Chapter Two Kami
Chapter Two
Kami
“Better we talk in my room,” Maggie said, waving me down the hall to a door with a sign on it that said The Orangutans. We walked in and I saw the usual elementary school classroom: pictures drawn in crayon and marker, colorful construction paper, addition and subtraction posters, the alphabet.
“I guess my first question is how things are going at home,” she said, leaning on her desk as I sat in a tiny chair. Thiago stood beside her, and I couldn’t help but notice how their bodies grazed each other slightly.
“Why do you ask, Maggie?” I couldn’t help but call her by her first name. Not when she was probably only five years older than me.
“Your brother’s kept to himself since the year started. And that makes his classmates see him as weak, and then they start testing him. Children, you know…”
“Why haven’t you done anything to stop them?” I was pissed already. “Principal Harrison said it himself—they’re only six. They’re babies!”
“I try to let all my students grow at their own pace, and that means encouraging them to explore their identities and—”
“Cut the bullshit. My brother’s getting bullied, and nobody’s doing anything.”
“Kamila,” Thiago said, censoring me with his gaze.
I focused my eyes on him. “Don’t Kamila me!” I practically shouted. “You’ve known something was going on for weeks, and you didn’t bother to tell me? You’re my next-door neighbor!”
I don’t know why I said that. Maybe to warn Miss Maggie here that she’d better be careful the next time she shows up at her new boyfriend’s place in a skimpy skirt. If my brother saw her like that, he could lose all respect for her as a teacher…
“I already told you in the office why I didn’t say anything,” Thiago said. “I wanted to avoid jumping to conclusions…”
“You took your time, didn’t you? How long did you need to realize it’s not normal for a six-year-old to be covered in scratches and bruises?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized just how stupid I’d been myself.
How could I have just swallowed all his excuses about falling down during soccer, or some game in the blackberry bushes…
It was my fault. I had been so focused on myself and my problems and my parents’ issues that I hadn’t seen the signs…
and now it was Cam who was getting hurt.
“Kamila, we are going to take action,” Maggie told me calmly. “I just need to know if there’s anything going on at home that we should know about.”
Thiago looked unfazed, but I could tell he was worried.
“My parents are getting a divorce,” I admitted, avoiding Thiago’s gaze as I said it.
I didn’t want to see him relishing my misfortune.
He’d told me more than once that he wished my family would fall apart the way his had.
Maggie, meanwhile, was looking at me with such pity that I wanted to shout, Wipe that stupid look off your face.
But I kept going. “So as you can imagine, my brother’s not exactly living in what you’d call a healthy environment right now. ”
“I had a hunch,” Maggie said, “when I saw this drawing your brother did the other day.” She opened a desk drawer, pulled out a sheet of paper, and passed it to me.
What I saw filled me with grief. It was a group of stick figures.
I guessed that the one on the left was supposed to be my mom.
She was bigger than the others and far away from them.
She had green circles for eyes, which I realized were probably supposed to represent the cucumbers she put on her eyelids at the spa.
On the other side was Dad—I could tell because of his huge belly.
He had his back turned, and a phone was pressed to his ear.
Cam was in the middle with his iguana. And then there was me.
I was tiny, with short blond hair, a giant frown on my face, and blue tears pouring from my eyes.
Was that how my brother saw me?
Was that how he saw all of us?
I could barely bring myself to look up. Thiago was clearly worried, his hand clenched into a fist. “Kids…really suffer when their parents split up,” he said. “They hold it all in. That’s probably why he didn’t tell you about everything that’s been going on.”
“What’s the solution, then?” I asked in a near-whisper.
“I’d like to talk to your parents,” Maggie responded, “but they’ve both made it clear that neither of them can meet with me anytime soon. Some of the kids have told Cam that his father’s a thief—that’s one of the reasons why I was asking about his home situation.”
“Thief?” I interrupted her, taking a moment to understand. “Who said that?”
Maggie, looking uncomfortable, glanced over at Thiago. “George said something about your father stealing a bunch of money from his—”
“That’s a lie.”
“I understand, but I have to tell you what I’ve overheard.”
I stood, ready to go. There could only be one person behind all this. “I’ve told you everything you need to know,” I said, but before I could go, Maggie turned to me.
“It would be great if you could stop by the playground during recess sometime, just to say hi to Cameron.”
“Oh, you better believe I’ll be showing up at recess,” I said, feeling surer than ever, “and I’ll slap the shit out of anyone who dares to lay a finger on my little brother.”
After saying that, I rushed off down the hall.
“Kamila!” Thiago shouted when I was a good fifty feet away.
I stopped, took a deep breath, and turned. “What do you want?”
In just a few long strides, he had reached me. “You can’t just tell a teacher that you’re planning on slapping a bunch of little kids. Are you out of your mind?”
“If no one else is going to stop them, I damn sure will.”
“That’s not how you do things.”
“It isn’t? How do you do it then? Jog my memory.”
Thiago looked up and down the hall, then gripped my arm and pulled me behind a column next to the janitor’s closet.
“Just calm down, OK?” he said, his green eyes gleaming. “I’ll make sure no one touches him again.”
I’d wanted to tell him to fuck off, but now he had my attention. “Are you serious?” I asked.
He nodded, looking at me like a concerned doctor. “Are you all right?” he said, keeping his eyes on mine.
I felt a tingle in my fingertips, and I wanted to reach up, wrap my hands around his neck, pull him to me and feel those lips on mine.
