“Fuck you!” Polly said, clenching and unclenching her fists.
Her mother looked up, alarmed, but without missing a beat, she whacked Polly across the face with the newspaper.
Polly ran. First she ran outside, into her backyard, and then she ran down the alley. At the end of the block, at the end of the alley, was a field. It was an empty corner lot, the only empty lot on the square block. All during her elementary school years the neighborhood kids played kickball, kick the can, and tag there, especially during the summers. They also climbed the boysenberry tree and ate its berries.
Polly climbed the tree. “Fuck you,” she said, picking the overly ripe berries still left on the branches at the end of September and eating them. Soon, she was calm, her lips and cheeks and fingers stained a gorgeous wash of purple.
“Your father’s a faggot.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that. This came from Michael Turley, who lived across the street from her. He was her age, a light-haired, thick-bodied boy she’d known since birth. She played with him often over the years. He was, in fact, her first sleepover. She remembered being able to take a bath with him; they were only five. It had been exciting in an innocent, five-year-old way, splashing around with a friend. A few years later, they had a day of playing gone bad.
“She showed me her butt,” he shrieked to his mother, pointing at Polly. Mrs. Turley didn’t do anything — she had five other kids to worry about — but after that Polly didn’t like to play with Michael. Yeah, she showed him her butt. How dare he tell on her.
Regardless, they were neighbors. It was Saturday. Another dreadful week at Jefferson was over, and the month of September marched on. She was sitting on her bike, bored. Michael had lazily crossed the street to say that to her. Polly stared at him.
“Fuck you,” she said and stuck out her middle finger.
“He’s a fag. That’s what my dad says. And you’re an ugly flat-chested bitch.”
Polly rode her bike down the street. The fire station, which sold candy as a sort of fundraising, was three blocks away, across from her old elementary school, and it was open for a couple of hours in the morning on Saturday as well as for an hour during the week after school let out. She rode slowly. It was a gorgeous day, sunny, the Midwestern sky flat and endless above her, clouds floating by like they had all the room in the world. When she got there she hollered up the stairs, up through where the poles came down through cut-out circles in the ceiling, “Candy Box!” Then she waited.
A fireman came down, keys clanging. His shirt, untucked, hung over his large belly. Polly’s eyes were focused on the metal locker, which was full of candy, but he grabbed her chin and she looked up at him.
“I bet you got candy in your box, little girl,” he said, and then he smiled, showing his red thick tongue between his teeth. His hand came out and tweaked her mosquito bite that pushed on her tight green T-shirt.
“Ouch,” she said, putting a hand over her nipple.
“Don’t like it? Wear a bra,” he said.
Then he opened the locker and in that moment, as the door swung open, everything that bothered Polly went away in a wash of color. There were Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Milky Ways, Snickers, penny gum, Twizzlers, Peppermint Patty’s, Jolly Ranchers, Mounds Bars, Mars Bars, Almond Joys, Paydays, and SweeTarts. There was everything a girl could want. She bought a pack of Twizzlers and rode over to McKinley’s playground. There were two black boys playing basketball and no one else. She parked her bike over by the hopscotch area and sat on some cement steps, carefully peeling one Twizzler off at a time. She gnawed away, happy to grind her jaw. Was her dad a fag? He was different. For instance, he didn’t have a job. Maybe that made him a fag. He was gentle, too. He wasn’t prone to smacking her across the face with newspapers.
A week later, her other nipple burst. She’d finally gotten used to the one little mosquito bite, had finally stopped scratching at it, and now this. In math class, she was going crazy with the need to scratch the shit out of it. She rubbed her notebook, hard and fast, over her chest. She was in the back row. John Bellini sat next to her, a short Italian boy from her part of town.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Polly stopped rubbing the notebook against her now burning burst nipple. Her face turned red from embarrassment, from exertion. “None of your business.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Fuck you,” she said to him.
He looked her squarely in the eye. Then he spit, slowly, a large wad of spit onto the floor next to his desk. Polly then spit herself, an equally large wad next to her desk.
“I bet I can make a bigger pile of spit than you,” he said.
“Betcha,” she said.
In the weeks that followed, Polly and John continued their effort, every day a different puddle. Neither of them ever declared anyone a winner, but it made the time pass. Finally, the teacher, Mr. Rotterman, noticed.
“Hey! Hey! What’s going on there!” He was on them now, from the blackboard at the front of the class to the two of them in the back in a heartbeat, grabbing John by the arm and pulling him away. “Go to the principal’s office. Now,” he said. And then to Polly, “You. You I’ll talk to after class.”
The bell rang. Everyone left. The room seemed enormous, empty like that. Mr. Rotterman, from behind his desk, said, “Come here.”
Polly sat still.
“I said, come here.” His voice boomed across the room, echoing off the tiled floor, the empty white walls.
Polly stood up and then stood on her chair. She felt tall this way. She was tall this way. “No.”
“I don’t want to call your mother. But I will.”
Fuck you, Polly thought. Fuck you, she thought, hopping down from the chair, her feet thwacking the floor, like a capgun sounding off. She walked to the desk. She was wearing a pair of white corduroys, and they were too small. They crawled up the crack of her front and back. They also didn’t reach her shoes — floods, they called them. When she got to Mr. Rotterman’s desk, he grabbed her, quickly, and leaned her over the desk.
“That,” he said, as his hand slapped her ass hard, “is for being bad.”
“Bad, bad, bad,” he repeated as he spanked her over and over again.
Fall turned to winter and Polly had a friend. The friend didn’t like her very much and wasn’t nice to her, but Polly was so grateful that none of that mattered. Her friend’s name was Breanna and she was from the other side of town, a skinny white girl, much like Polly herself, but one whose parents were divorced and one who was allowed to watch as much television as she wanted and eat sugar cereals for dinner.
Once, during a Saturday night sleepover, while they were watching the dancers gyrate on Solid Gold, Polly said, “Mike Turley says my dad is a fag.”
“Really?” Breanna grinned and looked at her with interest. Generally, anything that caused another person pain or humiliation interested Breanna.
“Yeah. Maybe we should kick his ass.”
“Whose ass? Michael Turley’s or your dad’s?” Breanna nearly fell over laughing.
“Shut up!”
“Maybe your dad is a fag.” Breanna started to guffaw. Then she smacked Polly’s arm.
“How could he be married and have a kid if he’s a faggot?”
“Fuck if I know. I don’t anything about fags.”
When getting ready for bed, in the bathroom at Breanna’s, Polly stared at herself in the mirror. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. She grinned. She had big teeth in a small head. She pulled down her underpants and looked at the dark wisps of hair forming. This was new but not as troublesome as her nipples. It was more hidden, and it didn’t itch quite so much. She touched herself gently, just there where the hair was growing in. Then she looked at her teeth again. When she was a little girl and her teeth were coming out, she could barely stand the feeling. The agony of waiting! It was like her other itches. She would tie dental floss around the tooth and saw, saw away. Back and forth, saliva, then blood, and still the tooth wouldn’t come out. Her mother would say, “It’s barely loose! Wait until it’s looser before you pull it out.” But Polly couldn’t wait. She tried tying the string to a door and slamming it, but that didn’t work. She always moved toward the door inadvertently. So she’d sit back down on the couch, sawing away, cartoons on in front of her that she barely watched because she was so intent on her sawing. And when it came out! Shooting across the room, smacking the TV dead on. The relief of it! The tooth was long and strange looking, because the root was still on it. Blood poured into her mouth, dripping down her chin onto the rug. She could feel her mother’s anger. Looking into the mirror, she’d see the gaping, throbbing hole and it gave her a sort of satisfaction, but it was never long lived.