The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  “Can you get them on the internet?” Mom asked. Mom has tilted mysterious eyes and beautiful long black hair. She’s a thoroughbred too.

  “I tried, but the lady selling them on the site said I was too late, same as the clinics here.”

  “Chrissie, go to your room,” Mom said.

  “No,” I said.

  “How much does it cost?” Mom asked.

  “Maybe two or three for the surgery and then four hundred for one ticket, and then you got to stay over about three nights for the complications.”

  Mom threw up her hands.

  “I know that,” Monica said.

  “That’s college,” Mom said.

  “Yes,” Monica said.

  “Can’t he pay?”

  “He’s gone to working rigs in Wyoming and hasn’t returned any of my texts,” Monica said.

  I looked at them both hunched over. Their eyes looked hurt. I started crying.

  “Chrissie,” Mom said.

  “Chrissie, Chrissie,” Monica said.

  I kept crying and started howling.

  “Chrissie,” Monica said. “Run around like a Palomino.”

  “Yeah, do your Palomino,” Mom said.

  “I’m not a Palomino,” I sobbed. “Emma says I’m a Clydesdale or an Appaloosa.”

  “Do it, do it,” they both told me.

  I got up and started prancing around the kitchen. “The Palomino is the most special horse there is,” I practically screamed because I tried not to cry anymore. “The Palomino was invented in Arabia, and it’s gold and pale and yellow.”

  “Mmm hmmmm,” Mom said.

  “And in this war that happened, a second war,” I said, trying to remember what I read about Palominos. “A World War, something.”

  “World War Two?” Mom asked.

  “In World War Two the Palominos blended in with the sandy beach, and the soldiers rode the horses, and the enemy couldn’t see them until it was too late.”

  “The Germans,” Mom said.

  “That’s good, Chrissie,” Monica said, staring at her hands.

  I kept prancing through the kitchen even though they’d stopped looking at me. I whinnied and reared up like Trigger and Xena’s horse, Argo, who were both famous Palominos, along with the war ones.

  “Where are we going to get that money?” Mom said.

  “Call Teddy,” Monica said, thumping on her calculus book with her fist. “Call her, call her, Mama, call her.”

  The next day Emma, Lucinda, Karen, and I prepared to go into battle. We went to McNally Middle School, in Fayetteville. Mom, Monica, and I weren’t always from Fayetteville, but Mom moved us there after she and Monica came here from Alabama because of Mom’s job and I wasn’t born yet. Mom said that out of all of Arkansas, Fayetteville had the best schools for me and Monica and that even though it was a racist place, McNally gave us scholarships.

  I was in the talented program with Emma, Lucinda, and Karen, and it was a racist program because there were only three black kids and four Mexican/Salvadorans in it. Georgie Marshall, Yolanda Frederickson, Gloria Peterson, Selena Hauser, Luis López, and Juana Morales were the other kids, but once I became friends with Emma, they wouldn’t talk to me. I felt super bad about this for a long time, but once Emma decided that we were going to become horses, I got really excited, and then I didn’t care anymore until the Palomino problem started.

  “We’re going to attack Kenny and Bobby after school,” Emma said, at nutrition. “We’ll do the Battle of Pea Ridge.”

  “The Confederates lost that one,” I said, looking it up on my old and gross phone.

  “No, they didn’t,” Karen said.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “The Confederates won,” Lucinda said.

  “No, Chrissie’s right,” Emma said. “But that’s okay, because we’re going to rape them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, biting my nails.

  “What’s raping?” Karen asked.

  Lucinda started giggling. “Raping is raping.”

  “You don’t know what it is,” I said.

  “Raping is where you put your penises in somebody and they don’t want it,” Emma said.

  I looked it up on my phone and showed Karen and Lucinda. “She’s right.”

  We all went quiet, thinking.

  “But we don’t have penises,” Lucinda said.

  Lucinda, Karen, and I nodded, because this was true.

  “If we’re horses, then we can penises,” I said finally.

