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Amy 25: Shut Up and Eat! Copyright 2014 by Amy Komori The original characters and plot of this story are the property of the author. No infringement of pre-existing copyright is intended. This story is copyright (c) 2014 Amy Komori. All rights reserved. Chapter One: Apple Letting go of someone can be really hard, especially if that person remains a friend. Like with Gina. She had been my first like-like as a girl. But then I decided I had to get on with my life. At that point, I started weaning myself off thoughts of Gina as anything other than a good friend and drummer in our little band. They didn't go away completely. I couldn't just will them away. Mostly what I could do was turn my mind to other things whenever feelings for Gina welled up from my heart and painted nonsense images in my brain of the two of us getting married and traveling the world as a musical duo or something while also solving crimes. While I was busy doing that, another friend by the name of Dallas was doing the same thing with her romantic notions about me. It kind of bothered me a little she had been my first kiss and nearly my first sexual experience, but only sometimes, the way you might have an itch here or there and flick it away with a quick scratch. Dallas and I weren't talking much at the moment as we reconfigured our relationship in the wake of all that. And I had to live with the fact that had Dallas not fucked it up by stopping, we would have gone all the way that time even though my most consistent emotion towards her on a day-to-day basis was annoyance because she was such a buzzkill. Anyways, all this happened over the summer between our sophomore and junior years at Delacroix High. That was also the time when I'd completely and officially become a girl. I'd been a guy, then a guy in a girl's body, then a nothing in a girl's body and then, thought lots of struggles and difficulties, some of which I'd caused myself and others of which had been placed in my path by the shitty male-oriented culture we all suffered in and still others offered by girls who should have been my fucking sisters instead of calling me Komugly and making my life hell, I had managed to turn myself into a girl within and without. And far from feeling shitty about the circumstance, I was actually happy about it. I finally felt as complete as a 14 year old lesbian Japanese American girl in a small university town possibly could. I expressed it in a few different ways, things I couldn't have conceived of being into in my past life (as best as I could remember these days). For one thing, I had my ears pierced five times by now, two in one ear, three in the other (one up top). For another, I also loved wearing goofy string necklaces, and rosary beads I bought at the flea market and antique stores. Unusual stuff. Kids' play jewelry and things like that. I came by that taste from Emily, and I inherited a lot of crap from her when she moved into her own apartment. Oh yeah, and beaded charm bracelets, both plastic and wooden. Emily had given me this one set of three in pink, purple and red she called my "power bracelets," and I was rarely without them. I never cared for rings, though. Every so often the notion would come over me and I'd proudly wear a dress or a skirt. I mean, whenever the occasion demanded it. Every so often my friends and I glammed ourselves up in vintage dresses, or freaked ourselves up in old plaid housedresses from the 70s. I also loved my big shoe collection. Fucking weird. I had mostly sneakers, but I also owned some clunky-heeled black oxfords, some mary janes and what not. And some awesome shiny Doc Martens I was too afraid to wear out of the house for fear of scuffing them. I didn't allow anyone to wear their outside shoes in our house if I could stop them, but sometimes I loved to wear the Docs in the privacy of my room and try to work up enough courage to show them off at school. They weren't broken in and I couldn't bend my ankles in them, but I loved how butch they made me feel. But I didn't have frilly girly undies. None of my friends did as far as I knew. Those things were uncomfortable and stupid, so we left them for the trendy people and the supermodel wannabes. And I didn't have a lot of bras was because I didn't have a lot of chest. A tank under a shirt usually took care of the twins, and some sports bras for skating. Okay, so that was my more traditional girly type side. Other than those things, which thrilled me more than I was comfortable letting on to anyone, I usually wore baggy pants and tees. But so did a lot of girls at my high school, so that wasn't exactly special or unique. Mostly I dressed for skating. But even though I wore a helmet and pads, and incredibly baggy pants (camo army fatigues, or these denims with holes in them), I could easily be mistaken for a guy. Well, except for my beads and necklaces flashing. I'd include my smoothness, but most of the guys I skated with didn't have much more than fuzz on their arms, either. One thing I was certain about, though: I still dug girls, and being an American teen, not many of my peers would come out as lesbians just to get with me. In fact, the only two Delacroix High girls I knew who were into girls were Dallas and Heidi Fleegleman herself (although she covered it by fucking as many jocks and college guys as she could). How did one become a girl? In specific terms, how did I? That was something I'd put a great deal of thought into over the past year when I'd decided I was going to go with it. Well, most were born that way in the first place. They came out with girl bodies and girl minds and spirits. Or even male bodies and girl minds and spirits. In the course of my gender correction, I'd read about this kid who'd had his penis burned off accidentally. The doctors were like, "Oh, raise him as a girl. We're really malleable that way, so it won't be a problem." Only it was. He was never happy as a she. Eventually, he committed suicide. That totally broke my heart for a few days and still made me depressed whenever