Hello Kitty Must Die (4 page)

Jeremy loved to kick things and other students who were smaller than him. Girls in particular.

“I have strong legs, Sister. And they’re bored.”

And so Jeremy exercised his legs on his fellow students. He also served us all with an array of wedgies, pink bellies, knickerbockers, and whatever suited his whim. His forte, however, was lunch-stomping. He would grab your lunch box, throw your sandwich, leftover pizza, muffin, banana, the pork bun your mother had oh-so-carefully wrapped, onto the ground and stomp on it.

Jeremy called it food thumping.

One afternoon, Jeremy decided that my baloney sandwich needed a good thumping. He tore my blue Smurf lunch box out of my hand, opened it, and sent my Thermos, apple, and sandwich tumbling onto the tarred ground before tossing it aside. He must have been feeling especially spry as he attacked my sandwich with both feet, jumping up and down on the two slices of Wonder Bread and Oscar Mayer baloney.

I grabbed my lunch box and chased after my Thermos as it rolled down the sloping pavement into the bushes surrounding the rectory, leaving Jeremy to thump my sandwich to its demise.

I didn’t cry. Crying only spurred Jeremy on. Everyone knew that. No matter how scared we were, we never cried. Jeremy would only hit you harder.

“Give
him
a thumping with that thing, Smurfette.”

I turned around. A boy my age was peeking around the corner where he was smoking his cigarette, away from the ever-watchful eye of Sister Maria. He nodded at the lunch box in my hand.

“This thing? Jeremy’s a solid bonehead. His skull will crack this thing in two. And my name’s Fiona, not Smurfette.”

“That’s why you have to fill it with rocks first, Fi-
ona
,” he said, jerking his head at the smooth round rocks that lined the flowerbed. “And no worries, I’ll back you.”

The boy winked at me.

“You’re the same size as me.”

“Two against one. I like those odds, don’t you? Or do you prefer thumped sandwiches?”

I stared at him. I looked back at Jeremy who was bouncing my apple against the convent wall with great enthusiasm. “

Yeah, right. I don’t want to die.”

“Everyone has to die. You’re just scared.”

“So? Aren’t you?”

“No such thing as fear. Go on. I’ll be right behind you. One thing, smile at him first. And don’t say a word. Just clock him.”

His piercing blue eyes bored into me. Their fierceness drew the fear out of me like poison from a wound.

I felt light. Calm. Like all the sound had been sucked out of the world around me. Like I had suddenly been placed in a vacuum.

Fearless.

I filled my lunch box with rocks and snapped the latch shut tight. I walked up to Jeremy who had gotten bored with my sandwich and had moved onto someone else’s pizza.

“What are you looking at?” he growled.

I smiled brightly and clocked Jeremy in the face with my lunch box. Hard. And I kept swinging. And swinging. Even after he fell to the ground.

I called it jackass thumping.

Then I looked around, expecting to see my backup.

But he was nowhere to be seen.

I broke Jeremy’s jaw in three places and landed myself on the bench outside Sister Carmen’s office. The principal’s office. The final destination for all troublemakers before they were expelled.

A familiar figure rounded the corner and sat down next to me. The boy who had called me Smurfette. He had snuck out of class.

“Thanks a lot, Charles Manson. Look where you got me.”

“That was some wailing you gave him.” He looked genuinely impressed.

“Shut up. And where were you?”

“You didn’t need me. You had yourself covered.”

“Yeah, now I’m going to get expelled. Who the hell are you anyway?”

“I’m Sean. And no, you’re not. Just tell her how much you love Jesus.”

Jesus. I love Jesus.

Jesus got me a major discount off of thirteen years of Catholic school education. Jesus also saved my ass every time I got into trouble with the nuns.

The nuns at St. Sebastian loved Jesus. I guess they all do. And if you loved Jesus too, they treated you better. You got better grades, a better seat, a better place in line, a better table in the cafeteria.

