The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (6 page)

That gives us at least one thing in common,
I thought, and had to jam my mouth shut to keep a crazy laugh from getting loose.

It was possible. Kai had called me while she served her time, but I never got to visit. If this boy was Kai’s—the whole ragged story of my childhood teetered on the edge of reinvention, waiting to retell itself. If this boy was Kai’s, I’d cost her so much more than I’d ever known. The ocean roar was starting up again in my ears, and this was going to be a bad one. This one was going to make my earlier freakout look like the gentle fluttering of tummy butterflies.

“You’re hunting for . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say
your mother
. It was only a letter away from
our
.
Our mother
. I didn’t want to think those words. “You’re hunting Kai.” My voice came out so thick and slow.

He blinked. “Is that what she goes by? I hired a guy, a private detective, to find my birth mother. He hasn’t found her yet. He did find you.”

There are a lot of Vausses in the world,
I thought.
There are a lot of Karens
. But my lungs, twisting themselves closed, did not seem to be listening, and my vision was getting furry at the edges.

The line for the father’s name was blank. That line was blank on my birth certificate, too. My body shuddered and my teeth banged against each other in a chatter. I tried to make out the letters of the child’s first name. Not Garrett. That was definitely an
h
at the end. Garreth? Either way, a yuppie name.
Nothing Kai would choose,
a calm, inner voice said, while my body gulped for tiny sips of air.

Then the letters resolved themselves. It wasn’t two
r
’s. It was a single cursive
n
. The boy child had been named Ganesh. What southern woman names a baby after Ganesha, a Hindu god with an elephant head? Who names a kid after the lord of luck and fortune?

But I knew who. The same mother who would name a kid for Kali. I threw the certificate away from me and lurched up to my feet. The earth spun, trying to tip me sideways.

Birdwine caught me around my waist, and the solid wall of him was the only thing that kept me standing.

“Paula!” he said again.

Ganesha was often in Kai’s stories as a feasting god, an eating god. One who could never be filled up.

Julian was standing now, too, coming at me, his mouth open, saying, “Do you know where I can find her?” and I could see that his green eyes were terribly hopeful and endlessly, endlessly hungry.

“You thought I’d look like you, is what you meant,” I said. The laugh got out. I could hear me laughing crazy from very far away. “When you pictured a sister, she was white.” The little Nazi had the grace to blush bright red.

“Sister?” Birdwine said. We both ignored him, even though his right arm was the only thing keeping me from puddling to the floor.

Julian said, “Oh, sorry, no. Well, yes. But I mean, it’s fine. I don’t care if you’re—” He floundered, not sure what I was, and I didn’t feel like helping him. I didn’t feel like anything, except for maybe throwing up or screaming. I couldn’t breathe, and my heart slammed into my ribs over and over, like it was trying to get out. Julian ended with “—you’re good.”

The darkness grew, coming in from either side, like those elevator doors closing. I saw Julian’s red face framed in the narrow opening between the black, his lips shaping that
Oh,
that
sorry,
and now I could see so much more that was familiar in his jawline, his broad forehead, his narrow build, his long-fingered hands. I saw my mother, manifesting in his shapes and colors. Was this what her note meant? Had she somehow sent him, to show me the true tally of my debt to her? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe at all.

Julian stepped toward me, and Birdwine physically moved me behind him, pushing me roughly down into a chair without turning, his eyes fixed on Julian. He seemed to swell into a wall between us, rising up to his full height.

“This would be a great time for you to go,” he said, calm and deadly serious. There was a fraught pause, and then he took a single step toward Julian, big as a bear, every line of his body meaning business. Julian’s eyes flashed wide, and his mouth popped open. Birdwine took one more step, his arms rising, and Julian turned and fled, abandoning his papers.

I put my head down, hands braced on my knees.

Birdwine did not give chase. He turned to me instead.

“Are you—” he said, but stopped mid-question, as if he was uncertain how to end it.

“I can’t be seen like this,” I gasped out, sick and shaking so hard I couldn’t try to stand. “Nick and Catherine already think I— Oh, shit, help me, Birdwine.”

He was already moving, swinging me up like this was a year ago, back when he was my lover and I was made of air and ribbons. He carried me fast down the hall toward my office.

I let him. I even closed my eyes and let myself sink into it, cursing my stupidity.

