Planet Lolita (11 page)

December 13, 20—
*Infected port
*497 infected, 12 dead

I was in the room again. Better, it was live inside my computer, and so inside
my
bedroom. The same camera showed the same interior—the bed, the table, the chair—except for two details. Next to the lamp was a bottle of liquor, the sort that men poured out in small glasses, and hanging off the chair was a belt with studs and a buckle the size of Dad’s wallet. Lamplight cast the liquor the colour of seaweed snacks at 7-Eleven, and light from the camera glinted off the studs. Though the frame was once more empty, I had no doubt about what was going to happen this time. I waited, my own image in the bottom corner, a girl playing with the cross around her neck, zipzipzip.

A woman was thrust into the chair, a hand releasing her arm only once she stopped squirming. She wore a SARS mask and Hello Kitty pajama tops that, being two sizes too small, outlined her fuller breasts but equally bony shoulders.

“Mary?”

Her expression, hard to read with just her eyes showing, revealed more puzzlement than fear. She didn’t know what she was being asked to do, or why. Her hair was frizzy with static, as though she’d been forced to pull the pajamas down over her head, despite them not fitting.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said. Talking wasn’t easy with my heart beating hard and fast and my throat suddenly dry.

She crinkled her eyes. They were beautiful—that much I remembered accurately—but everything else was different from five weeks ago. My gaze drifted to the bottle, and the belt, still partially visible. Five weeks of having sex with men had vanished teenage gawkiness and sparkle, leaving an adult of twenty or older, heavy with the same grown-up worry and aloneness that I often detected in my parents. As well, she seemed irritated about nothing, or everything—another adult quality.

“I have those PJs,” I said in English. “They must not make them any bigger.”

Someone off-camera barked at her. She looked past the lens.

“Sorry that awful photo of you got porned. I don’t even know how it happened,” I added.

“
Gai le
,” a female voice said. An arm handcuffed in cheap bangles pushed a sheet of paper into the frame. Mary held it before her face with both hands. At first I was distracted by the pig’s tail of smoke curling towards the screen. Her nails, too, the same neon purple as the Sticky Fingers sign, threw me off. Printed on quality paper was a digital photograph of another Asian girl, also taken on the beach. Five weeks hadn’t changed her one bit. Beneath my photo was an address,
2201, 26 Old Peak Road.

I switched to Cantonese. “That’s where I live. I hate it here.”

Rings from the cancer stick between her second and third
fingers widened out and then dispersed. She lowered the photo. No matter how hard I tried drawing her in with my gaze, Mary wouldn’t focus. Her eyes registered a different space and place, like she was confiding her feelings to a mirror. Which feelings? Confusion, perhaps. Boredom, for sure. Plus that irritation, although not, I hoped, with me.

“I could try being you for a while,” I said, first in Cantonese and then, fearing it made no sense, English.

Nothing.

I tasted blood, and raised a finger to confirm the cut I had opened in my lower lip. Misinterpreting it, Mary lifted her own finger to her lips.
Shhh
, she said.
Shhh
, I replied, though I really wanted to show her the bleeding. Before I could, someone ended the call. Three times I called back, but no one accepted my request.

I was scared now—of answering FaceTime, of leaning over railings, of Hello Kitty, more or less. For real.

“It’s my sister,” I heard her say. “She keeps calling. Something must be wrong.”

It was true. I had banged on another door and barged into another room. Aware that it was early morning in Toronto, I kept on requesting FaceTime. But on finally being shown a screen I was startled to find it opened as well onto an empty chair. A sick notion nearly toppled me—Rachel had been kidnapped too, and was being held hostage in the same place as Mary. One more disappearance from my life and I’d lose it.

But then she sat in the chair, reaching out to adjust the laptop.

“It’s you!” I said.

“You were expecting …?”

“Why wouldn’t you accept my request?”

“Dude, I was asleep when you started calling, and it had to sink in that, yup, it
is
7:19 on a Saturday morning and, yup, my crazy
mei mei
is insisting we chatter. Sorry I didn’t jump right up.”

Rachel, who was my
jie jie
, since we were using the Mandarin words for big and little sister, wasn’t alone in her room either. She kept checking herself in her box on the screen, pawing her hair. She wore it pixie-cut, a new look, to match the tattoo. Next she would get a nose ring.

