Kung Fu High School (22 page)

And you know, he was right.

I couldn't take a shower. For some reason, I just felt heavier when I got back in the house and brought the thick glass deck door to a shut kind of rest before popping the safety pole down to keep it closed. The heat leaned on me, a wounded family member, and I alone was carrying it. As a general rule, I never take drugs because they stay in my system so much longer than a normal person. Remo tried to explain it to me once but I wasn't listening. Something about metabolism, which was weird because mine's pretty high. I always figured if I had a high one it'd get the stuff out of me right away but that's just not the case apparently. Probably should have paid better attention.

It was all quiet inside. So much so I couldn't hear Dad snoring. I chalked it up to that same heat. Heat makes everything shush. That, or it was the Vicodin. The pills were still a massive coat over my entire body, pulled up over my head and zipped to the collar, the lining stuffed into my ears, mouth, and nostrils. No lights on at all. Dark in all corners, the living room no longer smelled of casserole. I wished the gas wasn't on so that I still had to run the oven 'til it croaked and stopped giving me warmth, the sound of a warped fan, and old smells that put my mom back in the present long enough for me to miss her and hate her all over again. She was gone and definitely not sleeping in the next room. Felt that.

So of course I bumped into the wall as I turned down the hallway. Didn't even feel it, just threw me off balance a little which produced a big lean into the last family portrait Dad ever painted. I was losing it. Needed to feel something, probably more psychological than anything. The wall held me up and the carpet made sure I didn't pitch over. Peeled my sweatshirt off once I got to the threshold of my room and bumped the door open with my nonhurt hip. Sheets pulled tight over my ribs and cocooning my chest, that was what I needed to feel.

But there was a person sitting on my bed, blocking me off from that cotton chrysalis I just had to have. It was Jimmy. I knew it. Didn't need to see him but the outline of his posture against the white wall told me that this was an Armageddon-type thing, a last-night-on-earth thing. A what-would-you-do-if-you-had-thirty-minutes-before-the-nuclear-bomb-got-plunked-down-on-your-head kind of thing and even given the scenario in fourth grade, not even knowing what it really was, everyone in my class agreed it was sex.

A whole mob of ten-year-olds had said the word like it had two x's, then giggled excitedly. It was a word our parents would never let us say but we watched television. We knew the rule. If everything was going to blow up and be gone, you had to have sex with your last moments on the planet. You know, if you were going to die. So no, Jennifer, eating your favorite food was the wrong answer. It was the worst answer. The answer was sex. Everyone knew that! How could I not? What was I, retarded or something? A big fat moron? Because somehow I should've known that you had to have "it" to be human and no one wanted to miss out. If I didn't know that instantly then I was stupid. That was what my classmates said to me.

So my big fat moronic mouth wanted to say: leave, Jimmy. Leave, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, skeleton in the marrow closet of my bone. Leave, you son of my blond mother's blond sister. Leave, my link of denied whiteness, because see, we're not white together. We're not cream together. We never shared that skin. So different, me, the half Latina and you, my cousin, all half Taiwanese. Like we each got a hold of the albatross and we're tugging the body but not rocking no boat, trying hard to break the wishbone inside by new rules: nobody wants more, we each want less. We each want the little part. We each want the smallest broken bit of forked connective tissue. So shatter that hollow density. Tear that too-white bird. Unfuse those clavicles, I say, pull. You can have your wish.

But it can't be like this Jimmy no middle name Chang. You know it and we've discussed it already, because what would my "no" mean if I went back on it? So get your near-to-naked ass out of my bed and stop looking so fine. Stop tempting me. You scare me good, and you probably know I got this strange thing inside of me, the not wanting to, but wanting something, but not being able to feel it, and I mostly don't know, just like always, so give me an excuse to kick you right out of here with my toothpick arms that feel like stripped timber logs piled up in a quickly clearing forest.

Instead, I just asked, "So, boy, what was Hong Kong like?"

And I went and sat down hard on the homemade bed right next to him, my knee pressing against his. The carpet had thrown me, the bed had caught me, held my weight up, and my skin felt nothing. The boards underneath the mattress didn't make a sound. They wouldn't tell.

