Planet Lolita (7 page)

“Does it hurt?”

“Greg said my arm will be sore for a couple of days. He has three of them, including one on his—”

“Is that why you’re crying?”

“Am I? Shit.” She wiped her cheek.

“Your pupils are all Sailor Moon.”

“I had to smoke pot to get through it. Ninety minutes of raging pain. I might as well have popped out a baby.”

“Dr. Wilson and Mom—wheels,” I said, anxious to talk about something else. “Wheels”—to flirt, and get ready for a hookup. Miriam Tsang taught me the term last week.

“He wants to have sex with her?”

“Mos def,” I said, another expression that wasn’t mine.

“Makes sick sense. She’s his vanilla mistress fantasy.”

“She cried in the washroom at his office.”

“Because he wants to jump her skinny bones?”

“No!”

“Because you have epilepsy? She’s been sobbing non-stop since you were diagnosed. And why can’t
you
sit still?”

I told her why. Rachel let out such a whoop that Manga jumped down from the bed and began nosing the closet door, in the hope of convincing her to come out.

“Welcome to the jungle, Baby Kwok. Took you long enough to get here.”

“Get where?”

“I mean, almost sixteen is way late to be starting.”

“I’m not a freak,” I said. “Though I feel like one now.”

“Is Leah micromanaging your first hours as a woman? She hovered over me my entire debutante period.”

“She’s not home yet.”

Rachel arched a single eyebrow, an expression she used to practise in the mirror.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Gloria helped.”

“If it’s so okay, why the late-night snack?”

“You’re rubbing your tattoo,” I answered, retucking the hair behind my ears.

“I’m just surprised that she isn’t right there, stressing and fussing and having more fun than a year’s worth of lawyer orgies.”

“Dad isn’t home either, and it’s midnight.”

“That’s no surprise. Plenty of hot lips yet to taste.”

“Rachel?” I said with as much impatience as confusion. Why did she have to say mean things about him too? I still hadn’t told her about the phone call in the taxi. But then she changed subjects.

“Those photos of the girl on Tai Long Wan,” she said, “the sexy one you call Mary?”

“I posted the nice photo on my wall.”

“I saw it. Did you also post the other two?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I sent them just to you. By mistake,” I added.

Now it was Rachel’s turn to chew her lip. “You didn’t maybe decide to share the wet T-shirt shot with some drooling East Island Facebook boys?”

I shook my head.

“Well, it’s out there,” my sister said. Her expression made clear that she had no idea why.

“I don’t get it.”

“The fuck-me photo has gone semi-viral. ‘Mary, Tai Long Wan’—she’s all over the web.”

Though I wanted to keep saying it—
I don’t get it!
—I knew she’d be annoyed. “How could they know her name?”

“Exactly. Are you
sure
you didn’t share her?”

“Where did you find it?”

“I was on Piratebay, downloading some music, when an ad for a porn site popped up with her face attached. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘that can’t be right.’ But it was.”

“Can you send me the link?”

“Why?”

“So I can see her.”

Like our dad, Rachel looked directly at a person when speaking to them, never blinking, nothing to hide. But tonight her gaze kept drifting past me to the wall behind her desk. “Trust me on this, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You don’t know her and she doesn’t know you. But take the nice-Mary photo down from your wall,” she said. “Tonight. If only so the parentals don’t go postal. You haven’t told them, have you?”

“You told me not to.”

“And Gloria?”

“The same.”

“And unlike me, perfect SeeSaw would never do anything sneaky … Fuck, it stings! I need more weed.” She rubbed her arm again.

My own ache widened out to wrap my stomach in a belt, and then tie it too tight.

“Speaking of drugs,” Rachel said, “what are you taking?”

“Valproic acid, three times a day. Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”

“For the curse, I mean. Extra Strength Advil is the one thing that does the trick. Mom says a pill at a time but I say two, every three hours. Swallow them like candy until you’re through.”

“I hate this.”

She clipped the mask back around her ears. “‘Help!’” she said, imitating my voice. “‘My life has been kidnapped by SARS and menstruation and parental units who can’t stand to be in the same hemisphere together!’”

“I’m going now.”

“But no worries, Sailor Moon. Guanyin has got your back. Sailor soldiers forever!” Rachel was fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight, never running from a real fight, when I ended the call.

