Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

I ran my hand over my smooth chin, a wordless reminder that I was six years old. “Do what I do,” he said. He mixed the shaving cream in a cracked wooden bowl. I looked around their bathroom. There was a curious lack of feminine things, the oils and creams and powders of the bathroom I shared with my sisters. No evidence of my mother.

Father lathered up his face and neck and I did the same. He handed me a disposable plastic razor. It was easier to look at his reflection in the mirror than at him, like seeing the sun through a pinhole projector. I followed his example, clearing away the foam from my hairless face in strips. “Did your mother ever tell you your Chinese name?” he asked.

I didn’t want to get my mother in trouble, but I was more afraid of lying. I nodded. I couldn’t remember the actual syllables she had whispered. I remembered they rhymed. “Powerful king,” I said. We rinsed off our razors in a second bowl of water.

“Adele’s Chinese name is her middle name. It will make her life hard when she’s a doctor.” He paused. I didn’t know Adele wanted to be a doctor. “Maybe she will change it.”

He ran the blade over his Adam’s apple. “We waited a long time for you. In a family, the man is the king. Without you, I die — no king.”

I slid the razor over my flat throat. It caught on the skin. “ Hah. ” A line of blood appeared.

My father glanced over, unalarmed. He ripped off a piece of toilet paper. He held the back of my neck and pressed hard with his other hand to stop the bleeding; it felt like being strangled. “It’s okay. Just part of being a man.” I stared up at his face, my head hanging back like a dancer’s in a dip, this strange embrace. “Women bleed much more.”

The space under the Big Steps was closed off on one side. There was only one way in or out. Cracks of light came through the bleachers, throwing the shadows of a prison window.

Roger dragged Shauna there by the arm. Our feet crunched on the gravel. We herded her toward the back of the hollow, blocking the entrance with our bodies. The momentum felt unstoppable. Lester’s elbow dug into my side as he tried to get closer, just as it had at Ollie and Roger’s grass fight. His expression was the same: manic, nauseated.

Shauna had lost a barrette somewhere along the way. Her mother would ask about that, I thought. Her socks were stained by the pale dust under the gravel. She cried. Not like I cried, not the way I heaved and sobbed into Adele’s chest in a closet. Soundless tears, as though crying were impolite.

“Lift up your skirt,” Roger said.

She blinked. I could smell Ollie’s sour breath. It came out in short, excited bursts. She raised the hem of her skirt by the corners, not quickly, not slowly. With a knowing I hadn’t expected. Like she’d done this before.

Roger’s eyes fixed to the spot. “Peter, pull down her underwear.”

I looked into Shauna’s eyes. My hands on her small hipbones. I tried to tell her that I was sorry. That we were both victims. I wanted her to see who I really was. The one who took a stone in the back. The one who combed his sisters’ hair. In her eyes, I could see only the reflections of four attackers, four boys in that dead, marble blue, like you could see the sky right through her.

There. Shauna’s ankles bound together. A bald, pink wound.

Shauna’s legs trembled and then buckled. She hit the ground on her knees. Her skirt pooled protectively over her thighs. Better to be one of us, better to be standing on this side than kneeling and weeping in the gravel while they leer, that was all my father wanted from me, to be one of them, to be a king.

But I belonged in her place, holding something so stunning they’d steal for it, they’d stare into its hot center even as it blinded them.

We took a long time walking home, not talking. The streetlights were already on. We passed through the undeveloped area between the school and our houses. The corner store, a garage, a laundromat, a stretch of empty lots. We lingered for a while over a dead rat, steamrolled flat by tire treads. The tail was the most recognizable part.

We came to my house first. I stayed on our gravel driveway and watched them walk away. The road rose uphill and then went down, creating the illusion that the boys disappeared into the horizon faster than they should.

I pushed open the front door. My father was sitting at the kitchen table. Mother sat on the floor by our shoes. My sisters were nowhere to be seen. They knew. Shauna’s parents must have called.

Mother picked me up by my armpits. She could barely lift me; my head hovered above hers, my feet dragged on the ground. She held me at arm’s length like a bag of garbage. She carried me into their bedroom and dropped me hard into a chair.

Father came in behind us. He leaned on the wall by the door. Mother opened her mouth and a long stream of invective came out in a language I barely recognized, a language of hard, short sounds, a language of pain. My father put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. She wasn’t supposed to speak to us in Cantonese. Our English would come out wrong, he’d insisted. Like theirs.

Deprived of that weapon, she used the only other one she had: she slapped me in the face. For a moment, no one moved, as if the sound of her palm cracking against my cheek needed time to echo. Mother walked out. The door hung open.

I met my father’s gaze. He stayed leaning on the wall across from me, his expression inscrutable. Slowly, deliberately, he straightened up. He was smiling. He didn’t speak for a long time, just smiled. I felt his approval like a warm glow.

He said, “Bonnie is moving into Helen’s room. You get your own room, son.”

My father loved me.

“I LOVE AN EIGHTEEN NIGHT,” Adele sang over Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night,” dancing with her hands alternating over her head like pistons. For the summer after she turned eighteen, we replaced any two-syllable word in songs on the radio with eighteen. Bon Jovi was livin’ on an eighteen. Janet Jackson told eighteen boys that they don’t mean a thing. Adele skipped through the house singing, “Bam-ba, eighteen! Bam-ba, eighteen!”

I was eight years old, the summer before Shauna and Roger and being marooned in my own bedroom. Adele would be leaving soon. Helen had been waiting seventeen years for her own room, and she would lose it within a few months. It wouldn’t surprise her; nothing did.

Bonnie and I imitated Adele’s steps in our white socks and plastic slippers. Adele drew circles in the air with her hips while Bonnie snapped just off the beat, marked by jolts of electric guitar. Adele and I leaned in toward each other, mouths moving in unison. “Yeah, I love an eighteen night.”

Helen sat at her desk, hunched so far over that her shoulders rose above her neck. She’d signed herself up for an SAT prep course that was run out of the high school, otherwise dormant for the summer. I danced over to her chair and asked if I could help her study. Rather than answer, she handed me one of her vocabulary lists. I couldn’t pronounce the first word. “That’s what I thought,” she said. She went back to her practice set of math problems. We sang straight into her addled brain: B can clean the house in half the time it takes A. If they cleaned it together in three hours, how many hours would it take for A to clean the house all by himself? Eighteen hours.

Bonnie slipped and fell onto the gray carpeting. Adele grabbed her chubby hands and pulled her upright. “Well, I love an eighteen night.” She spun Bonnie around. I took weaving jazz steps backward.

Helen leaned on her elbows, resting an index finger in each ear. In a class of seventy-two students, forty-one students are taking French, twenty-two are taking German, and nine are taking both French and German. How many students are not enrolled in either course? Eighteen students.