What Curiosity Kills

Copyright © 2010 by Helen Ellis

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—The Psychedelic Furs, "Pretty in Pink"

  
I want to scream for help, but pain that feels like fire ants has found
me. The ants crawl up and out of my knee socks and take over every
bit of my flesh. They are between my toes, behind my ears, and in every
crevice in between. They scamper across my scalp. They bite. Their bites
are unbearable. I twist and scratch within the suffocating comforter.
I'm trapped.

  
The boys lean over me, say things—to me, to each other—I can't make
out. My hearing is fading. I'm shrinking. The boys' faces get bigger
and rise like moons. One of them blinks. When his eyes close, they are
chestnut. Open, they are emerald green. He smiles, parts his teeth, and
unrolls a long, narrow pink tongue. He licks the tips of his incisors,
which have grown past his lower gums to form fine points.

  
He purrs, his voice velvet. He says, "Don't worry, Kitty. There are no
such things as vampires."

I knew something was wrong with me when I fell asleep in school. I never fall asleep in public because it is way too embarrassing. Your face goes slack. If you're sitting up straight, your mouth hangs open. You could say something stupid or say someone's name or make some weird, inappropriate noise. You could snore. Twitch. Drool! In the movies, people watch other people sleep and say that it's beautiful. Those people are crazy—or in love. Trust me. Nobody at Purser-Lilley Academy loves me that much.

  What I did was roll out of the seal position and crash on my Pilates mat. The seal is when you start on your back with your hands clutching your ankles and your knees bent out to the sides, making your legs look like a diamond. You're supposed to clap the soles of your feet three times and then rock forward onto your butt and clap your feet three times again. Then, roll back and forth, clapping like a maniac—Ar!
Ar! Ar!—
until you build up enough momentum to throw yourself forward into a standing position. You're supposed to end up with hands in the air like a gymnast.

  I ended up in the fetal position. For five full un-revivable minutes.

  My friend Marjorie says I was motionless for so long, she thought I was dead. Marjorie's sister promises me that the rumors I was sucking my thumb are untrue.
My
sister will tell anyone she hears spreading lies about me that my hands were curled up under my chin.

  "Like she was all Laura Ingalls and shit, tying a bonnet," my sister says.

  You might wonder how my best friend, her sister, my sister, and I are in the same tenth-grade gym class; how my sister can curse in front of teachers and get away with it; how a high school gets twenty Pilates mats and towers drilled into what was once a basketball court. The answer to all these questions is: money.

  Marjorie and her sister Magnolia—nicknamed Mags—are in vitro twins. Sometimes, we call them Baby A and Baby B, which is what they went by before they were born and their parents "deselected" the weaker of the quads, C and D. Kathryn Ann wanted to experience the blessing of childbirth, but not that much of a blessing. She didn't want to be bedridden. She wanted to get back to her call-in cable TV talk show, Chime I
n
with Kathryn Ann
. A former district attorney, Kathryn Ann had made her name by charging drunk drivers with murder and now makes a living pressuring upstanding citizens to go after drunks and pedophiles and anyone else who, as she says, coul
d
be shot for less.

   Kathryn Ann was forty-four when she had Marjorie and Mags. Long story short: She built herself a career and then remembered she wanted kids. But her ovaries were like, What?

  Kathryn Ann wrote a check to her fertility specialist. And then another. As did a lot of older couples who wanted kids late in life and found themselves "reproductively challenged." At Purser-Lilley, there are fourteen sets of twins and six sets of triplets.

  We also have a bunch of kids who don't look like their folks. You can spot adopted kids because most Upper East Side parents go for Asians. An Asian baby says you have twenty thousand dollars, plus cash to fly to the other side of the world and put yourself up in a hotel for two weeks. Asian babies are also good because their biological parents aren't going to show up to reclaim them. At Purser-Lilley, there are four Korean boys and eight Chinese girls. One of them, Ling Ling Lebowitz, is the meanest girl I've ever met.

  Ling Ling likes to tell me that I am white trash. I don't think anybody uses this term anymore, but she read Gone wit
h
the Wind
and fell in love with the slur. She says, "One day, your real parents are going to kidnap you and hold you for ransom. They're gonna take you back to Ala-bama. Say goodbye, 72nd and Lex! Good-bye, Bravo marathons! Your real parents are so poor, all you'll have to do for fun is fish for
crawdaddies in the crick!"