  “That’s the spirit,” Emma said.

  “I’m a Palomino,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” Emma said.

  We set the showdown for three fifteen. Kenny and Bobby were next-door neighbors and always went home from school together by walking down Mill Road. Kenny was tall and pink-skinned, with brassy hair, and he wore loafers with pennies in them. Bobby was tall too and tan with dark hair, and he wore sneakers and an Aquaman backpack.

  Emma, Karen, Lucinda, and I waited for them on Mill Road, whinnying and pawing our hooves on the concrete. Kenny and Bobby came walking around the corner. We reared up on our hind legs and snorted. It was four war horses against two unarmed men in the Battle of Pea Ridge.

  “Ahhhhhh!” we yelled and went running for them.

  “What the fuck,” Kenny said.

  “It’s girls,” Bobby said.

  “Ahhhhhhh!” we kept screaming. We ran at them with our hooves up and our noses shooting fiery flames and our manes streaming in the wind. Emma jumped on top of Kenny and started wrapping herself around him and biting him. Lucinda and Karen ripped off Bobby’s Aquaman backpack and then tore off his shirt.

  But I didn’t want to rape anybody. I ran.

  “Come back here!” Emma shrieked at me while Kenny started punching her.

  Mom and Monica said that I shouldn’t come to Teddy’s and should stay home and look at TV. There was some ice cream in the freezer, and I could stay up and watch Miraculous: The Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir and Star vs. The Forces of Evil. But I screamed and cried so hard that they wound up taking me.

  Teddy’s house was in Mountain Ranch, off Betty Jo Avenue, about six blocks away from us. Her complex was big and brown. She buzzed us in, and we went up to the third floor.

  “You brought Chrissie?” Teddy asked, first thing when she opened the door.

  “Her shows are on around now, and if it’s okay, she’ll watch them on your set,” Mom said.

  Teddy was white with braids and a lot of blue eyeliner that I thought looked good. She was a nurse at a hospital here that I don’t know what it was called. She was probably a Chestnut Belgian and wore a yellow T-shirt and blue jeans and bare feet with a turquoise pedicure that I wanted Mom to do on me. She smiled at me and said, “Hey, chickadee.”

  Monica put her hand on my hair and said, “Hey, Teddy.”

  “Hey, Ted,” Mom said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Sweethearts, just come on in,” Teddy said. “What a world, what a world.” She shook her head serious but friendly as she led us into the living room, where she’d laid out cheese and crackers and Diet Cokes. She had a TV set up in a wood furniture thing, which also had some books and vases in it.

  “So,” Monica said. She wore a big, flowy purple shirt with a black cotton skirt and sandals. Her face is beautiful like Zendaya’s, but right then her cheeks had started to puff out bigger.

  Mom wore sweatpants and sneakers and had her brown purse. She took out her wallet and poured out some money. She gave it to Teddy, and Teddy didn’t count it.

  “What we’ve got here is a simple little operation that I do all the time,” Teddy started saying. “We go to the back room and use just a little hose and some water. We also need some little sterilized instruments, which can help things go super smooth.”

  “Teddy, Teddy,” Mom and Monica started yelling.

  Teddy looked at me. “Oh, sorry.”

>   “Let’s just, kind of . . .” Monica’s voice grumbled down into nothing, and she looked all around the room with one eye crinkling up.

  “Have some Coke and TV,” Mom said to me.

  I looked up at the three of them and then went over to the TV and snapped it on. I got the remote and switched it until I found half an episode of Ladybug. I looked at them and ate a cube of cheese.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  Monica started shaking.

  “Okay,” Teddy said. She put her hands on Monica’s back, and Mom put her hands on Monica’s arms, and they pushed her toward a back room and shut the door.

  I ate another cube of cheese, and I opened up a Coke. The Ladybug episode was one that I’d seen before, which was when Alya would stop at nothing to reveal the true identity of Ladybug, who was really Marinette Dupain-Cheng, who wanted to become a fashion designer. I watched the show and thought about how Marinette Dupain-Cheng didn’t have red skin with black spots and that didn’t stop her from being able to be Ladybug.

