She meets him in her science class. Let’s call him Samuel. My mother has always looked forward to science class—the gurgling chemicals, the slick cool of test tubes, her teacher, Mr. Jackson, who looks like the Michael Jackson if you squint hard enough—but now science is her absolute favorite subject since Samuel came around. He sits behind her, and he stinks of Marlboros and pot. A haole boy with blonde hair in long waves—sometimes she swears she can feel him breathing on her shoulders.
Samuel wears rock T-shirts torn at the stomach. Bare knees through the tears of his jeans. And his eyes, seriously, his eyes, she says, can turn a girl into a puddle. She tells Carla this, the only girl who will talk to her, her lab partner. Do you think he would ever …?
He’s from the other side of the parking lot, she says. You’re so bad!
It’s true—there are two sides of the school parking lot. On one side, Ned Cohen and the rest of the baseball team, the football team, their rows of matching jackets, plaids and collars, shining bowls of hair, arms hooked around calendar girls. They lean back on the hoods of their cars, flared khakis crossed at the knees, none of them ever talking very much.
On the other side, the hippies. The Afros. The braids. Radios spun up. Tongues on necks. This is where Samuel has been smoking his cigarettes before and after classes, where he stubs them out in meticulous piles, the place from which he has been watching my mother for months—the way her hair flicks over her shoulders, her whinny laugh—waiting for her.
Carla scratches something into her notebook. Mr. Jackson is talking about the elegance of the periodic table when the paper is balled up, passed back and then forward, back and forward, until my mother receives it on her desk, smooths out the crinkles, squints at the smeared graphite shine of words.
Would you ever go out with Loki? Yes or No.
Samuel did not circle either word. Instead, he has written Sure.
My mother presses her hands into the desk until there’s a pale halo of steam.
Have you heard about the shark movie with lines wrapped around the plaza? Samuel asks my mother. I imagine it was he who’d suggested it; my mother is afraid of sharks. The two of them are sitting on a bridge walkway, legs dangling.
It’s impossible to get in.
My sister and I can get into any movie, any time, says my mother. We know Ronald, the ticket guy. We’re his favorites.
The local movie theater exists inside a strip mall nearby, next door to a bookstore with carts of shriveled pages. My mother spends her summer days reading through them all, looking for the sexiest scenes. Recently, she opened up to a page describing a woman making love to a snake. She squeezed the book between her forearms, spreading the pages just enough to read the scene in that dark, electric inch.
But really, it’s the movie theater that matters most to my mother. How they take her away to that numbing realm outside herself, that Other Place that she will return to, in different ways, for the rest of her life. Sometimes Ronald the ticket man will let my mother stay inside for the entire day, where she’ll watch and rewatch the same scenes, hum along to the same score, the same crescendos, mouthing each word of dialogue until the words sound like something she might say.
My mother, Samuel, Tao, and her own Boy decide to try the movie. It’s Friday night, and it’s true—the line for Jaws snakes around the parking lot. My mother and her sister pull their boys by the belt loops, past the crowds of smoke and denim, all the way to Ronald. Ronald’s wearing his usual blue Adidas sneakers and sagging T-shirt. He pulls my mother and Tao in for a hug—My girls—and tilts his head to signal them in.
In the theater, after Susan Backlinie is yanked under that freckled, gray sea, my mother leans into Samuel; she rests her head on his shoulder. She’s tapping her foot on the movie theater floor—that’s the way I see it now, anyway; she still does this—as the boy presses his thumb into her chin, gently turns her face, and kisses her.
Here’s Samuel, with a joint behind his ear, with peeled elbow scabs and Pink Floyd T-shirts and flunking grades. But the bad boy is not bad. To my mother, he’s the soft, stretched song of his stories—her ku‘uipo. The way he is careful with her, a delicacy to his movements. When she stumbles, he corrects her, a hand on her back, You okay? It’s the way he always pushes her hair behind her ear, I wanna see you better.
At home, after the movie, the boys ask to come inside. They want to spend the night with the girls—they’ll be quiet, they promise. My mother decides against it. She says goodnight, another kiss against the wall of the house, their hips touching, a burst of warmth inside her. My Aunt Tao invites her boy in, where they will grind into their teenage love, and fall asleep in her bed.
When my grandfather finds them in the morning—crumpled sheets, their fingers clasped—he calls the police. My mother awakes to blue seesawing across her bedroom wall, the pounding of a hammer, her sister screaming, a thud. My grandfather has yanked Tao’s door from the hinges, where it will never be replaced again, not as long as they all live under the same roof, though my grandfather will leave this place long before they do.
SUMMER, 1997
THE HERRINGTON INN, GENEVA, ILLINOIS
Here’s how I learn about sex and babies:
It’s one A.M. and I feel like a loser. I competed in National Pony Finals today and placed twenty-first in the country. I am disappointed by this placing, but my mother reminds me that there are thousands of girls and boys who wake up at four in the morning and practice every day, thousands of more expensive ponies, thousands of those kids and ponies in this very competition. I’m still at the age in which plurality is terrifying.
I hit every stride, I say. I didn’t chip once. We had speed. My jacket with the tails.
Twenty-first out of thousands, she says. That’s pretty impressive to me. I sit between her legs on the bed as she brushes my hair, both of us in bathrobes. She flips through channels on the hotel television as I massage my calves, not paying attention. Everything hurts.
Look, says my mother. Look, your favorite.
It’s JonBenét Ramsey on the news again. Here she is, smiling for a camera, my favorite pageant girl. My favorite dead girl. She waves. Flashbulbs sparkle in the space behind her head.
I love her, I say.
Why do you love her so much? asks my mother. It’s very sad, what happened to her. I found her pictures torn out under your bed. What is it?
Because she was raped and murdered, I say.
That’s a very sad thing to happen, says my mother. That’s the most horrible thing that could happen to a person.
What is rape? I ask her, And why is it horrible?
My mother places the hairbrush down on the bed. It’s a deliberate movement for her, careful, slow. She turns me by the shoulders so that I am looking right at her, our faces close.
Rape is when someone forces sex on you, she says. When you have sex without wanting to.
What is sex? I ask. My cheeks are thumping. I think I might get in trouble for this question. It’s a word that is always hushed in school, and my teachers get red and stuttery whenever it’s mentioned.
Instead, my mother rubs her thumb over my cheek and speaks softly. She sways me a little. She breaks down the anatomy, and explains the parts that we have. These parts belong to us girls, she says, but sometimes we can share. She tells me that sex can result in a child. She tells me that it usually does.
But JonBenét’s a child, she didn’t have a child, I say.
That’s why it’s rape, she says, and very wrong.
So sex is when you have sex with a child?
It shouldn’t be.
But this person used a rope on JonBenét, and twisted the rope around her neck, and had sex with her, too, at the same time. Is that how people have sex?
No, that’s why it’s murder, she says.
And rape, I say.
And horrible, and wrong, she says.
Do people usually die after sex?
No—
Does it feel like dying?
Sometimes.
Can JonBenét’s body still have a baby now that she’s dead?
No—
Can children have children?
They shouldn’t.
If I don’t look like JonBenét, will anyone ever want to rape me?
That’s not the right question.
Will I want to die?
SPRING, 1976