Planet Lolita

by Charles Foran

  “We should go back to the tent,” he said.

  “I gave her the last apple.”

  He looked Mary up and down without, I sensed, focusing. “She’s a bit young for this,” he said.

  “My hat!” I said. “Or else her brain will boil.”

  I gave her my straw bowler, saying “Please” in three languages. “Sailor Moon,” I said of the decorated pins, “Pikachu, plus Chihiro, you know her, from Spirited Away?”

  “Zala oon,” she answered, pointing to the Sailor Moon pin.

  “Girl power!” I said, raising my hands up. “Though I know that stuff is for kids.”

  Mary put on the hat. Her beauty went Asian Vogue cover then, her smile forming the speechless wow! of models doing the pretend-surprised expression. When she shifted to the teen rebel pose, the kind friends post on Facebook walls, I felt my own smile widen.

  Pulling out my phone, I positioned Mary in the frame. For her first face, her lips went push-pouty and her eyebrows arched, super cute. For her second, she was the sweet girl giving the peace sign, her head cocked and her finger running along her cheek. I laughed at those expressions, the same warm, tugging feeling as the ocean around my calves.

  For her third face, Mary reversed the hat, hiding the pins, and yanked it down over her skull. Her eyes emptied and her lips formed a catwalk sneer, also pretend. I didn’t like this pose nearly as much, but snapped it.

  This time Dad, who had been scanning the beach, pinched my skin. “Enough, Xixi. Come on.” He pulled me to the tent, splashing water on us both.

  “I could see her heart beating through her chest,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Mary—she’s all bones. Should I be worried about her?”

  “Mary?” Dad said. Then, raising his Ray-Bans up onto his forehead, “Here they are.”

  Mom and the Boss Lady, having chosen higher ground for their return, were laying fresh tracks in the sand. One trekker, her shirt even more sweaty, was panting, the pff-pff rising above the lap of waves. The other wore a slight flush, as if from repeated compliments about her toned body and brisk good looks, the Isle of Skye in her gaze.

  Boss Lady peeled off. She made straight for Mary, wagging a finger. Readying herself, Mary bowed her head, her hands back to being clenched. Soon the other girls formed a shell around them, blocking our view. I kept expecting the hat to wash ashore. If it did, I’d put it back on.

  “Xixi gave the girl her hat,” Dad said.

  “I noticed,” Mom said. “That one’s special cargo, I bet, worth double the rest.”

  “You can almost see her heart in her chest,” I said again.

  “Did anything else happen?”

  “No,” Dad said.

  “I told you not to do anything.”

  “We didn’t,” I said.

  “Jacob, I may have fucked up.”

  We waited.

  “On top of the hill,” Mom said. “I cut a deal. Her crappy phone still didn’t get a signal up there, so I let her use mine.”

  We still waited.

  “She got to contact her Triad connection and we get to walk away. Everyone forgets we ever met.”

  “Sounds good,” Dad said.

  “I hated how she looked at Sarah. I’ve seen that look before.”

  “So you made a deal.”

  “I hope so. It was a pretty broken communication. But a phone number is a track directly to us,” she added, staring down at her iPhone. “They could obtain our names and address from it.”

  “Maybe they could visit us,” I said, not smart.

  Her scowl made clear just how not-smart. “We have to vanish from this beach as well.”

  “I’ll take down the tent,” Dad said.

  She told him to forget about the tent. “Mamasan began checking that headland the instant we were back on the strand,” she said, pointing to the north end of Tai Long Wan. “They won’t need an hour to bring speedboats from Sai Kung. They were probably waiting all night in a cove. We have twenty minutes or less. And Christ, here she comes now. Bet you she’ll insist we stick around to meet her friends.”

  Mom must have changed her mind and asked Boss Lady her name. Mamasan approached, her phone raised like the chalice at Mass. Two photos she took, one of the parentals, the other of me.

  “Okay?” she said in English.

  “I let you use my phone!” Mom said.

  “Pretty girl, Xixi Kwok,” she offered. “Pretty face.”

