“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.