Things to Make and Break

by May-Lan Tan

  Marc’s pre-med. He’s planning to be a plastic surgeon. He says he wants to fix my nose, but I think he just wants to cut people up. Either way, he knows I’d never let him anywhere near me with a scalpel. I wouldn’t need his help anyway. My parents offer me a nose job every Christmas and birthday. They’re incredibly superficial, considering how clapped-out they both are. It’s no wonder Marc and I turned out the way we have. We’re the embodiment of their vanity. Sometimes I even think the triplet thing might have been down to eugenics. You need your face, my mother says, as if I haven’t got one at the moment. I’ll never get it fixed. It might be the ball-ache of my life, but it’s mine.

  Marc taps the ashes into the wastebasket, replaces the bowl, and passes me the bong. He pulls a baggie out of his pocket and tosses it on the bed. I start to pack a bowl.

  “You should’ve come to Galen’s,” he says, setting the lighter on the pillow. “She has this hot Swiss girl over. Slamming body, like wa-pow. Tits up to her chin. Pierced tongue.” He stretches out on the carpet.

  “And let me guess, you porked her. Fascinating.” I take a hit and hold it. The peppermint scalds my sinuses. Coughing, I hand him the bong. He pulls a deformed paperclip from his jeans pocket and pokes the contents of the bowl before lighting it.

  “She’s definitely worth a squirt,” he says, talking through the hit. “But get this, she’s Galen’s girlfriend.” He blows out the smoke.

  “Fuu—. That’s hot.”

  “At college this girl is known as Flipper.”

  “Um, because she has an incredibly large vagina?”

  “No you moron. She flips girls.” He offers me the bong. I shake my head and lie back, seeing Coney’s body projected on the ceiling. I think about her cool, slippery skin, and her warm insides.

  “Hey, queef breath,” Marc says, “did they buy a cat?”

  I turn. It’s sitting in the doorway, cleaning its paws. The blue lights twinkle.

  “It’s like a scary robot cat.”

  “I don’t like it either.”

  The cat rearranges itself so we can see its balls.

  “What’s up with telling Coney we lied?” I say. “Oh, and a heads-up would have been nice.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Whatever. She’s done with you, bro.”

  “Thanks for the news flash, Friend Zone.”

  “She’s kind of falling apart, you know.”

  Marc looks at me. He gets up and comes to the edge of the bed. “You fucked her, didn’t you?”

  He widens his stance and I start to block my face, but then his body language tessellates with the way he’s been acting all night, and I know. Coney wasn’t lying. She really did knock him back. I drop my guard and stand up. I get right in his face, close enough to kiss. When our noses touch, he steps back and his eyes remind me of when you look into an animal’s eyes and it seems intelligent. He turns and leaves the room. My brother is a destroyer. Nothing survives. Only me, and I have to wonder what that means. It feels like the loneliest thing in the world.

  I hear a sound. It’s soft, and deep. I go out into the hall. My bedroom door is open and there’s a low glow coming from the lamp on the floor. I hear it again: halfway between a sex noise and a sob, but muffled. An image flashes through my mind like dark lightning and something uncoils inside me. I run down the hall.

  Coney’s lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, and Marc is hugging her legs with his face pushed into her stomach. That’s how they always make up, except this time it’s my brother who’s crying. He lifts his head and looks at me, his face wet and different. When our eyes meet, the world moves half a turn, and the picture in front of me changes. I stumble forward, trying to find the edge of the bed behind the image of Coney standing beside our pool, lacing her hair into a messy braid. Three chlorine-tinted bales, locked around one another and tied off with a rubber band.

  Laurens

  Both have boys’ names for surnames and live off Interstate 10 in towns that have girls’ names. They have bloody Popsicle mouths and uncombed filament hair. They smell like butter and jelly. They know how to skin things. Their fathers are hunters.

  The summer their mothers suicided, the Laurens went to SeaWorld San Diego, where they occupied the same quadrant of the bleachers during the Shamu show, their screams mingling. The girl Lauren nibbled a churro in the background of a photo of the boy Lauren stroking a manta ray. Hotel beds were icy and bright, the fathers’ eye sockets smeared with sunburn.

