Lucky Child (10 page)

Suddenly, I am far from home and I begin to run, hoping to leave the panic behind. I stop in front of a cemetery where there is a shortcut. I walk up to the black iron fence and peer inside, searching for suspicious signs of trouble. My gaze follows the brown brick path, resting fleetingly on the swaying trees, gray headstones, and thick shrubs. Nothing looks amiss; everything appears quiet and calm. But then the wind abruptly picks up and whips my hair about my face. The gusts swing the iron gate back and forth slightly, as if beckoning me to enter. Slowly I walk in. In the sky, the white clouds grow dark and follow me.

Once inside, I open my mouth to sing, but instead of a song only a nervous hum comes out. My eyes flicker here and there and all around me. In the distance, I see a dark silhouette of a man standing near the path. With my heart pushing against my shirt, I walk closer and closer to him. The dark clouds expand and shut out the sun. The wind blows angrily at the man but he stands as still as the headstones around him. As I draw near,
I see that the man is old, unshaven, and dressed in a gray, loose-fitting shirt and pants. Next to him is an erect shovel with its head dug deep into the earth. I tell myself to walk past him as fast as I can, but my feet move like two ironclad, lopsided hooves.

As I am about to pass, he blocks my path.

“Come here,” he hisses between his unseen teeth. “I have been waiting for you.”

“Get away from me!” “Leave me alone!”

“Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I have something you want to see. I have what you’ve been looking for.” He extends his hand toward me as the light catches the white of his open palm.

“I don’t want to see it!” I push past him.

I am surprised that he does not stop me. My legs surge with a new strength and move me quickly away from the man but strangely, after a few feet, I stop and turn to face him. I walk back toward him. He greets me with a nod. Against the dark shadows of trees and stones, his fingers direct me to an open grave. Cold beads of sweat dampen my scalp and slide down my forehead and neck. Step by step, my feet take me toward the grave, until I am standing at the edge of it.

Inside the grave, a little girl sleeps in her coffin. She looks about nine or ten years old. Her hair is black and shiny and fans across her face like a veil. Her smooth brown skin is made darker by the whiteness of her dress. From under her puffy sleeves, two arms rest across her chest, holding a bouquet of white daisies. Peeking out of her flared skirt, her small feet are dressed in white socks and black Mary Janes. She has knobby knees just like me. She looks as if she is napping and I do not want to disturb her.

I crouch on my knees and as I stare into her face, a loud scream bursts forth from my throat. The girl looks exactly like me! Like a ghost, she opens her eyes, reaches out her hands and grabs my shirt.

“You can’t leave me. Don’t leave me behind,” she pleads with me from her dead mouth. But her eyes! Like shiny black orbs, they gaze at me with sadness and anger.

“Noooo!” Her white dress is now covered with blood. There is blood all over her chest, soaking into her daisies.

“Noooo!” I thrash at her in panic when I see the hole in her chest. It looks as if someone has cut her open and taken out her heart. I press my palms against her shoulders, pushing her back down into her grave.

“Let me go! Let me go!” I beg.

As I begin to hyperventilate, I float out of my body and hover above the two girls. Like a silent movie, I watch from the clouds as one girl clings desperately to stay together while the other fights to escape.

With this last vision still lingering, I am jolted awake. In front of me the girls continue to struggle. The residue of the ghost girl’s desperation, the tight grip of her hands, her palpable fear as she tries to hold on to me hang in the quiet air like a mist. I lie paralyzed in bed as the girls gradually begin to fade before disappearing altogether into the white ceiling. On the wall the clock ticks past midnight when I close my eyes and drift back to sleep.

In the morning, I awake alone in the cold apartment. Meng and Eang have been long gone to their jobs. Because he speaks Khmer, English, Mandarin, and Chiu Chow Chinese, Meng now works as an interpreter and support person for newly arrived refugees in Vermont. Meanwhile, Eang is employed in a nearby manufacturing company. With both of them working, Meng has been able to take our family off welfare and now we can buy our food without shame. I’m glad for that but still, sometimes, I miss waking up to Eang’s pots and pans clanging in the kitchen.

