Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

“Maybe,” Adele said. Helen snorted.

We let the afternoon pass in an air-conditioned haze. The movie was a modern Cinderella story: The unnoticed chauffeur’s daughter falls in love with one of the sons of the main house, played by William Holden. She goes to Paris a girl and comes back a woman, finally attracting his attention. Humphrey Bogart plays Holden’s older brother; he tries to discourage their romance by pretending to be in love with her too. Every frame was like a photograph, champagne and ball gowns in black and white. I watched Adele as much as I watched the screen, the scene changes playing out as light and dark on her face. She had her hands pressed to her mouth in delight. I thought she looked just like Audrey Hepburn — the gamine smile, the swan-necked beauty.

As we left the theater, I noticed that the bakery next door had a bank-foreclosure notice in the window. The whole town was shutting down because Adele was leaving. At least the Luther exited with class, running up an electric bill of daytime neon.

Time felt loose. We meandered in the opposite direction of home and came to the new bridge. It led to a housing development whose funders had run out of money while it was still concrete foundations in a pit. Helen had begun to speak out loud. “ Ensconce, lachrymose, crepuscular .” She looked at me meaningfully. Now that she wanted me to ask her what the words meant, I’d lost interest. Her gaze drifted southward, past the river. Toward her future in the States.

Bonnie dropped her arms down over the railing of the bridge. Cars rumbled behind us, a few at a time. They weren’t in a hurry either. “How do they build bridges?” Bonnie asked. She pushed her toe against a large bolt jutting up through the metal.

I remembered the hollow frame being lowered on a hook. “Cranes,” I said.

“Like the bird?” Bonnie traced a split in the concrete with her foot.

“Sort of,” Adele said. “They’re a lot like birds. They dip their beaks, pick up parts of the bridge, and raise them up high.”

Bonnie nodded. Giant white cranes with ink-stained wingtips and red crowns built the world, steel crossbeams balanced on their stick legs. She traced the groove in the concrete again. “And what are these lines for?”

“I don’t know,” Adele said.

Helen had walked ahead a few steps, her back to us. “Those are expansion joints,” she said. The wind carried the words back to Bonnie.

“What does that mean?”

“So that the bridge doesn’t break when it expands and contracts with the temperature.”

Bonnie stared down at her feet in horror. “What?” I asked.

“Heat makes it expand, cold makes it contract,” Helen finished. Her hands were in her pockets and she leaned back on her heels.

“Why?” I asked.

Bonnie climbed up the railing, trying to get her feet off the bridge that might collapse at any moment. Adele went to hold her safe. “Concrete’s like people,” she explained. “When it’s hot, each little bit of concrete tries to get away from every other little bit. Like how it sucks to share a bed with someone in the summer. When it’s cold…”—Adele squeezed Bonnie hard until she had to giggle—“they snuggle together close. Like you two, always climbing into my bed in the winter and sticking your cold feet on my back.”

“That’s not it at all,” Helen said, still facing away from us. “The kinetic energy increases as you heat something, so the particles vibrate at higher amplitudes, increasing their average distance from one another.”

Adele tickled Bonnie, who hooted and arched backward over the railing, almost falling. “That’s what I just said.”

Helen turned around. Her chin-length hair tangled in her face from the hot wind. Her shoulders broadened. Expanding. “That is not what you just said.” She gestured at Bonnie and me. “They believe whatever bullshit you say, you know. They’re going to think concrete has feelings.”

“Of course not,” Bonnie protested. She slid to the ground, toed the bridge sympathetically. “It just doesn’t like to be cold.”

In August, the flies and bees came in from the lakes, swarmed like a fog through town. The four of us sat on the two-meter strip of grass behind the house, the bit of lawn that was ours in front of the sparse trees that belonged to no one. It was the last summer that we would all be together.

Bonnie poured orange soda on her hand and held it out, watched in fascination as the flies swarmed the back of her knuckles, tasting it with their feet. The heat forced Helen to study by osmosis. She pressed the cool cover of her SAT prep manual to her forehead. The glossy cardboard soaked up her sweat, and the knowledge flowed into her bloodstream. She pictured the problem in her head: a sheet of paper folded in half and then in half again, the constellation of holes and half-holes. Four holes in seemingly random places, one half-hole like a bite mark along the edge. How many holes will there be when the paper is unfolded? Eighteen holes.

Adele, in a white bikini, rested on her stomach on a towel. She dealt in small joys: bringing Alfie to life, letting the ticket-taker at the Luther touch her hand. Wearing a bikini on our lawn where boys could slow down their cars and gawk, too stunned to honk.

I drew on her back in black Sharpie. I was drawing angel wings, feather by feather. She let me wear one of her old bikini tops, as long as I wore a boy T-shirt over the top. I felt the warm sunshine through my T-shirt, and I hoped I was getting a tan around the halter straps of the bikini. I held my elbows in tight as I stroked her back with the felt pen. It squished the flat skin over my sternum into ridges that were not completely unlike Adele’s shelf of cleavage.

“That tickles.” Adele yawned.

The SAT manual blocked Helen’s face completely. It looked like it had replaced her head. “All the toxins in the ink are seeping into your skin,” she said, muffled.

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.