Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(24)

But what are you doing about school? he says. How will you do well in school from North Carolina? Some things are important, according to my father.

My teachers send homework in the mail. Yellow paper packets. Fat clips. Periodic tables. I tell each and every one of them somebody died.

Somebody died, I say on the phone, because my mother is too superstitious to say it.

My teachers have always called me a liar. You play sick, they’ve said. Nobody skips like you. Nobody is sick so much. Sick in your head, maybe. What do you do all day at home?

Absent again, Queera? Clarissa will ask me on AOL. Cheater.

What I do all day when I’m at home: I watch Bob Ross flutter his paint strokes on the television in my room. I listen to him describe the world—the cockeyed birds, the fuzzed-over face of a rock. I want to shape my own planet this way, color it the way I want. I boil soup; I practice making coins disappear between my fingers; I call psychic hotlines; I wait for my parents to wake up.

Somebody died out here, I tell my teachers, so we’re burying them all up.

Them?

Nobody ever believes me.

Plural?

What I do all day here in North Carolina: More soup. More magic tricks. I practice levitating playing cards, spinning them between my outstretched hands. I breathe into my gas mask and pretend that I’m dying. I ask my mother to drive us past the local orphanage so I can be dropped off and live like Little Orphan Annie. This always hurts her feelings. Do you know what I’ve gone through to keep you? she says. My mother is drying out here, too, but she doesn’t have help like my father. Mostly, she sleeps. We listen to Tammy Wynette and watch a movie about Tina Turner having her face smashed in by Ike Turner. There is so much we’re both trying to understand.

You’re exactly like me, my father says into the phone. Carbon copy.

I am not.

My mother stands in the corner of the living room. She stands stiff and blank-faced as if in a crowded elevator. She’s always in this elevator lately—arms by her side, waiting—and I wonder where she goes in her mind. Which floor. Which new view.

She looks at me on the phone, the curls of the cord warping my fingers bloodless. She says, You have his canker sores. His bad hip. His receding hairline. You are both sharp when it comes to giving directions, but neither one of you can stand being left alone.

My father says, You’re wrong, you have my hands.



THE FEELS OF LOVE

A senior thinks you’re cute, Beth Diaz whispers in your ear. These are the most amazing words you’ve ever heard come out of her mouth. There is you, and then there are high school seniors—seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds, with cars and sound systems, no uniforms on Fridays because they’re now exempt. You ask, Who? Who?, your abdomen burning up with this news, and she whispers again, Shhhh, it’s Chad—that’s who, because her friend’s brother’s cousin’s babysitter said so. Something like that, but it doesn’t matter to you. A senior thinks you’re cute.

And who are you? You are still a middle schooler, twelve years old, almost thirteen. You have two friends, four horses, a new splatter of acne across your forehead; you don’t even wear a bra yet. Lately, you are known as Queera or Twinky Chinky. But now, everything is different—everything will change, you’re sure—a senior thinks you’re cute.

Here’s what you do when you come home from school: Find Chad in last year’s yearbook. Call Clarissa and Beth on three-way to tell them you found him: Look, page forty-nine. Those lips! they both say, and you agree. You have never seen anyone more beautiful than Chad. His eyes are squinty and green, like the deep end of a lake, his black hair spiked. The yearbook shows him laughing with a group of friends, sprawled out on a school picnic table in the sun. They look so much like adults you can’t even believe it.

He’s going to instant message you tonight, says Beth. I gave my friend’s brother’s cousin’s babysitter your screen name to give to him. You all scream into the phone. You scream a scream that brings your father into the room, soggy from a nap, yelling. The fuck is happening? You jacking up my phone bill? He closes the door before you can answer.

Here’s the thing about America Online, about the instant messaging: you can be anyone—Dominique Moceanu, Britney Spears’s cousin, a milkmaid from Mississippi, a criminal—anyone but yourself. Recently, the jealous ex-boyfriend of a popular girl from school—such a creeper—uploaded some photos of her onto an AOL homepage. They show the girl lying on her stomach, on a bed, her pink thong blooming. Slats of light curve over her body from the bent window blinds. She wears dark-blue eye shadow; her hair is in a white-blonde ponytail; her pointer finger is in her mouth. You and Clarissa have been sending these photos to the anonymous men you meet online, in chatrooms, and they’re all crazy about this so-called Ashley Flowers, a tenth grader in downtown Miami. They send erotic poems, photos of the stirring bulges in their pants, hyphen roses that blossom into @ symbols. One man named Richard sends a blurry photo of his cock next to a Coke can, for scale. In the dark, with your face inches from the screen, you feel like each one of these men might love you.

On the news, JonBenét Ramsey does a dance. Her case is still open, years later, and everyone still cares. You watch her stamped-on face, clickety-clack cowboy boots, the tulle, her curls of shredded heaven. You strap on your headgear, hook the elastic behind your big ears. One has to be so beautiful to be chosen like that, you think. Only beautiful girls are taken. Angelic, white girls. Adored and obsessed over. Too good for this Earth. Your parents sip their seltzers, hold hands, and say, Such a damn shame. So cute, she was.