K-Ming Chang
Virgins
Sixth grade was the year I met Melanie. She’d transferred from private school, Catholic, and around her neck was a copper locket with the Virgin Mary’s portrait inside it. It was the first white person I’d ever seen, minus the halfie in our class who had freckles even in the crack of her ass.
The first time Melanie showed me what was inside her locket, we were changing together in the concrete-walled locker room, right in front of the window spattered with flies that spanned the gym teacher’s office. Everyone knew those were the worst lockers to get, the ones in front of the window, because inside the office was our lesbian gym teacher with gray pubic hair at her temples and breath like bug spray. She never wore a bra under her gray T-shirt, and so her nipples pecked out at us like twin beaks, twitching as she chased us on the blacktop, blowing the whistle that meant Run, bitch. While the lesbian gym teacher paced the length of the window, watching us, I was bent over, trying to cross my arms over my chest while simultaneously bucking off my teal terrycloth T-shirt from Ross. When I glanced beside me at Melanie, I saw that she could change from her pink babydoll T-shirt into her gym shirt without undressing at all, and that she could do it with her shorts, too, some kind of magic, the uniform descending over her like an eyelid, clean as the sky when it swaps its skin from morning to evening.
Melanie saw me looking and said she’d teach me. It involved acrobatic choreography, yanking my original shirt out of the sleeve of my substitute, threading my head precisely. She was fleshed like a chicken breast, so I was impressed by the elegance of her undressing, and it was satisfying to be naked next to someone who wasn’t yet whittled into any shape. In comparison, I was a silver skewer, a preened wing, I had a few bones showing. Beside her, I glittered like the locket that swung from her neck when she bent, the pendant like a scab on her chest. When I asked her why Mary’s first name was Virgin, she said because Mary gave birth as one. That doesn’t make sense, I said, did they check to see it was really a baby and not just a really big shit? Melanie turned away from me, but I could still see the puckered purple line at the back of her neck where she carried the weight of that face.
I didn’t master Melanie’s undressing method for another three weeks, but our skin solidarity strengthened—sometimes she’d hold up her babydoll shirt as a curtain so that the lesbian gym teacher wouldn’t see me fumbling with my sleeves—and I discovered three things about Melanie. First, that she wore that mare-haired woman around her neck by choice, which confused me because the woman wasn’t even pretty or a celebrity. Second, that she lived two streets away from me in an apartment building where a husband-wife murder-suicide had occurred in the past year. And third, that she didn’t know we had three holes.
This became evident one day when I chose to change in a bathroom stall because my tampon was leaking and I didn’t want to flash the stain at our lesbian gym teacher, who might interpret it as a mating call, the way birds grow bright feathers on their breasts to attract females. When I left the bathroom and joined Melanie at the exit of the locker room, she asked why I’d changed on my own, and I said I’d gotten it, and Melanie said, Oh, I haven’t gotten mine yet, I thought I did last year, but actually I just peed blood because my brother threw me at the TV, he was playing Call of Duty, so how do you know if it’s blood you’re peeing or the actual thing, and I said, you idiot, it doesn’t come out of that hole, and she said what hole, and I had to explain that there were three—I held my fingers up to her nose and furled them down one at a time—the pee one, the poop one, and the period one. Melanie said, Oh, like the five holes, the five wounds Jesus bore, and I said, No, three. Three holes. She thought everything came out of one hole, kind of like the spout of a soft-serve machine, where sometimes it’s a vanilla swirl, sometimes it’s chocolate, and sometimes it’s a chocolate-and-vanilla braided swirl, and I said, What the hell are you talking about. Melanie didn’t like when I said hell, and always chained her voice to mine: O, she added abruptly. What the hell-O. You can’t say What the hello, I told her, no one says that.
That afternoon I walked home with Melanie. It bothered me that her locket was always bouncing up and down when she walked, knocking against her flat-yet-fat chest, and I wanted to grip it in my fist and sprain the chain and her neck, too. Her apartment building was next to the highway and inhaled the exhaust.
At the entrance to the highway was a cross made of popsicle sticks screwed into the dirt. Melanie told me that someone had committed suicide by jumping off the highway bridge and the cross was to remember them, but that they should have chosen another shape because it’s a sin to commit suicide. At Sunday school, she watched a film of a girl shooting herself in the head and then going to hell. I asked her what hell looked like, and Melanie shook her head and said I shouldn’t ask. All she would tell me was that it was very red. Like my underwear, I said, but she didn’t laugh.