“Never better,” I replied coldly.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” he said, and I laughed bitterly.
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” I told him, stepping back. “You wanted this. Or have you forgotten how much you hate my family?”
Thiago blinked, and I could see that old rage return. “I’ll never forget that your mother’s selfishness killed my little sister. You can believe that. But I never wanted anything bad to happen to you or your brother.”
I couldn’t believe what he’d just said. And that made me wish he would touch me even more. Hold me. Kiss me. Before I knew what I was doing, I had stood on my tiptoes and was resting my hand on his chest.
But Thiago stopped me. His hands were on my waist, but he was pushing me back rather than pulling me in. “No,” he said. “We can’t do this. For all kinds of reasons. Most importantly, you’re with my fucking brother.”
I pulled away as if his skin were hot metal. My eyes filled with tears. I was a horrible person.
Thiago looked at me, regretful for a moment, then decisive. “Listen, any questions you have about what’s going on with Cameron, just ask…but if it’s anything else, I’d prefer you keep your distance.”
And before I knew it, he’d turned and walked away.
***
I went to talk to my brother, telling him I was aware of what was going on and that I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t told me earlier.
“I didn’t want to be a snitch…”
I had taken Cam over by the football field, after persuading one of the cafeteria ladies to give me an ice cream sandwich for him. We sat on the lawn, listening to the elementary kids playing soccer in the distance.
“Cam, you’re not a snitch, OK? No one has a right to hurt you. No one. You hear me?”
He wouldn’t even look me in the eye. He pretended to be interested in the soccer game, but I could tell he wasn’t actually watching.
“Cam…” I took a deep breath. “It’s sad that Mom and Dad are going to split up. And if you need to talk about it with me, you can. I’m sad too, you know?”
He looked up at me. “You are?”
“Of course.” I hated seeing him like that. “But sometimes it’s better for people to break up. You don’t want to see them fighting all the time, do you?”
He pulled out a few blades of grass and threw them. “I don’t want Dad to be alone,” he said, tears in his eyes.
My heart shrank. I grabbed him and hugged him as tight as I could. “Dad won’t be alone,” I said as I felt him break down in sobs. “We’ll visit him every weekend. And you know what? When we do, we can stay up past midnight watching Star Wars because Mom won’t be around to tell us to go to bed!”
Cam turned to me and tried to grin through his tears. “All of them? Can we have a marathon?”
I laughed. “Yes, we can have a marathon.”
That seemed to cheer him up. Mom was so controlling. I thought a little less order in his life would probably do him good.
We talked a while longer, and then I took him to class and made it back across campus just in time to grab my books before English class.
“How’s it going?” Taylor asked me when I walked through the door.
We sat together in all the classes we shared.
I don’t know if it was the best thing, because I was easily distracted and Taylor was one hell of a distraction.
His hand seemed to constantly seek out my inner thigh, though I always stopped him.
I couldn’t take another visit to the principal’s office.
But Taylor was surprisingly smart. I remember the teacher once caught us giggling and thought he was going to stump us with a super difficult question about Lenin.
But Taylor answered without hesitation, and the teacher had no choice but to go on with his lesson.
One rainy afternoon, when we were sitting in Taylor’s car, I had asked him what he wanted to study at college, and he had surprised me by telling me he wanted to be an astronaut.
When he saw the look on my face, wide-eyed, he’d started laughing like crazy and said, “You don’t believe me?
I’m lying. Really, I want to be a computer engineer. ”
I hadn’t expected that either. “How come?” I’d asked.
“So I can hack into all the porn sites without having to pay.”
I knew he was kidding. Taylor might be lots of things, but he wasn’t a porn addict.
I rolled my eyes, and he chuckled again.
That was just Taylor—he always blurted out the craziest thing he could come up with, but I liked it because I never got bored with him.
I had been so much more easygoing when I was young.
But now, all the rules, all the keeping up appearances had made me boring, well-behaved, someone who always obeyed orders and never said “To hell with it.”
Taylor was helping me to become bolder, teaching me to live life with no limits, that a day without laughter was a day without meaning, and that there was always something we could do to make ourselves feel better.
Where did you run off to earlier? he wrote in his notebook.
As I read it, I wished I’d opened up to him before. About my parents, about everything. I could have rested my head on his shoulder and let him console me. I was so sad…I took a deep breath and held back the tears.
“Ouch, something’s stung me on my foot!” Taylor shouted out of nowhere, right in the middle of class. Everyone turned to stare. I would have believed him if he hadn’t winked at me slyly when no one was looking.
“What?” the teacher asked alarmed.
“Something stung me! God, it hurts!”
“Like a wasp or something? Do you want to go to the nurse’s office?”
“I don’t know, sir, but it’s killing me!” Taylor made a show of standing on one leg, and continued with his act of the century. “Help, Kami, please,” he said.
I stood and wrapped an arm around him.
“What if I’m allergic?” he exclaimed, putting his hands around his neck.
“Go straight to the nurse, Di Bianco. Hamilton, can you help him on your own?”
“I think so,” I said, struggling not to laugh as we walked out.
Once Mr. Stow could no longer see us, Taylor grabbed my hand and took off running.
“What are you doing?” I couldn’t believe the stunt he’d just pulled.
We ran down the hall and outside. He dragged me all the way to the bleachers, then underneath. There, he grabbed my face in both hands and gave me a kiss that took my breath away.
“I’m taking care of you. That’s what I’m doing,” he said. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”
I could only hold his stare for a second before I broke down in tears.