What I’d told Dr. Wilson about the episode on the minibus—
I went away, I came back
—I wanted to tell my sister as well. I hadn’t known what I meant when I said that to him, and still didn’t. But those words described the experience, and the feeling left behind by it, and if they were vague and maybe as weird as the wrong photo of Mary, Tai Long Wan going semi-viral, they were also
important. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t hurt by the seizures, like I was by menstrual cramps or she by a tattoo gun, but that every time I went away and then came back, I did feel not quite the same girl as before. That would have been even harder to explain, and I’d have made a mess of it. She’d have raised a practised brow, called me Spacey Xixi or Mal-Brained Girl, and then nattered instead about marijuana, and vodka shots, and stalking the profile of a dumb boy who was super cute. But I wanted to try.

A Google image search of “Mary, Tai Long Wan” opened onto a row of the third photo I had uploaded from my iPhone nine days ago. Was the image that dirty? Did a pretend-pouty expression and a real wet dress turn Mary into porn? I remembered her posing on the beach, the hat reversed to hide the pins. It was fun. I’d felt happier at that moment than at any time, pretty much, since Rachel went away. I couldn’t get my sister back until next spring, at the earliest—she’d already ruled out a Christmas visit, preferring to mooch off the grandparents in Richmond Hill—but maybe I could hang with Mary instead? At least we were in the same city.

I clicked onto each of the photos. One linked to a travel agency specializing in Asian beach holidays. Another site sold sun hats, offering to ship them for free anywhere in the world. The third, prettyasiangirls.com, showed a high school yearbook of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Filipino teenagers, most in school uniforms. Girls volunteered their photos for posting, including a few who went to East Island. The fourth click took me to datingasiangirls.org, which claimed to be “the best singles bar on the web.” After that was a link to teenageasianpussy.com. It uploaded a blue screen with WARNING: ADULT CONTENT
and a request that the viewer confirm he or she was eighteen. My final click on the photo led to the URL exploitedasianteens.com, a title I couldn’t decipher for a second—
exploited, Asian
, and
teens.
This website gave no warning and asked no one’s age. Instantly I was staring at naked girls having sex with men, sometimes two of them, or with other girls, and framed in the middle was a still from a video titled
Three Dicks for a Filipino Chick
that lasted 21:40 and had been awarded four stars out of five. Several minutes passed before I clicked the X on my toolbar and shut it down. My eyes stayed open the entire time.

Next I looked at my profile. For
Photo
, I usually rotated between a shot Rachel took of me holding Manga up to the camera—emo-dog face atop skinny-girl neck—and one of us together, smushing our cheeks to fit into the frame. For
About You
, I rewrote “50/50 girl with her body in Mid-Levels but her heart back in Stanley, LOL! BFF, non-Facebook—Gloria the Bella and Manga the Mutt!” For
Favorite Quotations
, I kept “Chihiro: ‘Dad, are we lost?’ Chihiro’s father: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got four-wheel drive,’” and didn’t touch the quote from the film that my sister had added a while ago: “Chihiro: ‘There must be some mistake! None of these pigs are my parents!’” I left
Life Events
blank, not yet having had any.

Then I looked at my friends. Most of them were also Asian girls in school uniforms. There were Ashley Chung and Miriam Tsang, Suzie Ng and Chelsea Lam, along with Jackie Jones, who was Australian and lived in Repulse Bay, and the
gweilo
gang, two-thirds British, that I’d grown up with in Stanley. Xixi Kwok had 173 friends, not very many, and only thirty or so that I seriously stalked, to look at photo albums and “like” things or write on their walls. Of the 173 friends, 142 were teenage girls who wore hats on beach holidays and were pretty and, unlike me, already into dating. Did that mean they were
teenage pussy
ready to be
exploited?
Plenty of girls I didn’t really know, and basically every guy who asked, got turned down for friend requests.
Not Now
was the only answer Facebook let me give, which was fine, except when the request came from strangers, some of them grown-up men with profile photos that resembled the mug shots of actors caught drunk driving. The box I wanted to click for those men was
Not a Chance!
Or, pretending I was English,
Piss Off!

