Let me tell you about this exasperating girl of eight years ago. She’s answering a math quiz and is fucking up all the numbers grandly. Her fingers work too fast for her mind to keep up. She’s solving problems the wrong way and is getting answers that don’t make sense, decimals and fractions and shit. The answers should always be exact whole numbers, right? She scratches out her wrong answers, doodling rough spikes and loopy curls over them to hide their glaring wrongness. Her paper tears. I hate that sound. That tearing. Someone looms behind her. Her math teacher. The teacher has longish hair and uneven teeth and goes on tippy toes to reach the higher parts of the blackboard and places her hand over the low V-neck of her pink uniform as she bends over to pick up spilled chalk. The little girl’s classmates think this math teacher’s pretty. But the little girl thinks that really they’re just bored, deprived of proper boys. Of course, this cute little girl has no way of knowing she’ll grow up to be a raging lesbian, with a libido so uncontrollable she’d sleep with just about anyone. But am I speaking too frankly here? Am I spoiling the story? You see, I’m a writer but not a very good one probably because I don’t make new stories anymore and just rewrite old ones. But let me try a little restraint here and attempt to lay this down more or less chronologically. Hah, restraint, that’s a laugh. Okay, no more diversions. Let me tell you about that time when the little girl’s math teacher played a game and the game was called “If you could take someone from the class on a trip for two to Paris, who would you take?” What the fuck? The class tittered and pointed at each other, fancying they liked each other enough to take each other to Paris, the city of love. The teacher asked the little girl first and she just shook her head. What did this have to do with math? The kids quickly got bored of the little girl’s fuming silence and bugged the teacher, who would you choose, ma’am? The teacher made a great show of thinking hard then finally told them take out their math books and solve problems. Bitch. The little girl was quickly done with her problems and was resting her head on her desk. She heard her teacher clicking down the aisle with her baby heels and suddenly two fingers loomed before her holding a folded note. Puzzled, the little girl took it into her palm and unfolded the note and read I choose you. Fast-forward to where this story began and the teacher is looming behind the little girl now as she struggles to answer her math quiz. The proximity apparently of a womanly body against a childlike one signals malicious intentions. Once again the teacher is making it clear that she’s choosing the little girl. The teacher leans down close and whispers into the little girl’s ear all the correct answers. Too close, the flick of a tongue. Get away, little girl, lean forward, strain your body against your desk, feeling your stomach sear as it’s cut in half against wood table knife anything just to get away get away get away from the whisper close the whisper wet—
Whispering lying whispering it’s okay
—the little girl is answering a math quiz that she’s fully prepared for. She answers all the questions easy-peasy, no trouble. Smart girl! She looks around the room grandly seeing if anyone’s finished as fast as her. No one has. But now someone looms behind her. Her math teacher. The little girl flips her paper over, concealing all her answers, so the teacher steps away and returns to the front of the classroom. Soon, the bell rings and papers are passed from hand to hand to the front and it’s time for lunch so all the girls fly outside the door toward freedom. They drift down the corridor in clumps while the little girl plods alone. Most people go to the canteen for junk food and, hey, what about one of those little cups of mashed potato swirled by the machine with gravy and cheese and ham? I love that! But on the other hand, the little girl’s stomach is too queasy for food just now. That math teacher’s eyes were way too fucking sticky. So the little girl waits in the gym where they all line up after lunch and she has her big purple journal so she’s not bored at all waiting for her friends, who are from other sections. She writes about eight years ago when she was four when she was with her sister at that beach in Bohol and she couldn’t finish her food and her sister dug a hole into the sand so they could hide it, aluminum foil plate and all, but she edits that part so that in the journal it was her, and not her sister, who thought up that smashing idea. And she also changes the part where they got caught. Next, she writes about them hiding out with their handsome twin cousins in a room and the twins’ younger brother was banging on the door crying to be let in but they all smiled and waited and watched the thumping door. But now the little girl’s friends are here so she hurriedly closes her journal. They sit in a circle and trade print-outs of fan fiction they’ve found online. This is what they do, generally. Don’t you think that’s just sick? The stupid little girl swallows as she reads about this boy with long yellow hair whose big thing goes in and out of the butt of a boy with short green hair. She tries to smother the smile creeping up her face as the yellow-haired boy spanks the green-haired boy’s ass hard thrust hard against perfectly round white globes smile creeping—
Smacking flesh friction leaving purple sweat
—walking alone to the canteen, she dreams of mashed potato swirled by the machine with gravy and cheese and ham. And she walks right up to the mashed potato lady and buys her dream for all of twelve Pesos. Wow. Mashed potato. I sure could use a cup of one now, you think they still make it that good old way? Scooping mashed potato into her mouth, the little girl sits at a table with her friends and they talk about the latest episode of Getbackers. When they finish, they walk together to the gym and though her friends start to sit around in a circle to share the fan fiction they’ve all collected online, she tells them let’s play tag instead. But out of the blue one of her friends rips her big purple journal from her arms and takes off running. Terrified, the little girl chases after her. Run, little girl, run faster! But she’s puny weak and can’t run fast enough and two other friends have joined in and hold her arms so that she can’t grab the journal back. They laugh like it’s a game, like it’s all done in good fun. But the girl knows and I know and you know it isn’t. That journal’s private and this isn’t some fucking game. But now that bitch friend’s saying, ooh, look what we have here! She flips past the pages thick with spidery writing and reaches the back filled with doodles of naked men with massive hairy things fucking and the friend’s eyes widen and she shows the others and their eyes widen too and there’s a bad silence that falls around them because they all thought they were perverts but turns out they’re all saints compared to demon ugly bad inside who does that no one never should have shown—
Show me how you moan he’s saying yanking hair roots popping
—before she suggests a game, she goes to the gym C.R. and stuffs her big purple journal safe into the dark blue suspenders of her uniform. Nestled as it is against her still-flat chest, no one will dare touch it. What a silly girl. But it works. Maybe you can try that sometime to keep little things safe, stuff them in your bra like I do sometimes but don’t ever fucking tell. The little girl and her friends play tag but she can’t play well because one hand’s always holding her journal safe against her chest so it won’t fly away as she runs. Then the lunch bell rings and they all file neatly into lines by section and troop back to their respective classrooms for more of the same old thing, same old stupid classes, same old stupid teachers, blah blah blah blah blah. . . . Can’t we just skip these boring parts? Because why not? We have the power here. So fast-forward to the fun part, dismissal and the rusty azure service speeding her back home. And she eats her snack and does her homework while listening to burned CDs of Japanese pop anthems and the day’s memories build up in her until she’s a kettle whistling for release so she goes to her room and closes the door and lies in bed. She puts her hand between her legs, inside her shorts, and two fingers stroke the slickness there until she feels herself pulsate a little and she slips inside and her head smacks back against the pillows, numb. Her lips part and she releases a single sigh just as the door swings open and it’s her sister, whose eyes widen with alarm. The satisfied sigh she just blew out floats out into the air between them and diffuses like smoke strings that tighten tighten tighten the moment until it breaks shatters sister running fumbling to get out of bed not knowing what to do—
Tightening steadily steadily then sighing not satisfaction no just empty
—before she begins, she locks the door and when she turns around, her breasts sore and her buttocks beaten from the thumping, or maybe the bruised breasts and buttocks are mine because she’s still so young, but what does it matter now? When she turns, when I turn, there’s a man on the bed waiting for us looming whispering it’s okay.
