13 Chapter XII
Police Officer: What happened to Callie?
Me: Selena kicked her out of the Kitties for good. The next day, she vanished into thin air. Nobody saw her again.
Police Officer: And Cole?
Me: Gone with the wind. Rumor has it that Selena finished both of them off.
***
Sunny bolted to the transgender bathrooms right as the bell rang for lunch, but the Kitties were already there, waiting for her arrival. The three of them sat cross-legged in the handicap stall with their butt cheeks flat on the cold cement floor. The girls, knee-to-knee with each other, formed a semi-circle around the toilet. The stall was sealed by the white brick walls and together with Selena's culpable eyes, the whole room gave a rather odd vibe, as if someone was lying dead on the other side of the wall.
"Sit," Selena said, sipping her coke. Sunny pulled in the door, turned around, and came face-to-face with the flawless-looking group of white girls. No Callie. Just yesterday, Sunny saw her in her usual hooker outfit, clicking her heels as she twisted her body down the halls. Then, gone. Oddly, the group didn't seem too worried about it.
"Ni hao!" Tate said in a black revealing crop top and biker shorts that were clearly too short.
"Ha-ha-ha," laughed Ashley.
"Soooo Sunny, how many hours of sleep did you get last night?" Tate spoke in a voice that was cute on sunny days but pestering on days where the world bites you.
"What?" To Sunny, her entrance seemed excessively awkward, unnatural. She fancied that the girls resented the interruption and I could tell she was thinking about leaving. She had to call up all her strength of mind not to bolt.
"Well, you look very tired. Your eyes can barely keep themselves open!"
"I do?" Sunny's cheeks, rubescent, suddenly displayed an awkward and uneasy self-consciousness. She quickly positioned her palm to her face and started to pat her eyes frantically. Selena turned to Tate and said something like, "No T, I think... I think she's just like Korean or something." Sunny was Chinese, but that didn't seem to matter. The bigoted behavior of the friend group was not always clear from the beginning. Sunny bit into her rice, and she bit hard.
The girls had little private homes of their own which, unintelligible to the outsider, amused them enormously. Though surrounded with chatter and excitement, she was perhaps a little lonely, with a touch of envy of the pleasant life which she had had a glimpse. A little bit offended by such existence without the share of the majority, Sunny's eyes began to wander around the stall.
On the back of the door, a sad stick figure stood in one corning. WHORE someone had in black ink above the lean man. I WANT TO DIE, someone else had written alongside, in letters so small they seemed afraid to draw attention to themselves. Besides that, a drooping penis with thick prickles of hair sticking out the side was drawn in purple ink. In the center of it all were three huge words. CALLIE IS DEAD. Sunny blinked. It was possible.
"Ok time for the rules. Listen up. Rule #1: lunches in the bathrooms. Always. There are no exceptions," said Tyra.
Sunny, in a mire of dysfunction, was amazed that this was happening. Though Ashley and Tate were less attractive than their photographs had suggested, they still were THE KITTIES. The girls who all went to their beach houses and lake cabins for the summer and spring breaks. The girls who cheered on the boys at football games, and when they brought home victory, the girls who'd kiss them with their beautiful shiny red lips. And now they were teaching Sunny how to be like them.
"Good privacy in here," said Selena as she handed everybody vapes. Sunny passed as all the other girls lit up. Sunny learned that in order to get good grades here, you didn't study but rather brought the teachers coffee every Monday. After a few weeks, they'd let you call them by their first names, and in return, they'd grade your tests on the curve. On weekends, The Kitties threw parties so wild that college students arrive, and they'd all get abortions before the prom. Sunny gulped. She still couldn't believe that she was sitting with them.
The smell of toilet water mixed with that of their sandwiches and pop, immediately making Sunny nauseous. The girls seemed accustomed to such fragrance as if such thing were common enough. Her hungry stomach calling, Sunny sank her teeth into her mom's rice and experienced a culinary orgasm.
"Oh god. Are you seriously still eating that shit?" Lyssa had played Sunny dirty and packed her lambs again. Sunny looked down in embarrassment. Selena took the container resting in Sunny's lap and dumped it into the toilet.
"What are you doing?"
