by Cris Beam
J guessed he looked like a mixture of exactly what he was: Puerto Rican and Jewish. There wasn’t really a word for this; in his head, he sometimes called himself Jewto Rican, but his dad never made much of the Jewish part. J’s face was thin, with some baby fat around the cheeks that he hoped he’d grow out of, and he had a dimple in his left cheek when he laughed. His eyes were probably his best feature, round and chocolaty, framed by long lashes that his mother cooed over but that J thought were too feminine. His jawline was also too soft for J’s standards, but he tried to toughen up the look by pressing his full lips into a permanent hard line. He could raise one eyebrow easily, and often did, making him look quizzical and accusatory at once.
If J let his hair grow, it would be curly and black, but he liked the buzzed look with the razor-straight hairline across his forehead. Most people didn’t even see this, as J always wore a baseball cap. They couldn’t see much of his body, either, as he hid his hips in the baggy jeans and his chest in two sports bras and all the shirts. On this morning, like all mornings, he pulled on his clothes as fast as he could to avoid even looking at his bare skin. Then he grabbed his camera, scratched Titi behind her ears, and ducked out the door.
“Hola, Jeni.”
J spun. His stomach clenched hard, as though he’d been hit. For a blessed half hour, he’d been in the world of his head. And then, before he’d even left the building, the other world was slamming him again. The glass doors to the outside turned to water in his eyes, and he slowly turned around.
It was just the neighbor lady Mercedes, in a stained shirt, sitting in the vestibule with a basket of laundry, gathering her strength to haul it up the stairs. Mercedes had known J since he was a baby, had been to his christening. J’s mother and Mercedes traded recipes and gossip from home in PR, at night or on Saturday afternoons. J couldn’t muster a “hello” back, not now that Mercie had screwed up his day; he didn’t care that she’d tell his mom he’d been rude. Fat pig Mercie, J thought. She should know better. Nobody calls me Jeni anymore.
The dissection was already in full swing when J slipped in the door. Today they finally had the animals, though J likely wouldn’t get to touch one, since there were thirty-six kids in biology class and only three rats. Why they couldn’t get more was a mystery; J’s dad worked for the subway and said tens of thousands ran through New York City’s tunnels every day. His teacher ordered the animals—cleaner, pinker, and bred to be carved up—from a lab in Iowa.
Berkin assigned J to group three. Dominic had already cut a thin slice through the rat’s belly, along a purple line someone had drawn with a marker. Dominic’s eyes were wide, almost hungry, and the girls in the group were pulled back behind him in a knot, ewwwing to each other. The insides were shades of gray and brown; they looked like swollen little sponges snuggling in for protection under the rib cage. Below this was a mass of intestinal tubing, shiny and green. Dominic lifted a ribbon of intestines with some tweezers; another kid told him to shove aside, give someone else a chance. J moved in closer. The kids all had worksheets; they were supposed to identify the heart, the diaphragm, the stomach, the spleen, and the pancreas. If the rat was female, they were to “excise the uterus”; if male, they should simply locate the testes and write it down. J rolled his eyes in disgust. Of course Berkin wouldn’t make them cut off the balls.
Their rat was female. J looked at its face. The rat’s head was tipped back in the tin dissection pan, and its teeth protruded like two yellow bits of corn. The whiskers were intact, the fur sticky from the formaldehyde but still white, the arms splayed open like a T.
Suddenly Dominic was dangling a long worm of intestine in front of the girls’ faces, saying, “Mmm, lunch…”
The girls jumped back in horror. One said, “You nasty!” Everybody in the small group was pushing and shoving around the wiggling flesh, trying to make somebody else get closer to Dominic, who was wagging the thing and cracking up. J, who was feeling woozy anyway, was thrust face-to-face with Dominic’s evil grin. The slick intestine brushed J’s nose.
“Ugh!” he shouted, and tried to get away. Where was Berkin? The formaldehyde made J feel faint.
