Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

Ollie found me eating lunch alone at my locker. He sat beside me and unwrapped what appeared to be a T-bone steak in tinfoil. I didn’t mention that we hadn’t talked since elementary school. We didn’t talk about what he’d done or what had been done to him, though everyone knew. The buzz was fading. We were coming up on the anniversary of a car accident that killed four students the year before, and the retelling of that story had taken over. Ollie acted like we had always been friends. “You work out?” he asked.

I almost laughed.

“I need a new gym buddy,” he said. Because you knifed your last one, I thought. He held the foil-wrapped bottom of the steak and ate it out of his hand, like it was a banana. “I can sneak you in for free. Nobody mans the desk at night.”

“I work nights,” I said.

“Get out. Where?”

“The new restaurant.”

“Every night?”

“Three nights a week.”

He drank a carton of milk with his steak. “Tell your parents it’s five nights. We’ll go lift weights, have some beers, and you can just say you were at work.”

It was a good trick. In spite of everything, I wasn’t afraid of Ollie. I felt pleased that he had thought of me. “Yeah, okay.”

His head jerked backward as he ripped the meat off the bone with his teeth. “I’m going to get huge. Then small-dicked assholes like the coach won’t be able to pick on me. He calls me a fag just ’cause I’m skinny.” Ollie watched me peel the crust from my white-bread-and-strawberry-jam sandwich. “You aren’t a fag, are you?”

I was supposed to shake my head, deny it up and down. He looked so cheery and simple, his cheeks stuffed with beef. I said, “I don’t know.”

Ollie took a hard-boiled egg from his bag. It gave off a strong, sulfurous smell when he rolled it on the floor and cracked the shell. I watched him pick the shell off and drop the shards back into the paper bag. “Well, do you want guys to suck your dick?”

I felt a revulsion so strong it was closer to hatred. “ No. ”

He ate half of the egg in one bite. “Do you want girls to suck your dick?”

The revulsion didn’t change. “No.”

Ollie shrugged and swallowed the rest of the egg. “Then I don’t know what you are.” Perhaps from the way I sat there staring at the floor, he added quickly, “I’m not queer. I’ve got a girl up in Innisfil.” I kept staring at the floor. “Hey, you okay?”

“I just don’t like thinking about it.”

“What?”

“Sex.”

“Jeez.” He chewed thoughtfully. “What’s that like? I can’t stop thinking about it.”

It wasn’t true. I loved the way the cooks at the restaurant talked about sex. Mapping out women’s bodies for one another like explorers who’ve returned home. Their jokes with animals, old women, and babies as the punch lines. It was over-the-top enough, absurd enough, that it didn’t feel real.

The sauté cook had graduated from Brock Road the year before. His name was Simon Hughman, and I remembered him only because he had a notoriously squeaky voice, as immortalized on the boys’-room wall:

Simon Hymen

forever a virgin

voice so high

the girls won’t screw him.

On our third night, Simon’s board had filled up with orders while everyone else was still going at an easy pace. Chef came up behind him and surveyed the chits. Simon tossed one pan and then another like he was juggling clubs. I had already noticed that the people who moved the fastest seemed to get the least done. “What’s the problem here?” Chef asked.

“Just got really busy.” His voice cracked on busy. He tried to elbow Chef out of his way, but Chef stood his ground.

“You jerking off on my time, Simon?” Chef mimed it with an empty fist. He grabbed Lyle, the garde-manger at the next station, from behind and started thrusting. “Having a good time with Lyle over here?”

The other men, including Lyle, laughed. Simon continued to flip his pans unnecessarily, as though it would make the mushrooms cook faster. “No. Just busy. Fuck off.”

The cooks hooted. I banged two pots together to join in the noise. Chef put one hand on the range hood to cut off Simon’s path. “You telling me to fuck off, Simon? Is that what just happened?”

“Sorry,” Simon muttered, squeaking. “I’m just trying to work.” He tried to push past Chef again. “I need more onions.”

Chef held him by the collar of his jacket. His voice changed. “Stop being such a macho fuckup and ask for help when you need it. That’s my fucking job, to help you. Don’t go running off to the cooler when your station looks like this — send someone. You hear me?”

I slipped away from the pit. The dishes were almost cleared. The rashes on my arms had begun to peel and weep pus. Inside the cooler, I filled a new insert of chopped onions and brought it over to where Chef and Simon were now cooking elbow to elbow, working to finish all the sauté orders.

“Thanks,” Chef said, surprised. He nodded at Simon. “Maybe we should give Wong your job.”

Simon pretended to laugh in his high, wounded voice.

In the front seat of Ollie’s truck, I changed from the work clothes that my parents saw into a T-shirt and sweatpants. Ollie ate handfuls of raw almonds out of a bag on the dashboard while he drove. My unstrapped body flung around with each sharp turn. “What are you going to do after graduation?” he asked.

“Culinary school.” It was the nearest approximation to what was expected of me that I could handle. My parents might be able to understand. It had the word school in it.

“My brother went to university,” Ollie offered. This was still unusual in Fort Michel.

“So did both of my sisters.”

“I know. We have that in common.” He gave me a moment to digest that. “I’m going to follow him after I graduate. He lives in Montreal.”

Ollie’s gym was a storefront in one of the strip malls at the edge of town, its emptiness visible through the windows. We parked right in front of the door. “My brother says it’s, like, the best city on earth,” he continued. “The hottest women. The craziest parties.”

We hopped out of the truck. He unlocked the door to the gym with his member’s key. Though there was no one around, it still smelled powerfully of sweat and bodies at close quarters. A poster by the door showed a woman doing some kind of twist, one foot in the air. She wore red spandex shorts and a halter bra, her defined abs and cleavage oiled. “How do you look like that? ” I said aloud.

Ollie took the question at face value. “Diet and exercise. I’m doing a bulk. If you want to look like her, you’ll have to keep your body fat quite low.” He didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about my wanting to look like her — like it was as legitimate as his desire to be hulking and large. Another thing we had in common: we wanted different bodies than our own.

He called on me to watch and learn as he started loading weight onto a bar. My eyes kept drifting back to the poster of the girl. When I looked at it again, I couldn’t tell if was in fact oil or if she was just that slick with sweat. Droplets clouded the air around her ponytail. “What about her legs? How do you get legs like hers?”

Ollie hoisted the bar behind his neck and started doing squats. He talked only on the exhale. “Your legs are already… as thin as hers. You just need to build… muscle on your ass.” He lifted the bar back onto the rack.

I searched his face, looking for judgment. His expression was as resolute and unemotional as when I’d watched him running with his former teammates. He had me try squatting the empty bar. My knees bowed outward after only three, and he pulled it off me quickly.