Hello Kitty Must Die

by Angela S. Choi

  “Good night, Don. Thanks for dinner. You’re very nice. But I’m not marrying you. I’m sure you’ll find someone more suitable.”

  There, I had said it as clearly and directly as I could. There could be no more further misunderstandings or miscommunications.

  He nodded and smiled. “So you want to come over next Saturday?”

  “What?”

  “Next Saturday. For dinner again.”

  “No. No dinner. Not next Saturday. Not ever. Good-bye, Don.”

  Without waiting for him to respond, I marched out the front door and got into the back of my parents’ car.

  “Let’s go home.”

  “Did you guys kiss?” asked my mother.

  “No. I told him I wasn’t going to see him anymore. No dinners. No wedding. No kiss.”

  And that was that.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  “IT’S NOT SO MUCH ABOUT standing up for yourself, Fi. It’s about giving them what they’re asking for. ‘You just need the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t,’” said Sean, quoting Keyser Söze. The Usual Suspects was Sean’s favorite movie, followed by American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange.

  Sean always knew how to deal with bullies, on and off the playground. Again, thanks to his old man. Give them what they’re asking for. Like how he gave Stephanie what she asked for.

  And Evan, who all the kids in Sean’s old neighborhood had dubbed Evan the Terrible, learned what Keyser meant. Courtesy of Sean himself.

  Two heads taller than any kid on the block, Evan rained terror on every child with a little help from Buddy, his oversized German Shepherd. His parents, too busy working when they weren’t partaking in some good old-fashioned domestic violence, ignored their son’s foibles. Evan patrolled the neighborhood, taking lunch money, giving wedgies, thumping heads against the curb while Buddy chased the bloodied victim up a tree, over a fence, or worse.

  Sean became Evan’s favorite target. So he decided that Evan and Buddy had to go. He waited for them on his front porch every day after school, accompanied by a spray bottle filled with lighter fluid, his Zippo, and his father’s baseball bat.

  “Home court advantage,” Sean told me afterwards.

  One day, Sean got his wish. Within fifteen minutes, the stench of burnt dog filled the air while Evan lay on the ground with a broken collar bone and a cracked skull. Sean retrieved Buddy’s scorched dog tags and gave them to me after we became friends. After I thumped Jeremy good and proper.

  “Remember, Fi. No fear. Just do what the other guy would never do.”

  Sean did what Evan could never do.

  The problem is that bullies grow up. They leave the playground, school, and neighborhood, and become attending physicians, senior partners, vice presidents, and general managers. Instead of giving you pink belly or thumping your lunch, they force you to work overtime, change your schedule around, call you incompetent, threaten to fire you, put you down in front of your colleagues, impose impossible deadlines and wait for you to fail. They become people you can’t set on fire or pummel with a crow bar.

  And you become too old for juvie.

  But they are still bullies. And you still have to deal with them. Or they’ll step on you every chance they get, even if you have alphabet soup after your name.

  Like Sean, I hated bullies.

  “I need everything reviewed by the close of business, Fiona. Don’t give me this shit about not enough time,” Jack yelled with his office door wide open.

  “Jack, there are five boxes of this stuff. The documents didn’t come in until noon today.”

  “That’s five hours, Fiona. Christ, my wife gave birth in less than that time. An hour a box.”

  “Jack, there are thousands of pages here. No way could I do all this myself. Why can’t I split the piles with another associate?”

  “Because we want consistent review.”

  Bullshit.

  We were conducting due diligence for a major merger. Jack wanted me to review the entire set of documents delivered by the other side, catalog and summarize each one in a neat chart all by five o’clock the same day. All by myself. Thousands of agreements, leases, financial records, licenses, employment contracts.

  “Laziness and incompetence are not tolerated here at Beamer Hodgins. You should have this done in a snap. I can’t believe you went to Yale.”

  Yale.

