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.”