Girl Mans Up

by M-E Girard

  “What? Why you laugh, huh?” Mom asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  Mom says I should’ve learned my lesson by now.

  Dad tells me I shouldn’t be laughing right now; my parents can’t take the stress.

  Mom looks up, asking the ceiling why I couldn’t just be going around smoking cigarettes and sneaking boys up to my room like a normal girl.

  I say nothing.

  Johnny asks my parents what decade they’re from.

  Dad states the year he was born and asks what that has to do with anything.

  Mom says Johnny needs to shut up right now.

  Now Dad is the one whining at the ceiling, going off about how getting dragged to school to deal with this shameful business is not acceptable. Getting suspended from school is not acceptable.

  Mom puts her hands out in front of her while her face hardens. Then she says there are new rules for me to obey: No more job. No more boy clothes. No more girls over at the house. No more boys over at the house. No more short hair.

  “Not gonna happen,” Johnny says. “Nah, man.”

  Dad tells Johnny to shut up.

  “Give me the key,” I tell Mom.

  Mom throws Johnny a pissy glare and turns her nose up at me. I take a couple steps left, getting closer to Johnny. Dad furrows his brow like he has no idea what’s going on.

  “Where’s my key, Ma?” I wince with each word. My jaw feels huge. “You stole it, right?”

  Now her evil look is on Johnny.

  “Forget it, Pen,” he says. “I can get another key.”

  “Duarte!” Mom says, stomping her foot like a kid.

  “João, you get outta here,” Dad says. “You stay at you house now.” He says it would be better if Johnny stays away until we figure out how to get back on track.

  Dad goes to walk away, back to the living room.

  “Nah,” Johnny says, stopping Dad in his tracks. “Not gonna happen. I’m taking Pen with me. You tried it your way again, and it’s all messed up.”

  I look over at him, trying to see in his face, but he’s having a stare-off with Dad.

  “What you say to me?” Dad’s puffing out his chest. In Portuguese, he asks if Johnny just dared threaten to kidnap his daughter again.

  “Pen, go downstairs,” Johnny says.

  “No way,” I say.

  “I’m not kidding around,” Johnny says. “Go.”

  “You just said you were taking me with—”

  “Go!” he yells, startling the crap out of me, making my eyes sting.

  I stomp over to the basement door, slamming it closed behind me. But I park my butt at the top, bashing my feet against the stair to make it seem like I’m going down. I hold my chin with one hand, and the skin there is hot and swollen.

  “Where is the respeito?” Dad says. Every word is clear, because they’re right on the other side of the door. Why bother sending me away? They know we can hear everything through the walls in this house. Dad continues, “I never hear this from nobody in my life! No one talk to me like you talk to me, João. Nobody!”

  “I can take it, the way you guys are,” Johnny says. “In one ear, out the other. But I told you to let the kid breathe.”

  Back to Portuguese. Dad says the way they raise their kid is none of Johnny’s business.

  Johnny says this family likes to forget the important stuff. “I don’t. I forget nothing.”

  “Stop talking,” Mom says. “Cala a boca.”

  Then things quiet down. They’ve moved back to the living room, and they’re muttering in Portuguese. I open the door a crack, just in time to hear my dad go, “Respeito, João.”

  That word. That goddamn word.

  “What does that word even mean? What is respeito?” I yell from the hallway, cutting through their whispers. When I get to the living room, Mom’s holding a picture of me at five years old—this picture of me wearing the one dress I liked, because it was Ninja-Turtle green.

  The three of them stare at me.

  I aim my words at Dad. “Everything you said at school about me—you didn’t mean any of it. You just didn’t want to look bad in front of strangers.”

  He holds his hands out like he’s some helpless old man.

  “This isn’t respect. None of this is respect,” I shout in a way I’ve never shouted at my parents before. No one interrupts me. “It’s all just a bunch of rules. As long as I clean my room, and say Pai bença and Mãe bença, and wear the clothes you like, and don’t embarrass you in front of other people, then you get your respeito and who cares what’s really going on, right? Who cares how Johnny and me feel, right?”

