Girl Mans Up

by M-E Girard

  “No. Not you business, Penelope,” she says. “Come.”

  She drags me to the kitchen. I’m so mad my eyes sting. We sit at the table, listening to the shouting going on below us.

  “You let you pai talk to João,” Mom says.

  “Whatever.”

  “João got big big mouth, big head. He gotta shut up his mouth. He gotta stop being crazy. Stop being estúpido.”

  I stare back at her. “Whatever, Ma.”

  Her face goes all mean. “Tu não quer saber o que tu faz para trazer problemas para o seu irmão?”

  “I already know what I did. I already know it’s my fault—trust me. You don’t have to yell at me about it.”

  “I no yell. Listen. You cut you hair, you get people laugh,” she says. “You go outside like this, what you think gonna happen? I tell you. I tell you this all the time.” She asks how I can expect people to understand something that doesn’t make sense. “João no need problemas de sua irmã. You irmão he need to grow up, be a man. You grow up and be a woman.”

  Things get quieter downstairs, and I picture Johnny throwing his stuff into garbage bags, getting ready to finally be done with the crap this house is full of. Maybe I should go help him.

  “I tell you when you no try to be good girl, the other people they gonna have to . . .” She gets tongue-tied here, so she starts over in Portuguese, telling me when I insist on not being a good girl, I’m making things harder not only for myself, but harder for everyone around me. She says I should be bending for other people instead of expecting everyone else to bend for me.

  “I already know all this, okay?” I say, my voice harsher than I meant it to be. “You can stop explaining it to me. I’m not stupid. I already know.”

  There’s pounding up the stairs now. Shouting. Johnny’s the first one up. I leave the kitchen before my mom can try to pin me to the table. Dad makes it up the stairs, winded.

  “João!” he yells.

  Johnny stomps around the front hall. “It’s done. This shit’s been going on too long.”

  “I tell you get outta here long time ago,” Dad says; then he says Johnny should’ve never been allowed to come back.

  “Believe me, I didn’t wanna come back,” Johnny says.

  “Well, then why did you?” I ask. “Huh? Why the hell did you bother coming back?”

  He goes quiet. Dad’s finger is still up in the air like some kind of warning. All this yelling, and when I ask a question, everyone goes mute.

  “Leave. For good this time,” I say. Johnny’s looking back at me like I’m not speaking clearly. “Just go.”

  They’re all staring at me.

  “Come outside a sec, okay? I gotta tell you some stuff,” Johnny finally says.

  Dad looks ready to say something but I beat him to it.

  “I don’t need stuff explained to me like I’m stupid. I get it, okay?” My voice is louder. “You’re old enough. You have a job. And you hate it here. Why would you stay? There’s no reason. There’s no reason at all for you to stay here.”

  Johnny’s looking around like he’s trying to find a reason, but he’s coming up empty. I can’t stop clenching my teeth and staring at that statue of Mary, picturing myself dropping it on the floor and watching it shatter into pieces.

  “You need to cool off,” Johnny says, tapping my shoulder.

  I whip his hand off. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Pen, man,” he says. “Calma.”

  “I don’t need to calm down,” I say. “I’m done calming down, okay? Get outta here.” He holds his hands up like I usually do when he’s losing it in front of me. “Get out! Don’t be a pussy. Leave.”

  Johnny gets in front of our parents, but he turns to look at me. His biceps are huge, ready to bust. “Don’t be a stupid little hothead, Pen. This family’s all about talking shit about everyone else and then going off about respeito. Bunch of hypocrites.”

  “You’re one to talk,” I say.

  “Que desgraça,” Mom says. “Nosso filho é uma desgraça.”

  At being called a disgrace, Johnny pretends to wipe his hands and shake the filth off them before whirling around.

  Then the door slams. He’s gone.