  My albatross. People who didn’t go to an Ivy League college will take every opportunity to put you down, to prove to themselves they are smarter and better than you. That the Ivies aren’t all that and neither are you.

  So when you don’t walk on water, read minds, predict the financial future, or finish twenty-hour projects in five, you are incompetent, stupid, lazy, less than them, proving that the best and the brightest didn’t go to Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. They went to UCLA or Cal, like Jack did.

  Jack tossed my half-finished chart back at me.

  “Get this crap out of my face, and bring me some hot decaf coffee. Sugar, no cream. I need to take my heart pills.”

  Jack had heart problems. His heart didn’t contract properly, so to keep it working effectively, he took digoxin, a form of digitalis. He pulled out his vial and popped off the cap with too much force. The pills tumbled out onto his desk and floor.

  “Fucking son of a bitch. Look at what you made me do. Go! Now!” he screamed when I stooped down, trying to help him pick up the pills.

  So I left with my inadequate analysis chart and four tablets of digoxin. I went into the break room and got Jack his hot decaf sweetened with sugar and no cream. And digoxin. Crushed, dissolved, and stirred to smooth perfection.

  “Here you go, Jack.”

  Talk about using something from the victim.

  Because I couldn’t set him on fire or beat him with a tire iron. But Jack had asked for it. For Fiona thumping.

  I went back to my office, wondering where I had put Buddy’s tags from all those years ago.

  I studied the painted portrait of a long-faced lady with her hair pulled back that I had put up on my desktop. Instead of Ted Bundy, I had chosen Marie Delphine Macarty, or Delphine LaLaurie, or as history would know her, Madame LaLaurie.

  The Paris Hilton of New Orleans in the early 1830’s, Delphine threw lavish parties for the elite who adored her until they found out she had been playing plastic surgeon with her slaves in her attic. She gave one a sex change, turned one into a human crab, and another into a caterpillar by slicing, dicing, and resetting limbs with the help of her surgeon husband. She even chained one woman up with her own intestines. She definitely used things belonging to the victim. So they ran her out of town.

  “Who’s that?” my new secretary asked when I first put Delphine’s picture up.

  “A true role model for women.”

  Girl power.

  Suddenly, someone screamed out in the hall, silencing clacking keyboards, mice, and water cooler chatter. Someone else began yelling for an ambulance. Someone gasped. Someone started running around outside. Everyone at Beamer Hodgins sprang to life with noise and movement, everyone except Jack.

  WITH AN INDEFINITE extension for my due diligence project, I took the afternoon off and went home.

  “Why are you home early?” my mother asked. “You didn’t get fired, did you?”

  “No. I took the afternoon off.”

  “Why?”

  “Boss suffered heart failure. Bad vibes at the firm.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible. But it’s good that you are home. Your father has something to tell you.”

  My father shuffled out to the dining room where my mother was sweeping up the crumbs he had left behind from his lunch.

  “You’re home early. You didn’t get fired, did you?”

  “No. Mom just asked me that.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, I have some good news.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve booked your wedding reception at the Empress Restaurant. So lucky that weeke
nd was free.”

  “What wedding reception? I told you I’m not marrying Don.”

  “Then why did you agree to have dinner with Don and his family?”

  “Oh my God! Dad, you are unbelievable! I went because you dragged me. I went to tell them explicitly to their faces that I wasn’t going to marry Don! What the hell is wrong with you people?”

  “But didn’t you guys talk and kiss when you left?”

  “No! No! No! We didn’t. I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

  “Well, we already booked the place.”

  “Then unbook it! Unless you want to marry Don.”

  “Fiona, stop shouting.”

  “Then stop trying to marry me off to Don. He’s a total loser.”

  I marched out of the house, slamming the door behind me. Anger blinded me, propelling my legs one in front of the other. I had no idea where I was headed, only that I was headed away from my house, away from any talk of marrying Don. I walked until my legs were tired and the sun began to set. And I found myself once again at Sean’s place on Russian Hill.