Kai had been gone only five months, and already I’d forgotten the most essential—maybe the only empirical—truth about her: My mother never
stayed
anything. Not even dead.

CHAPTER 3

I
am a mouse in a red saddle, the girth pulled so tight around my chest that I cannot breathe. This is what I know: Ganesh has come. I am Ganesha’s little mouse, and as the huge god plops onto my back, my lungs compress, and I am flattened into something paper thin and airless.

The stricture around my chest eases, and I am not the mouse. I am me. I am eleven, and Ganesha is only a dear and funny fellow from my bedtime stories. I lie weeping in a bed soaked in the antiseptic reek of roach spray. Kai has doused the mattress so they don’t come and touch me with their whispery, plastic feet while I am sleeping.

We used to live in Asheville with Hervé, who had horses and an inheritance that let him say he was a folk musician. Kai kept him as her boyfriend for more than two years, a personal best. Then they started fighting more and more, and he called me a little shit when I spilled juice into his sitar.

The next time he took a fishing weekend, Kai told me to grab my stuff and load it in the old Mazda Hervé let her use. It was not my first hasty evacuation, but it was the first one I was actively against. I stared at her, big-eyed and balky, while she shoved her underpants into a duffel.

I wasn’t crazy about Hervé, but I liked his horses plenty, and I loved the hippie co-op school his money paid for. Before Asheville, we’d homeschooled. It was easier than reenrolling me as we changed names and cities, pausing only in the places where we lived with Eddie, then Tick, then Anthony. Kai loved teaching—I was working ahead of grade in English and science—but I was a class of one. I’d pick up day-pass friends at parks or fall in with a tribe of campground kids, good for a weekend.

At the co-op in Asheville, I had friends I got to keep. I felt at home there from day one, sitting in a multi-age classroom so mottled with colors that my copper hide was just another bead in a mosaic. My purple thrift-store pants were rendered regular when placed between a sari and a snaggy home-knit rainbow tunic. There was a girl named Meadow and a boy named River, not related. My essay on marsupials was taped up in the middle of the honor wall, and I’d collected nineteen Reading Challenge stickers. Only my friend Poppy was ahead of me, with twenty.

Kai saw me, frozen in the bedroom doorway, and said, “Thirty minutes and we hit the road. Anything that’s not in the car gets left behind.”

I knew from experience she meant it. I ran and started throwing all my favorite books in the trunk, claiming space, while Kai thoughtfully and thoroughly robbed Hervé. Kai drove the Mazda to Greenville, where a guy she knew gave us cash for it, even without the title. We took a Greyhound to Lexington, where we bought ourselves an old VW bus with a mattress in the back that gave us lice. We threw the mattress by the road and got a futon, slowly camping our way south to Georgia.

We met Dwayne right when the weather started turning cold.

Now we’re living with him in a sagging farmhouse deep in Paulding County. Kudzu heaps are laced around us, shielding us. From the highway, the house isn’t visible at all. Neither is the path that runs through the woods behind us, winding through the clearings where Dwayne’s pot plants are growing.

I have become the me my mother has invented to match the her she’s made for Dwayne. The word
mama
is an odd shape in my mouth after spending two years as Kai’s orphaned baby sister. This new daughter-self pinches at me from the bottom up, like I’m wedged into my own old shoes. I don’t belong in this place. Paulding County people are either black or white, and they don’t mix. The only Asians I’ve seen are three middle-aged ladies who work at Viet-Nails. If they have kids, they keep them elsewhere.

We could be here awhile, though. Dwayne is not a palate cleanser. He’s a genuine boyfriend, with broad shoulders, curly hair, and square white teeth set evenly, like Chiclets. He’s easygoing, and he makes Kai laugh. Worst of all, he’s nice to me. No matter how mad and mean I get, no matter how I goad him, he laughs and calls me Bossy Pony, tugging on my bangs like they’re a forelock. That goes a long way with my mother.

I miss the big bay gelding quietly. I miss my school out loud. So loud and so consistently that Dwayne decides to fix it. He sells fake IDs as well as pot and stereo systems of dubious origin, and he gets me registered for the local public middle school. My name there is Pauleen Kopalski; I don’t look like a Kopalski, and I can’t remember how to spell it.