  “No, no,” I heard Monica saying through the closed door. “No.”

  “Stop doing it,” Mom said.

  “It’s fine,” Teddy said. “It’s just a little water.”

  “It’s not clean. Get off me. You’re gonna kill me,” Monica said.

  “Monica, Monica,” I screamed.

  “It’s all right, Chris,” Monica yelled back. “Mom, go help her.”

  Mom came out with a horrible look on her face and wrapped me up in her arms. I cried and screamed some more while Monica came bolting out of the back room with a big wet stain on her purple shirt.

  “I’m sorry, but no,” Monica kept saying.

  Teddy came out after, wiping her hands on a cloth. “It’s okay, I get it. It’s scary. You’re fine.”

  “I’m sorry,” Monica said.

  “You’re okay.”

  “I want to go home,” I hollered into Mom.

  “Sounds good,” Monica said.

  Teddy went back to the back room and came back with the money Mom had given her. She put it in Mom’s hands.

  Mom peeled off a few bills and gave them back to Teddy. “For your trouble, honey.”

  Teddy munched up her mouth. She shrugged and put the money in her jeans pockets. “Thanks, Marina.”

  We left.

  “No, you cannot eat lunch with us,” Emma said the next day in the cafeteria. She looked up at me with a big bruise on her right eye that had swollen it shut.

  “You abandoned us at the battle,” Lucinda said. She had a long red cut on her cheek.

  “You’re a coward,” Karen said. She didn’t have anything wrong with her.

  Kenny and Bobby had been suspended for violence against women and girls. Emma got a talking to from the principal, and so did Lucinda and Karen, but they were allowed to keep going to school.

  “You can’t be that mad at me,” I said. “You didn’t tell on me to Principal Figgis.”

  “That’s because you went AWOL, and so you’re dead to us,” Emma said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  I took my lunch tray and wandered around the cafeteria. Over on the far end of the room, I saw the table with Georgie Marshall, Yolanda Frederickson, Gloria Peterson, Selena Hauser, Luis López, and Juana Morales. But when I walked over to them, they raised their eyebrows at me and laughed.

  So I went over to the other corner. I sat down in an empty place and ate my Jack Cheese Fry Up by myself.

  While I ate my cheese fingers in a corner, though, I was really shimmering like the sun had just come out and hit my mane so that it sparkled. I didn’t actually drink milk like a human girl or wipe my mouth with a napkin like a regular mortal. Instead, I galloped by the sand dunes while the enemy tried to track me with their spy glasses. But they couldn’t find me or hurt me, because I was the kind of special breed who could disappear into the background.

  “I disappeared into the background,” I said to Monica and Mom that night. We all sat at the kitchen table again, this time after a dinner of meatloaf and green beans and milk. “It’s because I have that camouflage that protects me from the enemy.”

  “So what now?” Mom said.

  Monica took her phone out of her pocket and poked at it. “Well, at least we’re not in Alabama or Ohio or Mississippi, where the scarier baby savers live.”

  “Little mercies, I guess,” Mom said.

  Monica looked at her phone some more. “On Twitter even Trump says some abortion’s okay, like when you’re going to die or got bothered by your brother or were . . . raped.”

  “You said that’s an option, right?” Mom said. “Out here, in Arkansas.”

  “Mom,” Monica said.

  “Rape’s where you put your penises in somebody but they don’t want you to,” I said.

  Mom and Monica looked at me with little jerks of their heads.

  “Great,” Monica said.

  “You’re too young to know that,” Mom muttered.

  “Emma said it because when we were horses, she wanted to rape Kenny and Bobby at the Battle of Pea Ridge.”

  “Dixies lost that one,” Mom said.

  “That’s what I said,” I said.

  “Emma’s not going to rape anybody.” Monica cacked out a bad little laugh.