“I’m sorry, Sister Carmen. I’m sorry because I hurt Jeremy. And because I know what I did really hurt Jesus too.”

The nuns ate that up. Being sorry for something you did because you thought it hurt Jesus. They told us that every time we did something bad, we were torturing Jesus like the Roman soldiers did.

But anything remotely fun seemed to hurt Jesus. Chewing gum, talking in class, passing notes, forgetting to do your homework, smoking, food thumping.

Problem is that God seemed to have made poor Jesus specifically for suffering. First the Cross and then the daily antics of millions of school children.

Sister Maria said God made us in His image. Me, Sean, Jeremy, all of us.

God must be a sadist. He made us all to hurt Jesus like He did. And He made it fun too. Poor Jesus.

Sean was right though.

I didn’t get expelled. Instead, Jeremy did because he wasn’t sorry for hurting Jesus like I was. Him and his broken jaw.

After that, Sean and I became best friends.

BUT ONE DAY, FATE
took Sean away. Stephanie told the whole class Sean was gay because he wouldn’t kiss her. So he lit her hair-sprayed head on fire with his Zippo lighter.

Poor Sean.

Not even Jesus and all His angels could save him.

I heard that he set someone else on fire after he got expelled.

Maybe that was why he changed his name, to erase his naughty schoolboy past. And probably because no one wanted a hymen surgeon who had a history of setting people on fire.

“I changed my name.”

“Yeah, I can see that. And became a hymen restoration surgeon. How did you settle on that?”

“Atonement for all the ones I had demolished in my disrespectful youth. That and the money’s great. Hey, you mind if I smoke? I can open that window there.”

“God, Sean, yes. Asthma, remember? Besides, I thought doctors knew better.”

“Lies. All lies about smoking. It’s good for your health. Warms your lungs good and proper.”

“With tar and nicotine.” I laughed. Sean. Still funny after all those years.

“Everyone has to die. So what brings you in?”

“Sean, I’m missing a hymen.”

“How do you know?”

“I tried to take my own virginity with a dildo covered in two-percent Lidocaine.”

Sean just stared at me.

“I see. And?”

“And nothing. I was all ready to soak up my blood with some gauze and nothing.”

“Fi, why?”

“So I could keep it for myself.”

“Like that creepy guy in the geisha movie?”

“Something like that. And it was really interfering with my dating life. Dad wants me to find a man and get married.”

“Wait, Fi. I’m twenty-eight. That means you’re twenty-eight. And you’ve never...?”

“Sean, I’m Chinese. It’s complicated. And no, it’s not like I’ve been living in an Afghan cave. I just never went all the way. Besides, you know anyone who wants to marry me by the third date?”

“Fi, why would
you
want to marry anyone by the third date? You never know. The guy could be a complete psycho.”

Sean had a good point. He would know.

“Actually, I don’t want to get married. Hell, I don’t even want to date.”

“What?”

“Hate dealing with another person’s crap. Takes time away from me. Told you. Dad’s idea.”

“Then why bother?”

“Humor me. Chinese mental gymnastics. Just go with it.”

“Fi, who cares if you have a hymen or not?”

“I do.”

“Do you need one? I mean, is your dad marrying you off to a Chinese boy that won’t have you unless you have one? I assume your dad is not going to have you lynched by a mob.”

“No. Just feel like I should have one like every other girl. Why? You think it’s a bad idea?”

“Sort of, but let me get this straight. You want me to create you a hymen so that you can pop it with a dildo yourself? So that you can go out and date even though you don’t want to?”

“Kinda. I feel robbed of the experience by cruel Mother Nature. Yeah, is that too weird?”

Sean laughed. “A little, but you know that rupturing a hymen is quite painful, right? As I recall, you used to be... how do I put it? Highly pain-averse.”

“Used to be.”

“Fi, you drowned that dildo in Lidocaine. You probably used the whole damn bottle.”

Another good point. Sean had a knack for making lots of them.

