Haters

by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

  “I don’t need them to be trendy, exactly,” I qualify. “Just I’d like to fit in better.”

  “Of course you would.” He looks truly tormented by the fact that he hasn’t realized this sooner. “I have been so selfish, Chinita. I’m so sorry. God, I’m an idiot.”

  Don Juan wanders in and meows in agreement.

  “You’re not an idiot,” I say, wondering for the millionth time why it’s always my job to make my dad feel better when he should be the one who’s there to make me feel better. In truth, I agree with Don Juan; I do kind of think my dad’s an idiot.

  “No, I am. I am an idiot,” he moans. He pulls out his wallet and starts to riffle through it. I see wads of receipts, no cash, and a few credit cards. I’m familiar with the contents. Bleak. I think you can tell how responsible a father is by the state of his wallet. Emily’s dad, the businessman, has this neat, crisp wallet full of cash and shiny platinum credit cards. My dad’s wallet looks like a bunch of pieces of old linty cardboard all stuck together.

  “How about I give you my charge card and you go get yourself some clothes?” he asks.

  “I don’t think anyone will let me use it. They usually want an ID?”

  “Oh, okay. Right.” He looks at the digital time display on the face of the microwave. “How about we play hooky today and go shopping for you? I can call in sick. I’ll call the school for you.”

  I think of Chris Cabrera and how I’ve been looking forward to seeing him for days. “No,” I say. “I can’t miss school, Dad. I just started. God.”

  He looks guilty again. “That was a stupid idea. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Bad parenting. God. I’m an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot,” I say again. Yes, you are.

  “How about I go get some cash and leave it here for you and you can go shopping after school?”

  I shrug.

  “How much do you need?”

  “I don’t know.” I hate this. I hate that he is always asking me things like this, making a big deal out of things that don’t seem to be a big deal for normal parents, people like Emily’s parents. Her parents take her shopping for school clothes and don’t apologize about the fact that they forgot about it. Oh, wait, that’s because they don’t forget about it. Normal parents like Emily’s always remember to get her what she needs, and she always looks great. For my dad? Everything has to be a big production, like he wants me to stand in awe of the fact that he’s actually acting like a grown-up.

  “Five hundred dollars?” he asks.

  I gasp. That is more than he has ever spent on clothes for me in one shot. At most, he’s given me fifty bucks and dropped me off at JCPenney’s. “Yeah,” I say, excited. “Can you afford that?” There I go again, acting like a mom to my own dad.

  “Punkin, I wouldn’t offer if I couldn’t.” He smiles like he’s the big shot now. “I’m making a lot of money now, Chinita. We’ll probably get a house in the next six months.” I’m so angry at him for having money and not telling me about it, for forgetting that I might need clothes, for being a dad when what I really need is a mom. I wonder if my dad has any plans to do something psycho with his newfound money, like get “ice” implanted in his front teeth. God, that would suck, to see my dad flashing his teeth like Mike Jones. He’ll stop calling it a mouth, and he’ll call it a grill. Just watch.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Nothing.” I try to erase the image of my dad smiling through a grill full of ice.

  “You don’t want to go shopping?”

  “I have to go shopping. I need clothes.”

  “You want more money? Is that it? I know these girls out here put a lot of time and effort into their threads.”

  Threads? What is he now, a has-been extra from some old show, like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? “No. It’s fine.”

  Dad looks hard at me, like he’s trying to figure out a top-secret code. It creeps me out. He asks, “Do you think I’m neglecting you? Is that it? You want me to stay home tonight? I can do that. We can rent movies and stay in and have a dad-daughter night. I don’t mind. Hey, we could do microwave popcorn now that we have a microwave.”

  He seriously needs to get over the whole microwave fascination. “But you just said it’s a bunch of people you should know,” I say. I don’t want to stay home with him. I want him to go to a party. I want to be alone.

  Dad shrugs. “It is. But none of them — none of them — is as important as you are to me. Okay, Paski? I want you to understand that. I want that absolutely clear.”