  Nothing. Dad sits in his recliner and covers his ears like I’m assaulting his hearing. Mom’s frozen holding that picture of me.

  “I have respect, okay? I have a butt-load of respect.” I point at Johnny next to me. “For him.” When I turn to Johnny, I wish I hadn’t. His eyes are watery. Everything in me dissolves. “And you made him go away. You made him leave on purpose so I’d be by myself.”

  Oh, man—my voice is shaking.

  “That’s so mean,” I say in the most pathetic voice ever.

  My eyes get blurry. Johnny’s hand lands on my shoulder, and now it’s over. I’m leaking tears.

  “I don’t like you guys. I keep trying, but you make it impossible.” Why is my voice so high-pitched when I cry? I rub at my leaky nose. “I can’t respect people I don’t like—people who don’t like me. When everyone was picking on me at school when I was little, it was Johnny who came with his buddies to check on me. Johnny bought me my Turtles. Johnny took me to the movies. Johnny gave me his clothes. Johnny let me play hockey outside with him. Johnny cut my hair. Johnny—”

  Now I have the hiccups.

  “I didn’t have to ask him for that stuff. He just did it,” I say. “That’s respeito.”

  “All right, man,” Johnny says. He swipes at a lower lid—because he doesn’t have to make a girly mess of this crying thing. “Chin up, take a breath.”

  Mom storms out of the living room. It goes quiet, and then Dad gets up to follow her. Then it’s just me and Johnny standing in the middle of the room. But I’m not done.

  I’m not done yet.

  From the kitchen doorway, I tell my parents what I’ve wanted to tell them since I was eight years old.

  “Remember grade two? Remember when Victor and his friends trapped me in the change rooms and wouldn’t let me leave? Remember that?” My head hates dragging that memory back up to the surface. It’s full of those messed-up feelings—the kind of feelings that I was full of that night with Colby. “We all remember it. Those kids wanted to know if I was a boy or a girl. They wouldn’t let me leave until I proved what I was.”

  “Pen,” Johnny says. There’s an edge to his voice. I know he thought I’d blocked out that day, or just let it fade until it wasn’t real anymore. I know that’s what he thinks about every time something messed up happens to me, every time someone gives me a look, or laughs at me.

  “Do you know what those kids wanted me to do?” I say. Every word tastes like puke on my tongue.

  “Pen, come on,” Johnny says. “Let’s go outside, all right?”

  “No—I have stuff to tell them. I have—”

  “I can’t listen to this! I don’t wanna hear about this again.” Johnny’s voice is a loud rumble, and for a second I think he’s going to punch the wall. But just like that he lets the tension out. “Come on. Let’s just go, all right?”

  Mom’s got that look in her eyes again—she’s not defeated yet. “When you small one, the stupid crianças they no understand why you look like that, why you be like that, okay? They don’t understand. They stupid crianças, okay? That’s why you stop making hard! If you stop making hard, people stop doing bad things to you. Look—it happen again today!”

  I run my hand against the back of my head, letting the prickly feeling of my buzzed hair numb my fingers. “You’re blaming me again, Ma! I didn’t
do anything to Victor. He almost made me pull my pants down in front of his friends.” If the teacher hadn’t walked into the change rooms that day . . . “Do you remember what you said?”

  Mom’s crying now.

  “You said I should’ve tried harder to be a good girl.”

  She’s swaying like her legs won’t be able to hold her up. Dad rubs her back and shakes his head.

  “Stop crying, Ma! I have everything to say.” I’m done holding on to this stuff just so I won’t make her feel bad. She makes me feel bad all the time, and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. She’s more than twice my age—she should know better. “Victor wouldn’t leave me alone after that. He kept following me home and yelling stuff at me, calling me a boy-girl. You didn’t listen. He listened.” I point to Johnny again. “He fixed it. And what did you do? You kicked him out for it!