  But Sean wasn’t home.

  “Dr. Killroy is with a patient,” said his receptionist when I called him at his office. “May I take a message?”

  No, you may not.

  Bullies come in all shapes, sizes, forms. Jeremy, Stephanie, Evan, Buddy, Jack, my father, Don. And I needed to deal with them on my own. Like Sean did, without fear, without remorse. Because they were asking for it. Because I was tired of taking it.

  “Don?”

  “Fiona?”

  “Yeah, hey, your offer for dinner on Saturday still good?”

  “Uh, sure. My dad said you would change your mind.”

  “Really? Guess he was right. But listen, let’s have dinner just the two of us. At your place.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll make crab.”

  “You do that.”

  A weight lifted from my chest, along with all the anger and frustration. Making up my mind and settling on a solution to my problem changed my mood from helpless to hopeful. It gave new energy to my tired legs, powering my walk home.

  By the time I returned, my mother had dinner on the table. One of the benefits of living at home. My mother made sirloin steak with steamed rice and vegetables. My favorite.

  “Fiona, where did you go?”

  “Oh, nowhere, Mom. I just went for a walk.”

  “Your father and I were worried about you.”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’m having dinner with Don this Saturday.”

  My mother looked at me, surprised.

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to see him again.”

  “Well, I changed my mind. I think I need to sort things out with him.”

  “Oh good, your father will be so pleased.”

  “But I’m having dinner alone with him at his house.”

  “Alone? The two of you?”

  “Yes. We shared a tent already, remember? Out in the middle of nowhere under the stars. Dinner in San Bruno can hardly top that.”

  “Fiona, don’t be facetious. I guess it’s a good idea for you two young people to talk by yourselves.”

  “Yes, Mom. Talking is good.”

  After dinner, I retreated to the quiet of my room and reveled in my thoughts. Thoughts of Don, thoughts of peanuts, thoughts of Don and peanuts. I paced back and forth in the dark with my iPod with Cobain crooning in my ears.

  I’ve been locked inside your heart shaped box, for weeks

  Insanity.

  It’s part of being Chinese-American, having to deal with insanity. Whether you are driven to it by your parents, by your peers, by expectations, by nonsensical logic, by cultural superstitions, it doesn’t matter. Eventually, you end up in the same place and find yourself thinking about engaging Snickers or PayDays in unintended uses.

  Like I did with Lidocaine and Mr. Happy.

  I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap

  Don. Like a deadly cancer, he was metastasizing through my life slowly, insiduously, relentlessly. You can’t ignore cancer away or walk away from it or tell it off. Cancer must be physically eliminated, cut out and chucked into a biohazard bag. And burned in a high degree furnace.

  I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black

  I barely heard my cell phone ring with my headphones on, but I picked up when it vibrated itself off my desk onto the floor. It was Sean.

  I pulled out my left earpiece.

  “Hey, what’s up, Fi?”

  “Oh hey, you won’t believe what happened at work today.”

  I started to tell Sean about Jack and the digoxin.

  “Fi, okay, stop right there. First rule of doing God’s work: You never talk about doing God’s work. To anyone, Fi. You hear me? No one.” Fight Club, another one of Sean’s favorite movies.

  “But...”

  “No buts. You never know who is going to sell you out.”

  “But, you...”

  “No, Fi. Suspecting something is one thing. Talking about it explicitly is quite another. Not even to me, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “Self-preservation, Fi. We’re too old to go to juvie. And you never know if someone is taping the conversation.”

  Forever in debt to your priceless advice

  “Got it.”

  “Good girl. Now tell me, what are you doing this weekend?”

  “Second rule of doing God’s work, Sean. Never ask one question too many. I have something to take care of this weekend.”

  Sean laughed.

  “Good girl, Fi. Now you’re learning. Need any roofies?”

  “No, I’m good with Snickers.”

  Sean chuckled.