At this new school, the white kids drop half their consonants, the black kids drop their helping verbs, and I don’t speak like any of them. I don’t get their references. They all stare openly at me, practically nose-picking as they ogle my pale and tilted eyes, my copper skin, my shaggy black hair. It’s not because I’m pretty, either. At eleven, I am breastless and storky-legged, doughy in the middle. I have a huge outbreak of stress pimples on my forehead.

My second week there, a couple of seventh-grade white girls trap me in the bathroom.

“What are you, anyways?” the first one asks me. I don’t answer. I look down, wait for them to get bored and go away. “Are you black?”

The other answers for me. “She doesn’t seem that black.”

I try to step sideways for the exit, and they jostle me back. They use their shoulders. When I try to bolt sideways, the first one catches me and shoves me, her hands sinking in my squashy belly.

“I know one thing, she’s a Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat,” she tells her friend.

Her friend repeats it, laughing. “Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat! That’s what we can call her.”

The push and the injustice leave me breathless. These girls own the third-best lunch table, and one of them has a boyfriend. The meanest wears a pair of real Guess jeans, and she has pretty hair and hardly any ass at all, just a narrow slice where her slim legs meet.

They step in closer, crowding me into the corner by the stalls. The meanest had an egg for breakfast, hours ago; I can smell the salt and rot of it behind her teeth.

I feel something—someone—new, rising to my surface. It is not a Paula I have been before, but I find it inside me anyway, both new and already mine.

I’ve been a lot of things, but until Asheville, I’ve been them all in tandem with my mother. We’ve been tambourine players and yoga teachers and Ren Faire workers. We were vegans with Eddie, then spent the next winter squatting in Tick’s deer blind. We’ve read palms and tarot on the street near Anthony’s tiny New Orleans apartment. At the Asheville hippie school, away from her, I was somehow all those incarnations—an amalgamated girl who felt like me.

This is different.

“Are you some kind of ching-chong thing?” the meanest says, making more red rise up beneath my copper skin.

In fight or flight, Kai has always chosen for us, and my mother is made out of wings.

I don’t think that I am like her—not in this way. My ears are cocked inward to hear a rushing sound like churning water, a violent, foamy washing away to something bedrock and essential.

“Let me by,” I tell the meanest. I’ve decided it’s the last thing I will tell her.

When she says, “Not until you tell us what you are,” and shoves me back against the stall, my hand is already a fist. I rear it back and punch it toward her belly, and it feels good. I like when it connects. I like to see her fold and puke onto her shoes. I like the way her friend’s face blanches right before she runs to get a teacher.

These two girls are white honor students who’ve been in this county since first grade. I am new, and racially confusing, and I didn’t do well on the Monday fractions quiz. I’m the one who gets suspended.

Now I lie in my stinking, bug-sprayed bed, thrashing and snotting, and I’m not sure where the fight-y girl has gone. I’m not even sure that she was more than panic and adrenaline. I weep and kick like a ruined infant until Kai comes and pulls my head into her lap. She runs her fingers gentle through my hair.

My body stays in a stiff curl, unyielding. “I hate it here.” It’s not the first time I’ve said this. My face is slick from weeping.

“You can’t get into fights,” Kai says.

I didn’t mean to. They started it and pushed at me and pushed me. I only punched a girl who deeply needed punching. “I hate that school.”

Kai keeps petting my hair with soothe-y fingers. “You haven’t given it much of a chance. Dwayne did some things to get you in, babe. It’s what you said you wanted.”

“I hate it there,” I say. “And they hate me.”

I’m on that whole clique’s radar, now. Next week, I’ll have fifty watery-eyed rednecks blinking their pink-rimmed lids at me, waiting for a chance to smash me into paste.
Maybe
I’ll be that fight-y girl again,
I think. It scares me. I like it, and that scares me, too.

“Baby, you can’t call attention to yourself this way. We can’t have DFCS sniffing around here. You can’t get in fights or disappear from school.” When I don’t answer, she adds, “Keep your head down, okay? Try to find a friend or two. It will get better once you settle in.”

“Is she okay?” Dwayne asks her, from the doorway.

“She’s fine,” Kai tells him.

“Poor kid. Middle school is hell,” he says. He leans in and sets two dollars down on my roach spray–smelling blanket. “If you want, you can bike up to the Dandy Mart. Get yourself a Coke and Pop Rocks. Would that make you feel better?”

“Maybe in a little. Give us a sec,” Kai says. She waits until he leaves before she lies down beside me. Her voice is soft from sweetness, not from whisper. “I’m going to tell you something that happened a long time ago. A very long time ago, but it’s happening right now.” That’s how Kai begins her bedtime stories. It’s her way of saying
once upon a time.