"It wasn't really Hong Kong, that was just the nearest big city," he corrected me. "I just tell people that so they don't ask too many questions."

"Right, yeah, okay." My words were slowing down.

"It was exactly like home except bigger and with no..."

I could feel pressure as I let go of my lean and crumpled against him, my arms going tight to my body as he caught me, like a chicken's wings once it realizes it can't ever really take off and stay up in the air. That it's just fooling itself with all the flapping. If they ever do, realize that, I mean. Jesus, the Vicodin was still crawling around in my head too, all up in my brain. I wondered if the water I drank made the effects worse. Like if it got digested first or something but then I could only smell Jimmy's soap-clean skin on me. Mostly it was the scent of the generic crescent spring stuff that sat in the back corner of the shower that we all used and it just made me sad. It was too familiar. It was still the brand left over that Cue used to buy, what he used to smell like. Jimmy wasn't talking anymore though. He was lowering me, flat-backed, onto the mattress.

I didn't want to sniff soap anyway, never Cue soap then. I didn't mind the not talking but I wanted to smell the licorice I smelled before when Jimmy raised his body up from sleeping in my bed and I tended his wounds, his first real wounds, his broken cherry blood. That was us, together, that scent. I needed it again, to light my brain up somehow, to wake up my legs and spine gone heavy, to lift up my head gone soft to pillow, to turn the warning lights on inside as he leaned over me and rubbed my stomach in little too-close circles like I was some damn car and he was waxing me, grazing my pubic hair through my thin shirt on the rotating downward turn of each circle and then back up, onto my belly. He bent down to kiss me and got turned-cheek instead of mouth. That was for you, Mom.

"Is this okay?" Jimmy's words sounded far away.

I could feel the pressure of his weight pushing my intestines against my backbone, at least that was how I visualized it, already full inside. And I tried hard to imagine how it would feel, him touching me with vertical strokes better than his massage, his confident working of my tattoo. I'd seen his hands, those skinny fingers that looked like a secretary's—too damn soft—where even the calluses seemed like they'd been filed down and I wanted to remember how they felt. Not like a fighter at all, but like someone who types too much. Someone who'd never had a broken hand start to look like rotting fruit even when healed but nonetheless purplish on the edge of what was still considered the flat of the hand even if it was now normal for it to be more bent than a pot rim.

I felt his breath on my neck. He brought that small mouth of his to my ear.

"Is this okay, Jen?" He asked twice more. Didn't say my name the second time.

Maybe I just nodded.

Don't hurt me, Jimmy. Don't hurt me too bad. I've never been punched on the inside before and I need to walk tomorrow. I need to run. Those words didn't get to my mouth. They left my tongue well alone and just rebounded off the walls of my skull.

But none of it mattered because I would die tomorrow. Nobody would ever find out. I would die and I wouldn't tell. See, breathing was ease in his arms. Not easy, not easier. Just ease. No other word for it. My fingers twitched less, even when he pulled me over onto my side. His hands snuck behind me, spread over my tattoo, gripping at it and maybe even pinching but being frantic like someone so new and inept at putting a body together with another and I guess I felt a thin pity then, a see-through veil over my brain that covered my eyes from the inside, as he rolled me again to my back. I felt bad for him. How he was untouchable. How he'd never learned. How most women must've been afraid of him. Like maybe he would break them, even in his temple suburb of Hong Kong, I just knew he was the loneliest boy.

So would I actually be able to feel him inside or would it just be pressure? Would it feel like my fingers felt or just more strain, rounder, larger? And would he taste me? Maybe I wouldn't mind if he kissed me just afterward so I could taste too. How I tasted on him. Not like licorice at all. Probably like sweaty hidden skin I mostly wished wasn't there and clean teeth and tired tongue and of course it was pointless. I was numb inside too. I didn't bother moaning, didn't fake pleasure or pain I couldn't feel, didn't touch him more than to hold on, but that was all I needed then, to clutch our heat between us and grab him tight as I possibly could while knowing—just a deep-down, silent kind of knowing—that he'd never ask me to let go or loosen my grasp, wouldn't even twitch if it was too hard because there was no such thing. Jimmy could take my strongest grip and never, ever complain or wish it gone. He was a rock.