  “We won’t make trouble for you.”

  “Was that a threat?” Dad asked.

  But Mamasan had already turned her back on us.

  “No deal, I guess,” he said.

  I managed to grab the electronics and bring Dad his shorts—“Put on your effing shorts, Jacob,” Mom said—but the sheets and pillows were also abandoned. We followed their path back towards the hill, making a mess of each step, and though I was pinched between the parentals, and had been instructed not to look over, nor to smile, and definitely not to wave, I managed a few glimpses of Mary. Her height, and my hat, made her stand out. She was where I had left her, up to her knees in the tugging ocean.

  Fifteen silent minutes later, climbing the slope, Mom finally spit out her complaint. “You told them your name?” she said to me.

  “Look,” Dad said.

  Tai Long Wan lay half in sunlight, half still in shade. It was perfect, the most beautiful, secluded strand in Hong Kong. Three speedboats the size of plastic toys had rounded the headland and were ripping seams in the ocean. They slowed nearing the shore, their engines the faint growls of dogs letting you know they’ll attack if you don’t back off.

  “Come to collect their cargo,” he said.

  “Their property, more like it.”

  “We’re off the beach, Leah. Our tracks will have dissolved by mid-morning.”

  “You told them your name?” she said again.

  Friend me, Mary, I said to myself. I’ll accept. And made the Asian-girl wave, in plain sight of both parents, although there was no hope she could see it from so far away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  November 8, 20—

  *Atypical pneumonia

  *74 infected, none dead

  Other stuff happened that same day. Between abandoning our tent on the beach and pulling into Sai Kung on the minibus. During the hike back to the road and then the ride out. Stuff happened, but I couldn’t remember all of it. Not yet.

  Like the photo my sister Rachel was examining. It had been sent at eleven this morning from seesawk@gmail.com to rachelk312@gmail.com with the caption “Mary, Tai Long Wan.” SeeSaw was me and Mary was her, the girl in the dress, and at that hour I was seated in the back row of the bus, squeezing the railing and trying not to throw up. Did I still manage to email Rachel a photo of Mary? I must have. Could I remember touching Send? Kind of not.

  “Nice hat,” Rachel said.

  “Is it …? Can you see my pins?” I asked, hoping I had emailed her the first or second photo, not the third.

  “Sailor Moon, Pikachu, and Chihiro,” she answered. “The SeeSaw Trinity—Father, Son, and the Holy Goat.”

  “Funny.”

  “She’s hot.”

  “Do we look alike? I think we do,” I said. Hair fell over my eyes, and I twined strands together.

  “Don’t.”

  I pretended not to understand.

  “I’ll reach through this screen. I have superpowers too.”

  “Fine,” I said, dropping the braid, though not before it had passed between my lips once or twice, a soft tickle.

  “Hands by your side, please.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No slouching,” she said.

  In my room in our apartment in Mid-Levels, Hong Kong, I slouched. In her room in her dormitory in Toronto, Canada, Rachel sat prim and proper. Thanks to FaceTime on the MacBook Pros our parents bought us last summer, before she went away to university, the duck-egg face of Rachel Kwok filled my screen. My own sunflowe
r-seed face was tiny in the bottom corner. To decide if Mary and I looked alike, she held up her iPhone, her eyes darting. Watching her watching me was okay, but watching me watching her watching me was too much, a 3-D action movie about giant robots, made for boys who live inside video games.

  “I read that there are two Chinese face shapes,” I said, “the duck egg, and the sunflower seed. Between us, we’ve got both.”

  “Say what?” she said. Translated, she meant, Stupid SeeSaw comment, hardly worth the bother.

  “My face is long and thin, and yours is more … round, I guess.”

  “You mean, I’m the peasant in the family, you’re the aristocrat?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You know so,” my sister said. “Just not consciously.” I was silent.

  “What SeeSaw doesn’t know about the grown-up world would crowd a gigabyte memory stick,” she said. “But I’m going to school you as best I can. You’re too exposed in that apartment. Too vulnerable to seeing and hearing shit that will mess you up.”