it popped up in my head. I mean, mostly for him because his story really sucked and it was shitty what they did to him. Being a girl could be way cool... if you were actually a girl in the first place. So the other reason it made me depressed was after reading it, I wasn't sure at that point I could ever pull it off no matter what my re-structured body and brain were telling me, along with my hormones and even the people around me. People treated me the way they saw me, as a girl kid. And it did affect me deeply. But like the guy in that sad story, my gender had been male to begin with, and at the outset of everything that happened to me, I had been bound and determined to keep it that way. Only I hadn't. I'd changed, and willingly so. I was even cool about it now. Left alone with my friends and on my best days, I rejoiced in it. Treated like shit and kicked around by the patriarchy and all that, I defended it as best I could. My big sister Emily and I talked about it a couple of times that summer when she came by our house for dinner or because she missed us. Her theory was still that I'd been shaped by my reshaping, with this Bruce Lee metaphor she liked to use all the time. The one about water and whatnot. The way it went with me, though, she said you could pump girl hormones into someone with a male brain and they'd have different feelings, but they'd stay essentially male. The exception being transgender people, but Emily said she was pretty sure they had brains that matched their gender identification, so that didn't apply. Adding the appropriate hormones and body changes could only benefit. But that wasn't what happened to me. Which, as far as we knew, was unprecedented. You couldn't find this kind of shit in any textbook, at least not the ones a normal person could walk in off the street into a normal library and check out. You'd have to go someplace more secretive than that, where certain books and materials were kept under lock and key. Some of that was in circulation around the world because I was evidence of that, but Emily could only go so far in that direction before turning back so exactly why I was a girl inside as well as out would remain a mystery. The last word on that, when Emily and I were on the sofa watching, of all things, "The Craft," was, "There are just some things you do not wanna mess with. We're protected, you are who you are, and that's all that matters now." And then we both felt the need to turn on the lights. Also, bringing up my male past had come to make me feel really squirmy and uncomfortable, the same way having to conform to any kind of female gender role had made me feel when I'd first changed. I could remember what it looked like to pee standing up and fuck a girl with a penis and all that, but it seemed gross to me now. And alien, even. Hanging around most guys made my skin crawl sometimes, too. When they did creepy things or said stupid things. Which was pretty often. That stuff annoyed me from the side of the fence I was on, not from having had those same thoughts myself at one time. Whenever I did have this feeling I'd like to have a penis, it wasn't from any sense of nostalgia or wanting back what I had lost. It was just this thing I had like some of my girl friends, especially Michelle who would get on that topic like at least once a month and just go to town, along with her fake story about having been a boy when she lived in Oklahoma. She hadn't actually, but it was one of her fave running jokes. We all could talk about what it'd be like to be boys in a wistful way or a complaining one, or in Michelle's hilarious one, but we all knew we were fine the way we were. Sometimes you just felt down because life wasn't fair and the people who had the dicks had made it that way, so you sometimes had that "greener grass" feeling, or even just good ol' human curiosity, and that's all it was. As far as I knew. I mean, I'd come out as gay and maybe one of my friends would one day come out as transgender, but until that happened, I took them at face value and respected them. You know, unconditional love and all that. Chapter Two: Beef Jerky Anyway, fairness was on my mind a lot that summer because of a bad idea my mom had when I first became a girl. Mom had to put together legal documentation for me and we had to figure out my future if I was to have one. For whatever reason, she felt we could skip me a grade ahead. She almost made it two years, but in the end she felt just one would allow for a little extra socialization and make me not stand out too much. The way Mom had it figured, with a one-year headstart, I'd have one less year to suffer through in school, I'd be a little closer to the advanced post-college education I'd once had, and making me out to be a genius would ward off questions about my precociousness and sometimes strange behavior. Well, my strange behavior ultimately had more to do with the kind of girl I was than the kind of guy I'd been. But the problems created by Mom's well-intentioned decision included being bored in class (except for some of the math classes, where I definitely had to re-learn equation solving and formulas), being smaller than everyone else, being behind on the physical development stages (although that wasn't a huge factor, it turned out) than everyone else... And getting to learn to drive a lot later than everyone else. That one thing was really eating me up alive! I fucking knew how to drive because of my past life, even if I was way out of practice. But I wasn't allowed to do it at all before I turned 15 and it felt as if time had stood still, jamming me at 14 forever. Meanwhile, most of my friends one after the other turned 16 and now held these licenses called provisional permits. Except for Sarah, who was prepping for hers by taking this driver's education class Mrs. McAvoy signed her up for where she got to drive on a closed range or whatever they called it. She wasn't too sure herself, so she was no help on the matter. "You're so lucky," I told her in this dreamy way one afternoon when I was hanging out at her house chatting