We climbed up four flights of stairs to her empty apartment, no siblings swarming the sofa, and I remembered what my mother had said about only children: they’re unnatural, like divorced people, a symptom of some subterranean problem. In the living room, two mattresses crouched side by side, and the hallway to the right was curtained off with a bedsheet. Across from the two mattresses was a TV squatting on a card table, tuned to the Taiwanese news channel I recognized, where a woman in a black suit stood in front of a pixelated typhoon and mouthed silently.
The sound’s broken, Melanie said, but we can still watch stuff. Behind her I could see a dusty glass door that led to her balcony, where underwear clipped on a line was flapping its wings to dry. Aren’t you all about modesty, I said, Your underwear’s hanging out completely. Without turning, Melanie said those were her mother’s. She sat down on one of the mattresses, the left one, and fiddled with the locket between her fingers, flicking it open and shut. I looked at the bare walls and expected to see a cross or a mural of Jesus like the one on the Chinese church across my street, but all I saw was her shadow, the way she sat with her knees open like a frog’s, the soles of her feet meeting. She sat like a child, like she didn’t know someone might be watching.
With the TV still playing, she bent her head and began whispering. I didn’t know what she was talking to, if it was the space between her knees or the face in her fist, but I wanted her to know who was here, whose shadow perched above hers on the wall. Hey, I said, remember what I told you about the three holes? Melanie stopped whispering and raised her head. I felt the center of my palm pulsing, the sweat on my neck singing. Melanie shook her head. Well, I said, I could show you. You have to know where this shit is. I laughed and said, Do you even know where your shit comes out? Melanie looked up at me, her mouth half-open, and pointed toward the bedsheet curtain. That’s where the bathroom is, she said. Her raw-pink biceps strained the sleeves of her T-shirt, and I wondered again how it was possible that she could change faster than me, how she could skin herself so easily.
No, I said, I’m not asking you. Lie down. Melanie grasped her locket in her fist and lay down on the mattress. What are you doing, she asked me, and I said, Do you have a mirror somewhere? In the bathroom, Melanie said, and I sighed and said, No, like a hand mirror, you know, a makeup mirror, and Melanie said that wearing makeup was a vanity. I leaned over her face and said, If you don’t shut up I’m going to sit on you. I realized there was a mole on the inside of her nose, growing there in the dark like secret mold, and I stopped looking in case it would spread to me. Then I told her to shut her eyes. I’d have to teach her by feeling.
She shut them, still gripping her locket in one fist, and I wondered where I’d have to touch her to make her let go. I kneeled beside the mattress and unbuttoned her jean shorts and shimmied them down. Lift your ass, I said, and she did. I liked the sound of the mattress spring aching, the weight of her hips when I accidentally cradled them. The force of dragging down her pants had tugged her underwear all the way down, and I almost laughed at how little hair she had. If she wanted to, she could see herself clearly. Her thighs were so piglet-pale and hairless I could have bitten into them without getting anything stuck between my teeth. Anything could scar her surface, even dust.
With her eyes still shut, Melanie lifted her head, saying that she didn’t need to go to the bathroom, and I said, I know, I’m just showing you how little you know. Her knees were trembling, lifting off the mattress, and I pushed them down with my palms. I opened her legs into a V, surprised by how light they were, and pushed my finger inside her, so fast she wouldn’t feel it. See, I said, this is the one that babies come out of. I was surprised by how easily my finger went in and thought Melanie must be lying about knowing nothing. Her body was so stiff, I was afraid to pull my finger out in case it might undo her, like taking out a structurally important screw. I leaned over to see her face and realized that her eyes were wide open, that she wasn’t even blinking.
She let go of the locket, which slid from her chest and balanced on her left shoulder like a coin. I called her name, but Melanie didn’t move. Her face was rearranged into blankness, same as the woman in her locket, and I wondered if somehow they had swapped places. OK, I said to Melanie, Do you get it now? When she didn’t answer—the only thing that moved was her left elbow, which leapt a little off the mattress—I pulled out my finger. Only when the air wrapped around my skin and stayed stuck did I realize how wet my finger was. I stood up and said she was clearly ready for babies, but at least she hadn’t gotten it yet, at least it’ll wash off easily.