“Oh yeah, baby,” a guy said off-camera.

“Greg is here,” she said.

Tofu Burger from Facebook muscled into the frame, his own hair spiky from sleep and emo-boy product. His shoulders were bare, aside from the tats, and covering his chest were pubes.

“Hi there, Baby Kwok,” Greg said.

“Tell him to leave,” I said.

“Hey!”

He grinned how cute boy-men do, in order to never be held responsible for their actions. From his Facebook profile I knew that the four characters inked onto his right forearm spelled the name of his thrash-folk band. The tattoo looked pretty neat. Shirtless, he was buff.

“You still in Head Tax?” I asked to not seem so bitchy.

“We broke up,” he answered. “Creative differences. I’ve formed a duo, mandolin and sitar—Yellow Peril.”

“Cool.”

“How’s your girl Mary, Tie-the-Long-One doing?”

I was too stunned to reply.

“The hottie from the beach? Your sister showed me that sexy pic of her. Man, oh man,” he said, “guys in the res got major wood from it.”

“Bad boy,” Rachel said. But her knotted brow told me she was
equally puzzled. How did “guys in the res” even see the photo?

He kissed her cheek and she punched his bicep. Unable to help themselves, my sister and her boyfriend dissolved into each other, forgetting I was there. For the second time in fifteen minutes, I was see-through. Except for possibly being naked from their waists down, they could have been in a photo booth, smooching for the camera. How must it feel, being skin to skin with a boy? How must it—he, I supposed—smell?

Greg’s words about Mary rattled in my head. My leg, meanwhile, was pumping, causing the desk to shake and Manga to whimper.

Finally, she noticed. “Okay, SeeSaw,” she said. She instructed her sex friend to crawl back into the bed, insert his earbuds and crank his iPod,
and
pillow-smother himself.

“
Zie
jien
, Sailor Moon,” he said, showing his own expertise in Mandarin.

“He’s cute,” I said, wiping my cheek.

“He sure thinks so.”

I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I thought it was you, Rachel. When I answered the call. The first time, at least. But it wasn’t—it was her! In a Hello Kitty top, which was weird …,” I said, suddenly realizing that since no one came onscreen during the first FaceTime, how could they have known what was I wearing? “The top didn’t fit her much better. We’re the same size, and I’ve a closet of stuff I never use. I could give her some dresses and Pearl jeans. She’s much older than sixteen.”

It registered. “Are we talking about—?”

“Mary!”

“She FaceTimed you?”

“I was in her room. Twice,” I said, regretting that I hadn’t told Rachel about the original call. “And she was in mine.”

All loudest, funniest half-Asian chick on campus vanished from her features, leaving our mother in Lawyer Leah mode. My sister issued two commands, one to Greg, the other to me. He was told to leave her dormitory room, now. I was told to march the MacBook into our parents’ bedroom with her still on the screen, and tell them what had just happened. Rachel issued a third command. “Stop crying.”

I tried.

“How many ‘Likes’ and ‘Talking about this’ today? Wait, I’ll check myself.” She opened the “Finding Mary” page in a corner of her screen. “7,551 and 2,754. Shit, shit, shit.”

I chewed some hair.

“Why are there twenty-nine messages for you? And those photos?”

“People send me shots of girls on the street. They think they’ve found Mary.”

“Turns out she’s found you.”

“I still don’t know where she lives,” I said. “Though I’m pretty sure it’s in Mong Kok.”

“Maybe your photo will turn up on her Facebook wall. Or maybe they’ll post it on
your
‘Finding Mary’ page, with our address.”

“I won’t mind that.”

“You won’t
mind?
”

“I still want to meet her.”

Rachel blew air from her mouth in disbelief or exasperation—or both. “The parentals are still oblivious to all these cyber interactions, aren’t they? Jacob and Leah are stuck thinking in analogue about a digital happening. You’re in different universes.”

“We’re in the same apartment.”

“Not what I’m talking about.”

“Okay.”

“It’s growing-up day, Sis,” she added. “This isn’t a manga strip anymore.”

The dog yip-yipped at his name.

“What about Guanyin? Won’t she rescue me?”

The gingerly way she touched her bare arm made me wonder if, all these weeks later, her skin could still be bruised. “Fuck, I better put on a long-sleeve shirt. You can’t tell them.”