away and listening to music. Also trying on some of her clothes, none of which fit me at all because Sarah was taller and like super-curvy in this amazing way she wasn't all that crazy about. "Why?" she asked in this surprised voice. I was lying on the floor in one of her dresses, which on me was like a bed sheet. Well, not that big, but I could have slept under it with my feet poking out at least. All around me were the crumpled piles of things we'd been wearing and discarded, including the clothes I'd actually worn to her house that morning. At the moment, I was holding her learner's permit, which I'd fished out of her little wallet thingy I found in her bag and which she'd been too Sarah to stop me from clawing through. I showed it to her to answer her question. "Oh," she said. Then she added softly, "My instructor hates me." "What? No way," I told her in this voice that was meant to be reassuring. For all her amazingly positive attributes, like being the smartest girl in our grade and having this glorious curly red hair that was thick and shiny and lustrous and all that good stuff, from being like beautiful like a woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting to having this clear voice of multiple octave range into which she could pour pure emotion and finally, having this naturally kind and trusting soul, Sarah was really unsure of herself. She and her mom had all these hard times before I knew her and some since. There was shit with her father, businesses that had failed, financial problems and her own introversion and general shyness to deal with. "He does. He says I'm the worst driver he's ever seen." I frowned. "Well, he's an asshole, then. Also, that just means he's ever seen Gina or Michelle." Sarah's photo on her learner's permit was a good likeness. My sister Emily's license shot barely looked like her and she was looking slightly up with these puffy cheeks I made fun of her for. Sarah's was unsmiling but there was just this openness about her freckled face and her big eyes that came through despite the best efforts of the DMV to uglify her. "I can't wait until August," I said softly, and I put Sarah's permit back in her wallet and carefully tucked the wallet into her bag. I got up and went over to Sarah's big ass mirror. Her dress kind of flowed down my body like a waterfall. Lacking Sarah's soft curves, I looked like a boy crossdresser who was supremely skilled at presentation but clueless when it came to clothes sizes. My black hair had grown out into a pixie cut I could comb or brush. I'd have to decide what I was going to do with it as it grew longer. I didn't want to end up with a bowl cut or something. Standing there looking stupid in Sarah's dress, I wondered what my driver's license photo would look like. I'd have short, boyish hair. I knew that much. For a while, from junior high until the previous spring, I'd worn my hair in glossy, girly-girl bob with straight bangs, inspired by Natalie Portman in "The Professional." This was mainly because my big sister Emily thought I should have one and I was too stunned by being remade into a girl to disagree. Over time, I started enjoying putting barrettes in it: sometimes stars, sometimes butterflies. I had also loved to braid it up into a bunch of short pigtails that stuck out in every direction, or just pull it through a bunch of rubber bands for the same effect. I missed doing that. I planned to do it again as soon as possible. "'Ello," I suddenly said in this weird accent that was meant to be cockney but what did either Sarah or I know about British accents? I turned to Sarah and gave her a smart salute. "My name is Tommy, the deloightful crossdressing chimney sweep." Tommy was this dumb boy character I'd come up with a few weeks back after a shower when I'd had the impulse to comb my hair in a guy style to see what I'd look like. Why he came out faux-cockney, I had no idea. Sarah laughed. "Oi'll clean your chimney lickety-split," I continued, pretending to scrub a chimney with an imaginary long-handled brush. My knowledge of chimney sweeping began and ended with Dick Van Dyke. "Oi may look loik a bleedin' princess, but Oi'll do a bang-up job for the loiks of you!" "I'm the princess," Sarah said. She did the royal wave, hand twisting from side to side as she pretended to greet the commoners. "Why, sure! Your 'oighness, Princess Praline," I said, and curtsied. Sarah's name in this game was actually supposed to be Princess Caroline, but the first time I pretended to be Tommy and she came up with her own little character, the name came out Princess Praline because she was laughing so hard and that's what stuck. We were ourselves again, just kind of laughing. I started changing back into my own clothes, my usual skater kid wear. Tank and cut-off army pants that were way too big. Most of the time I just wasn't really a dress type girl. That was more Sarah's and Dalls' thing. I was telling Sarah as much when I made the mistake of mentioning one of my exceptions to the general rule, which had been letting Emily dress me up however and paint me. "What do you mean?" Sarah asked, hugging her knees and leaning forward, really interested because overtly girl behavior from me fascinated her due to its relative scarcity. "Dress you up like what?" I tried to come up with a quick way to get her on another topic. She tended to like bunnies, but nothing about bunnies came to mind at the moment. I flicked my eyes to one side and scratched my shoulder with pretend casualness and told her, "Like story characters. That was a long time ago." "What story characters?" "All of them." "No, tell me." "God, it's embarrassing." I was blushing now. Sarah smiled happily, her face lit up. "No, you have to tell me!" "Like... okay, the best thing was a yukata. I was supposed to be..." Then I decided it wasn't really the best thing after all. "Supposed to be WHAT?" I blurted it grudgingly: "The moon princess." "Oh my god, that's so cute! Who is the moon princess?" Sarah had really taken to this topic. "I don't want to talk about this now," I told her emphatically. "She's