World and Town (19 page)

A
nyway, Sophy is just hoping that one day her sisters will be living with her again, the three of them sharing one room the way they used to. She doesn’t care if it’s Cambodian or not, because it was just the best! It was, it was, like, love or happiness, or heaven, or something. She sees now that she was bad, and that that was why things happened the way they did. Because in Khmer there’s an expression,
One bad fish spoils the whole basket
, and that’s what people believe—that if a girl is bad, it shows that that whole line of the family is bad. So that what Sophy did made everyone look down on her sisters, until finally they couldn’t take it. Like it shattered their face, which is why they went bad and got into trouble too.

But probably she should just say what happened, right?

Okay.

W
ith Ronnie, it was a lot like being with her sisters. Like they shared stuff and hung out. The downtown being full of fancy stores, and the whole city being, like, this showcase, Cambodian kids were not supposed to hang around downtown—Latinos either. Because the merchants didn’t like the way it looked. They didn’t like all the black hair, and they thought everyone was, like, in a gang. So you could wait for your bus downtown, but if the bus came and you didn’t get on it, you got arrested for loitering, or for disorderly conduct, something. Even if you weren’t doing anything, the police would come and harass you until finally you gave them the finger and then they could arrest you for that. They were tough—Irish, mostly, or Greek. And in the evening there was a curfew to keep kids off the streets, eleven o’clock, which a lot of people said wasn’t even legal. But the town had that curfew anyway, and that pissed Ronnie off. “What is this shit?” he’d say. “Are we second-class citizens or what?” He was short, but he had this big way of talking, and Sophy loved that, even Sophan said like Leonardo DiCaprio, and he was! Like he wouldn’t have just stayed downstairs in the
Titanic
and shut up and gotten drowned, he would have broken through the gate and escaped. And he didn’t care he was short. “You’re Cambodian, you’re short,” he used to say, laughing at guys who wore elevator shoes and stuff. You could tell he was used to being on a stage, being the lead singer of his band, and the lead guitar too, because he’d, like, spread his arms so wide you could see the bony sides of his body through the droopy armholes of his basketball jersey, and he’d turn his head from side to side, looking everybody right in the eye and showing off his earring, which was real platinum. Ronnie had the only real platinum earring anybody’d ever seen, and it really was real, like he’d bought it off a rock star who was getting a new one, and that was, like, so Ronnie. He was ahead of everyone, and not just in his jewelry. His thinking was ahead too. Like he’d say, “Pretty soon there’s going to be a poop scoop law, so if Cambodians shit on the streets we’ll know we should clean it up ourselves,” and he called the police
Angka
. “Watch out, here comes
Angka,
” he’d say. “Watch out. They’re going to send you to see
Angka.
” The whole point of school was to keep Cambodians off the streets, he’d say, which was why he, for one, was not going to school. “Because what is this shit?” he’d say. “Aren’t these our streets?” He liked to walk down the middle of them sometimes, which of course brought
Angka
running. Downtown, but also where they all lived, in the Yard, because that was the trouble area where shootings happened. And when the blues came running, Ronnie’d run too, ducking and feinting, and having a good laugh later. “
Angka
is like a pineapple,” he’d say. “
Angka
has eyes everywhere, but we got by the bastard. Can you believe this shit?”

Ronnie used the same words for a lot of things, only changing his voice. Like he was into Cambodian culture. He was into playing
roam vong
, and
roam k’bach
, and
saravan
, and not just rock, and whenever he found some new way of mixing them with rock, he’d say, “Can you believe this shit?”—kind of pleased, like. And with Sophy too, he’d say it. Like if she said her mom and dad didn’t want her to date until she was engaged, he would say, real gentle-like, “I don’t believe this shit.” And when they’d go sit down by one of the canals and make out, he’d put his hand up her shirt and say, “Now this is some shit,” and she’d think that too. Like she’d say, “Put your hands on me, Jack,” like Sophan did when she was imitating Rose in the movie, and he’d do that. And sometimes he’d put his whole head inside her shirt and pull it down like a tent, and like, nuzzle and touch her, and it’d be like she had a baby in there, something really hers. And they could do that for a long time in the beginning. But then she started nuzzling him back, and then they could not stand it, it was just some shit! And one day she had to have him not just in her shirt but in her, she didn’t care they were outside, she didn’t care what happened, she didn’t care about anything. Or maybe she did, because she made him pull out in the beginning. But then he pulled out later and later, until finally he said, “Oh, what is this shit, my love, what is this shit,” and even though they had been planning to get some rubbers that very day, she couldn’t say anything except, “I’m flying!” like Rose in
Titanic
.