  My response to Ling Ling's barbs (another beaut is, "You're so flat-chested, your redneck mama must have breast-fed you Mountain Dew!") is: "Could be." This stumps her and shuts her up, but the next time I run into her, she's prepared with another verbal assault. I don't enjoy it, but I bear it and say "Could be," and it's over in a minute. I'm not going to argue with her. That will prolong her abuse. Besides, most of what she makes up is actually true: the poor part, the Alabama part—but not the part about rednecks plotting to kidnap me.

  As far as adoption goes, my sister and I are an oddity at Purser-Lilley because we came from within the United States, and our folks didn't get us when they were middle-aged and we were infants. When they decided to start a family, they cast their nets wide and took the first kids they caught: me from Alabama, Octavia from Nebraska. Unlike Ling Ling, my sister and I have memories of our eight years before our adoptive parents saved us—memories we do our best to forget.

  My birth parents were neglectful. I spent a lot of time alone. I barely went to school. I survived by eating so much generic cereal out of the box that to this day, I won't walk down the breakfast aisle at Gristedes. When a social worker came and got me, my biological parents missed every court date to get me back. If it weren't for my southern accent—which I cain't shake to save my life—I might have been able to blend in at Purser-Lilley. My same-age sister's appearance stopped any chance of that.

  Octavia is the only student in the whole school who's black— or, as Purser-Lilley mandates we say,
African American.
Her minority status was our ticket into private school. Over frozen hot chocolates at Serendipity 3, when Octavia and I were both thirteen, Dad had a brain freeze. He let it slip that success can often be attributed to what you look like. To this day, my sister's greatest discovery is the race card.

  The thing is, she taught herself to keep it real from TV Land reruns of shows older than we are, so 227, Living Single, and
Martin
are her guides. Our parents ignore her
Yo'
s and
It's like dis and like dat'
s and when she goes, "Can I ax you a question?" because Octavia makes all As, and Mom says trying new identities is part of growing up. Mom says when she was our age, she imitated California girls and said Totally! when she agreed with you, and when she didn't, Gag me with a spoon.

  In school, Octavia gets away with murder. If she doesn't want to be called on, she folds her arms across her chest and gives the teacher a look that says, Are you calling on me 'cause I'
m
black?
If she wants an extra brownie at lunch, she says to the Jamaican lunch lady, "Hook a sistah up!" If she doesn't want to play basketball, she says, "What, Coach, you think I was born to shoot hoops?"

  That's how we ended up with just half a basketball court for dribble drills and H-O-R-S-E. Our last coach told Octavia (in front a bunch of us) that the only reason she got into Purser Lilley was to help us win the city title. Other parents were so afraid of being labeled racists that they withheld their second-semester tuition checks until the principal eliminated competitive sports.

  Which brings us back to yours truly being all Little House o
n
the Prairie
on a Pilates mat.

At lunch, Ling Ling stops by my table and offers me a baby bottle she snuck from Health and Development. Ha, ha. Very funny. I sucked my thumb, so I'm a baby.

  My sister comes up behind Ling Ling and pokes her shoulder hard. Octavia warns, "You better check yo self before you wreck yo self."

  Ling Ling doesn't test her. She scuttles off, prop slipped into her book bag, because she wants nothing to do with my sister. Ling Ling teased Octavia once about domestic adoption and was met with a brutally honest tirade about birth parents mutilated by farm equipment; the greedy, heinous devil that is America's health-insurance system; an older brother jailed; a sister pregnant and married at sixteen; another sister missing; and four years of personal foster-care horror stories. Octavia put an end to any and all future Ling Ling harassment with: "Uh, and if you don't know, now you know!"

  Octavia plops down next to me with a brownie the size of two fists. Across from us sit Marjorie and Mags, who are the same shade of pale from their platinum-blond heads to their never-painted toenails (unlike Kathryn Ann, who will not be seen without blood-red tips and lips and a permanent spray tan). Ling Ling calls the twins albinos every chance she gets. Her favorite zinger is that they might have had a little color if their mom had let them cook as directed and not scheduled her C-section a month early to coincide with the verdict of a trial she was covering.

  With Ling Ling out of earshot, I ask the group, "Did I really look like a baby?"

  Marjorie says, "A dead baby. I kept shaking you. I thought you'd never wake up. I nearly cried."

  I gush, "Aww."

  Mags says, "It wasn't Aww. It was scary—but you definitely weren't sucking your thumb."

  The twins look at each other. They are mentally conferring. Eyebrows arch. Lips twist. Noses scrunch in concentrated worry. It drives me nuts when they do this, but I've known them long enough to read a line or two from their minds.

  "What are you deciding to tell or not tell me?"

  The twins swing around to Octavia, the official teller of all you might not want to know but should know.

  "What?" I plead. "Okay, don't tell me. No, tell me!"