just this princess from a story. She came from the moon. There's a bamboo cutter or something." "Oh, so cool! Can I see this painting?" "It's in our utility room at home." "Who else?" "Didn't I just say I didn't want to talk about it?" "Yes, but I never get to hear about this stuff. Emily is so amazing. I can kind of picture you in a yukata." "Yeah." "What's a yukata?" "Like a kimono, only for summer. Moon Princess should wear a kimono, but those are really expensive and we don't have any. Just a yukata." "Oh. Who else? Just from Japanese stories?" "No, from all kinds of stories. Pippi Longstocking and whatever. This is really fucking embarrassing, okay? I'll show you the stupid paintings and you'll see. And then I'll drink poison and die." "NO!" Sarah wailed. She jumped up and wrapped herself around me protectively. "Don't kill yourself! I'm sorry!" "It's okay." "You can borrow my study book," Sarah offered. She let go of me. I was grateful for that and for the abrupt topic switch. "You can at least start learning about driving." "Thanks. Mom already got me one," I told her. It was true. The book was unopened on my shelf in my room back home. "I feel like a kid. It sucks being younger than everyone." Sarah nodded. We both sat back down on the floor among the heaped clothes and we just kind of hung suspended there in silence while Tori Amos sang to us about icicles. Chapter Three: Sugar Water For the next few weeks before my 15th birthday, I studied the driving laws. Many of them were still in my brain from my past life, but it was also really weird to me how many I had forgotten or maybe had never known. Had I forgotten them when I was a guy and had been a much worse driver than I had even thought at the time or had they sieved away since, having been replaced with a whole new body of knowledge that came with my reeducation in the ways of being an American girl child as one century ended and a new one threatened to begin? And it was so fucking boring. When I wasn't holed up in my room trying to regain mastery of four wheels and internal combustion engines so I wouldn't feel like the least useful of my friends, I spent the rest of my time skating with Michelle and the guys at the skatepark or playing music in Gina's garage. Sometimes after practice, we'd all jump in her pool. No one wore swimsuits like Heidi and her friends did. We usually just wore tees and shorts. Like cut off jeans and khakis or whatever. I may or may not have had one of my old swimsuits back in the dresser in my bedroom at home, one of the first girl suits or whatever I'd worn down at the beach the last time we went (which was also the trip where I met Gina) but I had no intention of wearing it and no desire for a new one. I was happy in shirt and shorts, soggy and cool as I splashed and screamed and laughed with my friends. It felt so good to chill in the water after sweating it up in the hotbox of a garage under the strict musical dictatorship of Lena, and it was also fun seeing her loosen up and act like a person rather than a future orchestra conductor or whatever it was she dreamed about being when she wasn't bitching at me for playing the wrong notes on my bass. We didn't take a beach trip or anything. We didn't get invited to cool parties with college kids. The shit between Michelle and that freak Bob destroyed that. Sarah was sometimes seeing Guitar Genius, Emily was working at a sushi restaurant and spending her time with Snowboard Boy and her own friends and this was summer. Boring, fun, silly, a lot of different things. Watching TV until 4am some nights, sleeping until l0am, sometimes smoking clove cigarettes with Gina and Michelle downtown pretending we were in college, probably sending everyone intense signals that we weren't. My hair grew out and I could actually comb or brush it, sometimes put a hair clip in it again. Michelle and I browned up and got thinner and shinier, Sarah and Gina broke out in even more freckles and everything was cool when it wasn't boiling hot. When my birthday came it wasn't that big a deal. I didn't get a party and I didn't get to run out and get my learner's permit that day, either. My mom was too busy with work and stayed that way for the next couple of weeks. So delayed gratification. Eventually, I did get my permit, but all the while Mom was too busy to help me learn what I was supposed to, so as far as I was concerned, the whole thing was a major letdown. I mean, I passed the fuck out of both the eye exam and the written test with no problem, then had my picture taken and there it was, a little plastic card that told the world (if interested) I existed and I was learning to kill pedestrians in my one-ton metal and plastic death machine that also stunk up the air and ruined all life on earth as a little value-added. But it wasn't a magical mother-daughter bonding thing. For my actual birthday festivities themselves, I had to make do with cupcakes and Michelle's gift of an old Babysitter's Club book she'd bought at a yardsale with the word FART written on it. Michelle swore that was on there when she bought it and I believed her. It didn't look like her handwriting anyway. "You're still the youngest," Michelle told me with a smirk. "You're still the shortest," I told her and her smirk when away at once. And then it was Back-to-School time at Wal-Mart and Target. And back to Delacroix High for our junior year. The first day of school was still hot and summery. My mom dropped me off and told me good luck and I shouldered my backpack and put on my brave face and made my way into the building along with all the other prisoners and condemned people. That I had this shit locked now through practice and just being didn't mean I exactly liked it, although I was looking forward to seeing my friends in this familiar context again. They made the days bearable and even fun sometimes. We barely had time to squeak and scream and hug as if we hadn't seen each other just the day before and then we had to answer to the bells. The commanding bells that ruled over all. First, homeroom. My homeroom teacher was