Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

by Kim Oh

  I reach up and touch my head, right above one ear. My fingertips come away wet and red. I wipe them on my dirty, scuffed-up skirt. “It’s nothing.”

  The car driver takes a cell phone from his pocket. “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  “No –” I grab his hand before he can punch in the numbers. “Don’t. I’ll be all right –”

  He studies me for a few seconds, then shrugs and puts the phone away. “Your funeral, lady.” He gets back into his car and drives away. That’s the last I see of him.

  So that leaves me on the side of the road. I’m a sight, my business-lady outfit looking like it had been used to mop up a garage floor, my face streaked with dust and tears, blood caking and drying at the side of my head. The motorcycle looks better than I do. The right-side fairing is scraped down to the fiberglass, or plastic or whatever it’s made out of, and there’s a crack in the upper corner of the windshield, but basically it’s all holding together pretty well. Tough little machine – no wonder they’re popular.

  Of course, after a fall like that, I’m not going to climb back on top of the Ninja and ride away. I’m too spooked, hands shaking so badly that I wouldn’t be able to keep a grip on the handlebars. I’m not going to leave it there, though. Good thing it’s so lightweight, as the upshot of my decision is that I’m going to have to wheel it home. Which is where I must’ve been heading in my whacked-out fugue state. I look around and recognize the local landmarks, the store on the corner, that sort of thing, and realize I’m maybe ten, twelve blocks away from the shabby apartment building where Donnie and I live. That’s another break, at least.

  And talking about spooked – something weird happens as I’m getting ready to make the trek. I’m still rattled by what happened – maybe bonking my head on the asphalt did knock something loose inside my skull. Maybe a slight concussion? You know you’re screwed when you’re hoping for it, when something like that would be the good news compared to what else might be wrong. If I woke up dead tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t be surprised. Right now, I wasn’t even all that upset at the prospect, except for worrying about who would take care of Donnie if I were vanished from the scene.

  The weird thing – I take a deep breath, trying to pull myself together as much as I can. Standing at the side of the motorcycle, I pull it up straight with its handlebars and lift the kickstand out of the way with the toe of one badly scuffed shoe. As I’m doing all that, a strange perception washes over me, as though all the surrounding buildings, and the cars zooming by on the road a few feet away from me, were all just painted on overlapping transparent sheets. As though none of them were real, with no actual substance to them, just their flat two-dimensional appearances being all that they possessed. That made me feel even more disconnected. For a moment, I was actually afraid that a wind would pick up and scatter the transparencies with the buildings and the cars and everything else on them – leaving behind what? I didn’t know. Didn’t want to find out, either.

  I took another deep breath and the disoriented perception faded a bit, as though reality was seeping back into the two-dimensional things around me, filling them out, making them real again. But not before I had one other freaky perception, that scared me even more. For just a second, I had the strangest feeling of being watched, and from every direction – as though those transparent sheets with the buildings and cars on them suddenly raised a little bit from their lower corners. And there were things peering out from behind them, their blank eyes narrowing first with curiosity, then darkening with some unfathomable intent directed toward me.

  By that point, I was thinking maybe I should get over to an emergency room and have my head x-rayed.

  The weird perception passed and the world became normal around me again, all solid the way it had been before. It still sucked, but at least it sucked in the way that I had become used to.

  It must’ve taken me an hour, but I got myself and the motorcycle home at last. Now I was even more sore and weary, from the effort of keeping the machine upright and pushing it along, from one long block to the next. But the fatigue helped numb the other pain, at least.

  I left the motorcycle parked at the curb in front of the building. I’d have to make other arrangements for it, and soon. In this crappy neighborhood, you couldn’t leave anything like that hanging around in the open, without one of our lovely neighbors making off with it. I’d have to go back to the dealership and get one of those heavy-duty chains they sell just for locking up motorcycles, with the big heavy links that can’t be cut with anything short of military ordnance. I figured the bike could make it through one night before it was in real danger of disappearing. And if it did vanish, at this point I didn’t know whether I even cared. About it or anything else.

  Of course, that was the bad place talking, inside my head. But that’s where I was.

  I climbed up the four flights of stairs to our tiny apartment. Donnie heard me letting myself in and called out from the bedroom at the back. “Kimmie? That you?”

  I dropped the business-lady purse on the kitchenette table – the purse didn’t look brand-new and professional anymore, either. It had also taken a hard shot in the fall, out on the street. I morosely ran a fingertip across the raw scrape in what had been nice shiny leather, while wondering just what I was going to tell my younger brother.

  This took even more gathering up what little strength I had left. All the way home, pushing the motorcycle along, this was what I hadn’t allowed myself to think about.

  “Kimmie?”

  I took one last deep breath, drawing my hand away from the scuffed-up purse on the little table. There was a hard knot of something in my gut, that I could use to walk back to the bedroom where Donnie was waiting for me. It wasn’t courage or resolve or anything good like that. Maybe it was just resignation, the notion that at least I’d gotten to a point where things couldn’t get any worse.

  Of course, I was wrong about that. But finding it out came later.