  “You making Johnny go away—how could you do that? And you did it twice,” I tell Mom. “That’s the meanest thing you could ever do to me. O pai ea mãe sabe que—you knew he was the only one who had my back. That’s my brother, and my parent, and my friend—you must really hate who I am to do that to me. For real, man.”

  I’m not going to cry again. Chin up, take a breath.

  Dad’s face—it’s like he wants to be sorry for it all but he’s not allowed to. He just rubs Mom’s back faster, while she buries her face into Dad’s chest.

  “You irmão he go there and tell everybody he fight—” Dad starts over in Portuguese, saying Johnny made us look like savages, showing up at school with his bandanna, threatening little kids, following them after school, getting the police called to our house. “And now he do it again! It’s no good.”

  “What you want, huh?” Mom says, sniffling. “Why you do this to me? Everyone laugh at me since you small one. They laugh at me, Oh look at the little boy Penelope. My mãe was a bad bad lady. She no like me, no buy me nice dresses, always say Ana not a pretty girl. When you came, I tell everyone this is my little princesa. I gonna have the pretty princesa. But you no like nothing I do. You no like me.” She hugs the framed picture to her chest, like the kid in that picture is dead. “What you want? What you want?”

  “Nothing,” I say. My hands aren’t shaking anymore. It’s like I could go to sleep right now, and I’d probably sleep for a day. “I don’t want anything. I’m just telling you all this because that way you’ll understand why I’m leaving.”

  Just like that, Johnny and I are outside, hopping into the truck, and taking off.

  FIFTY

  BEING SUSPENDED IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS that’s good and bad at the same time. I don’t want to leave my friends alone at school, not knowing what Colby’s friends could be doing to mess with them—but I’m also kind of glad to not be there.

  I thought it would be weird suddenly being at Johnny’s apartment, but it just feels like his place, normal.

  On Monday, Johnny gets home from work and collapses face-first into the couch. I’m scrubbing the crap out of the stove top because I let the water boil over when I made Kraft Dinner and it turned crusty brown everywhere. Finally, Johnny says, “I’m starving.”

  “I made two boxes of KD,” I say.

  “Again? I’m a carnivore, man. Can you make us steaks or something?”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. “But I cut up hot dogs into the macaroni this time.”

  “All right.” He sits up. “Hey—did you know they don’t call it KD in the States?”

  “They don’t have Kraft Dinner in the US?”

  “Well, yeah, they do. But they call it macaroni and cheese,” he says.

  “That’s the most original name ever.”

  “Well, if you think about it—what the hell is a Kraft Dinner? Dinner is supposed to mean mac and cheese in a box?”

  I nod like, Totally. “How’d you hear about that?”

  “Dom found this list of foods that are different between Canada and the US. I’ll send it to you. It’s weird as hell,” he says.

  “Totally send that to me. I wanna show Blake.”

  He pulls out his phone. “So what are you doing tonight?”

  “Well, after this, we’re hitting the weights. I think I’m ready to start with the ten-pounds. Five-pound weights are sort of pathetic,” I say.

  “You gotta start at the beginning. But pretty soon you’ll be lifting forty like I do.”

  I hand him a big bowl of KD/macaroni and cheese and take a seat in my usual spot on the couch with my own bowl. “Me and Tristan are playing Crypts later, too.”

  “How about we skip the weights tonight? We got some place to go,” he says, chewing with his mouth open. “Pai says it’s okay for you to go pick up some of your stuff.”

  “Maybe next week.”

  “You know that crap Ma said to you . . . ,” he says, sighing like he’s not sure how to finish the sentence.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like I care.”

  “It’s bull, all that princesa stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I say, twirling the fork in my bowl. “Was Avó Fernanda that bad?”

  “That’s what Ma’s always said,” Johnny says. Neither of us met our mom’s mother. She died a long time ago. “Who knows. Apparently she was a bitter old lady. They wanted to bring her over from Portugal—bought her round-trip flights a couple times—and she didn’t wanna visit. But bitter old lady or not, it doesn’t mean our own mom has an excuse to turn into the same thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Still—I can’t help but wonder what kind of mother my mom would’ve been, had she ended up with a princesa for a daughter.