Mrs. Lattimore, who liked me but also didn't trust me because she knew I had... Tendencies. Mrs. Lattimore called roll and handed out the year's rules, this big photocopied booklet stapled together neatly by some machine in the office. I thumbed through it. Same deal as last year. Dress code, code of conduct, honor code, cheating rules, no gum, no guns, no plasma rifles in the 40 watt range. "Are we going to have a good year, Amy?" Mrs. Lattimore asked me after the bell rang and we started filing out to go to our first class of the day. "The best," I told her. "Do you have your schedule?" "Of course!" And of course, because she'd asked me, I suddenly couldn't find it. Our schedules were these little computer forms we got in the mail way back at the beginning of summer break. I'd opened mine, saw a lot of AP classes again based on how well I'd done the year before and the college track I was on, showed it to Mom at dinner that night, put it in my jewelry box and didn't think about it before that morning when I was sure I'd picked it up and put it in my backpack. Now it wasn't there. I stood by the door feeling myself rapidly entering panic mode in front of Mrs. Lattimore. But there it was. It had slipped into one of my new notebooks. My heart slowed to its normal pace. I showed it to Mrs. Lattimore then had to walk really fast because I was starting to run late. First period was AP World History, which was no big deal, but this year second period was art class. I sat at a table across the room from Dallas, instead of the one we'd shared in the back of the room. Paler than ever, she sat back there alone in her misery, so tiny and vulnerable, dressed completely in black; a blonde Bjork. Kept to herself, brought a CD player and some headphones to class and zoned us all out. Mr. Tanner indulged her moods because Dallas was the only one of us in there who was a real artist; the rest of us we just dodging tougher classes. She'd even had a show at a little gallery over the summer with her trash can celebrities and they'd written it up in the real paper and the music paper. I wanted to talk to her, I really did. When Michelle and the others were around, we were at least civil. I just couldn't make myself open up to her when it was just the two of us. As soon as the bell rang, I stuck all the info Mr. Tanner had given us into my art drawer and slipped out so I wouldn't have to feel Dallas' presence everywhere. I went to my locker, grabbed my Spanish book, and felt someone next to me. I figured it was just Willis Wallace, the sole remaining devotee to the Cult of Amy Komori. He had this annoying-ass way of just standing there and not saying anything until you did. I was about to tell him to fuck off, but instead of Willis the Thrillis, I saw someone new. She had her locker open (one that no one had used since I first started at Delacroix High), and one hand on the door. Long, brown fingers with nice fingernails. By nice, I mean healthy; not too long, and neat. Shiny, even. Like maybe they were clear-coated. "Hi," I said. Then, because I'm a regular detective, I added, "You just start here?" She shut her locker, and totally amazed me. Wild, frizzy, Macy Gray hair rising like a black cloud above her head, gorgeous, doe-like black eyes, high cheekbones, a long, regal nose like on one of those sleek Egyptian Nefertiti busts. A wide mouth with plump lips. She was long and slender, and stood all loose-limbed in that slumpy, tall-girl way. So bony, so beautiful, yet not a hard angle on her. Wore a pink muscle tank and faded jeans slung low on her hips. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also a human Eiffel tower. She must've had at least six inches on me. At least six, especially with that cumulus (for some reason, I'd retained a lot of weather-related shit from physical science) of hair. A storm front of hair. And she smiled at me, her eyes like happy crescents and her mouth all gums and perfect white teeth. Then, she spoke: "Jenny Shimizu." "Huh?" Oh my god. Amy's... smart-maker... no... function. I blinked, let my mouth hang open, couldn't think of a thing to say. "You look just like Jenny Shimizu," she said, then smiled and her upturned eyes became crescents again. "You know, from 'Foxfire.' You have a little more hair, though." Oh, that Jenny Shimizu. The lesbian model with all the tattoos, who had an affair with a married Angelina Jolie before she got divorced, started kissing her brother in public, and married that Billy Bob Thornton guy (the freaky celebrity story of the summer, and so unavoidable even my friends and I knew about it). I knew exactly who she was talking about. I just hated, absolutely fucking hated "Foxfire." I wanted to tell her that, sort of introduce myself with a wisecrack and see if she could take it. But what I said was, "I do?" "Yeah, it's that black stuff on top of your head." She winked, and walked away, hips swaying. Just like that. I stood there and blinked. She'd totally fazed me with her looks and her cool. My thoughts were kind of along the "fuck that" lines. Mostly like, I'm the cool girl around here! I play bass in a band. I... I can do a flatspin! So why did I act like a complete dumbass when I saw her? Then Sarah grabbed me from behind and I just about shit in my pants. I'd forgotten I was in school. In fact, I'd pretty much completely forgotten everything: my name (if Sarah had asked me, I'd probably have replied, "Jenny Shimizu"), the United States, the planet I was on... Everything except that girl. She seemed 12 feet tall in my imagination. "Amy, are you high?" Sarah asked, frowning, her eyes darting all over my face. "No!" I snapped. "Why do you think I'm high?" "Your pupils are huge. You know, dilated. Like you've been doing drugs or something." "No..." I bit the inside of my lip, unable to look Sarah in the eyes, my mind kind of wandering away on me. "Really. Are you okay?" I struggled to be myself again, instead of the mindless, mute freak I'd been with that girl. It pissed me the fuck off. Who was she that she could just take the empty locker next to mine and make