  “I know.”

  “You are my life. I know I forget things now and then, but you’re everything to me. You got that?”

  “I know.” I get up and rinse out my bowl and stick it in the dishwasher. It’s nice to have a dishwasher, though I’m not all in awe of it, like my dad is with the microwave. We didn’t have either one back in Taos because my dad, in his former incarnation, was Mr. Nature. Now he’s all about the radiation. It’s alarming. Back in Taos, it took, like, twenty minutes for the water to get hot. Here, it’s instant. Life is almost too easy in Orange County. I can see how it’d be real easy to forget about things like conservation and nature here. The rules of nature don’t seem to apply.

  “You are my world, girl,” says Dad. He looks mopey and sad. I think he needs a girlfriend. Or a dog. Antidepressants. Something. He really does. I don’t like being his life besides work. I think he needs something else in his personal life, so that I can have a life of my own. It’s too much pressure to be another person’s life. Especially when that other person is your dad.

  “Just go to your party and have a good time,” I say, heading upstairs, sounding like a mom again.

  “So, I’ll see you when we get home later?” calls Dad.

  “Yeah,” I call back.

  “I want you home by midnight,” he instructs. “And I want that harmless boy’s name, parents’ names, and phone number before you leave.”

  “Okay,” I say. “You be home by midnight, too.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that. Traffic is pretty bad around here.”

  “I was joking, Dad,” I scream down the stairs. “I am the kid, remember? I don’t set your curfew.” God. What is wrong with him?

  “Right. Okay, well, just call me if you need me.”

  His voice sounds so small and sad downstairs. I close the door, go to the bed, and start to cry into my pillow. I don’t know exactly why. I’m trying to be alone with my misery when the Japanese girl’s voice suddenly comes again. I want it to stop so I can sob in peace. I don’t want to hear voices, and see coyotes, and whatever else happens to me. Then I’m startled by a light thumping on the wall next to my bed. I hear a muffled voice call out: “You okay over there?”

  I stay still and say nothing and hear it again. It is not a spirit voice. It’s human. From the apartment next door. It’s Keoni.

  “You want me to come over?” he asks. “I’m a good listener. If you have a problem.”

  Great.

  His room is directly on the other side of the wall. He’s practicing his good listening skills without my permission, through the wall.

  15

  Half an hour later, Dad has gone to work, and I’ve called Emily and Janet to complain about my weird father. Talking to my buds always makes me feel better. What I’d love more than anything is if they could visit me here.

  I leave the apartment through the garage. Kerani and Keoni wait outside for me, with concern on their faces.

  “You okay, Paski?” asks Kerani. He talks. He talks! I try to calm my surprise enough to answer.

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “We heard you crying,” the twins say in unison. Keoni speaks next. “We wanted to let you know that no matter what, we’re here for you.”

  Kerani speaks again: “Whatever you need. We’ll listen.”

  The twins look at each other and then back at me. Keoni says, “We know what it’s li
ke to be sad.”

  “Thanks,” I reply softly. I feel exposed. Sometimes I think it’s a bad idea to share walls with people you don’t really know. There’s something to be said for separate houses.

  “Want to talk about it and walk to school with us?” asks Keoni. As soon as he’s spoken, I hear the Japanese voice, the little-girl voice. I hold my hands over my ears, but it doesn’t help, of course, because this kind of voice doesn’t come from the real world. I wonder occasionally if I need medication.

  “What did we say?” the twins ask in unison.

  “It’s not you,” I say. I tell them about the voices I hear, hoping that they’ll decide I’m too weird to hang out with. I’m not a big fan of smoking or the ties with T-shirts. I’m sure they’re really nice guys, but there’s also the way they keep looking at my legs and my chest. They’re horny. I don’t need that right now. Not from them, anyway.