  TWENTY

  NO ONE COMES UPSTAIRS. NO ONE TRIES TO TALK to me. Not even with a text. There’s nothing to do, and I’m so damn ready to blow. So I take a shower, and I throw on some clothes. There’s a basket of folded laundry on my bed. I knock it over. Just because.

  My phone starts playing the Ninja Turtles theme, but it’s not Johnny. Good—last person I want to talk to is him.

  “Hey, you,” Blake says. Those two words and the breath rushes out of me. “I was doing some vocal exercises, but I keep thinking I feel a little tickle at the back of my throat. So, I decided to relax and play some Zelda, which made me think of you. You’re coming later, right?”

  “Um . . . I’m not sure yet,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes my mom says yes to stuff, then she changes her mind.”

  There’s silence for a moment, then a sigh. “Well, that’s sort of not cool. You live like that? With someone saying you can do something then turning around and taking it away?” she asks, and her voice takes on this edge.

  “I can’t really control what my parents do,” I say.

  “Well, do you tell them they’re not being fair?” she says.

  That makes me laugh. “Yeah, you don’t really know my parents. You don’t tell them anything. They decide. It’s their house. Respect and all that.”

  “That sounds like some crazy stuff right out of the fifties or something.”

  I snort. “It’s not crazy. It’s how a lot of parents are. Especially in European families.”

  There’s more silence, and it feels weird. I don’t want to be annoyed with her, because it’s Blake. But I sort of wish I hadn’t answered the call.

  “Well,” she starts, letting another sigh go, “I get it if you can’t show up. Just make sure you warn Olivia.”

  Olivia—crap.

  “I’m going to try to make it, Blake,” I say.

  This awkwardness is the worst.

  “Just in case, I’m going to assume you’re not coming, so that way I won’t look for you.”

  “But I want you to look for me.”

  There’s just the sound of her breath on the other end, and it makes me wish I’d just said I was coming. Because I think seeing her would make things better.

  “I should go,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  This isn’t better at all.

  OLIVIA LOOKS NICE, I guess, but a little too nice for this kind of thing. She’s got this shiny purple top on and her hair’s pulled back in a loose bun. We stand side by side at the terminal, waiting for the bus that’ll take us to the community center. I’ve got my white Portugal soccer sweat jacket over a white tee, jeans, and white sneakers. I was pretty sure I looked all right when I left home, but now that I see myself reflected in the terminal windows, I don’t know. I think I might be trying too hard to channel Cristiano Ronaldo or something.

  “This is a little weird,” Olivia says.

  I don’t even know why she still wanted to come to this.

  “Yeah. I guess it is,” I say. My texts probably weren’t enough to make things better. “Look, I’m sorry I was a jerk. I was in the middle of family drama.” So maybe the family drama hadn’t happened yet, but I’m not going to tell her I was having Colby drama.

  “What kind of family drama? Is everything okay?”

  “Someone’s gone. It’s all right.”

  She touches my arm. “Oh my god, Pen. Like . . . passed away?”

  “He’s not dead,” I say. “He just took off. It needed to happen.”

  “Your dad?”

  “I wish.” He could take my mom with him, too.

  Olivia makes a face like she’s tired of not understanding when I talk.

  “It’s just my brother. He’s old
enough to get a life, so it’s not a big deal.”

  There are other kids our age and younger walking in front of the terminal where Olivia and I are standing. Some of them—maybe most of them—probably think we’re on a date or something. Any girl who stands near me has to deal with that. I take a couple steps away, leaning my butt against the frame of a bike rack.

  “Plus, Blake’s pissed at me,” I say. “I probably shouldn’t even go to this, but I didn’t want to bail on you.”

  “Why is she mad?”

  “She doesn’t want me wasting her time.”

  Olivia’s head tips to the side. “She said that?”

  So I give her a two-line summary of that phone call. “I don’t know why she even invited me to this thing.”

  “She’s disappointed that you might not have shown up,” Olivia says, her eyebrows up like she’s waiting for me to clue in. “She probably had butterflies thinking about seeing you today, and then you said you might not even be coming.”

