For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu Read Free Book Online Page B

back. What kind of woman talks about miscarriages at a stranger’s front door? “Thank you for the offer, Mrs. Becker.”
    If my mother breathed out too hard, Mrs. Becker would blow away like a plastic bag. “No problem, Mrs. Huang.” She started down the front steps. She was wearing white sneakers, the same discount-store brand as my mother.
    â€œHow did she know our name?” Bonnie asked.
    â€œWho cares,” Mother said, going back to the sink.
    Â 
    Bonnie was born fourteen months after me, more like a twin than a younger sister. When she was twelve and I was thirteen, she stole a pair of earrings from a friend’s house. She walked into the jewelry store of the nearest mall and tried to sell them. The clerk called the cops. Bonnie told them she had taken it from her own mother’s jewelry box. The cop called our house.
    I was home. I hated answering the phone, so I stood by the machine and listened to the long, grave message. The moment he hung up my hand shot out and hit the Delete button.
    Bonnie was delivered home. She didn’t learn any of the things the cops had intended to teach her. She learned to go to pawnshops downtown, wear heels, not look twelve.
    Â 
    When Bonnie was five and I was six, we popped out of our shared gray bathwater and went into the kitchen. It was exam season, when Adele claimed to be studying at the library in the afternoons and Helen actually was. Our mother, hiding from us in the bedroom, had left dinner to simmer. Bonnie wet her hands in the beet juices on the cutting board and convinced me to do the same. She reached back and squeezed her own buttocks, leaving a pink imprint of cupping hands. I grabbed the sides of her face. Magenta tribal paint. She pushed back on my shoulders, giggling.
    Key in the lock. Our father walked in the front door and our mother walked out of her bedroom to greet him. The beet soup started to boil. We were covered in each other’s red fingerprints, smudged meaningless. Our hands were puckered from the bath, and the sunken stains highlighted the creases. “What are you doing?” Mother asked.
    Bonnie and I looked at each other, puzzled. It had made sense a moment before.
    My father took off his shoes, leaning his hand against the wall. He announced to no one in particular that a boy and a girl were too old to bathe together at our age. He disappeared into their room.
    My mother snapped back to life. She dragged us by the arms to the bathroom. Bonnie sat on the closed toilet seat, swinging her legs and examining her rosy blotches, while I sat in the tub and my mother scrubbed me with the back of a sponge. My mother concentrated on each stain, scraping the rough side against my skin until I cried, rubbing and rubbing as though she could erase us both.
    Â 
    My mother worked part-time as a telemarketer. She came home later on Thursdays. My father thought it would be good for her to get out of the house and talk to people. People in far-off cities, mostly in America, screamed abuse in varying accents, their voices slightly hollow from the distance. As though cursing her from the bottom of a tin can.
    On Thursdays, Bonnie and her friends went to a pool hall on the other side of town that didn’t card. They drank coolers in glass bottles, mostly sugar and dye.
    One night, Bonnie came home running. I watched her through the window over the kitchen sink, running in zigzags down the long driveway as though someone were chasing her.
She’s drunk,
I thought,
or she thinks she is.
    I went to meet her at the door. She burst in and kissed me just to the side of my mouth. My face felt tight where she left a glazed mark. I licked it and it tasted like candy. “Mom is behind me,” she said.
    Our mother had gotten onto the same bus. She had sat down near the front immediately and didn’t see Bonnie at the back. Bonnie looked out the bus’s window when Mother got on: they were stopped at the Chinese