Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

I didn’t have a watch. Wouldn’t they wonder where I’d gone? If they didn’t notice my absence, they’d notice the dishes piling up. They’d notice they had nowhere to put their meals.

Simon might have given some kind of explanation. “Peter? Oh, he was feeling lousy and I told him to go home.” Or more likely: “Peter? I saw him go outside. I thought he was just getting some air, but I guess he’s fucking off for the night.” They’d call in the other dishwasher, or take someone off the line to do it, or Chef would do it. Chef was not above washing dishes.

We didn’t use frozen carrots, I realized. Only fresh.

I sank down where I stood, thinking I’d lose less heat if I curled into a small ball. Stillness made me shiver. My fingers were already going numb. I flexed them in and out of fists, trying to keep the blood flowing. My best bet was to just wait until someone came into the cooler and then restart the banging and yelling.

I found that thought more comforting than I logically should have. Almost warming. Panic drained away. My toes pricked as though asleep. I wiggled them inside my shoes. I leaned my head against the wall behind me, my whole body fitting under a shelf. After a while, in the darkness, sleep became a strange, demanding force, like a rip tide. I was tired from working nights and going to school a few hours later. I was tired. More tired than cold.

I woke to muffled yelling. “What the fuck is this?” It was Chef. My mouth was dry, pasted shut. The crates were dragged away and the door was flung open before I could think to stand.

Chef stood over me. “Wong. Jesus. How long have you been in there?”

I blinked up at him. My arms and legs felt stiff as he pried them apart. I stumbled out into the cooler with his arm around me. As I woke more fully, I leaned on him harder, letting myself enjoy the firmness of his body, his smell of smoke and cooking meat and burned hair and spices and something more delicious besides. My body checked itself, decided it was fine. Numbness opened into uncomfortable heat. I buried my face in Chef’s armpit, trying to go limp, to seem as pathetic as possible. My eyes watered from the strong light. I let the tears flow. He moved me into the kitchen, then bellowed down the line, “Who did this?” All the kitchen noises, crude jokes and clanging dishware, stopped.

Chef gingerly released himself from my grip, held me up by the shoulders. “Wong? Do you know who locked you in there?”

I considered what Simon could do to me. Fort Michel wasn’t large enough to hide if someone was looking. I saw him cornering me in an alleyway between shuttered businesses, behind the Luther or the laundromat. I looked up. Chef’s eyes, brown irises made warmer with rage, made me invincible. I saw my future there. I would leave with Ollie; I’d live a life as rich and exotic as Chef’s, and Simon would stay here forever. “Simon.”

Everyone turned to look. Simon Hymen, forever a virgin, voice so high the girls won’t screw him. He looked convincingly astonished. “I didn’t. I don’t know what he’s talking about.” Still in the blast line of the Chef’s rage, he tried a different tack. “It was just a joke.”

I clutched at the Chef again, hugging his torso as though I’d collapse. He touched my cold cheek. “You’re fired,” he said to Simon.

Simon stared, uncomprehending.

“You’re fired! Get the fuck out of my kitchen!”

Simon’s mouth opened. His eyebrows knit slowly in confusion as he tried to figure out what had just happened. He looked to me. I smiled. I smiled with only my cold-cracked lips, so that it could have been a grimace of shock and hurt. I smiled so that only Simon saw.

The next morning in the shower, I had to shave. I’d put it off as long as possible. My father would mock the results — a notched-out teenage mustache, tufts of hair permanently under my lower lip and nostrils.

I watched the water bouncing off the blades. I considered. I stepped out of the stream of the shower, toward the back of the tub. I sprayed more shaving cream into my hands and spread it over my legs. Just running my palms up my legs and smoothing down the foam felt good. The razor felt even better as it slid up my shinbone. Clumps of hair washed away. I kept going. Stripping free the contours of my knee, then the scanter hair of my thighs. Water struck the skin with a new intensity.

I went over each leg twice, redoing missed spots, more fastidious than I’d ever been with my face. I shaved the invisible, downy hair off my buttocks. The water went cold and I let it. When I stepped out, I couldn’t believe how sensitive my bare legs were; the towel felt too rough but raised goose bumps of pleasure.

I put on my bathrobe, made of slate-blue terrycloth, inherited from my father. Our bathroom had a narrow full-length mirror hanging on the back of the door that I always had to avoid. I turned my back to the mirror and looked over my shoulder. Those legs! Coming out of the bottom of my bathrobe, a little pale, but so slim, so shapely. Legs made for high heels. Legs made for short skirts. Legs made to be seen.

My robe became a silk kimono, black with a red sash, tied loosely. I pulled it slowly up, clutching what I needed to at the front, lifting it high. Round as peaches, Chef said, squeezing each one, testing for ripeness.

That night, Ollie drove up to my house. He sat in his truck on the street with the engine off. Eventually I went outside.

I had to knock on the driver’s-side window before he noticed me. Even then he seemed to stare right through me, to the street. I knocked again and motioned for him to roll down the window. “Ollie, what are you doing here? I have work tonight.”

“Get in for a sec.”

I climbed in. “I only have a minute.”

He nodded. He didn’t seem to see anything around him. The cab of the truck was strewn with garbage, as it often was — food containers, condom wrappers, empty bottles. A wad of bubblegum was stuck to the dashboard on the passenger side. “Jeanine is pregnant,” he said, almost to himself. “We’re going to get married.”

I inhaled the stale smell of the dirty truck. I shut my eyes. All around us, Fort Michel came home from work, sat down to supper, watched the daylight vanish behind the low bumps that were the closest we had to mountains, to texture in the landscape. Turned on their TVs, raised a hand to their children, raised them to leave each other naked in a field or leave a snaking trail of blood from the locker room to the front door. Ollie and I were seventeen. Still believing that life was different in cities where the condos had been built, the pits had been filled, the buildings were tall — where you weren’t assaulted on all sides by failure and empty sky.

Ollie’s voice and posture were leaden. “There’re three girls in our year who are pregnant. None of them will ever leave Fort Michel. Nobody ever leaves Fort Michel.”

His brother, my sisters. We were supposed to follow them. Ollie finally turned to me. I was going to be late for work, for Quebec farmlands, European lovers. Ollie waited. I said what needed to be said. What everyone would say, as useless as consolations to the grieving: “It’s the right thing to do.”

I left Ollie behind. His truck was still parked against the curb when I got to the front door. I went to my bedroom to change. I still hadn’t heard his engine starting up.

I put on my uniform, and the pants chafed wonderfully on my legs. I would go alone to Montreal. I buttoned my chef’s jacket with the buttons to the right. Maybe Chef wouldn’t notice. Maybe he could make that mistake with me.

FATHER DROVE ME to Montreal with Mother in the back seat. I sat in the front, a suitcase in my lap and a hundred dollars in my wallet, at the start of a grim experiment. Bonnie was on a plane to Los Angeles, to get her diploma at an “alternative” school that Helen had found. “Helen will straighten her out,” Mother had said.