And he said, “This is some shit.”

Then they did it again, and afterwards they watched the water go gold in the canal, even though they knew that meant it was way after school hours, probably supper time or something. She felt like that shit just didn’t matter anymore because they were, like, a man and a woman. And they were starting a new life, they were. Like they were going to leave this place and forget about Cambodia. First they were going on a honeymoon with all their brothers and sisters on, like, an island where there were beaches and you could jump off rocks into the water and stuff. And then they were going to
make every day count
. They were. They were going to
make every day count
. Maybe she would have gone home, if it wasn’t already so late she knew she was going to be beaten. But that late there was no hope, her dad was definitely going to beat her with a broom handle or get drunk and yell at her with a knife in his hand, and so she didn’t go home. Instead she sat with Ronnie and watched the water, which was moving fast and kind of weaving around, the way it did when the locks were open, making all these complicated patterns that changed and changed. And then she hid at Ronnie’s house. She hung out with him in the daytime and slept with his sisters at night and, like, nobody in his family really cared. Because his dad had, like, two jobs, and his mom had three, and they were too busy to notice. And his sisters liked her, and she liked them. And, like, Cambodian kids ran away all the time anyway, that was just a normal thing for them, it wasn’t until Sophy got to the foster home that she found out other kids thought it was wack.

But so what. Ronnie and her just hung out and thought. He gave her his old guitar and taught her to play, and in between lessons they tried to figure out what to do with their lives. Like she thought he should do music at night and computers in the day, but he said that was because she was half Chinese. He thought that he should just be a rock star and that she should just be a model, that would be perfect. She hadn’t even convinced him that becoming a model was not realistic for a Cambodian, which she was, actually, and anyway would be a lot of stress even if she was beautiful, which she wasn’t, when the blues showed up. They’ll never know who ratted on them, but Ronnie thought it was the Bloods pulling shit as usual. Like here he wasn’t even a Crip, just a friend of the Crips, who played at their parties and that was all, and still the Bloods had to go showing disrespect. The last thing Sophy said to Ronnie as the officer was putting handcuffs on her was please, please, not to go looking for anyone, but she knew what he was going to do.

And meanwhile, there she was, a runaway and a “stubborn child,” as the cops liked to say. And a shoplifter, because she didn’t have any clothes when she moved in with Ronnie, and Ronnie’s sisters were smaller than her, and she tried on this T-shirt that made Ronnie whistle. Probably if Ronnie hadn’t said he took shit all the time, she wouldn’t have. But he did, and nobody thought the store owner would prosecute, but he did, too. And for a while she thought she was going to have a baby besides, but in the end she didn’t, and that was a good thing, since things were bad enough. Like she was not only in for shoplifting, she was in for resisting arrest, because she’d tried to keep Ronnie from punching the cop who arrested her, and when the cop looked like he was going to grab Ronnie anyway, she’d blocked him.