me feel stupid in the hallway of my own school? I should have chased her down, planted a foot in that gravity-defying ass of hers. But what I didn't need to do was take it out on Sarah. Sarah was too sweet and trusting, without a mean bone in her body. Oh yeah! Sarah absolutely loved "Foxfire." Well, that and "Grease 2." I told her I'd stop acting like I was on drugs if she answered one question for me. "Um... okay," she said. She looked at me with the wary expression so many of my friends had learned to wear over the summer. Was Amy about to strike? "Do you think... okay, it's stupid," I said, laughed a little. Nothing, it was really nothing. "Do you think I look like that gay model?" "What gay model?" "Jenny Shimizu." "Oh my god! You do! That's who you look like!" What a reaction. I didn't expect that. A joyful conniption. An explosion of spaz. Sarah forgot she was holding her books and they flopped to the floor. People actually applauded. "No, I don't," I told her. Sarah abruptly stopped and looked kind of worried. "Are you mad?" I shook my head. Then I nodded. "Yeah, but not at you." "Oh." Then I felt bad because I could tell I hurt Sarah's feelings and she didn't really believe me when I said my anger wasn't at her. I told her I was sorry. She gave me a weak little smile. "No, it's okay. I'm sorry. I think I hurt your feelings." It was funny to me that Sarah would use the same words I'd just been thinking. I didn't laugh about it. I shook my head and grinned in this humorless kind of wry way. "I'm just cursed, dude. It's like how many girls who are Asian are in this school? Me, Michelle and like I don't know. Maybe two more?" "Karen Koo." Karen Koo was a senior. That was all I knew about Karen Koo. I didn't even realize Sarah even knew of her at all. That kind of made my brain skip a groove and it took me a moment to find where I'd been and the point I was about to make. Well-meaning stupid asses were forever telling Michelle Cho and me we looked like someone Asian, usually someone Chinese because no one knew the fucking difference between Japanese, Korean and Chinese anyways. I'd heard everyone from this famous Japanese pro skater from the X-Games to Michelle Kwan to Connie Chung. And not even just Asian. One drunk guy in this burrito place downtown thought I was Pocahontas one Sunday afternoon. I told him I'd poke his hontas didn't get away from me, and he yelled at me and went so crazy Sarah, Gina and I ran out of the restaurant without finishing our food and Gina was pissed at me for the rest of the day. But really, I didn't think I looked like any of them. Most of the time, people meant it as a compliment, so I tried not to get upset. Today was just different. Today it upset me a lot, and because I didn't know why, that made it even worse. I explained all this to Sarah, and rested my case by saying, "No one ever goes around telling you you look like Tori Amos just because you both have red hair." "You don't look like Karen Koo at all," Sarah said by way of agreement. Then I realized she had been listening to me but also comparing me mentally to Karen Koo. Then she said, "One person said I looked like Tori Amos one time, though." "Who?" Sarah shrugged. "Some girl." "Oh." "But just one time," she added quickly in case I thought she was trying to undermine my case. Chapter Four: White Pepper Ice Cream On a similar topic, I also had another curse: nicknames. They stuck to me like they were felt and I was a girl made entirely of Velcro. Ayumi after the Japanese skater, Buttercup after the Powerpuff Girl, Spinelli after the tough girl on "Disney's Recess." Heidi and Ashleigh Bodine called me Komugly. The only reason it hadn't caught on more widely was no one really knew who I was. People had talked shit about me and discussed me whenever some rumor went around, but I could have stood right next to people as their main topic of conversation and they would have just said, "Hey, what's up kid? The junior high is that way." Sarah and I had third period AP Foreign Language next (we were the first class to get to take Japanese!), but I told Mrs. Anderson, our teacher, I needed to use the bathroom. Mrs. Anderson (oh, and she was Japanese American with a husband who was a history professor at the university we found out in class later) was new, but she already had attitude. "And why didn't you go between classes, Ms. Komori?" she asked, but she still let me nab a hall pass and went to the library instead. I signed in for a computer, got on the net and found a couple of Jenny Shimizu pictures. Most of the photos I saw were from "Foxfire," when she had her head buzzcut like mine had been. That's all I could find, because there wasn't a lot on her and I only had a few minutes. As far as I could tell, other than having a similar hairstyle and skin tone, we didn't look very much alike at all. My face was kind of rounder and I had a pointier nose and chin. Jenny Shimizu was fucking gorgeous and had strongly defined cheekbones and a totally differently shaped nose and even these full model lips. We shared a certain androgyny, but no. That girl was wrong. Then I went to the bathroom like I was supposed to. I had to check myself in the mirror against the mental images I'd stored of Jenny Shimizu. No, I don't look like her. Maybe, if I try this expression... okay, I do. No, I don't, this is complete bullshit. Plus, I kept thinking about that tall chick, and how I'd been totally stupid around her. I was pretty sure it was attraction, but I wasn't ready to fall for someone. It was too soon after the stupid sofa session with Dallas and too overlapping with Gina. I ordered myself not to think along those lines. It bothered me so much my heart was so quick to offer itself up for more punishment, and it bothered me even more that it bothered me at all. By the time I finished exploring my face and started back down the hall, I'd decided the school wasn't big enough for both me and Nefertiti. I got in so much trouble for taking too long, so learning Japanese and me got off to kind of a rocky start. Mrs. Anderson totally gave me the