  “Don’t hang out with Emma anymore,” Mom said.

  “She won’t talk to me,” I said. “That’s why I had to sit in a corner at lunch and be a Palomino so that I had camouflage and my enemies couldn’t see me.”

  Mom went quiet for a second and then said, “That’s what we need. To evade the enemy.”

  “Mom,” Monica said.

  “They got this idea that if you’ve been raped, then you’re something special,” Mom started huffing. “But a hell of a lot of women have a mess of sex that they never asked for, and if they don’t file papers, nobody cares about them. Use it, use it. Just say it. It’s all the same thing.”

  “You know I’ve been knocked down before, and that shit is so serious you can’t make up a story about it,” Monica said.

  “Ssshhh, sssssh,” Mom said, waving at me.

  “Thomas didn’t rape me,” Monica said. “He’s a dick, but he didn’t hurt me. I’m just up a creek.” My sister munched up her mouth. “Why they only give you a few weeks? They cut you off if you take your time to think it through, but that’s being a better person, I think, thinking about it, making sure.”

  “They don’t care what you think, darlin’,” Mom said.

  “I care what I think,” Monica said. “All I am is what I think and what I do.”

  “Baby, that’s just something you read. Get your damn head out of a book and look at the world.”

  Monica kept her head bent and stared at her phone like she wanted to disappear into it.

  I ate some meatloaf and kept my yup shut so they didn’t send me to my room.

  “Use the rape like a ticket,” Mom went on. “Use it now when you need it.”

  “I think if you start playing games with the truth, then something nasty happens to you,” Monica said.

  “Something nasty happens to all of us,” Mom said, her face turning shiny and twisted.

  Monica didn’t say anything.

  “Monica,” Mom said.

  Monica still didn’t say anything.

  “Monica, do you want to be a secretary like me, saying ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ to people who barely remember your blessed name?” Mom said, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “Right now, seems to me like nothing in the world’s going to save me from saying ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am,’ for the rest of my life,” Monica said.

  “Money changes all that,” Mom said.

  “Not all of it.” My sister shrugged, while Mom stared at her with wild Mustang eyes.

  Finally my sister sighed and turned off her phone. “Yeah, all right.”

  Mom made a doctor’s appointment for Monica set for a week later
.

  “We’ll be back this afternoon,” Monica said, while she put her jacket on by the door.

  “Do your homework,” Mom said, digging through her purse.

  “I’m going with you,” I said.

  “No,” Monica said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No,” Mom said.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I said.

  Monica shook her head. “Why do you have to go everywhere with us?”

  “Because I love you,” I said.

  “She’s getting separation anxiety,” Mom said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s when I get too tired to fight,” Mom said.

  So I went.

  The office was small, with white walls decorated with pictures of trees. Seven women and two men already sat on the sofas and chairs in the waiting area. The women all looked normal. There were no other kids.

  “Gutiérrez,” Mom said to the nurse at the desk.

  We sat on three little chairs up at the front, by the nurse. The nurse was a black lady wearing purple eyeshadow and soft blue pants and a big blue top and was a Tennessee Walking Horse. She gave Mom a bunch of papers, and Mom started to write on them right away. Monica blinked her eyes fast at the pictures of the trees and chewed on the inside of her cheek.

  “Don’t talk to me,” one of the women said to one of the men. The woman was black too. She had long, black, Peruvian Paso hair and wore green pants. She was crying. The man was white and wore brown pants and had a dog-like face.

  “You’ll feel better when it’s over,” the man said.

  Another nurse, who was chubby and white, with big blue eyes covered with lots of black mascara and short, frizzy, light-brown hair, and who was a Clydesdale, came out from a side door. “Mulligan.”

  The black lady with the Peruvian Paso hair and the dog man got up and went through the door.

  “Tell me about being an engineer,” Monica said to Mom.

  Mom kept writing on the papers and said, “You’re going to go into robots like you always wanted and make little machines that fix people from the inside.”