  I walked down the little hallway to the bedroom, pushed open the door, and stood there. I didn’t say anything, but just let him look at me. And the condition I was in.

  “Kimmie –” His eyes widened. “What happened to you?”

  This was supposed to have been the moment when I came home and told him about all the wonderful things that were happening out there in the world, and all the wonderful things that were going to happen. For both of us.

  Instead, I sat down on the edge of the mattress and reached over and wrapped my arms around him. Then I was rocking both of us back and forth, holding onto him as tight as I could. As though I was afraid that this was going to be taken away from me, too. The way I knew in my heart that it would be, some time that I didn’t let myself think about.

  “I had a bad day.” I couldn’t stop myself from pressing my face to his skinny little shoulder and sobbing. “I had a real bad day.”

  ELEVEN

  Let me tell you some more stuff you probably already know. I mean, this is stuff that everybody in the world seemed to already know, and I was just late coming to the party.

  When it takes a motorcycle accident to knock some sense into your head, you’re right in thinking that you’ve been kind of an idiot most of your life.

  That wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. This is it, actually: the real problem with getting your head into the bad place, whatever it happens to be for you – your stupid boyfriend, your crappy marriage, your job (none of which were things that I was worrying about at the moment), whatever – is that one bad decision just leads to another.

  You have to work to break that cycle. And some people never do.

  You should try not to be one of those people.

  That’s what I was finally trying, sitting out in the front room of the tiny apartment the next morning, after a long, sleepless, and crying night. My face was still all reddened and puffy, way after the tears had finally stopped. If you haven’t already noticed, that’s what kind of a wuss I was.

  �
��Maybe I could sell it.”

  “Sell what?” Donnie was in his wheelchair, across from me, so close that our knees were touching underneath the table we ate at.

  “The motorcycle.” I pointed to the window. “Maybe I could go back to the dealership and return it. Get my money back.”

  “I don’t know . . .” He pushed himself up, so he could look out the window again. That was why he’d gotten into the wheelchair – it took a little doing, on both our parts – so he could come out and see it, parked down at the curb in front of the apartment building. “It looks kinda banged-up.”

  “It runs.” The scraped fairing was even more evident in the morning light. “At least I think it does.”

  He knew better than to ask about insurance. That would’ve been a joke.

  “No.” Donnie shook his head. “You should keep it.”

  “Why?”

  “Simple.” He looked into my face and shrugged. “It’s what you always wanted.”

  “That’s not good enough. We still have to pay the rent.” Which, even on a dump like this, was a scary amount. “And eat.” I didn’t say anything about his medications. “What’re we going to do for money?”

  That was the real problem with the bad space that I’d let both of us get dragged into. It’s always money, when you come right down to it.

  What I’d spent buying the Ninja had drained our savings right down to the low two-digit marker. The shallower that particular pool got, the easier it was to drown in it. That was all we had in this world. Which was okay, while I was still working and covering our monthly nut with what McIntyre paid me. And now that was done.

  “I don’t have a job now, Donnie. That was where the paychecks came from. Remember?”

  “You can get another one. Another job.”

  The kid had confidence, all right. That was a good attitude for him to have, when it hooked up with his getting better someday. But right now, being confident in his older sister didn’t seem like the smartest bet to make.

  “Sure,” I said. “And I will. But that might take a while. They don’t exactly grow on trees nowadays.”

  “So . . .” He nodded, looking all sage and wise. “We just need something to tide us over. Get us by for a while. Right?”

  “You got it, pal.”

  “Okay, then.” He smiled. “There’s something you’re forgetting. You always forget it.”

  “What, the plasma donor center?” That was a running joke with us, especially around Christmas time. “There’s not enough blood in both of us put together to buy a ham sandwich with.”

  At least I had gotten back to the point where I could kid around with my brother. I still felt like crap, but that much of me was functioning. I even managed a weak little smile.

  “No, stupid.” He gave a shake of his head. “The envelope. You always forget the envelope.”

  That much, smart as he was, he was wrong about. I didn’t forget about it. I just didn’t want to remember it. There’s a difference.

  “Donnie.” I wasn’t smiling now. “We made a pact. We weren’t going to touch that. We weren’t even going to talk about it.”

  “Yeah, but that was before. Now is different.”

  He had a point. More than he probably realized.

  It wasn’t just the money thing – not having it, that is – that made now different. It was what had happened inside my head.

  I was still getting that weird feeling, that crazy perception, that everything I saw outside was painted on transparent sheets, laid one on top of another. All two-dimensional and phony. Something that could be blown away by a good strong wind. I looked out the apartment’s smudged, dust-covered window. In some ways, everything looked like it had before; in some essential way it was all different, like bad special effects that you see in a cheap action movie.

  And I wasn’t even sure what was going on inside my head that would cause that feeling. I was pretty sure I was recovered from the fall on the motorcycle, other than some impressively picturesque bruises running down along my ribs and onto my hip on the side I had landed on. I had taken a shower that morning, mainly to wash the dried blood out of my hair. When I was done, I had managed to inspect my skinny naked body in the mirror over the sink and discovered that a big stretch of me didn’t look Asian anymore – it looked like some bad modern-art painting.