  They wrap scarred knees over monkey bars and dangle upside down, spilt hair ablaze in sunlight, the knowledge of pain stashed like candy in the cheek. They’re as hard and as pretty as baby teeth, and people always say they are growing, but the Laurens don’t think so. They are pencils, getting smaller and sharper.

  Blythe, California

  Totally Hair Barbie has white-blond hair reaching all the way down to her toes. Lauren holds the legs while Kumi braids the hair. Kumi has slippery black bangs and pierced ears with aqua stones and she’s a really good braider. When she’s done she fastens the end with a clip. Lauren nods. It looks perfect. Kumi unsnaps the clip and combs out the hair with her fingers. “You do it.”

  She holds the legs so Lauren can braid, but Lauren doesn’t know how, so she twists the hair around and around into a ball and wraps an elastic band over it. It looks retarded.

  “That looks cool,” Kumi says, kneeling up and prancing Barbie along the windowsill. “Don’t you think she seems sort of French?”

  Lauren smiles. Every girl in her class knows she’s here tonight. Lately she plays a game where she pretends she’s on a TV show. She starts the camera in the morning when she’s running down the slope from her house and switches it off in the afternoon when the school bus spits her out onto the curb. This way only the good stuff gets on the tape. Today Kumi’s mom picked them up from school, so Lauren didn’t have to stop filming. It’s a special all-night episode. Kumi passes her the Barbie. Lauren holds the legs and watches Kumi’s fingers flutter.

  “When are you going to invite me to your house?” Kumi says. “I can come—not next weekend, but the weekend after.”

  “He doesn’t let me have anyone over.”

  Kumi laughs. It sounds like a coin in a can. “Are you serious?”

  “I know.”

  “Really?” Kumi says. “Never?”

  “I hate him. I’m leaving the second I turn fifteen.”

  Kumi looks up, surprised. “It’s no big deal. We can hang out here.” She wraps a ponytail holder around the end of the braid. “Want me to do it on you?”

  Lauren nods and Kumi scoots closer.

  “Your hair’s the exact same color as Barbie’s but it feels different,” Kumi says, working out the tangles. “It’s thicker and rougher.”

  Lauren scratches her palms. She gets nervous when people talk about how she looks, even before they’ve said anything mean. Kids at school call her Lizard because she gets eczema really bad sometimes, and because of her eyes. They’re greeny yellow and too wide apart.

  “It’ll get more soft and shiny when you grow up,” Kumi says. Her breath smells like hot juice.

  Lauren sits very still as Kumi braids her hair. She’s allowed to erase things from the tape, so she wipes the part where she told Kumi about the secret plan. She has to blink in a special way to make it work. She starts to think about Cody who used to work at the drugstore, who always had a shiner and was so pale he was almost see-through. One day he had one of those big casts around his neck and then he disappeared. Everyone thought he was buried in his father’s garden until they saw him dancing in a music video.

  “All done,” Kumi says.

  Lauren touches the braid.

  “What do you want to do now?”

  Lauren shrugs.

  Kumi shrugs back. “Hide and seek?”

  “Nuh-uh. I hate that game.”

  “Why do you hate it?”

  “Why do you like it?”

  “It�
��s fun.”

  Lauren makes a face. “How can you think that?”

  “You’re being weird,” Kumi says.

  Maybe Kumi isn’t talking about the real hide-and-seek. Maybe there’s a funny pretend version that girls play together. Lauren’s not quite sure she’d want to play that game either, but if Kumi gives a good report on Monday, more friends and invites will follow. Lauren has to live with him for seven more years. If she can spend every Friday night at other people’s houses, that’s like being away for one year out of the seven.

  “I’ll play,” she says, “but I want to be the boy.”

  Kumi scrunches her nose. “What do you mean, the boy?”

  “The seeker.”

  “Yah, fine.” Kumi gets up and walks out of the room. “Count to fifty,” she calls from the doorway, “no, a hundred!” She runs down the hall.