“I have to pee,” I said, straining to hold the computer, and her face, in front of me. I was already in the hallway.

“Seriously?”

“I won’t make you watch.”

Balancing the computer on the sink, the screen turned away, I did my business as quietly as I could.

“You back in the jungle?” I heard her ask.

“What?”

“Bleeding for babies.”

It was nearly time for my second-ever period. Earlier today I’d thought I might be starting. But then the cramps went away. “That’s gross.”

“Nature’s way of telling boys what might come out of where they want to put it into so badly.”

“What is nature telling us?”

“‘Danger!’” my sister shouted. “‘Our bodies could be invaded!’ Yuck,” she said. “You didn’t flush.”

“Shush,” I said, once more face-to-face with her. I—or we, in effect—had now crossed to the master suite and knocked on the door. To my surprise, both parents said “Come in,” harmonizing the words. My arms trembled, not just from carrying the laptop.

“Sarah?” Mom called.

“Rachel wants to talk to you guys.”

“Coward,” Rachel whispered.

“Come in, girls,” Dad said again.

“Girls?” Mom said.

She sat in bed in her nightgown, reading glasses on her nose and computer in her lap. He sprawled in the armchair, still dressed, one leg hooked over the side to flaunt his cowboy boots, their leather polished, as if to show that the night was young—for some. Stinking up the air, raw as salted fish drying on a dock, was a fresh argument.

“Put her where she can see all of us,” he said.

“Greetings, Asia-lings,” Rachel said.

“I cannot get used to this technology,” Mom said.

“You’re up awful early,” he said.

“Study study, Dad.”

“If you say so.”

“SeeSaw,” my sister said, “why am I up so early on a Saturday morning? Where are you, girl?”

I slid onto Dad’s side of the mattress. When I didn’t answer—how badly I wished I’d had the strength not to tell her about the FaceTime!—she pushed harder. “Why the hair chewing and lip bleeding and plummeting tears a few minutes ago about who’d visited
your
room, unannounced and uninvited?”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

“You’re going to tell them. Everything. We agreed.”

“Someone was in Sarah’s room?” Mom said. By folding down the laptop she showed she meant business.

“Mary FaceTimed me,” I said, studying the duvet. “The girl from the beach. From Tai Long Wan.”

I might as well have raised my top and revealed
my
baby bulge.

“What in the world …?” Mom said.

“She was wearing a SARS mask, and Hello Kitty. And she had
a photo of me, which she held to the screen. She’s older than I thought, and she smokes,” I added.

“How did—?”

“Let her explain, Leah,” Dad said.

“Is she explaining? Are you, Sarah?”

I tried to explain. My taking her photo three times on the beach, and then posting the nicest image on my profile. The third photo, not so nice, being stolen and turned into porn. The 7,551 “Likes” and 2,754 “Talking about this” on the page I created to help find her, though the numbers had surely climbed again in the last ten minutes. The first, and now second, FaceTime calls revealing the room where she lived. Her—Mary, Tai Long Wan—holding up the photo that Mamasan had snapped of me, reprinted on heavy-stock paper, and saying
shhh
with her finger but something else with her eyes. The address
2201, 26 Old Peak Road
printed at the bottom.

“Oh boy,” Dad said. He quit showing off the boots, sitting upright in the chair, hands on the armrests.

Mom tried blaming Rachel first. “You knew all along?” she said to the computer at her feet. “Knew that she was putting herself, and us, in greater danger? And still you did nothing?”

“She didn’t know about the FaceTime,” I said.

“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” Rachel said. “I’m here.”

“Not really, darling. Not at all, in fact.”

“I wanted to help her,” I said.

“Quiet.”

“Leah …,” Dad said.

“Those girls need us, Mom. Especially Mary.”

“Stop calling her that name!”

I chewed my lip.

“Back on Tai Long Wan,” she asked, “what made you decide
that those prostitutes wanted, never mind needed, our help? No, Jacob,” she said, blocking any objections with an outstretched palm, “the question is fair. Why did Sarah latch onto the girl who just happened to be the youngest and prettiest, and look the most like her, and decide that
she
, and she only, deserved to be saved? Any ideas, dear husband? Any at all?”