I wiped my finger on the mattress, waiting for Melanie to sit up and somehow change without even moving, her shorts sliding themselves into place like a TV rewinding, but she just stared at the ceiling. OK, I said, if you’re going to be like this, I’m gonna go, I said, and stood up. It unsettled me that she wasn’t dressing herself, so I took the bedsheet off the other mattress and spread it on top of her. I didn’t know how far to pull up the sheet, if maybe she was sleeping, so I tucked it in around her waist. When she still didn’t say anything, I turned to the door and started walking, afraid that if I turned around, she would be mounted on the wall like a painting, the walls crunching shut like the metal hinges of a locket.
The next day, Melanie wasn’t in the locker room. With no one to shield me, I changed by myself in the stall, taking off my shirt super slow to give her more time to show, but she still wasn’t by her locker when I got out. I finally saw her outside on the blacktop. We were always split up along rows of spray-painted numbers, one through sixty—Melanie was in the tens because her last name was An, and I was in the thirties because my last name was Hsiao.
I watched her as we did our stretches, our gym teacher up in front, fiddling with the whistle in her mouth like a nipple, strands of her spit suspended in the air when she pulled it from her lips, a cobweb that stuck to all our hands. She probably drooled when she looked at us, too. Ahead, the fabric of Melanie’s black jersey shorts strained itself sheer as she bent over to touch her left toe, her underwear showing through, My Melody print, and I was embarrassed that for all her sleeve sorcery in the locker room, I could see the dark sweat stain rivering the crack of her ass, flooding its bed. I tried to remember what kind of kiddie underwear she’d been wearing yesterday, but all I remembered was the coolness of my finger as it dried, how on the walk home I’d brought my finger to my nose to scratch the inside of my nostril where her mole was.
She bent over further, her fingertips skimming the blacktop, and for a second before she yanked it back up, the hem of her skirt scrolled all the way down to her chin and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a bra, that she had nipples small and pink, like the ceiling of pimples I plucked off my buttocks, flicking the skin into the toilet, her belly button an outie, its shadow hangKing like a berry, and I reached forward to pluck it with my tongue before looking away, looking somewhere that could not implicate me or my teeth.
Something wet released between my legs, a heat that squirmed like a finger, and I thought I’d pissed myself before remembering it was still my week. I ran from my number thirty-one into the locker room bathroom, looking down at the jellied blood in my underwear. I was there for a while when a shadow slipped itself beneath my feet. It was Melanie standing outside the stall, asking what happened in a voice so quiet I almost thought it was just me echoing. I told her to go into the teacher’s office and look in the lost-andfound for some shorts. Then I turned away and looked down into the toilet, tripping out of my underwear and tossing it in, the water turning the color of beef blood in the trenches of a Styrofoam tray.
Melanie kept standing outside the door, just standing, and I said, Hurry, hurry, and she said, Did you know this is punishment for Eve’s sin? And I said, Oh my god, now is not the time for you to be a Christian. Get pants. But Melanie lingered outside the door, and I sighed and said, Fine, if you’re finally talking, come in, look at what you’ve done to me, look at what I’ll have to live with if you don’t help me.
In the stall, she bent over the toilet and stared at the wad of my underwear, rafting up like an organ, pulsing in the water, and said, I bet this is what an abortion looks like, don’t you think it’s sad, and I said, No, just help me flush it. I pressed on the handle with my toe and watched the underwear slither down before getting snagged, the toilet hacking it back up, butchered water splashing our ankles and veining the floor. Shit, I said, shit, and reached in to tug it out.
No, don’t get rid of it, keep it in, she said, but she was backing away from me. Her head banged against the tin wall of the stall. Her eyes were copper-glazed, wide as yesterday when I dressed her with the sheet. I panted, kicking at the water that would ring our socks with permanent stains.
Stop, she said, and began wading to me, her locket wrapped tight in her fist like a charm that would repel me. I stayed still. Her other hand dipped into the toilet, and I flinched as she flicked her fingers at me, hot droplets feasting on my cheeks. We are forgiven for our sins during baptism, she said, I forgive you. Then she reached out to catch my wrist, lifting it to her lips, latching her mouth to the center of my palm, the tip of her tongue plunging a hole there, circling its rim before threading through me, and between my legs was the wetness again, bloodless and bearing her face.