stink eye the remainder of the period and kind of stared me down as I walked out of the class. But trouble beat boredom, every time. When the lunch bell rang, Gina, Sarah, and I split campus for the Burger King a few blocks away. We knew if we got caught, we'd be have to go through in-school suspension like we did towards the end of our sophomore year, but none of us cared. Well, Sarah cared a lot, but she didn't say anything because she knew Gina and I would give her hell if she did. I mean, what were friends for, if not for talking you into doing things you were normally too chickenshit to do by yourself? I used the walk to ask Gina what she thought about the pressing issue of our time: did I, or did I not, look like Jenny Shimizu? "I think you look a lot like... Ming-Na," Gina said, after some thought. She cracked herself up, but I turned red and frowned. "Great. She's Chinese. How come every person people say I look like is Chinese?" I asked, thoroughly pissed. "Or else a fucking cartoon?" "Name one famous Japanese actress," Gina countered. "What about those girls in the Godzilla movies?" Sarah asked, in her airy, semi-rhetorical way. Never even looked at us, distracted by birds or clouds or whatnot. I nearly let loose with some choice Amyisms, but as I thought about it, I realized I couldn't think of a single decent Japanese movie, other than those Kurosawa movies. And they were as old as the Godzilla flicks. I'd worked in a video store when I'd been a guy, but still drew a blank. Zilch. Nada. That was a big chunk of what he'd known that hadn't made the transition, I guessed. Now I was in the dark, totally ignorant about Japanese movies. And Japanese culture. In fact, other than that one aggressive skater who supplied one of my nicknames, and my idol Mitsuyo, lead singer for this all-girl J-Pop band, I couldn't think of a single woman from Japan who was really famous in America. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized Jenny Shimizu was the only famous Japanese American I even knew about. I was fucking ignorant. It devastated me to realize it. Plus, it had to be Gina of all people who revealed it. The problem wasn't any residual feelings I had for her or wanting to impress her. It was that Gina was the queen of getting shit wrong. Wrong lyrics, wrong titles, wrong information. She made good grades and she was plenty smart, but she had one of those hasty brains that caused her to spout off incorrectly all the time. I have to admit I ended up pouting over it at the Burger King. Sarah and Gina carried on a playful conversation and threw french fries at each other and at me, but I only stared out the window at the passing traffic. This whole gloomy mood washed over me. Then Sarah had another spaz fit over a midget with a broom taller than he was, and knocked over her soda. Splashed it all over the place. That did it; I laughed so hard, my soda spewed out my nose, all over my tray. Ruined my Whopper, Jr. That set Gina and Sarah off again. "It's not that fucking funny!" I screamed, and the restaurant went quiet. Not a food order, not a cellphone conversation. Just silence, and stares at the foul-mouthed Japanese girl. After I wiped my face, we headed back for the school, Gina and Sarah still tossing french fries and giggling like idiots. I had to hear Gina's account of my nose spray. "I just can't believe that much came out," she repeated several times. "I mean, your nostrils are so tiny!" "Shut up!" I shouted, and covered my nose with my hands. "They are not tiny!" "They are, too," Gina insisted. "I don't see how you even breathe out of them." I spent the rest of that fucked up first day of school in a sort of dream state. Chapter Five: Birthday Cake Our plan was that year Silly Monkey would get together after school every day and practice in Gina's garage. We were determined to become a real, all-girl garage band. And one day we were hoping to start playing shows. Sarah sang, which always cracked me up. Not because of her singing, but the fact that she sang at all. She was so shy and wishy-washy, but when she sang she rang out with this full-throated, awesomely beautiful sound. I played bass. I was pretty mediocre, but I liked to shake my little ass, jump around, and try to do some of my skater stuff, so that kind of made up for it (after our one big show we'd played so far, this jackass at the local music paper once wrote I was like a Japanese jailbait Pete Townsend, which simultaneously flattered and embarrassed me). Gina drummed, and this other friend, Lena, played lead guitar. Lena liked to shake it up with me whenever we played, and yet, she was another shrinking violet-type. So that afternoon, I walked with Sarah over to Gina's. She talked nonstop about how classes were going to be so hard this year, which had her really bummed out. This was all bullshit. She would ace them. She always did. I tried to listen, but my mind kept wandering back to that new girl and all this Jenny Shimizu stuff she'd poured over me like syrup on pancakes. "Are you all right?" Sarah asked. Little Miss Concerned. For such a helpless girl, she really had a lot of motherly ways about her. "Yeah, everything's cool." "Well, you almost walked out in front of that car." Shit. She was right. I had to get my mind on where I was, what I was doing. Great, now I was passing Yoda-style character judgments on myself. I wanted to slap myself awake. "Is Dallas still not talking to you?" Sarah asked, being Li'l Miss Inquisitive today. I shrugged. Not a topic I cared to discuss at the moment, but luckily we'd made it to Gina's without my being run over. Sarah and I crunched leaves as we made diagonal shortcut across the neighbor's yard. Now I could hear some sweet sounds from the garage that pushed all my problems almost completely out. Gina and Lena, jamming away. Gina loved to really beat the drums. Lately, she'd had this John Bonham fixation because she'd discovered Led Zeppelin, and whenever we played a fast song, she pounded a lot harder than she ever had before. It was getting kind of crazy and her face would look like a