  Lauren chews a cuticle and looks around. Kumi’s house is nice and it smells nice. The furniture is velvety and seems to sigh when you sit on it. Kumi’s walls are light purple and covered in artwork and stickers, and her bed is a bunk bed, except it’s double-wide. They can both fit up there and Lauren can hardly wait. Where the lower bunk would normally be is a desk with a computer and printer, as if Kumi is a businesswoman or something. Maybe it’s better that Kumi can never come over. She might not understand why Lauren doesn’t have a bedroom door. He made it into a coffee table. It still has the doorknob. He uses it to store elastic bands.

  She goes to look for Kumi. The hallway’s cool and dim, with a glossy wood floor. She sock-skates past the den where Kumi’s parents are watching TV. Kumi’s mom is plump and cozy with a large beautiful face and Kumi’s dad is a braces dentist. She switches on the light in the bathroom and looks inside the towel cupboard and behind the shower door. Out in the hall are some family photos on the wall. Each one is lit by a thin silver lamp. In the pictures Kumi gets bigger while her mother’s hair gets shorter.

  Kumi’s parents’ door is open. Lauren goes in and clicks on the overhead light. There are long purple drapes and an enormous bed with lamps sticking out of the headboard. When she gets down on her stomach to peek under the bed, the floorboards stick to her hands like the pages of a magazine. She gets up and goes to the window, finds the gap in the curtains, and pokes her head through.

  Kumi’s standing there with smiley eyes and both hands over her mouth. Lauren goes behind the curtain and tickles her. Kumi squeals and wriggles. Her eyes get bigger as Lauren backs her up against the window and lifts up her dress. When Lauren tries to put her hand in Kumi’s underwear, Kumi slugs her. Lauren stumbles backwards, getting caught on the curtain. It holds her for a second before the rings snap. She falls and Kumi and the curtain fall on top of her. It happens too slow and too fast, like a nightmare.

  They’re unwrapping themselves when Kumi’s mom comes running into the room.

  “Look what you’ve done!” she scolds. She yells something in Japanese.

  Kumi starts to cry. Lauren wonders how long it will take to walk home. His shift will have started by now, but she knows how to force the screen door and wriggle through the cat flap. The freeway will be dark.

  Kumi’s father comes in and frowns at the curtain on the floor. His hair is very neat and Lauren cringes at how disgusted he’s going to be when Kumi tells him what happened, but Kumi just stands there, bawling her eyes out. Her parents speak to each other quietly in Japanese and walk around picking up the broken curtain rings. They’re as calm as people on TV, and the way Kumi’s overreacting makes Lauren want to punch her.

  Kumi’s father smiles at Lauren in an embarrassed way, saying, “Kumi-chang, that’s enough now.”

  Kumi nods and hiccups. She wipes her nose with the shoulder of her dress and skulks out of the room. Her parents pick up the curtain and start to fold it.

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren tells them.

  “It’s OK, no problem,” Kumi’s mom says.

  Lauren goes out into the hall. She fetches toilet paper from the bathroom and goes to Kumi’s room. Kumi’s sitting at her desk, breathing weirdly. Her shoulders are jerking. Lauren hands her the tissue and sits on the carpet.

  Kumi blows her nose. “Haven’t you ever played hide-and-seek before?”

  “Sure I have.” Lauren gets a feeling like when you haven’t finished blowing up a balloon and you let go. The way it whizzes around hitting everything.

  “That’s not how you play, dummy.” Kumi’s eyes are red and ugly.

  “Shut up,” Lauren says.

  Kumi folds her arms and swivels her chair to face the other way. Lauren touches the handles of the desk drawers. She blinks her eyes and erases the tape.

  She lies on her side with her forehead pressed to the slats of the bunk, listening to the catch in Kumi’s breathing. After the fight, Kumi didn’t laugh or smile anymore, and she fell asleep halfway through their game of Othello. She hadn’t eaten even half the candy in her pillowcase. When Lauren tried to wake her up, she rolled to the wall. Lauren switched off the flashlight and ate the rest of the candy in the dark. It tasted like metal.