  “Butterflies?” I say, and Olivia nods.

  After that, I scroll through my phone for a while, wishing Blake would text, but feeling like too much of an idiot to text her.

  “So, is Blake’s band good?” Olivia asks.

  “I don’t really know, actually.”

  “What’s the band called?”

  “Uh . . . I have no idea.”

  Olivia lets out a little laugh and zips up her jacket. I stare ahead, at the random Saturday Castlehill people waiting around for the same bus we are. The sky’s kind of gray, like the sun’s not even going to try to pretend to stay up until dinnertime.

  “I’m actually looking forward to this. I’ve never seen a real band play,” Olivia says.

  “You’ve never been to a concert?”

  She shakes her head. “You?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen a few.” I stop myself from naming the ones Johnny took me to because I don’t want to think about him.

  “Should I take notes? I brought a notepad in case.”

  That makes me laugh. “I think just listening and then telling them if it rocked or not will be enough.”

  On the bus, we sit together on one of the back benches. A few people our age get on, three guys and two girls. They’re loud and that makes me shrink down toward the window. As they head to the back, they notice me right away.

  They fall onto a couple benches, and keep throwing glances my way. Their grins are definitely not the friendly kind. I pull out my phone to scroll.

  “When people can see you’re doing something wrong, they’re really mean,” Olivia says.

  “Huh?”

  “If they knew my secret—if they could see it—they’d be awful to me. Right now they can’t tell, so I’m safe,” she says, shifting in her seat a little to look over at me. She said the word “if.” But she’s talking again before I can ask her about it. “You’re not safe ever, are you? People can always tell with you.”

  Up ahead, those guys are making jokes and the girls laugh. I can’t tell if they’re about me, but they probably are. “Yeah.”

  “Did you look like a boy when you were little?” she asks.

  “Pretty much.”

  “You’re not a boy, though, right?”

  It’s now that I can kind of see why Colby might’ve called her to talk. There’s something about her really soft voice, and her tone, like she just wants to tell the truth and isn’t going to judge anything. Like she’s not even able to be mean if she tries.

  “Nope,” I say. “Sometimes I think things would probably be easier if I was.”

  “How do you know you’re not a boy?” she asks, and when I make a face, she goes, “Because my friend Lily’s cousin from Minnesota is transgender. He always knew he wasn’t a girl, but he says he just never said anything about it and let everyone think he was.”

  It’s hard to come up with an answer to her question. When I think about that stuff in my own head, I don’t usually end up anywhere because I don’t ever think it through to the end. Everything’s always made me wonder if I was supposed to be a boy. When I was really little, I even thought maybe I was born one and then some weird circumcision disaster happened and my parents decided to take home a little girl instead. But the older I got, the less that made sense to me. Because—

  “I don’t feel wrong inside myself. I don’t feel like I’m someone I shouldn’t be. Only other people make me feel like there’s something wrong with me.”

  Her staring at me is making my face feel hot. “I don’t really understand why you’re friends with someone like Colby.”

  “Well, I don’t really understand why you’re . . . whatever you were with Colby. So I guess we’re even,” I say.

  She nods like, Fair enough. Then she pulls out a little bag full of Halloween candy and chocolate.

  “I like that you’re such an honest person,” she says.

  I’ve never thought of myself as being honest. It feels like I’m full of it most of the time.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I like that about you, too.”

  She opens the little bag and holds it under my nose. I don’t need to be asked twice to eat chocolate.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE COMMUNITY CENTER HALL IS LIKE A DARK, dingy church basement. It’s this building that’s attached to the bigger rec center where the pool and skating rinks are. This is not the kind of place where people get married. It’s more of a retirement or anniversary party kind of place. There are round tables sprinkled around the room, and the windows are covered by heavy drapes. At the far end of the room is a corner with sound equipment. It’s not a stage exactly; I guess more of a platform. Blake’s band is set up there. At the tables, there are some other people our age or a little older. I don’t know most of the faces except these two other girls from our grade. There are a lot of guys who look like they’re in grade twelve or maybe even in college.