freckled monster's. Lena always seemed to be improving. I put on my cool face, and took a deep breath of September air, and it had the faintest touch of October in it. Underneath that blue bubble sky, it was hard to imagine Halloween was just a few weeks away. It was still kind of hot, but not as humid as it had been, so I was wearing a red hoodie. Inside one of the pockets was a roll of Mentos, the Fresh Maker, Sarah had given me when we met up. She had one herself and we were the Mentos Girls. I could tell this was going to be a kick-ass practice. Screw that tall girl. Only, there she was, sitting on a stool in my... our... practice space. Her head swayed to the beat, narrow eyed, a toothy grin. She saw Sarah and me, and her eyes widened and sparkled. Of course, the sparkle might've been from the afternoon light outside the garage. "Hi," she said. For a moment, I almost asked Gina to stop drumming; then I realized what I was hearing was my own heart. Just my heart and traffic in the distance. I didn't know what to say again! "Hey, Amy, Sarah, this is Tamara," Lena said. "She's in chem with me. Just started school this week." "Hi, Sarah. And Amy," Tamara said, with a special smile just for me. Another wink. "I think we've met." "Um, yeah. Your locker's next to mine." What the fuck was this Tamara chick doing here, glomming onto my friends? These were my girls. Plus, our practices were supposed to be closed to the public. Sure, I'd never told anyone that, but I assumed they were, anyway. And that's all that mattered. Sarah, usually so shy, went out of her way to get to know Tamara, asked her where she was from. All over, it seemed. Her dad had just retired from the military. She'd lived in Okinawa and Hawaii, been to Europe. The previous summer, she and two other girls from her last school went all over France and stayed in youth hostels. One of the girls drank too much, ended up in the hospital, and later, someone stole all their shit and they almost got stuck over there. I was so fucking jealous. I'd never been anywhere. "Her mom's Vietnamese," Gina said, then looked sheepish and shut up. "Hey, Amy's Japanese," Sarah added, quickly. Oh sure, that made Tamara and me practically sisters. The Asian connection. Now we'd have so much to fucking talk about at our lockers. As if our mutual respect for my resemblance to lesbian models wasn't enough. "Have you ever been to Japan?" Tamara asked me. "No," I grudgingly replied. The day's discontent came flooding back and I felt pretty sour. Then, I remembered a recent household discussion. "My mom and my sister and I are supposed to go next summer." "Oh, that's cool." Okay, we practiced. I kept fucking up, though. I couldn't keep my eyes off Tamara. Why'd she have to be so cool? And so nice? I watched her sway to the rhythm, and even wince whenever one of us made a mistake (usually me; I played as if I had on boxing gloves that day). Sometimes, she'd grip the stool with both hands, and her triceps muscle would appear, just a ripple and curved shadow along her long, cocoa arm. Cocoa arm. Cocoa butter. I let my eyes linger, then follow her body contour along her thigh, to her knee, hidden by worn denim. Then, down the flared pants leg to her feet. She'd slipped off her shoes, curled and uncurled her little wrinkled toes. "Amy!" "Huh?" What? Amy? I'm... Jen- No, I'm Amy. Someone just said my name. I looked around, almost forgot where I was. We'd stopped playing. Sarah stared at me, with the weirdest smile. "We're playing 'Everything You Wanted to Know About Me', not 'Send Me'." "I was playing 'Everything'." They all stared at me like I'd lost my fucking mind. Sarah still smiled. Only now, her voice got soft, which was her fearful way of confrontation. "No, you were playing 'Send Me'." "I fucking was not!" I unplugged the bass with an electric pop and fuzz and stormed out of the garage. I felt the bass slam against the garage wall as I went through the door. Lena gasped, audibly; I thought that shit only happened in movies. My face felt hot and I was just about in tears. What the hell was happening to me? Sarah followed me out. We leaned up against Gina's parents' car, and I pulled out my Mentos. Symbol of our love. I opened them and popped a Mento into my mouth and sucked the sweet shell before biting it and releasing the mint part of the taste equation and becoming all fresh. Even as I enjoyed the candy she'd given me, I wanted Sarah to go back in there with Queen Tamara, the Goddess of Great and leave me the hell alone. I didn't tell her that; no sense in hurting her feelings any more than I already had. I stared down beside the rear tire, at a wooden popsicle stick in a dark stain in the gutter. A memorial to the time a week or so ago when Sarah'd dropped a half-finished frozen treat there. "Your stick is still here," I said, my voice kind of juicy from the Mento. "What's up with you?" Sarah asked, her voice barely a whisper. "Nothing." "It's not nothing, Amy. First, you act weird all day at school. Then you get pissed at me over nothing and storm out of practice." "I've just... got stuff on my mind." I gestured with one hand, and with my other, felt the nice big chunk I'd taken out of the bass, which I hadn't taken off yet. Fantastic. You have to expect someone who'd been through as much as I had in the past four years to lose her mind sometimes. And the past few months had been exceptionally emotional. First, I got all hot over Gina, then had Dallas touching me and offering me anything I wanted, free of emotional charge. And Heidi. Somewhere, Heidi and the League of Evil Cheerleading People sat in the darkness and planned my doom (I assumed). But that wasn't it. There was something else, something nagging at me and making me act crazy. Then it hit me. It should've been obvious to me from the moment I met her and got so flustered, so aroused and engaged. I couldn't deny it, though, and this one simple truth ran through my mind, re-complicated everything: Oh my god, there's nothing I can do to stop it now. I'm definitely falling for her. And by "her," my brain meant Tamara.