As she speaks, she curls in even closer. I am enveloped in the familiar smell of pot smoke and fresh orange peel. I still to listen. I think she’s going to tell the story where Kali fights the Red Seed Demon. Every time, Kai tells it just a little different, but it is my favorite; in every version, Kali wins.

Instead, she tells me a Ganesha story.

A long time ago, right now, Ganesha has a saddle mouse. That mouse carries the feasting god, carries his big belly, his heavy elephant’s head, and all the lunches that Ganesha tucks inside himself for later. The mouse wears a little red saddle and a silver bit. He carries Ganesha to the market, to the temple, to weddings and funerals, to sickbeds and to celebrations. Now he’s carrying Ganesha home from a feast. The god lolls on his little mouse’s saddle, holding his round stomach, so full of feast that he is groaning.

At the crossroads, Ganesha’s mouse meets a rat scuttling home with a small bag of rice bound to his back. The rat eyes Ganesha’s mouse, strapped into the saddle, staggering under all that god.

The rat says, “You poor thing! How can you carry the weight?”

And the mouse says, “What weight?”

I wait, but that’s the end. My eyebrows knit together. I’ve heard a hundred iterations of this story, too. In most, they don’t meet a rat. They meet a cobra, who scares the mouse into bucking Ganesha off—it’s slapstick, and very funny. I have not heard this version before.

I hate it, instantly. I will never come to like it any better. I hate it because I understand it. She is telling me to settle into this life. To accept it, as I have accepted every other role she’s handed me.

But in Asheville, I started making a Paula of my own. Asheville Paula was competitive and smart. She liked horses and lining up her reading stickers in a careful row. Paulding County Paula is only starting, but I already know I’m not going to be good at accepting things, especially a life that smells like roach poison. I already know what it feels like to hit a girl hard enough to make her give her breakfast egg back. The story Paulding County Paula wants is Kali shredding Red Seed Demons, winning against all the odds. Instead, I’m being told to lose so endlessly that losing becomes normal. To duck my head down and become Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat for my whole life here. After a little while, Kai’s story tells me, I won’t even notice it.

I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I even tried.

It’s not easy to imagine the Paula Vauss I’d be today, if we had stayed in Asheville. It’s close to impossible to picture the woman I’d be now if I had listened to that story, tried to learn the finer points of eating shit. Maybe I would have fallen off the world. Maybe I’d simply be a sweet and gentle soul.

Maybe I would have grown up with a brother.

Now I wondered, when Kai told me the story of Ganesha’s little mouse, did she know she was pregnant? Did Ganesh—no, Julian—exist yet? Perhaps he was a single cell, busily becoming two. He’d kept on growing, though. Now he was a full-grown godling, sitting on my chest, caving all my ribs in.

Birdwine came back from the lobby, closing my office door behind him. He’d gathered up Julian’s abandoned papers while I lay here picturing elephant-headed gods and demon wars instead of Google’s recommended beaches. Not very soothing, really. No wonder I was still flat on my butter-soft leather sofa with my chest constricted and my bare feet propped up on a stack of decorative pillows.

“Did anyone see you?” I asked.

“Verona was back at her desk. I acted like this was my stuff, like I’d dropped it,” he said, holding up Julian’s folder. “How’re you doing?”

I wasn’t sure. I stared over my toes at the built-in shelves, assessing. Strange that I remembered that old nickname given to me by the mean girls in the bathroom. I hadn’t wasted hate or even thought on them for years. I never went back to that school or saw them again. I never had to learn to bear that weight.

Just above my toes, on the third shelf down, I saw my own familiar cream-colored envelope, addressed to Kai’s PO box in Austin. I hadn’t wanted it in my loft, but I hadn’t thrown it out or shredded it. I’d brought it here, the voided check with her note on the back still nestled inside it. The red words on the outside,
Return to Sender,
matched my pedicure.

The envelope was the only flotsam on shelves that had been meticulously staged by our decorator to reflect what she called “Lawyer Luxe.” I’d left this thing propped against the leather-bound books, a macabre souvenir from a funeral after-party I had never thrown. For the first time, this struck me as weird. No, past weird. Downright crazy. I’d set it there and then grown myself a great big blind spot all around it.