“What’s wrong?” Dominic taunted, pushing the tweezers toward J’s face as J swerved and ducked. “I bet you eat intestines all the time, you freak.”
“Fuck you,” J said, and tried to hit him. The other kids laughed.
“Awww, baby girl wants to fight with a poor little dead mouse?” Dominic purred, backing himself into his posse of boys. “Little dead mouse can’t defend herself. She all cut up.”
No, J thought, you asshole. I want to fight you.
J had been getting into serious fights since the fifth grade, when people had started harassing him more intensely for his clothes, for the way he looked. He wasn’t afraid of fighting anymore; in fact, sometimes he relished it. He often felt lighter after a fight, even if he lost, like an extra burden of guilt had been lifted, or shame for a crime he knew in his heart he hadn’t committed but sometimes in his head imagined that he had. He sometimes fantasized about being tough enough to carry a gun, or dreamed about clocking one of his tormentors from behind late at night when he was alone standing somewhere desolate. He picked up an X-Acto knife from the lab table.
“You wanna go there, Dominic?” J said. “You really wanna go there?”
“Fiiiiiiiight!” Several kids shouted at once, joy in their voices. “Fight!”
Berkin was at their table in an instant. “What’s going on here?” Dominic’s and J’s faces were suddenly blank, innocent. Other students, from other lab groups, gathered around. Berkin’s voice was serious. “Somebody speak up!”
The bell rang, and J pushed out of the room with the rest of the class, becoming invisible in the swell of bodies in the hall. He decided he didn’t really want to fight, not today. He remembered Melissa, heaved his backpack over one shoulder, and dropped deep inside himself, leaving school with one of the passes he had stolen months ago.
“¿Quieres comer algo?” J’s mom called out when she heard the front door slam. J had wasted time at a comic-book store on St. Marks before coming home at a reasonable hour; Carolina was cooking plantains at the stove.
“Sí. What are we having?” J kicked off his sneakers by the door, the way his mother liked, and padded over to the computer.
“Rice, beans, plantains—no chicken. Just juice,” Carolina answered. “Your dad isn’t coming home for dinner—union something.”
“Yeah,” J said, scanning the computer screen, noting there were no messages from Melissa. He took a plate from his mother and hunched over it at the little table, its top scattered with mail. Carolina looked at her daughter shoveling food and sighed. She handed J a napkin.
“You can breathe between bites.”
“Sorry,” J said, not looking up, his eyes shielded by his baseball cap.
“I’d understand you eating so much if you were still swimming, but now all you do is play on the computer,” Carolina said, stirring her rice and beans together. “How does that burn calories? How is that healthy for a girl?”
J stopped. He shifted his jaw left, then right, glaring hard at his plate. The g-word, and then the swimming thing again. Did she have to bring it up today? Ever since he’d quit the team in eighth grade, his mother couldn’t let it go. He’d been the top of his team, made it to the state finals, and Carolina believed J would get an athletic scholarship to college one day. Until that year, J had loved swimming. He was good at it, natural. He learned young, on a family trip to Puerto Rico, the salty water supporting his body as though he were made of rubber and air instead of bulky flesh and bone. In the pool, his arms naturally pulled the water in smooth, strong strokes, the trunk of his body thin and still as a knife. The pool was an escape; as he swam in his lane, his muscles could scream for relief, but he would hear only the thrumming quiet of the water in his ears.
J remembered the argument. “What do you mean, you quit? You can’t quit!” J and his mo
ther had been on the interstate bus, coming home from a meet in New Jersey, a towel damp and cool between them. For weeks, J had been mustering the courage to tell her.
“I already did,” J said quietly, fingering the nubs on the towel. “I already told the coach.”
“But why? You love this! We already paid the fees. Swimming will pay for college! You think we’re made of money? Did you go crazy?”
“I just don’t like it anymore,” J said.