  The twins listen to my story about the voices and tell me it doesn’t sound weird to them at all. They tell me that their mother prays to dead ancestors all the time, and that in Japan they even take the bones out of the dead and clean them off. Then the twins ask me to tell them what I’m hearing now. I listen to it again and try to repeat the Japanese words.

  “There’s a girl saying, ‘dandan kowaku naro,’” I say. “And a man’s voice answers, real mean, ‘Utsubuse ni natte kudasai.’ And then I hear the girl screaming and crying really hard, and it’s horrible. I hate it.”

  The boys look at each other and shrug. “Go get Mom,” Keoni tells his brother.

  “Yeah, okay,” says Kerani. He goes back up the stairs to his apartment and I notice that in the right light, these guys actually aren’t totally bad-looking. You always hear about actors or singers who are really hot in their twenties and they always say they were fat or geeky in high school. I think these could kind of be like that, if they get a little taller and lose the baby fat and the zits.

  A minute later, Kerani comes down the stairs with his mother. This is the first time I’ve seen her, and I’m totally surprised to see that she’s one of those young-looking moms you see around here sometimes. She’s wearing a Juicy T-shirt and terry sweatpants with flip-flops. Her hair is cut in a chin-length bob that is long in the front and sort of short in the back, at an angle. It’s got pretty highlights in it. She is beautiful. She smiles at me and I say hello. She tells me her name is Melanie and asks if I like Aliso Viejo so far. I lie and say I think it’s great. What else do you say? That I want to go home? That I don’t think I’ll ever be rich enough or cool enough to feel as comfortable and confident here as I did back home? That my best friends are the coolest people on earth and now, unless we all go to the same college, I won’t see them forever, or at least for another two years?

  “How is your dad?” Melanie asks me. Is it my imagination, or does she seem to think my dad is all that? She has a crush on him. I can feel crush energy powerfully sometimes, and this pretty woman finds something of interest in my weirdo dad. She must need medication. Or maybe she takes too much already. Whatever it is, something’s not right, not if she digs my dad.

  “My dad’s fine,” I say.

  “Mom’s an artist, like your dad,” says Keoni.

  Melanie looks embarrassed. “I make my living building custom cabinets and shelves, things like that. But I like to sculpt.”

  “Oh,” I say. I hear the voice again and try to ignore it, but it’s a damn unsettling voice that doesn’t want to be ignored. Melanie notices my concerned expression has shifted, so she changes the subject.

  “Kerani tells me you have some Japanese words you want me to translate?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I say. I repeat the words for her, and her face gets pale. Her mouth opens, and she looks at me like I’ve said something frightening.

  “Oh my God,” she says.

  “What is it, Mom?” asks Keoni.

  “You said the second part is a man screaming at a little girl?” Melanie’s eyes are filling with tears.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “The first part is a cry for mercy,” she explains. “The second part is a man telling her to lie facedown.”

  As she says this, I hear a new phrase. “I’m hearing ‘hahaoya’ now, and crying.”

  “How?” asks Melanie. “How are you hearing this?”

  “I’m crazy?” I joke. But by now she is completely crying. “What? What did I do?”

  The twins are as confused as I am. Their mother touches my arm and says, “My mother was a little girl in California during World War Two. She and her parents were rounded up and put in one of those internment camps. Do you know about those?”

  “No.” I respond solemnly.

  “I’m not surprised,” says Melanie. “They don’t teach about it in schools here. During the war, the government here rounded up everyone they thought was Japanese, or who looked Japanese, and they put them in concentration camps.”

  “Like the Nazis?” I ask.

  “Not that bad. But it was still pretty awful. My mother never really talked about it, but she did tell me that she remembered being in the camp when some soldiers . . .” Her voice trails off. She regains her composure and goes on, “Basically she saw soldiers rape her mother right in front of her.”

  “Oh my God.” My chest hurts with the pain of what that must have been like, both for the child and for the woman.

  “She was six years old.”

  “I didn’t know that,” whispers Keoni.