Today the stillness of the house does not dampen my spirit because it’s my first day of school! I have spent all summer watching TV and now know a few words and enough phrases that I hope will be enough to make me new friends. I’ve spent a lot of time with Li and Ahn, but at school, I want new friends who are not Asians, who aren’t “different.” Even though I pretend it doesn’t matter, I hate that whenever the three of us are together, people stare as if we are as rare a sight as a three-headed snake. My normal friends at school will have blond or brown hair and blue eyes, very much like the girls I see on TV. On the small screen, these white girls always seem so light and happy. I just know that if I’m friends with them, I’ll be normal and happy, too!

Before the alarm clock even rings, I crawl out of bed and walk into
the living room to find the outfit Eang and I picked out for my first day of school. The new pink dress is spread out on the couch with my black-buckled shoes lined up below. At 6:55 A.M. Mrs. McNulty arrives to walk me to school. Mrs. McNulty teaches grade two and since I’m going to grade three, she has volunteered to deliver me to my class. On our short walk, I force my legs to be calm, keeping them from jumping and skipping. My pencils and crayons roll like miniature logs in my pink Barbie backpack. I fill my lungs with the cool fresh Vermont air and step over the dried-up earthworms on the sidewalks. When we get to the brown brick school building, I am nervous with excitement. In my mind, I picture myself holding hands with my new girlfriends as we go from one class to another.

At the wide glass double door, Mrs. McNulty enters and says hello to everyone young and old. I follow closely at her heels, my smile spreading widely across my face. Inside, the brown brick building is cool and has many doors on either side of its long hall. All around, swarms of girls and boys rush into these open doors, their new shoes clicking and clacking against the hard shiny floor. I imagine that they are all going to a party as the girls swish pass me in their new dresses and the boys saunter by in crisp new shirts and pants. I imagine their heads turning into balloons; yellow, brown, red, and black, the floating balloons make their way into rooms where parties await their arrival.

Then Mrs. McNulty takes me through one such door and instantly my balloons pop like bubbles, leaving behind the squints and frowns of curious faces gazing in my direction. I turn my eyes to the rainbow of butterflies hanging from the ceilings and cut-outs of alphabet letters on the walls. As Mrs. McNulty talks to the teacher, I clasp my fingers together in front of my stomach. Although it is the first day of school for all of us, the students gather in bunches to talk and laugh with the ease of kids who’ve gone to school together all of their lives. Because it’s rude to stare at people, I watch them out of the corners of my eyes. Except for me, they all look like the kids I see on TV!

“Loung.” Mrs. McNulty bends down and smiles into my face. “This is Mrs. Donaldson. She is your new teacher.”

“Hello.” Mrs. Donaldson greets me. Mrs. Donaldson is pretty like
Mrs. Brady on
The Brady Bunch
with her light yellow hair and her nice big smile.

“Mrs. Donaldson will take good care of you. I teach another class, but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other soon.” I nod. Then she walks out the door.

“Class, we have a new student joining us this year.” Mrs. Donaldson stands me in front of the class and introduces me. The other students look at me but no one comes up to take my hand. Not knowing what to do, I cross my arms in front of my chest and wait for my next instruction. I feel my face color, my palms warm up and then begin to sweat, until Mrs. Donaldson sits me in a desk at the front of the class. When she returns to the blackboard, I spread my palms flat on the desk, letting the cool wood steady my hands.

As soon as I am in my seat, Mrs. Donaldson walks to the blackboard and writes down her name.

“My name is Mrs. Donaldson,” she tells us.

I repeat it in my head again and again. Then she takes a piece of paper off her desk and begins to call out each student’s name. Mrs. McNulty told me this would happen so I am ready. One by one, the students raise their hands and answer with a “present!” or “here!”

“Lu … onng Unng?” Mrs. Donaldson sounds confused and says my name like someone who is
ott kroup tik,
a person who’s born with not enough water. In Cambodia that’s what we call people who are born with something wrong in their head, so that they sometimes talk funny.