“Why the hell not?”
“I don’t know,” J said, but the truth was, he did: he didn’t want to wear the swimsuit anymore. His breasts had grown two cup sizes since the seventh grade, and the team suits were horrible. At home J could flatten his breasts with sports bras, but in the full, bright squint of the sun, J was a piece of glazed ham. The pool employees, the boys on the team, even the coach looked at his body hungrily, and the other girls saw his body changing, too; J knew it. Every day his breasts hurt his body; he could feel the strain of their growth beneath his skin Showering after a workout was an exercise in disassociation; he’d hold his head high and turn the water on hot, hoping the steam would obscure his vision. He hadn’t looked at his body naked in a mirror since fourth grade. He’d soap his arms and his legs quickly, keeping his gaze high, but he’d try not to touch anything else. He figured it all would get clean enough through the soapy-water runoff. The coach, a skinny guy named Red, never let him swim with a T-shirt and shorts over his suit, the way he could when he trained on his own. The latest insult was Red’s suggestion that J shave his legs, an offhand comment he made after practice. The humiliation was endless. J looked at Carolina apologetically. Carolina picked up the wet towel, smacked it across her daughter’s lap, and went to sit at the back of the bus for the rest of the trip home.
J shook his head free of the memory and dropped his plate in the sink. He sank into the couch to watch television. He turned the volume up loud. The party, Melissa, the rat fight, and now his mom. It was all too much.
“¿M’ija?”
J winced. “Yeah?”
“Can you turn it down?”
J shut off the television.
Carolina tried again. “Jay-jay, is anything wrong?”
“No,” J answered, clicking on the computer screen.
“Did anything happen between you and Melissa?”
J started to scroll through his e-mails. He tried to keep his voice neutral, but it shook just a bit. “No. She’s fine.”
That tremble in the voice, it had been giving J away since he was little. Carolina plunged on. “Did you and Melissa have a disagreement?”
J was getting annoyed. “Mami, no. Everything’s fine.”
“But you didn’t go there after school today, and you didn’t even go to school yesterday.”
J’s palms were starting to itch, and he rubbed them on his jeans. His mother, he thought, was somewhat psychic, and she was especially watchful over his relationship with Melissa. Sometimes, though, she was off base. He remembered eavesdropping on an argument Carolina had with his father, back when J was in sixth grade.
It came on the night J had asked his parents to stop calling him Jeni. Manny had gotten angry and stormed into his bedroom and slammed the door. Carolina followed.
“It’s a beautiful name—it was your sister’s name—don’t you care about that?” Manny had shouted. Even if J hadn’t been crouching behind his parents’ door, he would have heard the whole thing. It was one of the few things J knew about being Jewish; you named your kids after some relative who had passed away. Mostly, Manny didn’t care about his own heritage—he did Christmas and even let Carolina baptize J, because it mattered to his wife. But Manny wanted to give his child a J name, as his mother’s name began with J, and that’s just the way you did things. J’s aunt Jeni had died the year J was born.
From behind the door, J could hear his mother murmur something, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“I don’t like that you let her get away with everything!” Manny shouted back.
“She’s not getting away with anything,” Carolina said. “She’s being herself.”
“But this is too much. J is a boy’s name.” Manny’s voice had shifted from rage to a kind of firm authority. “Jeni isn’t the parent here. We are.”
“Manny—” Carolina started. “You know what Jeni is, yes?”
“Don’t say it.” J could hear his father pacing around the room.
There was a long silence then, punctuated by what sounded like his mother’s crying. That usually worked on his dad.
“Okay,” Manny had said finally. He sounded resigned, sad. “What do we do?”
“We hope she changes,” Carolina said. “Until then, we wait.”
“She’s not going to change,” Manny answered, his voice almost a growl.
“We accept her,” Carolina had said. “What else can we do?”