"If you are going to be one of us, you have to eat what we eat, wear what we wear, walk the way we walk. That's rule #2." She flushed the toilet. "We buy from the cafeteria. The daily combo. Thirteen dollars a plate. New members do the buying." She winked at Sunny who was letting out a big breath. They were right. There was just no way of knowing what the acceptable fashion was. Buying was the only way to avoid embarrassment. Then she remembered that they were the ones who made the fashions.
"Last rule. Always pick up the phone. Doesn't matter what you are doing, what kind of situation you are in." Selena's voice was heightened.
"But—"
"No buts."
The list went on and on, and at the end of it, Sunny concluded that she was to subject her flesh to a severe modification. Sunny was stupefied by their conversations and perfect lives, and she listened with astonishment to the stinging humor with which one would tear a sister to pieces the moment his back turned to another sister.
"Do you remember that one time," said Tate. "When Cole threw a little Muslim kid into a lake because he was on a fast or something and refused to eat the leftover pie?"
"Oh my god. He is so handsome!" Said Selena. "My handsome man."
"Well you guys technically aren't dating," added Ashley, with slanted eyes. Selena turned her head sharp and fast.
"Shut the fuck up or I'll throw you into a lake," she said.
"Like you did to Callie?" Said Tate. Selena slammed down her sandwich and stood up, suddenly becoming a different person. Her eyes warped into a miserable black. She balled her fist into a ball as if she were going to drive them through Tate's face.
"What did you just say?"
"We all know what you did," said Tate carelessly. "You know how people gossip."
"Boo hoo you couldn't take that she got your handsome man," said Ashley. Tiny veins popped bulged out of Selena's head, surpassing her thick coat of foundation. Hands shaking and mouth locked in a stone-hard, Selena blew open the door. It slammed in Sunny's nose so hard it felt like the wall jumped. The Kitties immediately turned small, and without a single moment of questioning anything, they split into their own classrooms. There was no last word. The boss was mad.
Sunny had never seen the Kitties look so inadequate and insecure. It was such an oddity that Selena could tame such flamboyant personalities just with a flick of a bad attitude. Sunny shook it off, but something about Selena's anger and Callie's disappearance didn't feel right.
The girls were quiet the rest of the day, mostly because they knew the depths Selena was willing to go to keep her little secret from spilling. She wore a mask of coping and normality on the day-to-day, emotionally starving herself through breathing unhealthy amounts of cigar smoke. But every so often, her crumbling soul would slither out, build, then explode into moments of boundless anger. Sometimes she'd blackout, numbed by her uncontrollable hatred. Then, with hot tears dripping all over her grey sweater, she'd wake up with bleeding wrists and a silver blade in her right hand. She was sick, warped in a denial that had the power of erasing conscience.
***
It took a few days for the new lifestyle to sink in. Sunny's lips stretched wider into a gaping grin, and her eyebrows arched for the sky. Amazement didn't quite cover it. Sunny made it. She was here and she couldn't wait to tell Devon. It was as if somebody took a spark of wonder and poured it in a blanket around her. Sunny was in paralysis of warmth as she got her first wave from someone in the halls. People didn't associate her with a race anymore, they saw her as part of an esteemed tribe. The Kitties was her holy grail, a soul-fire cure.
As she walked down the wall, peaceful vibrations swayed her inner storm into a soothing breeze. The feeling of bliss overtook the jangled troubles and made the softest of music heard in the hollows of her ears. It seemed as if Sunny could dance for the rest of her life. Then, breaking her mood, Selena flung her feet in front of her. The two stood twenty centimeters away from each other amid the noisy hallway.
"You," Selena said with a baleful voice.
"Yeah?" I could tell that the old feelings of fear were rushing back into her mind.
"You gotta drop her."
"What? Who?"
"The black kid. She's not a Kitty, and she's never going to be one, and we don't do friends outside of the circle."
"But—"
"No buts. You do it, or you're out." The bell rang, and Selena disappeared. Her thin waist and curvy hips wobbled on her way to class, inventing a legend to which attached a fanatical belief.
Sunny stood, flannel T wrapped around her waist, with a look of absurd confusion. She was a sad stick figure stuck in the conundrum of hangman. Dead either way.
She rushed home and quickly got out her paints, powders, and pencils. Sunny attempted, like a poor wanton, with shrill gaiety, to recover the illusion of Devon. In her painting, Devon was studying physics, seeking her reward in the pleasure of her studies and in the release from the burden of her thoughts, full-heartedly unaware of the fate which awaited her.