  Sugar from the gummy worms grits the sheets. The solar system shines on the far wall. Lauren loves planets. She loves their names and their magnetism and the way their orbits look like bangles. When she grows up she wants to have three jobs: she’ll be an open-heart surgeon in the morning so she won’t make any mistakes, an inventor in the afternoon because that’s when she has her best ideas, and an astronaut at night. She’ll go to college first, to learn how to take rock samples. Lauren wants to go to Venus because it’s the hottest world. She’ll have a special suit made, the same as people wear in the movies when they’re set on fire. Everybody goes to the moon.

  The door opens. She shuts her eyes and light washes over the lids. Kumi’s mom moves the blankets and tucks Lauren in a bit tighter. She smells like pink lotion. Her nightgown swishes and the door clicks shut. Earlier, she brushed Lauren’s teeth for her. It was kind of weird, but Lauren liked the way she’d held her by the back of the head and afterwards her teeth felt so smooth.

  Lauren’s mom didn’t go to college, she went to L.A. Later she came back and married Lauren’s dad. She liked to say she wasn’t city-beautiful and had found out the hard way. She used to stare through the TV, touching her mouth. Sometimes she walked in fashion shows at the mall. She had freckles in the morning when Lauren crawled into her bed. On the last night, she lay on Lauren’s carpet doing stretching exercises. Since she’s been gone, candy tastes bad. Rain falls harder and darkness is darker.

  The friendship is over. Kumi knows that Lauren is awful. She’ll tell everyone at school. Lauren thinks of an apple. It’s pretty OK inside. It only starts to turn rotten when you cut it open and it touches the world.

  She’s still awake when the planets on the wall stop glowing.

  The car stops in front of the house. Lauren unclips the seat-belt and looks in the rearview mirror. Kumi’s in the back seat in her ballet clothes, looking out the window.

  “Thank you, and sorry,” Lauren says to Kumi’s mom.

  “Don’t be silly.” Kumi’s mom smiles. “We loved having you.” She makes the locks on the doors pop up.

  Blinking her eyes to stop the camera, Lauren gets out and shuts the door. It’s a hot, dark day. The sky has berry-red lines, as if it’s been scratched.

  Kumi waves. “See you Monday!”

  “Goodbye,” Lauren says.

  The car turns around, kicking up rocks and dirt. It bounces down the track. She watches it fade, the dust rising.

  His truck is here and the screen door’s open. If there’s no girl, he’ll sleep until dark. The girls come from work. Some of them do weird and desperate things the first time they meet her, like baking banana bread or trying to teach her to knit. They stop when they realize it makes no difference to him. Leaving her shoes on the porch, she goes in with sock feet.

  The house is dark and stuffy. The living room shades are down and the TV’s fizzing cartoons. His door
is shut and there’s no guitar music, no blade of light underneath. A glass on the coffee table holds a bunch of cigarette butts. She picks up the glass, turning it to see if any of the filters have lipstick prints. The girl who doesn’t wear lipstick eats Skittles nonstop. She goes to the kitchen and pokes through the top layer of the trash. There’s no Skittles packet.

  The cartoons are spinning and popping. She finds the remote and turns down the sound. She pads over to his door and cups her ear to it. No voices, so she opens it and pokes her head around. He’s alone and asleep. She shuts the door and goes to the kitchen, gets the Tupperware from the freezer and peels off the lid. AccuTip Saboted Slugs are the best, and green and gold are her favorite colors. She counts out five shells, stuffs them in her shorts pockets and puts the Tupperware back. Her hands are sweating.

  Under the pennies and screws and bits of uncooked spaghetti in the drawer under the microwave is the key on its loop of wire. She goes to the living room and unlocks the cupboard by the TV. Behind the fly rods, the guns are stored open and safe. She lifts out the Persuader, making sure the red dot isn’t visible on top of the receiver. When she pushes the slide forward to close the chamber, it clatters. She’ll have to pump it again to chamber the first shell and she doesn’t want him to hear, so she slings the gun on her back, hooking her thumb through the strap, and heads outside.

  The Persuader feels heavy and unfamiliar. The .22 is the one she knows, the one she learned on, and fits her body perfect, but it’s more for snakes and squirrels and the smooth-bore barrel works better with the Heavy Dove Loads. He told her never to fire AccuTips through it because they’ll keyhole. That means the shell turns sideways and you don’t get a clean shot.