“No,” Manny said, sounding angry again. “You’re not listening to me. We’re the parents. Jeni can’t be—and we don’t have to accept anything. We pay the bills in this house.”
And that was the last they’d spoken of it, and of course J didn’t change. He’d grown even more masculine, coming home in sports jerseys and boy’s jeans, lifting free weights at night when Carolina and Manny were sleeping. Manny had dealt with the situation by staying away, getting more involved in his union, or at least that’s the way J saw it. Carolina tried to be home more, though J didn’t know how to cut a path through her endless questions.
Carolina looked at J, still fiddling with the computer. “Jay-jay,” she started, trying to get the words just right, “I know you love Melissa, that she’s your really good friend, but there’s more to life than girls.”
J’s hands froze at the keyboard.
Carolina continued. “I mean, there’s your school, and college applications, and you shouldn’t focus all your attention on one person, anyway.” Carolina picked up the cat. “I think you spend too much time with Melissa.”
So this was it, J thought. His mother didn’t like Melissa. Now she tells him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I won’t be seeing her that much now.”
“I thought you had a fight!” Carolina sounded triumphant.
“We didn’t have a fight,” J said, tightening his jaw. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Carolina looked at her daughter, miserable and rigid at the desk chair. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, her voice breaking. “Love is love, no matter who it is. There are other girls besides Melissa.”
J jumped up from the desk and ran from the room. He thought he was going to be sick. He locked the bathroom door, grabbed onto the sink, and stared at his face in the mirror. A lesbian! he said to himself. Your mother thinks you’re a lesbian, too. His eyes were dilated, and his face was pale. I hate you, he said to the mirror, and sat hard on the floor.
He wondered how long he could stay in there, whether he could sleep in the bathroom, how long a person could live on water from the bathroom sink. But Carolina was already tapping at the door, asking if he was all right. J barked out an answer, said he just had eaten his dinner too fast. Why was this all happening? Had everyone around him conspired to make him gay? And why did his mom, his Catholic mom, seem so fine about it? J just wanted to sleep. To sleep and sleep and sleep. He pulled a towel from the wall, covered himself, and shut off the light.
Sometime later, J’s dad got home and kicked at the bathroom door. J stumbled awake and blinked his way into the bright living room and his foldout bed. “G’night,” he mumbled to Manny, trying to look sleepy to avoid a conversation. Still, once he heard his father tuck in for good, J got up to check his computer. There was a message from Melissa.
The subject line read: Read this: Don’t call me. J clicked Open.
J—I’ve thought a lot about Saturday night, and I think right now we should take a break from our friendship. I’ve been thinking about this anyway. It isn’t just the kiss. We’re really different people, J, a
nd we’ve been growing apart. I’ve been becoming more serious about my dance career, and I need to think really hard about who I spend my time with. I can’t drain myself with people who pull me away from my art. I need to be around artists, J—real artists who commit themselves to their work. Not stupid high school kids who have no goals. I’m not saying that’s what you are, but you know what I mean. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.
I know what you’re thinking, and this isn’t about Daniel… although we have been spending more time together since Saturday. He said that if you were a guy and you did what you did, it would be almost like rape. I was SLEEPING and you TOOK ADVANTAGE of me. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for this.
Well maybe we can talk sometime. Until then, good luck with everything. m.
J stared at the screen and felt a silent panic rise within him. Daniel knew. Melissa, his best friend, had practically accused him of raping her. Ex–best friend. He pulled at his fingers, trying to make the knuckles crack. Faster and faster he pulled, until it felt as if he could pull them off. How dare she? He slammed his hand on the table and stood up, catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror. It was white. J picked up whatever was nearest—it was one of Titi’s fuzzy cat toys—and hurled it at the mirror. The cheap balsa wood frame shook against the wall, but the glass didn’t break. His own stupid face still stared back at him. The face that said fool all over it. The face that would never be what J wanted. J picked up his boot; he wanted to smash that mirror face into a thousand pieces.