  “All right, well, if you won’t go to the house,” Johnny says, “we’re gonna have to hit the dollar store, because my body wash is expensive and you’re wasting it all.”

  “Fine.”

  “You talk to Olivia yet?”

  I shake my head, pulling my phone out to check for missed texts. Not that I’ve texted her yet either.

  ON WEDNESDAY, FIVE DAYS after that crazy showdown at school, I get a notification that my cell phone account’s been suspended. Johnny calls the company to get it reactivated under his name, getting me a new number in the process. He makes me sign a made-up contract that says I’ll pay the bill every month myself. “Not a day late or I’m throwing the phone into the toilet.”

  “I think that’s a pretty fair deal.”

  I talk to Blake a couple times a day. She fills me in on what people are saying about me at school. Some are saying I punched Colby, which they seem to think makes me badass. Others are saying I backed Colby in a corner, trapping him into punching me and getting in trouble for it, that this is the kind of things girls do to get guys in trouble, because girls have too much power these days. Some are saying I should just never come back to St. Peter’s because I should be at a public school anyway, since Catholic schools are for religious people, and I’m not allowed to be religious when I’m so queer.

  “Now don’t let this go to your head,” Blake says. “But there are these three grade-nine girls who have been writing ‘Team Pen’ on their hands with black marker.”

  “What! No way.”

  “Totally,” she says. “My girlfriend is a badass stud with a fan club.”

  I laugh. It sort of does make me feel a little badass that these girls think of me that way, even if they’re little grade-nine kids.

  “Have you called Olivia yet?” Blake asks.

  “Almost.”

  “Do it. This is getting old,” Blake says.

  “She called the cops on me. I could’ve gotten arrested.”

  There’s silence on the other end, then a sigh. “I called.”

  “What—why?”

  “Because,” she says. “I thought it might’ve gone to hell.”

  “You thought I was going to get my ass kicked?”

  “I thought you might’ve broken his neck. You looked a tad psychotic when you went after him,” she says. Before I can respond, she goes, “So no more excuses. Call Olivia
.”

  “It’s not like she called me, either!”

  “Yeah, except you’re the one who has a new number now, so she can’t even call you if she wanted to.”

  “Oh. Right,” I say. “Is she still planning on using Colby’s picture?”

  “I don’t know. I tried asking her about it but she brushed me off, saying she was still thinking about everything.”

  “What do you think she should do?” I still haven’t sent her the photo, and now I’m wondering if I’d be dumb to do so.

  “I’m not sure anymore,” Blake says. “She told me a bit about what happened between them.” My heart jolts while I wait to find out if Olivia told Blake about the abortion. “He sounds like a manipulative stalker—basically the worst boyfriend ever. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, because that’s nothing to be all secretive about.”

  “Blake . . .”

  “I’m not trying to guilt you into telling me,” she says, and it sounds legit. “If Olivia wants to tell me someday, then she will. I just know that he must’ve done something awful—and if it’s that awful, then he probably deserves that photo revenge. It’s probably a way milder revenge than he deserves.”

  “Yeah. It would be.” Now I’m the one sighing. “I can’t believe you called the cops on me.”

  “Believe it, and now get over it.”

  After my phone call with Blake, I think about all the video games I could be playing right now. It feels like I’ve been separated from the Xbox for so long, and now that Rusted’s out—I bought it with my own money, and my twenty-percent employee discount—there’s a lot of gaming I could do.

  But I shove my phone and wallet into my coat pockets and head for the bus stop instead.

  I HOPED HER MOM would be gone once I showed up, but I can see her moving through the kitchen from where I stand on the sidewalk. She answers my knock on the side door, and gives me a thin smile.

  “Hi. Could I speak with Olivia?” I ask.

  It’s freezing out, but still, part of me is thinking she won’t invite me in. But she pulls the door open and tells me to come inside.

  “Olivia,” she shouts up the stairs. “Your friend is here.”