation. Her gaze landed on the plastic box in her hands. “Oh, right. I heard you had a little boy and girl. I had some toys we don’t need, so I thought I’d give them to you.” She opened the container: a rag doll and some toy cars.

  “My son is fourteen and my daughter is thirteen. But thank you.” My mother started to close the door. Something in Mrs. Becker’s face stopped her. “How old are your children?”

  “I don’t have any children.” She moved her head and hands constantly, like a bird, and it made it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. “I had a miscarriage a few years ago and my mother had already bought me the toys. You know—whether it was a boy or girl, we’d be ready.” She closed the container. “I guess they would have been more useful to you back then.”

  I couldn’t see my mother’s face, but I could feel the distaste radiating off her back. What kind of woman talks about miscarriages at a stranger’s front door? “Thank you for the offer, Mrs. Becker.”

  If my mother breathed out too hard, Mrs. Becker would blow away like a plastic bag. “No problem, Mrs. Huang.” She started down the front steps. She was wearing white sneak
ers, the same discount-store brand as my mother.

  “How did she know our name?” Bonnie asked.

  “Who cares,” Mother said, going back to the sink.

  Bonnie was born fourteen months after me, more like a twin than a younger sister. When she was twelve and I was thirteen, she stole a pair of earrings from a friend’s house. She walked into the jewelry store of the nearest mall and tried to sell them. The clerk called the cops. Bonnie told them she had taken it from her own mother’s jewelry box. The cop called our house.

  I was home. I hated answering the phone, so I stood by the machine and listened to the long, grave message. The moment he hung up my hand shot out and hit the Delete button.

  Bonnie was delivered home. She didn’t learn any of the things the cops had intended to teach her. She learned to go to pawnshops downtown, wear heels, not look twelve.

  When Bonnie was five and I was six, we popped out of our shared gray bathwater and went into the kitchen. It was exam season, when Adele claimed to be studying at the library in the afternoons and Helen actually was. Our mother, hiding from us in the bedroom, had left dinner to simmer. Bonnie wet her hands in the beet juices on the cutting board and convinced me to do the same. She reached back and squeezed her own buttocks, leaving a pink imprint of cupping hands. I grabbed the sides of her face. Magenta tribal paint. She pushed back on my shoulders, giggling.

  Key in the lock. Our father walked in the front door and our mother walked out of her bedroom to greet him. The beet soup started to boil. We were covered in each other’s red fingerprints, smudged meaningless. Our hands were puckered from the bath, and the sunken stains highlighted the creases. “What are you doing?” Mother asked.