He disappeared into the shadows of the hallway. I stopped holding my breath. “I don’t think Father likes you spending so much time with us,” Adele said.
“Why?” I asked. I wanted to hear it said out loud, in real words. I wanted to understand it, not just sense it in my gut.
“He wants to spend time with you,” Adele said. Her smile was so kind, it bordered on pity.
“Why?” I asked again. I focused on Adele’s gentle, reluctant face and avoided Helen’s shrewd eyes, her eyebrows that sloped to a point.
“Because he wants you to be like him,” Helen said.
Adele added, “Big and strong like him.”
“But I want to be like you,” I said, grabbing Adele’s knee. “I want to have hair like you. I want to be pretty like you.” Her sad, saintly expression frightened me.
“You can’t.” Helen had turned in her chair. Adele glared at her. “What?” Helen said. “He can’t. You can’t, Peter. You can be handsome, like Father or Bruce Lee.” She pointed at a poster of theirs, one that Father disapproved of: dot-pixelated like a comic book, a shirtless Bruce Lee posed in fighting stance, his body warped wide with muscle. I stared at the poster in horror. I started to cry.
“You’re a boy.” Helen said it like she thought it would be comforting.
“I am not! I am not!”
Bonnie was always delighted when someone older than her cried. She started poking me in the side. “A boy! A boy! A boy!”
Adele knelt down. “Peter, there’s nothing wrong with being a boy. There’re a lot of great things about being a boy. Sometimes I wish I were one.”
I started to wail, a bland, continuous cry, not pausing to take a breath. I felt out of control. A boy! A boy! A boy!
Helen turned a page in her textbook. “Father’s going to hear him and we’re all going to catch shit.”
Adele nodded. She pulled me into the closet and shut the door behind us. The seam of the hinge let in the only light, and my heaving breaths seemed louder in the tight space. I felt Adele’s thin arms close around me.
Bonnie pounded on the door, angry at being excluded. The sound was distant and unimportant. Adele whispered close to my ear, “You can be pretty. You can be pretty.”
Roger wasn’t at school on his birthday. He’d been talking for weeks about the party he was going to have. There’d be horses, he said, and arcade machines, and BB guns. He mimed popping off a shotgun on his shoulder, then watching an invisible bird tumbling from a tree.
As we left school that day, Roger was standing by the front door. Ollie and Lester walked together. I chased behind. They stopped abruptly and I crashed into their backs.
“Hi, losers,” Roger said. The scar on his nose was more noticeable than usual, throbbing over the spot where the bridge curved away from straight.
“Happy birthday,” Lester said. Ollie smiled without opening his mouth.
We waited for the front of the school to empty. Kids rushed past us. I saw Bonnie heading for the bus home. She looked just like me from behind: a helmet of black hair, a pair of Helen’s old overalls. I watched a version of myself stay with the crowd, get on the bus, go home. Home to my sisters.
“Where were you today?” Ollie asked.
“Pa took me to a baseball game,” Roger said. He looked us up and down, searching for something.
“What baseball game?” Ollie challenged.
“Blue Jays. Out in Toronto.”
“Then how come you’re back already?” Lester asked.
I’d believed in Roger’s birthday party.
“Yeah,” Ollie said. “When did this game end, so you could be back by three o’clock?”
“Morning game,” Roger said, vaguely. “You losers bring me presents?”
I said, “I got you something. It’s at home. I was going to bring it to your party.”
Roger sucked on his teeth, drawing his cheeks in. He addressed Lester and Ollie. “What about you two?”
Lester shrugged. Ollie brought something out of his bag: a gift wrapped in brown paper and kitchen string. Roger grabbed it out of his hands and tore a hole in the paper.
I saw the glint of metal. I couldn’t read the expression on Roger’s face as he stared at the half-opened present. “You’re a dick,” he said.
“What?” Ollie said, the words coming out the side of his shut mouth.
Roger ripped the paper off entirely. “This is your old lunchbox. I seen it.”
Ollie’s face twitched. Maybe a smile.
Roger kicked at the scraps of brown paper. They drifted up and down daintily, as though mocking him. “Fuck you guys.” He squinted, his cheeks squishing upward. Astonished, I wondered if he was going to cry. His eyes opened. His hands closed slowly around the collar of Ollie’s shirt. As Ollie’s breath caught, I could see him remembering how big Roger was.
Lester pushed them apart. “Cut it out. Someone’s coming.”
A small figure skipped toward us. As she came closer, I recognized her — a girl from my class, Shauna. Her desk was in front of mine, and I found it soothing to look at her. Her blond hair was always parted neatly in the center, clipped in barrettes that stayed in place all day. The glassy blue eyes of a doll. She looked like the child of the Mommy I’d wanted to be, the one receiving the plate of pancakes, the one in white socks and patent-leather Mary Janes that never left muddy footprints behind.
She seemed oblivious to us as she tried to go past and into the building. She wore a yellow skirt that bounced as she walked, short over her shapeless legs. Roger let go of Ollie, who started to cough. He reached out and grabbed Shauna by the arm. “Where are you going?”
“I forgot my pencil case.” Roger’s fingers sank into her chubby arm. “Let go. You’re hurting me.” The last part came out as a whine.
“Roger,” Lester said. “Come on, man. Let’s go to the corner store. We’ll buy you a Coke or something.”
“Shut up,” Roger said, deadpan. He stayed focused on Shauna. “It’s my birthday today. Did you know that?”
“What?” Shauna tried to struggle free. “Let me go!”
“Wish me a happy birthday first.”
“Fine. Happy birthday. Let go!”
The possibility of letting go, of ending it there, rose and died in Roger’s eyes. “Come with us,” he said.
After I had calmed down enough to leave the closet, Helen reminded me that our father wanted to see me. I headed out of my sisters’ bedroom and went down the short hallway like I was on a death march. My mother, who was nothing like the mommies in the magazines, was washing down the kitchen table. My mother, more like a wind than a person: visible only in her aftermath, the cleanliness and destruction she left behind, forgettable until a tornado blew off the roof. She motioned me silently toward their bedroom door.
I went into their room. My father stood by the window in the dark. The house was shaped so that the light from the kitchen window came through their bedroom window. My father’s white shirt glowed, revealing the muscles of his back. For the first time, I thought about what his body might look like. Did he have square pectorals like Bruce Lee, divided abs, all those sharp, frightening angles?
“Come with me,” he said. He walked toward their connected bathroom, and I crept after him. My eyes were starting to adjust. He pushed a stool against the sink. I hopped on the stool without being told. We stood side by side in the dark, facing the mirror.
I heard the light switch snap. In the flood of light, my father’s face was momentarily washed out, drained of its tawny color, his burnished tan. My own face was softened, blurred at the edges where I couldn’t focus my eyes. In the mirror, a white man and a girl.
Then — pupils contracted — just us again.
“Today’s special, for father and son. You learn to shave,” my father said. He winced at the sound of his own voice, mouthed the words a second time. Nobody heard his accent more acutely than he did. “I’m going to teach you how to shave.”