Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

Bouncing near me on the mattress was a pot of violet eye shadow that made me think of an eye forced open. I brushed it onto my eyelids. I wet my thumb on my tongue and smeared the shadow into an opaque layer, all the way from the tear ducts to the outside corners.

“Don’t mess with her makeup, Peter,” Helen said, as though that were the worst of the things I’d done. She tapped a pen against her lips. She made no effort to stand. “You look insane.”

I peered into the compact mirror again. I thought I looked lovely.

I popped open Adele’s clear plastic umbrella with a border of roses at the bottom and held it over my head, like I was in a bubble. I heard the bathroom door open. I sat up, crossing one leg over the other above the knee, keeping my back primly straight. Adele stopped in the doorway. She took in the sight of her things strewn across the room and the miniature version of herself. I announced, “Now you can’t leave.”

Adele pried my fingers gently from the umbrella. For a moment, she held it so easily it seemed to hover. Then she pulled it shut. The umbrella went back in the box.

She scooped clothes off the floor in piles. She shoved the Away box up against the edge of the bed, and, in a few sweeps of her arms, everything tumbled back in again — rumpled, disorganized, but back in the box. I couldn’t believe how quickly my plan had unraveled. She gave me an uninterested, affectionate pinch on the shoulder and left the room.

Adele and Helen were once offered a ride home by a stranger. Helen was twelve and Adele was thirteen, the more interesting age.

The man was not entirely a stranger, Adele would later argue — a friend of a friend’s father. She still remembered him as handsome, wearing a white jacket with large lapels like a preacher on TV. Unsustainably clean.

He gestured to them from the window. She remembered noticing his neatly trimmed fingernails. There was a fine rain. Adele got into the car. Helen refused, so Adele gave her the umbrella. Helen watched the car disappear through a watery blur of pink roses. She thought Adele would never come home, and she couldn’t make herself feel bad about that. When you behave that stupidly, there are consequences: maybe the river would be dredged for bodies two weeks later.

Helen and Adele arrived home at the same time. The coughing gray Lincoln Continental stopped at the house next door and Adele stepped out. One leg and then the other, like a movie star. Smiled and waved at the driver as he pulled off. Helen told herself that she was glad Adele wasn’t murdered, that she hadn’t wanted to tell the news cameras that she was the smart one, the one who didn’t get in the car, the one who knew it was better to squish down the sidewalk in waterlogged shoes than risk getting strangled by a pervert. She watched Adele wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

I ran from the bathroom back to Helen’s post. The one thing Helen and I had in common was our lack of friends. Bonnie sometimes disappeared to other little girls’ houses, and Adele had a wide territory through town. She could be anywhere.

“Helen, help.” Helen looked up and saw me frantically rubbing my eyes, purple- and pink-stained, as wide as raccoon markings. “It won’t come off. It won’t come off! Dad will be home soon!”

Helen watched my agonized dance as I hopped from foot to foot like I had to pee. Her face said I hope you’ve learned something. She ushered me back to the bathroom. She knelt to get into one of the cupboards, and her seventeen-year-old knees cracked.

“Here.” She handed me a tub of cold cream. “Put it on top of the makeup, then wipe it away, then wash your face again.” I spread a thick layer over my entire face, leaving holes for my eyes. A Halloween mask. Helen crossed her arms. “Why did you put it on?”

I was too busy dunking my head under the tap to answer. Water flooded in and out of my nose. “You want to look like her,” she said. I didn’t deny it. “You’re too young to understand how pathetic she is. How badly she needs people to like her.” I pressed a towel to my face and inspected it in the mirror for blush and shadow. My skin was dried out from the scrubbing. “You look at her and you think that beauty is all that matters.”

My face was clean. Colorless and uninteresting as Helen’s. Everyone could see that Adele was the superior creature: the ticket-seller at the Luther, the man who drove her home and left Helen standing smart and unwanted on the curb.

The night before Adele was supposed to leave, I was determined not to sleep. I sat up in bed, convinced there was some way I could stop it from happening. I’d hidden her bus ticket in the pantry, but that was only a stopgap.

I heard Bonnie shifting in her bed. “Hey, Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“The cranes aren’t birds, are they.”

“No.”

We sat in the dark, both of us picturing giant white birds sleeping in construction yards. Their heads were tucked under their wings, beaks harder than steel. Who would give us these visions? Who would take us to black-and-white films, let us draw on her back and wear her clothes? When Adele left, all beauty would pass from the world.

The sun seemed explosively bright when I woke up, though our bedside clock said it was only six o’clock. I got dressed without waking Bonnie. Her leg hung off the edge of the bed and twitched as she slept.

I stepped silently through the hallway and the living room. Adele’s boxes and suitcases were lined up by the door, the stacks varying in height like siblings in a family portrait. They were the symbols of her leaving. They were the agents of her leaving. I was going to bury them in the ground.

I decided to start with the heaviest box I could carry, leaving the easier boxes and the wheeled suitcases for later, when I was tired. I carried it as far as the backyard before I had to flop down. I took a moment to breathe then dragged it into the trees, digging my heels in the dirt.

Adele would be able to dig them up later, once she’d been convinced of her mistake. The boxes were sealed with tape. The contents would stay clean. I was doing her a favor.

In the copse of spindly birches, some of them dead but still standing, the trees were too far apart to provide much cover. I left the box between them anyway. I went back to get the metal snow shovel from where it hung behind the house. It was heavy. Another body to drag.

It took all of my strength to lift the shovel up and drop it, point down, to the ground. It bounced off the hard earth. There was no way I could dig a hole here, let alone one deep enough to contain the Away box. I slid down and rested against the shovel, picturing the boxes and suitcases waiting by the door, their passive victory.

As my breathing slowed, I became aware of the sound of moving water — a slow, babbling flow. I left the box and shovel and climbed the slight slope. I caught sight of a narrow tributary below me, a stream that flowed into the larger river that went through town, the one with the bridge that didn’t like to be cold.

Maybe the dirt would be softer closer to the stream. More like mud.

I couldn’t lift the box this time, so I shoved it up the ridge. Once it was over the hill, I gave it one solid push so that it rolled down to the river’s edge. I threw the shovel after it and stumbled down to them. The box was dusty and streaked with mud, the corners crushed inward, making it more like a ball.

I started to scrape at the bank with my shovel. It didn’t really make a hole — the dirt just broke away and crumbled into the river.

“Peter!”

I looked back. A figure stood on top of the ridge, the eastern sun behind. Even in silhouette, I knew it was Helen from the threat of her stance. She edged down the hill sideways, arms out like a surfer’s.