So there she was, all of a sudden, in this big room with everyone looking like they were on TV. Like even her dad and mom looked they were on TV, and when they told the judge she was no good, that was like TV too. She kind of liked the judge because he chewed gum in court, and because once he came down from the bench and sat with them, scaring her mom and dad so bad she almost thought they were going to change their minds about her. Like, her dad closed his eyes while the judge talked, as if he was really listening or meditating or something, and even afterwards he sat so still he looked like a statue, it was as if he had gone somewhere and just left his body to keep his place. And when he opened his eyes, you almost couldn’t tell whether he was going to say anything or not, which made her feel proud of him in a way. Because it was like right then he wasn’t the dad whose eyes moved around and who smoked cigarettes and drank, but somebody else—it was like right then he was the dad he would have been if he had never left Cambodia. A dad with answers inside him. Like looking at him sitting there, she remembered how he once said that if you put a bird in a cage, it wants to fly out. And she remembered how true she thought that was, and how she wondered then if deep down he understood her. But when he finally opened his eyes in the courtroom he didn’t say anything about what happens when you put a bird in a cage or anything like that. Instead he said, “We don’t want her. She is not our daughter, she is no good.” Just like that, in about the clearest English she’d ever heard him speak. And then her mom nodded too, as if she understood him perfectly even though he was speaking English, and as if she agreed. And even when the judge made everyone take a break and gave them both time to think about what they were saying, they came back to the courtroom and said the same thing.
We don’t want her
—her dad, like, lopping the air with his finger as he talked. And then Sophy just wished her sisters were at least there to say they’d missed her when she ran away and would miss her now that she was going to a foster home. But they were in school.

So she went by herself with the lady from DYS, her name was Fatima, to a foster home behind this big wire fence with, like, plastic woven through it. And Sophy was sent to a new school, and given a probation officer and a thousand rules, rule number one being that she was completely forbidden to see Ronnie. Of course, Ronnie tried to visit her there anyway, and once she really did see him, like, right on the other side of the fence. Like she could see the top of his head pop up, she thought at first she was, like, seeing things. But then he sent a paper airplane note saying that really was him, on a pogo stick! Leave it to Ronnie to even know what a pogo stick was. And then she loved him even more, and tried to write and tell him that that was some shit he’d pulled. Like she sent a letter to his house, disguising her handwriting. But she never knew if he ever got that note or not, because just when she thought she was going to get to see him a lot like that, bouncing up and down, he fell off the pogo stick and broke his leg really bad, and had to have an operation. Everybody else at school, when they got hurt it was because of car accidents. Only Ronnie would get hurt on a pogo stick, he really was some shit. But then stuff started happening with the Bloods when they realized they had a sitting duck, people said because Ronnie had already wet someone, to retaliate for the ratting. And that made Sophy feel terrible, because Ronnie had never wet anyone before, and wasn’t even a real member of the gang, he was just someone who played for them at their parties, it was only because of all this that he had to get jumped in. Anyway, she didn’t get the whole story, but she did hear how the situation got so dangerous that when Ronnie finally got out of bed, he had to go straight back to school, for the protection.

Of course, everyone was surprised to see him back, like, all of a sudden in the middle of the year. Like there he was with his textbooks in a backpack hanging off his wheelchair and everything. Sophy told Sopheap to take a picture for her, and Sopheap did, and snuck it in when she came to visit. And Sophy did laugh every time she saw it, and hid the picture in the math section of her school notebook, where nobody ever found it. And that was, like, a miracle because her foster parents were the nosiest people alive.

She hated the foster home. The kids smelled like B.O., and the house smelled like B.O., and she didn’t like Wayne and Jane, who instead of making people use deodorant, made them all go to church, like, three times a week. And you couldn’t just say Praise the Lord quiet-like when you were there either, you had to say it in a big voice so that everyone could hear you.
PRAISE THE LORD
! Every time someone came to visit her she felt worse. Like when her sisters came and brought pictures of what they were wearing and everything, she couldn’t believe that no one wrote even once how they remembered that that was Sophy’s shirt and what a ten she looked in it. Not that people had forgotten about her completely. In fact, Sophan said people were talking so night and day that she and Sopheap couldn’t get away from it, one time they even tried to hide in a stall in the girls’ room, but people looked under the door and found them. Because they could see there were four legs in there, and because everyone knew everyone’s shoes. Sophan said lunch was so terrible, she couldn’t wait to get back to class. And all because of the talking! That was one thing Sophy did not miss. People say, “The Vietnamese have their tricks, the Thais have their schemes, and the Khmer have their gossip,” and it’s true. Like it just would not be possible to gossip more than Cambodians.