  We walk in together and pause to scan the room. What if Blake throws me a dirty look and won’t talk to me? It helps to know that however messed up and nervous I feel, Olivia’s got to be feeling way more out of place.

  “Are you really up to being here?” I ask her. She looks confused, so I add, “You’re not gonna puke or anything, are you?”

  She pulls open her purse and there’s another bag of chocolate, plus lots of packages of soda crackers. “If I snack all the time, I don’t feel as sick.”

  Should we even be talking about the secret? Should I be pretending it’s not really happening? When I look at her, it just doesn’t seem real that she could actually be pregnant.

  “This place is a little,” Olivia says, chewing on the inside of her mouth like she’s looking for the right word, “run-down.”

  “Totally.”

  A couple people are looking over at us, but all I see is Blake up there. She looks hot in these black cargo pants that are all tight and bunched at the ankle, while her feet are in these black heels. She’s setting up her mic, looking like she’s trying to find the best spot for the cord not to trip her. The guy with the bass is a super tall black dude with thin dreads that fall into his eyes, and he’s plucking a couple notes that don’t go with the chords the guitar player’s messing around with. The guitar player’s a fat white guy with reddish hair; his face is all pierced and he’s playing a riff that sounds pretty sweet. The last guy must be Charlie. He checks the amps, moves Blake’s mic stand forward, and then motions for the guitar player to go more to the right. Then he grabs his drumsticks and settles behind the kit.

  Why would I even step out of the shadows? There’s no competition between me and him.

  “Can we sit near the front, but to the side? I like being able to see well,” Olivia says, and we go.

  “Guys!” Charlie shouts. Instruments quiet. “It’s four o’clock. I want to start. We only have two hours.”

  Olivia makes her way to the tables off to the right of the fake stage, and a few people notice us. Olivia and I take a seat.

  Blake looks over and sm
iles.

  “Hey!” Blake says, coming to sit with us. She leans into me and it’s enough to make me almost fall over, but instead, I square my shoulders and decide not to pay attention to anyone else right now. Her words are in my ears. “I’m . . . sorry,” she whispers. “I get cranky when I’m nervous.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, staring at my hand resting on the table.

  “I really wanted you to come over tonight,” she says to the side of my face, still so close to me.

  “You did, huh?” I pull away to look at her. She nods. “That would be pretty awesome.”

  “Sorry, audience. Our singer’s holding everything up,” Charlie says, super loud, into his portable mic.

  Blake gives him the finger by pretending to scratch her cheek with it.

  “Good luck,” I whisper in her ear. “You’re gonna rock this.”

  For a second I think she’s going to kiss me, the way she looks at my mouth. But she just grins and tiptoes up to take her spot with the band.

  “Okay, guys, well, thanks for coming out. We are Drowning in Shadows,” Charlie says from behind his drums, and we give a little clap. “Yeah, so, uh, just let us know how it sounds. Whatever.”

  “That’s a very depressing band name,” Olivia whispers in my ear. It makes me laugh.

  Now Blake is standing in front of her mic. The spotlight above shines on the four of them. She looks nervous, just standing there, tapping the fingers of her left hand against her thigh and staring at the ground. Charlie raises his sticks above his head and counts to three. Then the band starts and it sounds good—like real music. These guys are sort of awesome. I relax in my seat a little. Blake nods along with the beat and her eyes close. She looks so good, with this silver top, and her arms left bare.

  “They’re good, aren’t they? They must practice a lot,” Olivia says, leaning over. “I was so scared they were going to be awful and I’d have to lie.”

  “Same.”

  Blake sings now, and I can’t move anymore. The rasp in her voice disappears when she’s singing higher notes, unless she strains. Then, when she goes low, it’s smooth. She’s loud and totally hard about it.