  It’d be a while before that faded. Felt tender, also. Which, thankfully, at least my head no longer did. Wrapped up in a towel, I had leaned close to the mirror and taken a few tentative fingertip pokes at the side of my head. Nothing seemed broken, at least not that I could tell. That was as much diagnostic work as I could afford at the moment, other than holding my head up to a real bright light and asking Donnie if he could see anything suspicious.

  The spooky two-dimensional thing came and went, though, so I tried just not to think about it. A little more difficult with the bit about things looking at me from underneath the edges of the clear plastic sheets on which the world seemed to be painted. That creeped me out a lot more.

  As to the cause of those weird feelings, that was just one more thing not to think about. If it wasn’t an after-effect of the motorcycle accident – like I said, I felt like I had pretty much recovered from it – then the only other thing was all the other crap that had happened yesterday. Not just getting fired, but finding out that everything I had been dreaming about had been a joke on me. That and getting tossed out into the alley like a bag of trash. If that was what had screwed my head up, made the whole world seem two-dimensional and fake, and not just getting my head slammed onto the road . . .

  Then that wasn’t good. Even less good than everything else that wasn’t good in my life right now. If that was the cause, then I was pretty sure it was going to take a lot longer to get over than the whack to the skull.

  Meanwhile, there were more bad things – bad ideas – happening in that bad space where my head was at.

  Like the envelope.

  Even if Donnie had brought it up – I was still the older one. I was the big sister. As close to an adult as our little family unit had – or had had for a long time. I could’ve put the kibosh on that whole notion, if I’d wanted to . . .

  But I didn’t.

  I just sat there on my side of the table for a couple of minutes, not saying anything, just staring in front of myself. Trying to keep the world inside my head from falling part.

  “All right,” I said at last. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Kimmie –” My younger brother regarded me with great sad seriousness. “We don’t even know what’s in it.”

  I nodded slowly. He was right about that.

  So the first step, the first thing we had to do right now, was find out what we were actually talking about. Maybe there wasn’t even anything to be scared about at all.

  I pushed the wobbly wooden chair back and stood up from the table. I went to Donnie’s bedroom and to the closet at the far end of it. Up on the top shelf was where I stored the big heavy sweaters we wore around the apartment at night, even sleeping in them when the winter weather got really cold, because the landlord shut off the heat at 9:00 p.m. Underneath the sweaters was the envelope, right where I had hidden it. I stood on my tiptoes and pulled it out, then stood there looking at it in my hand. A plain white envelope, the kind you’d stick a stamp on and mail a letter to your grandmother with, if you had one. Only this envelope was fat and heavy with whatever it was stuffed with.

  Twisted around in the wheelchair, Donnie watched me as I carried the envelope out of the bedroom and set it down in the center of the table. Carefully, as if it were a bomb.

  I sat down again. We both looked at the envelope there between us. Then Donnie looked up at me.

  “Kimmie,” he said. “You have to open it.”

  I nodded, took a deep breath, then picked up the envelope. I slid my fingertip under the corner of the sealed flap, then tore it open.

  “Wow,” said Donnie after a moment. “That’s a
lot.”

  He was right. I sat there looking at all the money filling the envelope. Without even taking it out and counting it, I had to agree.

  It was a lot.

  * * *

  Now you’re really thinking about what kind of idiot I must be.

  First, I convince myself that some heavyweight guy like McIntyre is going to make some little nothing like me into the Chief Financial Officer for all his businesses, both the legal and illegal ones. So it winds up taking me completely by surprise when he has me tossed out into the alley behind the office building, when he no longer has any use for me. Anybody with a brain – which seems to leave me out – could’ve seen that coming.

  And then after that, I’m sitting in our crappy little apartment that I don’t even know how I’m going to pay next month’s rent on, and I’ve got an envelope stuffed with money in my hands – big money; I can see $100 bills in there – and I’m about ready to pass out from fear.

  Yeah, what does it take to make a girl happy these days?

  So here’s the story about the envelope. And why I’m not a complete idiot to have butterflies zooming through my stomach like a bomber squadron.

  A month before, and of course I’m still working for Mr. McIntyre. Droning away, Little Nerd Accountant Girl, dreaming of my big break that I was just sure was going to come any day now. A bright future, yadda yadda. And I’m there in my little windowless cubbyhole late at night, grinding over the books, like so many times before. I really am the only one left there, except for the janitors polishing the building’s lobby floor –

  A guy that everybody calls Badooch shows up in my office doorway. He actually has some Italian last name, but nobody calls him by that; they call him Badooch instead. He doesn’t seem to mind. Young, twitchy guy, always fidgeting and looking over his shoulder at something or someone who isn’t there. He scares me – but that’s no big deal, since little Nerd Accountant Girl is scared of everything, including her own shadow. But there is an atmosphere of random violence that seems to sweat out of his pores, like the chemical residue of whatever it is he’s always so cranked up on.