“Here!” I pronounce the word clearly and proudly because I’ve practiced it. As the word flies out of my mouth, my arm shoots straight up like a palm tree, my back stiff and tall.

“Good. You may put your hand down now,” Mrs. Donaldson tells me.

“Thank you, Mrs. Donaldson.” I smile and bow my head with respect. She returns my smile and begins to pass out thin square vanilla journals to all the students.

“Class, please take your pencil out and write in your journal what you did this summer. I will tell you when to stop writing. Begin.” Her words flood over me like rushing water, too fast for me to catch their meaning. All around me, the other students open their journal so I do the same. As
the students begin to scribble onto the white pages, my knees begin to knock against each other. All summer I practiced English with Sarah and our sponsors, but I only learned to talk. I don’t know how to write. And I’m too embarrassed to tell Mrs. Donaldson. Next to me a girl who said her name is “Barp-raa” is scribbling big, blocky letters in her journal. I quietly edge my desk closer to her and begin to copy her letters. On the wall, the clock ticks away very slowly.

“All right, class, you may stop now,” Mrs. Donaldson announces after a while. “Please hand me your journals.” I follow the other students and give her my book with a big smile.

After Mrs. Donaldson finishes arranging the journals in a nice neat pile on her desk, she speaks rapidly to the class about something called a “health check.”

“Loo-unng, please come up here.” She suddenly calls on me. I walk up to her as all eyes follow me.

“Class, open your reading book to the first page and read quietly to yourselves. I will be back shortly.”

With Mrs. Donaldson leading, I trail a few paces behind her. As we walk the long, quiet hall, our steps click and clack against the hard tiled floor. This time the echoes sound lonely and scary.

“Please wait.” Mrs. Donaldson smiles and walks into a small room. From outside the door, I peek at her talking to a woman wearing a white shirt and skirt. “Looung, please come in,” she calls. I gingerly enter the sterile, alcohol-smelling room.

“This nice lady is the school nurse.” Mrs. Donaldson introduces us as Sarah’s flash card of a picture of a lady doctor pops into my head. “The nurse will give you a checkup,” and with that, Mrs. Donaldson leaves.

“Hello, Loung.” The nurse’s mouth opens to show her beautiful white teeth. “Please sit down.” She points to a chair in front of her. I sit down and glance up at her face, which is soft and pretty. While I swing my legs back and forth, she pulls out a wooden tong and lifts up my hair with it. The sticks move up and down my head, like a rigid finger; they part and unpart my hair, scratch my scalp, and tickle my neck. When she finishes, the nurse sends me home early with a note and a bottle of special shampoo.

“Lice!” Eang yells as her fingernails scrape my scalp.

I am sitting in a tub of warm, soapy water, naked except for my underwear. Meng sits in the living room reading the one Chinese book he brought with him from Thailand.

“Lice!” Eang exclaims again, her flaring eyes and downturned mouth resembling the features of a stone garuda. “You have no lice. We washed you with lice shampoo many times already before we sent you to school!”

“Ooouuccchh!” I complain as my head begin to heat up. Furiously, Eang works on my scalp, her nails like tweezers as she pulls the dead eggs off strands of my hair.

“These are dried-up lice eggs in your hair! See, they’re only flat sacks.” Eang shows me a sack on a strand of hair she’s just pulled out. “If they were live eggs, they would be plump and shiny. These are flat and dull. If they were live eggs, we would be able to pop them between our thumb nails and they would burst.” She attempts to crush the egg between her nails. No pops. “These are dead and will not pop!”

“Ouch!” I scream. I know Eang’s right but I don’t have the words to explain it to the nurse.

“That nurse cannot tell the difference between a live egg and a dead egg.”

As Eang works, she talks to herself about how we are from a good family and that we know not to send our children to school with lice. Then she begins her familiar tirade about how we must save face and do things to not embarrass our family name. For the next hour, my scalp is washed, rinsed, and pulled, and then the process repeats again until Eang is satisfied.