  “Fi?”

  “Yeah, Sean?”

  “It’s about time.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  POISONING IS ALWAYS CONSIDERED first degree murder because it shows that you took time to pick out a poison, procure it, and use it on your victim. You thought and planned and had time to decide otherwise. Prosecutors call that premeditation.

  And you get twenty-five to life for murder one.

  You get less time if you jump out of your car and use a tire iron to bash in the skull of the person who cut you off on the highway. There wasn’t time to cool down and regain your good senses. You were too pissed off to realize what you were doing. Spur of the moment killing gets you murder two.

  And you can also blame it on road rage or some twisted sense of self-defense. You thought he or she was trying to get you.

  But the safest way to do God’s work is to make things look like an accident. A fall down the stairs, a slip in the tub, a faulty garage door. Make it look like God is doing His own work.

  Accidental overdose with chemical substances works too, so long as it’s not arsenic, strychnine, or the now-popular succinocholine. Those chemicals scream murder thanks to overuse in literature and real life. And nobody gets up and takes their regular two tablets of arsenic in the morning. It just doesn’t have any health benefits.

  Unlike digoxin. People take digoxin to stay alive. And sometimes, they accidentally take a little too much. In Jack’s case, too much of a good thing was anything but wonderful.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe he’s gone,” sobbed Margot, Jack’s faithful old-school secretary. In her mid-fifties, she wore blouses that tied into a bow at the neck and skirts with the hem right below the knee. She pulled her graying hair back into a low bun. With her tortoise-shell framed glasses, she looked like a secretary out of the movies.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He must have taken too many of his heart pills again.” Margot blew her nose into a Kleenex.

  “Again?”

  “He did that once before, a couple of years ago. We almost lost him then.”

  Poor Jack.

  So Jack had a history of being careless with his heart medication. And Margot, being an ultra-efficient secretary, had washed the coffee cup a
nd cleaned up his office to await his return. God bless Margot.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Killers don’t really think about getting caught and having to face the consequences when they decide to do God’s work. If they did, no one would ever do it. Death Row would be empty. It’s like flying. You can’t get in that cockpit if you are terrified of falling out of the sky. You just have to believe that if you do everything right, the laws of physics and aerodynamics will keep you in the air.

  I believed that the laws of karma would keep me out of jail. Jack had it coming.

  “You’ll be working for me now, Fiona,” said Doreen, another senior partner in the corporate and securities department.

  Another Jack, only in a skirt. Same shit, different partner.

  “The merger has to go according to schedule. I need that due diligence report by tomorrow.”

  Yes, Doreen.

  Anything you say, Doreen. So long as you ask civilly.

  SEAN WANTED TO STAY in and watch the Law & Order: Criminal Intent marathon on T.V. on Friday evening. And I needed some company after my somewhat traumatic week.

  “At least you still have your job, Fi,” he told me.

  “Yeah, I thought they were going to lay me off with Jack gone.”

  “Nah, trust me. Doreen should be more than happy to swoop down and take over Jack’s clients.”

  “Oh my God, Sean, that’s exactly what she did as soon as we got the news that Jack wasn’t coming back.”

  “How ruthlessly corporate. So you looking forward to tomorrow’s dinner with your fiance?”

  “Yup. I have a surprise for Don, and I can’t wait to give it to him.”

  Sean munched on a Ruffles sour cream cheddar chip, mulling over his thoughts. For a full minute, he didn’t say anything.

  “Fi, be careful. If the opportunity doesn’t present itself, let it go.”

  “I know.”

  “Seriously. It’s all about timing and opportunity.”

  “I know.”

  “I would hate to lose my sailing buddy, Fi.” Sean continued to crunch, washing down his Ruffles with beer. “Where does this guy work?”

  “Forget it, Sean.”

  “Okay, but seriously, be careful. Whatever happens, don’t panic. Fear and panic make you stupid. Don’t be stupid.”