But away from school, in the neighbourhood where we lived, the kids were as skeptical of my story as Anna Mae was unenthused, staring blankly at me as she had. Most of my neighbourhood friends had either just moved here from the Islands or had visited them so often it was like they lived both here and there. And so none of them found anything intriguing about my story — not even the kids who came from the Island cities and not the farms. I wasn’t foolish enough to tell them I’d stuck the pig, though — I knew if I pushed it too far, they’d find me out, and their trust would be much harder to win back than that of the white kids at school.
“So what did you do, then?”
We were at Jordan’s apartment, in her bedroom, sucking on jumbo-sized freezies and deciding which CD to play in the Sony stereo: Rule 3:36 or The Marshall Mathers LP. I was on the bed and lying on my back, my head dangling off the foot of the mattress, almost touching the floor, my eyes on the pink paint-chipped walls and the Destiny’s Child and Aaliyah posters.
“I watched,” I said.
Rochelle, who was sitting at the study desk in the corner of the room, logged in to a chat room, turned away from the computer, and looked at me. “Did you close your eyes?”
“No. I saw the whole thing.”
“And you weren’t scared?” said Jordan, inching closer to where I was lying down.
“Nope.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true! And when it was dead, I cut a piece off.”
Aishani laughed. “Did not.”
“Did too! Norris helped me so I wouldn’t mess up.”
“You didn’t tell us about a cousin named Norris.”
“Norris works for Auntie and Brother.”
Anita yawned, then put her hands behind her head. “I still don’t believe you weren’t scared,” she said. “You can’t even jump from the top of the stairs to the bottom like we do.”
“Well, I wasn’t scared of this.”
“I’m gonna ask your mom when she comes,” she said.
“Go ahead. She’ll tell you I didn’t scream.”
Anita’s mom picked her up before mine did, and I no longer had to fret so much about the possibility of exposure — I knew the other girls were less likely to press it. By the time my own mother came for me their insults didn’t have such a mean bite. They didn’t feel like they were meant for an outsider; there was a subtle warmth of good nature now, of the kind of inclusion I’d had and lost with my cousins.
My mother passed her tired eyes over me in the passenger’s seat. Even at ten my feet didn’t touch the ground. “Had a good time at Jordan’s?”
“It was fun,” I said. “I want to go over more, if that’s okay.”
“Maybe.”
We had to stop for gas before going home; a wood-panelled boat of a machine, my mother’s station wagon always seemed in need of gas and plagued us with new worries instead of simply ridding us of our old ones. I remembered her face when she first saw the car, how her nose wrinkled in disgust, but the woman who was selling it knocked the price down to a number my mother couldn’t afford to say no to.
She stuck me in the line to pay while she went to the fridges for some milk, promising me a chocolate bar when we reached the cashier. The woman in front of me took her receipt from the cashier and headed out to her pump, and then a man cut in front of me.
“Excuse me,” said my mother. She walked from the back of the store to the counter, a slim box of 2 percent in her hand. “You just cut in front of my daughter.”
“Oh,” the man said.
“‘Oh’?” my mother repeated. “She was next in line. Go to the back.”
“Jesus Christ,” said the man. He was beefy and mean-looking: buzzed blond hair, a red skull-and-bones T-shirt stretched over his chest. I wanted to tell my mother to leave him alone. “I could’ve paid for the gas in the amount of time you stood here bitching at me,” he said. “What’s your fucking problem?”
“That you didn’t wait your turn. Get to the back of the goddamn line.”
“Mummy —”
I tugged on her jacket but she slapped my hand away and I recoiled from the sting.
The cashier started to raise his hands in a plea for my mother and the man to calm down, and nervousness shivered through the line; the people behind us started to fidget.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered. “I don’t like this, I don’t like this . . .”
The man headed out of the store, pushing open the door so that it thumped against the outer wall. “Always something with you fucking people.”
My mother slammed the milk down on the counter and yelled the pump number to the cashier. She turned to me. “Why were you going to tell me to stop?”
“I just didn’t want to —”
“What? Want to what, Kara?”
I started to chew on my lower lip and hoped that by some miracle the floor would open up and swallow me whole and cushion me from her voice. “I wanted to forget about it.”
“Of course. You want to forget everything! I don’t know how you got to be so soft. Everyone will walk all over you if you just ‘forget’ it. Come on, let’s go.”
My mother banged out of the store without bothering to get a receipt, and I gave the cashier a small, apologetic smile before following her to the car.
* * *
After about a week, my teachers got wind of the pig’s head — probably because its severance became bloodier and more gruesome with every telling. My mother’s warning about being soft bounced around in my head, and soon I started adding new embellishments to the story.
“Have you ever heard a pig scream?” I’d ask, and after seeing a bunch of brown-haired heads wag from side to side, I’d shudder. “It’s really bad. I’m telling you.”
Every recess and during stolen moments in class, I’d report a new detail to my adoring audience: how the pig, being so strong and fat, gave us such a hard time when we grabbed it in its pen that Norris had to bash its head in with a hammer before I cut in with the knife; how I wasn’t wearing any gloves, so the blood poured warm and thick and sticky onto my hands. And then after school, when I finished my homework and I made my way down to the 7-Eleven with Rochelle and the rest of the girls (and sometimes even the boys from our block), I’d saunter down the sidewalk and sip my Slurpee and say, “Even when they skinned it, I didn’t look away. Not once.”