  “Holy crap, Mom,” says Kerani. “How come you never told us this?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s a sad chapter of our lives that I would rather forget, and my mother never wanted to talk about it, so out of respect for her, I have tried to forget about it. But she used to have nightmares, and she’d scream those very words that you’re hearing now.”

  “Do you think it’s Grandma talking to Paski?” asks Keoni.

  “Is she still alive?” I ask.

  “She died when I was a teenager,” Melanie explains. “She never got to meet my children.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I pray to her every day, and I’ve prayed that I’d hear from her. I have so many things to ask her. I think you’re communicating with her. I don’t know how or why, but you are.”

  I feel the flesh on my arms rise. I don’t want to be communicating with the dead grandmother of these guys. I don’t want to know about the fact that she saw some men rape her mother when she was six years old. It’s horrible. I hate this gift. My grandmother is completely wrong. It’s not a gift. It’s a curse.

  “Do you hear anything else?” Melanie asks me, taking my hands in hers.

  “No,” I say, adding silently, and I don’t want to.

  “If you do, tell me,” she says. “Tell her I love her.”

  God, I think. That is a huge responsibility. Communicating love between the living and the dead, between family members. Mothers and daughters. I get chills and feel so sorry for Melanie and especially for her mother. I just want to hold the little girl she used to be in my arms and comfort her and protect her.

  “Mom, we have to get to school,” says Kerani.

  Melanie looks at her son and smiles. “You guys are right about her,” she says. “Our new neighbor is very smart and special.”

  I’m not really sure how to feel since I know something so intimate and revealing about this family I’ve just met. Part of me just wants to get away.

  “See you later,” I say. Then I add, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything from your grandmother.” I don’t hear the Japanese voices right now, and I’m grateful for that. I look at the boys, who seem sad. So I say, “For what it’s worth, your grandmother loves you very much. She wants you to be happy. She thinks you’re great.”

  Melanie wraps her arms around the boys and smiles. “Thank you, Paski,” she says. “You have no idea how much this means.”

  I ride to school in the cool wind, listening to my music and trying to get that awfu
l story out of my head. Sometimes I just wish so much I could be a normal girl.

  As I’m locking my bike outside the front doors, I hear a familiar motorcycle engine. I look up just in time to see Chris Cabrera coming down the hill. My heart jumps, and I run my hands over my clothes and hair to make sure I don’t look totally dorky. When he steers the bike right up to the curb near me, I feel my breath leave me. He stops the bike and takes off his helmet. He’s smiling and looks like he got a bit of a tan, wherever he was. In short, he looks awesome.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” I say casually. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks. You look good.”

  I try to shrug like I didn’t put any effort into it, but that’s a lie. I worked hard figuring out the clothes, and I even did a little makeup with a photo of Rachel Bilson next to the bathroom sink, thinking of what Tina told me. I feel self-conscious about it. I’m hoping the effort will pay off, by at least getting Jessica to keep quiet about me.

  “You look good, too,” I say to Chris. I blush, and he grins.

  “Andrew tells me you’re going to Trent’s party tonight with him?”

  I shrug as if it hasn’t been the main focus of my entire week. “I don’t know yet. I have to see how I feel.”

  “You should come.”

  “You going?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it, but now that I know you’re going to be there, I’m going. Trent’s ‘rents are out of town. It’s gonna be wild.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  The first warning bell rings. We’ve only got a few minutes to get to class. “I gotta go park this monster,” says Chris. “See you in Big’s class.” He eases the motorcycle toward the parking lot and around a corner.

  I head straight to the girl’s bathroom to check my makeup. I’ve stashed mascara and lip gloss in my backpack, but they’re kind of old. The other girls here have new cosmetics, NARS and that other brand I keep seeing everyone use around here, MoAoC. I’m embarrassed because I got my gloss at the drugstore, and the looks on their faces tell me that they know it. I don’t think many girls around here get anything at the drugstore, except condoms, if they use them.