—

Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances. That’s a lie but we live it. We live anyway. That’s a lie but the boy opens his eyes. The room a grey-blue smear. There’s music coming through the walls. Chopin, the only thing she listens to. The boy climbs out of bed and the corners of the room tilt on an axis, like a ship. But he knows this too is a trick he’s making of himself. In the hallway, where the spilled lamp reveals a black mess of broken vinyl 45s, he looks for her. In her room, the covers on the bed are pulled off, the pink lace comforter piled on the floor. The night-light, only halfway in its socket, flickers and flickers. The piano drips its little notes, like rain dreaming itself whole. He makes his way to the living room. The record player by the love seat skips as it spins a record long driven to its end, the static intensifying as he approaches. But Chopin goes on, somewhere beyond reach. He follows it, head tilted for the source. And there, on the kitchen table, beside the gallon of milk on its side, the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare, a red eye winking. The stereo she bought at Goodwill, the one that fits in her apron pocket as she works, the one she slides under her pillowcase during rainstorms, the Nocturnes growing louder after each thunderclap. It sits in the pool of milk, as if the music was composed for it alone. In the boy’s single-use body, anything’s possible. So he covers the eye with his finger, to make sure he’s still real, then he takes the radio. The music in his hands dripping milk, he opens the front door. It is summer. The strays beyond the railroad are barking, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world. The piano notes seep through the boy’s chest as he makes his way to the backyard. Because something in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

Sure enough, there she is, standing at the far end of the little chain-link yard, beside a flattened basketball, her back to him. Her shoulders are narrower than he remembers from hours ago, when she tucked him into bed, her eyes glazed and pink. Her nightgown, made from an oversized T-shirt, is torn in the back, exposing her shoulder blade, white as a halved apple. A cigarette floats to the left of her head. He walks up to her. He walks up to his mother with music in his arms, shaking. She’s hunched, distorted, tiny, as if crushed by the air alone.

“I hate you,” he says.

He studies her, to see what language can do—but she doesn’t flinch. Only halfway turns her head. The cigarette, its ember bead, rises to her lips, then flutters near her chin.

“I don’t want you to be my mom anymore.” His voice strangely deeper, more full.

“You hear me? You’re a monster—”

And with that her head is lopped off its shoulders.

No, she’s bending over, examining something between her feet. The cigarette hangs in the air. He reaches for it. The burn he expects doesn’t come. Instead, his hand crawls. Opening his palm, he discovers the firefly’s severed torso, the green blood darkening on his skin. He looks up—it’s just him and the radio standing beside a flat basketball in the middle of summer. The dogs now silent. And full.

“Ma,” he says to no one, his eyes filling, “I didn’t mean it.”

“Ma!” he calls out, taking a few clipped steps. He drops the radio, it falls mouth-down in the dirt, and turns toward the house. “Ma!” He runs back inside, his hand still wet with a single-use life, looking for her.

Then I told you the truth.

It was a greyish Sunday. All morning the sky had threatened downpour. The kind of day, I had hoped, where the bond between two people might be decided on easily—the weather being so bleak we would see each other, you and I, with relief, a familiar face made more luminous than we had remembered in the backdrop of dreary light.

Inside the bright Dunkin’ Donuts, two cups of black coffee steamed between us. You stared out the window. Rain slashed down the road as the cars came back from church service on Main St. “People seem to like those SUV things these days.” You noted the caravan of cars at the drive-thru. “Everybody wants to sit higher and higher.” Your fingers thrummed the table.

“You want sugar, Ma?” I asked. “What about cream, or actually, maybe a doughnut? Oh no, you like the croissants—”

“Say what you have to say, Little Dog.” Your tone subdued, watery. The steam from the cup gave your face a shifting expression.

“I don’t like girls.”

I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-?ê—from the French pédé, short for pedophile. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.

You blinked a few times.

“You don’t like girls,” you repeated, nodding absently. I could see the words moving through you, pressing you into your chair. “Then what do you like? You’re seventeen. You don’t like anything. You don’t know anything,” you said, scratching the table.

“Boys,” I said, controlling my voice. But the word felt dead in my mouth. The chair creaked as you leaned forward.

“Chocolate! I want chocolate!” A group of children in teal oversized T-shirts, just back, judging from their paper bags full of apples, from an apple-picking trip, poured into the shop, filling it with excited shrieks.

“I can leave, Ma,” I offered. “If you don’t want me I can go. I won’t be a problem and nobody has to know. . . . Ma say something.” In the cup my reflection rippled under a small black tide. “Please.”

“Tell me,” you said from behind the palm on your chin, “are you going to wear a dress now?”

“Ma—”

“They’ll kill you,” you shook your head, “you know that.”

“Who will kill me?”

“They kill people for wearing dresses. It’s on the news. You don’t know people. You don’t know them.”

“I won’t, Ma. I promise. Look, I never wore one before, have I? Why would I now?”

You stared at the two holes in my face. “You don’t have to go anywhere. It’s just you and me, Little Dog. I don’t have anyone else.” Your eyes were red.

The children across the shop were singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” their voices, their easy elation, piercing.

“Tell me,” you sat up, a concerned look on your face, “when did this all start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?”

* * *

—

I was six, in the first grade. The school I was at was a refurbished Lutheran church. With the kitchen forever under renovation, lunch was served in the gymnasium, the basketball court lines arcing beneath our feet as we sat at makeshift lunch tables: classroom desks bunched together in clusters. Each day the staff would wheel in huge crates filled with frozen, single-dish meals: a reddish-brown mass in a white square wrapped in cellophane. The four microwaves we lined up behind hummed throughout the lunch period as one meal after another was melted, then pinged out, blistered and steaming, into our waiting hands.

I sat down with my mush square beside a boy with a yellow polo shirt and black comb-over. His name was Gramoz and his family, I learned later, came to Hartford from Albania after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But none of that mattered that day. What mattered was that he did not have a white square with grey mush, but a sleek, turquoise lunch bag with a Velcro strap, from which he presented a tray of pizza bagels, each one the shape of oversized jewels.

“Want one?” he said casually, biting into his.

I was too shy to touch. Gramoz, seeing this, took my hand, flipped it over, and placed one in my palm. It was heavier than I imagined. And somehow, still warm. Afterward, at recess, I followed Gramoz everywhere he went. Two rungs behind him on the monkey bars, at his heels as he climbed the ladder to the yellow swirly slide, his white Keds flashing with each step.

How else to repay the boy who gave me my first pizza bagel but to become his shadow?

The problem was that my English, at the time, was still nonexistent. I couldn’t speak to him. And even if I could what could I say? Where was I following him? To what end? Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation. To stay close to Gramoz was to remain within the circumference of his one act of kindness, was to go back in time, to the lunch hour, that pizza heavy in my palm.

One day, on the slide, Gramoz turned around, his cheeks puffed red, and shouted, “Stop following me, you freak! What the heck is wrong with you?” It was not the words but his eyes, squinted as if taking aim, that made me understand.

A shadow cut from its source, I stopped at the top of the slide, and watched his shiny comb-over grow smaller and smaller down the tunnel, before vanishing, without a trace, into the sound of laughing children.