She looked through Patrice’s notebook that was filled with spelling tests. His talent for spelling was legendary in her class. On top of each page was a small star.
She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have that many gold stars. The notebook was such a marvellous little universe of constellations. You couldn’t see the stars in the sky at night in the city. If you wanted to look at some stars, you had to befriend a boy like Patrice.
She let a boy named Jesse hit her hands with a wooden ruler. Then they went into his kitchen. He put ice cubes in a tube sock and then wrapped it around her hands. He kissed her on the cheek and apologized.
What did Little O look like? She was pale and had long, dirty-blond hair. She had big cheeks that made her head look too big for her skinny body. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in the class, but she would grow up to be. Somehow the boys knew this.
When she was eleven and a half, Little O found out about a gang of little boys that called themselves the Black Sparrows. The group was made up of seven skinny boys who all happened to be cousins. After school, they met in an apartment building that was made of orange bricks. She crossed the train tracks to go meet them.
They all squeezed together on the chesterfield in the living room as Little O sat on a wooden dining-room chair, facing them. She said that she would like to join their gang. As an initiation ritual, she said she would have sex with all of them.
They sat there quietly, not knowing what to say. They were all too embarrassed to say anything. In fact they each secretly wanted to be thinking whatever it was that the others were thinking. It was the sort of thing that they had fantasized about before. But now that it was here before them, it seemed too strange.
Although they had all always found Little O to be very beautiful, they saw flaws in her appearance. They noticed that one of her stockings had slid down into her shoe and that there were permanent yellow stains in the armpits of her T-shirt. They noticed that she had a pimple on her cheek.
It turned six o’clock as they were all sitting there. The mother of two of the boys came into the living room and announced that supper was ready. They asked if it would be all right if they invited their little friend to have dinner with them. The mother looked at Little O and naturally she wanted to say no, but she said, “Fine.”
Sitting around the kitchen table, the boys were suddenly happy. They had never felt so comfortable with a girl their age before. They felt the way that you feel after you have slept with someone for the first time and here they are in your kitchen the next morning. Here they are suddenly sharing your life. One of the boys had a sudden urge to put his head on her lap and weep.
When she laughed, she snorted. Now it was as if everything ugly about her was beautiful.
The sky became pink as the sun set, like someone had poured a packet of pink Kool-Aid into a glass of water.
She told the boy that he should go and get her a bottle of beer from his fridge. She said that he should take a deep, deep gulp and then kiss her immediately afterwards.
She asked him if he would like to watch her cry. He shrugged. She sat there for a while, looking straight ahead. But she could not make herself cry.
She would go to do the laundry late at night when there weren’t any people there. When she opened the bags they always smelled so bad that everyone in the laundromat would turn to look at her. The owner of the laundromat would sometimes give Little O an extra quarter when she was missing enough change for her load. He told her he had never seen such a good kid who did so much for her grandfather. He told her that she was truly wonderful, as spotless as a clean sheet.
Little O was getting married in the alley. There were three brothers who lived on the third floor of the building who kept tossing garbage down on their heads — banana peels and stuff like that. All the kids that were attending the wedding turned their faces up to the heavens and yelled at them to stop ruining their fun.
The boy was wearing his Sunday clothes. Little O had a paper doily bobby-pinned to her hair and was wearing a long silky nightgown that went to the ground. She was carrying a bunch of bluebells in her hands, which she had plucked from the train tracks.
Most of the kids were there because they wanted to watch Little O and the boy kiss. Most of the kids were there because they wanted to watch them do something bad. They knew it was bad, but they couldn’t figure out how bad it was.
The boy’s name was Murray and Little O hated this name. She was chilly in only her nightgown. She felt as if the other children were nothing more than a mad, terrible little mob. They were like the exact sort of people that would turn up to see her execution if this were another time.
Little O wondered whether if in all her past lives she had been humiliated in public this way. It seemed entirely possible. Because the feeling seemed so familiar to her. It was as if she had been born to be humiliated. She wondered if other girls felt the same way.
The minister was a boy named Bertrand. He was wearing a tuxedo jacket from his clown costume from last Halloween. He had long bangs that he wore down over his face. He spent most of the time in public fiddling with his bangs. They were a great burden to him.
He gave a good speech though. Nobody knew the difference between really bad and really good, so they chose instead to think of it as magnificent.
“Here we are. We are together to mention the coming together forever of this man and this woman. Murray Estaban and Little O. They will always be together even when they are sick and they are old. They will have sex. They will be stuck being married by the power invested in God. You, Murray and Little O, may kiss and may the whole city of cities fall on your heads if you try not to be married.”
There was a man who had a heart attack in Little O’s building. Since he had no relatives, the landlord put his possessions into boxes and put them out on the street corner. Little O looked through all his things.
There were a lot of pots and pans and a box full of books. There was a big book called The Joy of Sex. She held it against her chest and brought it up to her apartment immediately. The couple in the drawings were her new secret best friends. She could look at them making love in ridiculous ways for hours.
She also found a sailor’s hat that day that made the mothers think she was maturing too quickly for her age. They wished some sort of authority would take the girl away.
The mercury in the thermometer went down like the ink in the teacher’s red pen as she wrote criticisms all over everyone’s homework.
She was walking home in her underwear and a blue parka with a sheepskin-lined collar. She had lost her skirt in a game of strip poker. Why hadn’t she thought to gamble away another article of clothing, like her gloves or her earmuffs?
She asked Luke if she could watch him pee. But he couldn’t go while she was watching.
When she was twelve, in Grade Seven, she was the only girl who wasn’t dressed up for picture day. She had a white button-up shirt with a tie that you pinned on. She had on a pair of jeans with big holes in the knees. Perhaps she was dressed up.
There had to be one child who was a sacrificial lamb, one who all the mothers looked down on in order to raise their own child up on a pedestal. And that was Little O. Mothers loved it whenever their children came home with news about the terrible situations that Little O had gotten into.