Quickly, I became one of the most popular kids in my grade. I was up there with Savannah Evans and Nicholas Lombardi. Savannah was the richest kid in school; Nick, with his long eyelashes and dirty-blond cherub curls, was the cutest; and I was suddenly the craziest. Older sisters brought their younger siblings to me to be frightened and amazed, and in the playground boys started inviting me to play Red Ass with them, whipping me with the tennis ball as hard as they whipped each other.
Popularity did not claim me in my neighbourhood like it did at school, but there, nobody felt the need to translate for me anymore, to always bring up the great misfortune of being Canadian-born. I got bored of the live pig, of describing how boldly I’d watched its slaughter, and I moved on to explaining how I’d helped Auntie prepare jerk pork out of the butchered body. After that, whoever I hung out with mentioned fruits like skinup without asking me if I knew what they were, not asking me if I even knew what the Jamaican name for them — guinep — was, and they yelled “Wah gwa’an?” when they saw me instead of “Oh, hey.”
For a week I blustered around school and swaggered down Marlee Avenue and silently waited for the attention I got to transform me into a girl who would actually have the moxie to slaughter a pig. But that courage never burned in my belly; that aggression never revealed itself in a disregard for rules or in a penchant for pranks like it did with my friends. My sense of boldness only lasted for as long as my description of the pig did.
I didn’t know that the teachers had found out about my stories until a Monday afternoon when I saw my mother standing in the hallway just before final recess. We all queued up to leave and when Miss Kakos, the student teacher, opened the classroom door to let us out, I saw my mother leaning against the plastered wall, a chewed-tip pencil jutting through her messy ponytail of relaxed hair, her tattered knapsack by her feet.
The sight of her made my fingers quiver. She had no place in my stories; she didn’t belong with any of the identities I constructed during the time I spent at school.
Miss Kakos shepherded the kids to the yard, and Ms. Gold put her hand on my back and beckoned for my mother to come inside. I was in a split-grade class so my classroom was one of the largest in the school, divided into sections: Reading Section, Working Section, Science Section, Cleansing Section. I’d heard my mother whisper to her other mother-friends about schools that had walls and ceilings falling apart, about schools that packed children into portables because of lack of space — but my school wasn’t like that. Every room was big and colourful and chock full of brand-new equipment the school fundraised for. My classmates were picked up in Range Rovers and BMWs driven by their nannies and occasionally their parents. Sometimes the parents would stop my mother and offer her a job.
“I’m picking up my own child,” she’d say before walking away.
I’d be right next to her, tugging on her sleeve. “Why did Katie’s mom ask if you needed a job when you have one?”
“Stop talking, Kara,” she’d whisper back, her face tight.
Ms. Gold led us to the Corrective Section, which was really just her desk. She sat down behind it and gestured for my mother and me to sit in the two blue stack chairs on the other side.
“I’m just going to get right to the point, Mrs. — I’m sorry, Miss Davis,” said Ms. Gold, folding her hands together. “There has been a rumour around the school — started by Kara — that she killed a pig on your vacation to Jamaica. The children have been abuzz with it. It seems to be quite the playground story.”
“You called me down here because my daughter told a lie?”
“So the story isn’t true?”
“No,” said my mother. “But even if it were, a child witnessing or helping out with butchering isn’t unusual or uncommon in Jamaica. But no, my daughter didn’t participate in either activity.”
“Miss Davis, to be frank, whether or not the story is true is irrelevant. It’s the nature of the lie that’s concerning.”
My mother looked at me, but I lowered my head so as to not meet her stare. I went over the story in my mind: the blood, the knife, the hammer, the screams. It no longer came to me in images; now it just seemed like words that didn’t belong to me.
“From what Miss Kakos, Mr. Roberts — the gym teacher — and I have gathered, Kara has exhibited pleasure and enthusiasm toward the concept of slaughtering an animal.”
“Well, children enthusiastically step on worms, rip the legs off a daddy-long-legs, squish bees. Kids are intrigued by the concept of death.”
“I understand that this is a delicate topic, and I am not hurrying to any conclusions. However, perhaps it would be good for Kara to see the school’s child psychologist —”
“Let me stop you right there,” said my mother, raising her hand. She paused for a beat and then smiled the way I’d see her do sometimes when a cashier or a waiter or our landlord got on her nerves.
“Ms. Gold, did you also know that I’m quite familiar with educational protocol?” she said. “And I believe that for a situation like this, the protocol is that before prescribing the school’s psychologist, the teacher must give the parent the option to take their child to a family doctor who would then offer their own referral.”
Ms. Gold pressed her lips together, a flush of red colouring her neck. When my mother finished speaking, she cleared her throat. “I ultimately don’t believe that the situation is all that serious,” she said. “I just thought you should know.”
“Thank you for your concern, and rest assured it will be dealt with. If you don’t mind,” said my mother, standing up. I got up with her. “I would like to take Kara home now.”
In the car, my mother turned to me, her finger pointed in my face. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“Mom —”
“I’m speaking.” She snapped her fingers loudly, and I flinched. “These people already look at me like I’m trash, Kara.”
I opened my mouth to speak even though I had no idea what to say her, but she just shook her head and turned away from me, resting back against her seat. “I do not need you making things worse by lying. Why would you even say that you killed a pig?”
I stayed silent, hunched in my seat; my eyes wandered as if scouting out an exit strategy, though I knew I could never just open the door and walk away from her.
My mother banged her palm against the steering wheel. “I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know why I did it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re a little liar. If you were sorry you’d just stop making up stories,” she said. “I don’t know what I did to make you this way. Did you tell anyone from the neighbourhood?”