  I kept silent.

  “Okay,” she added, “you’re not ready. I get it.”

  “I think I look like her,” I repeated.

  “Who?”

  “The girl wearing my hat.”

  She studied her phone again. “A little. Except she’s grown-up.”

  “She’s only a year older.”

  “This hottie is sweet sixteen? You sure?”

  “She told me.”

  “The final photo especially,” Rachel said, holding the screen up to the camera. “She’s doing fuckable.”

  Images don’t transfer from screen to screen, leaving me staring at a rectangle of black. Still, I knew the photo she was describing. Meaning I had emailed all three, and failed to recall this as well.

  “Not Milan runway or Cosmopolitan,” my sister said. “Not ‘You want to fuck me, but it’s a fantasy.’ She’s doing ‘You can fuck me, if you pay.’”

  “Rachel!”

  “Adult life lesson number one, Baby Kwok. This is a wet T-shirt shot! A teen wankadesiac. Can’t you see it?”

  I examined the third photo on my own phone, the one of Mary pretending sexy. Her dress had gotten splashed. She was chilled from spending a night on a boat.

  “Her perky nipples, dummy,” Rachel said. “You made sure to include them in the frame … Are you maybe the youngest fifteen-year-old on the planet?”

  “Definitely not,” I replied. “Kimberley Tsoi’s parents don’t let her watch YouTube. She didn’t even know Justin Bieber.”

  She sighed. “In this case, it’s probably a good thing. It’s why you and Miss Asian Lolita here don’t look alike. Don’t look the same, talk the same language, or live in the same country. And be grateful for that fact,” she said. Her expression betrayed surprise at her own words. Which made sense—she’d never sounded like Leah MacInnes before. Our mom, who didn’t care about me, and Rachel said she hated.

  “Mary’s a good girl,” I said, feeling teary.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Her.” I pointed to the phone still in her hand.

  “Her who?”

  I explained about our conversation on the beach, and her telling me her name, and it being Mary, in both Cantonese and English.

  “Dad’s really got you hooked on that Catholic mumbo-jumbo, hasn’t he?” my sister said. “Or is it Gloria?”

  “It’s her name.”

  “There’s no chance this girl’s name is Mary. You just wanted to hear it. And that chain will break. And you will lose your precious Jesus stick.”

  I quit zipzipping the cross. We paused for so long that Manga, curled on my bed, whimpered.

  “You honestly don’t remember sending me the photos?” Rachel finally said.

  “No.”

  “Or the ride into Sai Kung?”

  “Or much of the hike out from the beach,” I said.

  “When did it happen?”

  “On the bus, I’m pretty sure. I remember everything becoming bright and clear. Then I remember Mom shaking me at the village terminal, telling me that I’d had one.”

  “A seizure?”

  “An episode.”

  “Did you take your pill this morning?”

  “That’s the first thing she said—‘Did you take your pill?’ Like she wasn’t on Tai Long Wan with us, and didn’t notice that we’d been busy, and maybe someone might not have thought to swallow a pill, especially without water. She can be so nasty,” I added. “I don’t know why.”

  “Because she’s married to him?”

  “I went through my searches for the day,” I said, ignoring her remark. “I’d looked up two words, probably once we got a signal on the path. Do you know what a mamasan is? I figured it was a first name.”

  “Polite Japanese for pimp,” Rachel answered. “The woman who runs the brothel and runs the girls.”

  My tummy flipped.

  “What’s the other word?”

  I told her.

  “Furtive?” she said.

  There was a knock, and Gloria entered.

  “She doesn’t wait to be invited?” my sister said.