I smiled sheepishly and snorted. I had used the whole damn bottle. “I was going to ask for another prescription for some more.”

Sean rolled his eyes.

“God, Fi, save your twenty-five hundred dollars. Forget the hymen. Get yourself a Chanel handbag to go with that suit. Be happy you weren’t born with a hymen, got spared the pain, and have some good sex.”

Sean was right. Again.

“Doctor’s orders?”

“Yeah. And one more thing. What are you doing on Saturday?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On why you are asking.”

“I was wondering if you wanted to hang out. So we could catch up on... oh, what is it? The last sixteen years?”

“Sure, Sean. I’d love to.”

“Great. And you can fill me in on whatever happened to that bitch, Stephanie.”

T
HE CANTONESE WORD
for “yes” is “hai,” if you pitch your voice down.

The Cantonese word for “cunt” is “
hai
,” if you pitch your voice up.

Anyone who claims that Mandarin is a better language than Cantonese needs to develop an appreciation for the fine subtlety of pitch, inflection, and intonation that can make “yes” sound like “cunt.”

I love Cantonese. I can express myself at a whole new level of crudeness and vulgarity that I can’t with English. That and it comes in handy when I have to deal with my parents.

Until I was twenty-three, my father always said, “Stay in school and don’t get pregnant, Fi.”

Hai, Daddy.

The morning after the day I learned that I had passed the California Bar Exam, my father came into my room and issued a new directive for the new chapter in my life.

“Now that you’ve passed the bar, it’s time for you to find yourself a darling and settle down.”

Hai
, Daddy.

That was my father’s way of saying, “Fi, you need to move out of my house.”

But at twenty-three, I saw no reason to move out. It wasn’t as if I was mooching off my parents. I paid rent. I paid for food. Yes, I got laundry done for free. But I insisted on doing the laundry myself. After all, I enjoyed conversing with the laundromat customers.

For the next five years, I tried to heed my father’s new decree, but the hymen I never had kept getting in the way. That and a couple of other things.

At twenty-eight, my father concluded that I had failed miserably at the task of landing a husband. So he decided that he needed to take a more proactive approach to ensure my happiness, my domestic bliss.

“You are almost thirty. You need to get married.”

But the damage had been done, thanks to my maternal grandmother. When I was nine years old, my family and I visited her in Hong Kong. She feared for my future in America. Land of loose morals. She thought that if I started dating, I would lose focus on my education, become a teenage unwed mother, and condemn my family to shame. So she had to save me.

“Boys will ruin your life,” my grandmother said. “Boys are dirty.”

To drive her point home, she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a pair of breasts that had nursed seven children. Think Ms. Chokesondick from
South Park
. The flopping, elongated boobs swung like dual pendulums past her naval, marking the passage of time and multiple pregnancies.

“You want boyfriend? This is boyfriend,” she said, shaking her baby-ruined tits at me violently. “You want to be fat? You want to look like this? You go touch boys.”

If my grandmother’s display wasn’t enough, Eddie Martin’s present certainly put me off dating. Eddie developed a crush on me in the fourth grade. Unlike other boys who gave gumball machine jewelry to the objects of their affection, he gave me a pair of ears. Two little pink discs of flesh that had previously belonged to Sammie, the science class hamster.

I couldn’t wear them. They didn’t have any earring posts. All they did was stink up my desk.

So when my father started pestering me about marriage, I threw myself on my bed with Pepito squatting on my left index finger. Pepito. Forty grams of pure love. Pepito with his yellow feathers and dark squiggly lines, whom I had named after the iconic boy in the yellow shirt who rode around on his bicycle yelling “chicle, chicle” in every movie filmed in Mexico.

God must have a thing for birds. He gave them convex, paunchy bellies. If He had given them concave bellies, no one would put up with their seed-throwing, screaming, nipping, and constant pooping. Most-used anuses in the world.

“I already found the love of my life, Daddy. See?” I said, planting a large kiss on Pepito’s head.