But my friends were safe on my wall. We were all safe in our apartments and houses in Hong Kong. Mary, Tai Long Wan, the second most beautiful girl on my page—Nicole Jardin, with a China Doll mom and a French dad who dropped her at school in a Porsche, had already had her photo in
Hong Kong Tatler
—was less protected, thanks to the wrong photo I took of her having leaked somehow onto the web. Rachel had said I should edit her from my Facebook before Jacob or Leah discovered her there. Knowing that someone had stolen the other image was creepy enough, but then to disappear her nice, regular Asian girl photo from the rows of Suzies and Chelseas, Ashleys and Miriams?
Not a Chance! Piss Off!

In the bathtub I washed myself over and over. Even so, sitting beneath the faucet with my chin on my knees, I watched my insides form a blood stream to the drain. The stream never stopped, never dried up.

Gloria knocked. “SeeSee, you
ho-kay?
”

“Go back to sleep,” I told her.

“Everything all right, honey?” Mom called a few minutes later.

“Fine,” I answered.
Go away
, I said silently to her. Getting out of the tub, I rubbed a hole into the steam on the mirror and examined still another Asian girl. She had the eyes, hair, and skin colour of the region. Only her sharp chin and the freckles sprinkled across her cheekbones, like pepper on a fried egg, suggested
the far side of the planet. This girl had bumps for breasts and hips no wider than her shoulders, but she was, I decided, already fuckable, and not in the fantasy
Vogue
sense. XIXI, TAI LONG WAN, I etched into the glass below my face.

In the bath I’d had an idea. Back at my desk I created a separate page on Facebook dedicated to Mary, inviting my friends to like it. Then I uploaded the first photo and typed the caption,
This is my friend Mary. She’s in trouble. Comment if you see her!

Next, I texted Rachel:
Check the new page.
I added,
Is Mary already giving blow jobs night and day?
For the last hour I’d sensed that my big sister remained at the far end of the digital connection. She’d known I would Google the photo and click on those sites, and then would return to my Facebook determined to do something for Mary, to really, really help. She had been waiting for me to text her again, and was no less worried or distressed than I was. After all, she was just like the rest of us.

Xixi Kwok created a Facebook page called “Finding Mary”?
Rachel replied almost at once.
BIG MISTAKE!

Me:
Why?

Rachel:
Check it now …

I did. Already, thirty-three people “liked” the page and seven more were “talking about this,” which basically meant sharing it with others. That was pretty fast, I had to admit.

December 1, 20—
*Index case
*187 infected, 1 dead

“It’s what they call the patient who triggers the outbreak,” Mom said. “A medical term.”

“And you think it’s him?”

“He’s been in the hospital for two months. Hard to imagine anyone else who’s had it for that long. And we all know about his travels to favoured ports of call in Thailand and the Philippines.”

“Pretty scurrilous,” Dad said. “And medically unsound. Also, he’s still alive. How could he be the index case?”

Were they talking about Mr. Clark? Hidden again in Rachel’s old room, the window cracked to leak in balcony conversations, I couldn’t very well ask. I was sorry to be spying—“Girl, not like you,” Gloria said when I told her—but had no choice. There were things I needed to know, and neither parent was going to tell me. I kept hardly any secrets, so why should they? We were supposed to be a family.

“We need a plan, Jacob.”

“An exit strategy?”

“I can’t believe how glib you are.”

“It’s a wave, Leah. Another one.”

“Are you still convinced?”

“After eleven years here, we’re going to just abandon ship? Worse, we’re going to jump the queue over local women and children and nab those precious spots in the lifeboat? I’ve seen that movie,” he said, “and have no desire to play that asshole.”

“My firm has arranged a plane for partners. There’s no queue. Matter of fact,” she added, “I’ll have to petition for you and Sarah. They aren’t promising that all families can be evacuated at the same time.”

“Xixi and I will see it through, thank you very much. Survive the latest panic on dried noodles and orange juice, plus a crate of Absolut. Us, and Manga the Mutt.”

Yeah, Dad!
Only he forgot to include Gloria among those riding out the
epi-dem-hick.
Cicada song, swelling from the hillside with the same force as Tagalog chatter from a park on Sunday, forced me to squat right under the windowsill. If a parental decided to peek through the crack, they’d see a mop of hair and know I wasn’t Perfect Xixi any longer. Next, they’d probably sneak onto my Facebook—like Rachel, I usually left it open on my desktop, as easy to read as a diary—and find things they wouldn’t understand that would make them angry. Or she would. He was too Cool Kwok to snoop.