  I switched off my phone. When we first started doing FaceTime, the sound of Rachel’s voice freaked Manga out. Shih Tzu are normally as quiet as Buddhas, but he would yip-yip and jump down from the bed, nosing beneath it and scratching at the closet door, in case she was hiding in there. Gloria wasn’t much better, describing my appearance for Rachel and asking me to ask her questions. She couldn’t believe my sister was live on the screen—was in the bedroom, courtesy of the digital superpowers—and could see and hear us almost as well as we could see and hear her. Two months ago I gave her my old Mac and told her to tell her son, Miguel, to use some of the money she sent every month to buy a web camera. Only once she began seeing and hearing her family in Batangas City, Luzon, did our amah get how people talk now, how we connect. Though Manga still didn’t get it, he eventually settled down, wagging his tail when Rachel called to him, his eyes perplexed behind his emo-boy bangs. Her absence-presence became yet another doggie-life mystery, like the stone Shih Tzu that served as temple guardians around Hong Kong.

  “Lean over,” I said to the only helper either of us had known. “Rachel can’t see you.”

  Gloria Bella smelled of clove hair oil and Tiger Balm. She wore flip-flops non-stop, and was my Filipino mom.

  “Rachel-boo,” she said.

  “A mask, Gloria?”

  Most of Gloria’s face squeezed next to mine inside the icon. The SARS mask dangled from the earlobe that was on camera. I wished she’d taken it right off.

  “Another epi-dem-hick comes,” she said. “Any day now.”

  “Comes to the Kwok-MacInnes residence?” Rachel said.

  “To whole city.”

  “We took showers the second we got home,” I said.

  “SeeSee, not you,” Gloria said, putting my name first in her sentence, the Filipino way. She straightened up and out of the camera eye. “Those women on the beach this morning, maybe they are sick already. Last time, one Chinese man goes to wedding in Kowloon, he brings the killing flu.”

  I’d told Gloria about Tai Long Wan. Not the details, or anything about Mary. Just the facts. Already she’d twisted them, as usual.

  “Dad said that we won’t wear masks this time either,” I told my sister.

  “I could have guessed.”

  “Your father is fool,” Gloria said, “and I hope he hears me call him this.” But she lowered her voice, in case.

  “He says Hong Kongers never see waves, only tsunamis,” I said.

  “And Mr. Clark, he is tsunami or wave?” Gloria said of the lower-school headmaster at East Island, the school that Rachel had graduated from in June and I still attended, grade ten. He’d been off sick for a month, and there were rumours. We’d both known Eric Clark for nearly as long as Gloria Bella.

  “Is it definitely SARS?” Rachel asked.

  “Who’s saying
that?” I said.

  “Everyone,” she replied, meaning everyone on Facebook. “Remember how he stood in the school entrance each morning, calling the kids by name and hugging the little ones? And how they’d all line up for a squeeze? He was a creepy Dumbledore, minus the beard.”

  “Not creepy,” I said. “He smells nice.”

  “Don’t tell me …”

  “No! My last hug from Mr. Clark was a year ago, almost.”

  “You’re not his variety of jailbait,” my sister said, her second nasty comment in as many minutes.

  Gloria said goodnight to her, even though it was good morning in Toronto. She had trouble with time zones as well.

  “What?” I said once the door was closed. But I knew.

  “She’s our amah, SeeSaw, not our parent.”

  I hated this conversation as much as the one about Mr. Clark. Strands of hair fell back before my eyes. I twisted a few.

  “Sorry I’m not there for you,” she said.

  “Because of the epi-dem-hick?”

  “Your problem. Your condition.”

  “When I was told about it, I knew right away what you’d have said if you’d still been living with us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘No big deal, Baby Kwok—I’m also damaged goods!’”

  “Fucking A,” Rachel said.

  “I wish Mom or Dad had said something nice,” I added.

  “I wish they had too.”

  “He just joked how he was pretty sure he hadn’t dropped me on my head when I was little.”

  “Ha ha, Dad.”

  “She freaked out for a few days, like I was going to die. Then she went to work making sure I got the best treatment.”

  “Leah’s good at getting to work. It’s all she can usually handle.”

  I didn’t know what Rachel meant by that, and didn’t want to. It had been a long, strange day.

  “One request,” she said. “Two, actually.” The first was that I quit chewing my hair. The second was a shock.

  “Do the parentals know about the photos?” she said.

  “Dad saw me take them.”

  “Did she?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I remember everything about the beach,” I said.