My view of the ceiling was part-covered by limp cords of dampish hair connected to the face in the dark, pressed firm to the crook of my neck. That was when I knew we were the two notorious puzzle pieces in the box that my mom always complained about. She had sworn always that in every puzzle there were two mismatched pieces that fit perfectly together even when they didn't make the bigger picture. They never made up a part of the mountains or the old, old train engine or whatever it was supposed to be, and that was confusing in the solving rhythm, made it slower, but the hooked peninsula of what looked like a turned-over leaf really did fit the receding grotto-shaped cutout of half a coal furnace and the spotty cardboard locked together even though the top pattern was all wrong and I felt so light-headed, so finally awake in a deadened body that I fully expected the walls of my room to take off on their subway rounds again, like they had at school, in streaking red-bricked horizontal lines of very real velocity, leaving me here with him, to be slow. Too slow. One dragging foot in front of the other, going nowhere, for just one night.

Getting ready like it was my last day on earth: no Vicodin ever again, no real breakfast, just a protein shake, an old tuna sandwitch, crusty on its edges, and an extra long shower where I took about all the hot water. I wanted to wash everything twice. So I did. In between my toes, the back of my knees, I rubbed the skin raw with a balding washcloth and then worked in all the parts I usually miss or just gloss over with a fluff of soap bubbles. I even cleaned behind my ears and inside them. I washed my hair three times but didn't bother with conditioner because it was just going to get frizzy anyway. Shaved my legs and armpits, didn't sweat my bikini line. Couldn't even look down there. Lower back and my shoulder blades and the arch of my neck too, they all got scoured, as best I could with my reach anyway. I popped a few pimples, one on my shoulder, two on my right cheek, but for the most part, took it real easy on my face and the wound on my jaw. Rinsed my mouth with saltwater real good three times.

I dried off every bit of me with a clean towel, a blue one that used to be Cue's and happened to be within reaching distance as I balanced on one leg on the bath mat. Almost scraped my wrist on the counter when I lost my balance but caught myself Yeah, I was nervous. I had no idea what to expect. From school or from Jimmy. So I did my best to concentrate on the simple, small tasks at hand. Dried my face, chest, toes, legs, belly, arms, and ruffled up my hair helmet. Then I wrapped a towel around me and another around my hair and jumped the hallway carpet into my room and shut the door.

Waited fifteen minutes until the majority of skin was good and dry and then I put on lotion, with vitamins. I didn't do it enough. That was why my skin was so raw all the time. And also because I wore so many layers and never worried about sweating so long as I was protected. So this time I felt kind of greasy as I slipped my padded chonies plus specially made cup on. I didn't mess with T-shirts and went straight for the long-sleeved turtleneck with Kev protection all the way down the arms, front and back organ protection, and most importantly, plastic-molded throat protection. Leggings went on. I put a plastic kinfé in the sheath. I needed the lightest, most protective stuff I had. I grabbed all of it and even lined my khaks out with hard plastic shunts: over my kidneys, thighs, and calves then clipped the insides of my khaks to my leggings so that the weight of the shunts wouldn't get wild and bunch the fabric in the wrong places when I needed to kick. Two pairs of socks, then the boots. At about that point, I felt like I needed to throw up. Just nervousness really, about what was to come, not the previous night.

Flushed the toilet and part of my protein shake down with it, then proceeded to not put any books in my backpack. Not a single piece of paper or a pen either. The first thing that went in was a full water bottle. If I was going to have to roll anywhere near as much as I thought I would, I'd need that. Of course, when shit went down, I had no idea when I'd have a chance to drink it, but at least I had it. Next in was a pair of chuks wrapped up in a sweatshirt. Chuks = Nunchaku: two rounded pieces of wood about a foot long and connected with a thin rope. I didn't know them too well, but it extended my reach and that'd be huge when forced to fight in groups. In went a pared-down first-aid kit, stuffed to the zipper with extra gauze and duct tape. I zipped two plastic kinfés into the bottom pocket. In the same pocket, there was just enough room for a pair of hard industrial plastic knuckles, like brass knuckles but without the metal. They're just as hard and cause just as much damage, trust me. Left at the top was enough room for my lunch and a padded hat.