Blast | June 16, 2023

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  The heartaches, evasions, diversions, missteps, victories, and singular drama of the teenage years are the subject of G. B. Qinzi Yu’s captivating story “The Bush Years.”

The Bush Years

G. B. Qinzi Yu

 

He cocked his head the other way and proceeded with his tongue. “You’re such a good kisser,” he whispered through his braces. “This is just like in my dream.”

I stood still, feet planted on the sidewalk, letting him kiss my face any way he wanted. Head tilted left. Head tilted right. Tongue circling clockwise. Tongue in and out. If I moved, he might change his mind. This was my first kiss, after all. How else would I know if I was any good? Luckily, my technique was working. I don’t just mean for kissing; I mean for life. I live by a simple philosophy: Do nothing. Deep down, I am a pebble at the bottom of a stream. I let water and time smooth me over and shape me rather than tussle with shaping myself. Everyone is so busy, but do they ever get anything done? They wake up and go to work and read their email, and ten years later, twenty years later, their life is the same. And maybe one day, they fall in love and make a family, but twenty years later, thirty years later, life is still the same.

His dad’s car pulled up next to us, and Jason jerked his head back. “See you at pep band!”

He hauled his backpack to the driver’s side: his turn at the wheel. Jason had appeared in our grade this year, as if beamed from outer space. It surprised me to see that he had a dad, to see that his dad had a tie and a navy Toyota and a bumper covered in stickers conveying views. I stood there like I was not caught off guard while Jason’s dad made his way around the car.

“A pleasure to meet you.” He gave me a firm nod like I was an associate before picking something off the ground and getting in as a passenger.

“Jason, you dropped your sock,” he said over the ignition.

“It’s not my sock,” Jason replied.

He tossed the ankle sock behind his back, and it flew out the driver-side window as the two pulled away. The folded triangle shape landed on the ground by my feet. Pfff, like a hamburger bun. Thanks, I said to no one, for it was my ankle sock. It must have fallen out of my bralette while Jason felt me up. I picked it up, tucked it back in, and walked the six blocks home.

***

“Why you late?” my mom asked as I removed my shoes.

“English project.”

“You have English project yesterday.”

“I had to meet with my group again. We’re rehearsing Romeo and Juliet to perform for the class.”

I chugged a bottle of Sunny Delight in the kitchen. Mom was Swiffering the floor. CNN played in the background.

“And-then-I-have-to-report-a-story-for-journalism-and-interview-the-basketball-team.”

“OK.”

“And-then-I-have-pep-band-tonight-home-game.”

I went to my room and closed the door. Once I go silent, my mom starts asking questions. The best way to get ahead of that is to list everything I plan to do. Make myself sound busy, like I’m working hard. I am working hard.

I shook my backpack upside down, and my binders and folders and books tumbled out. Ever since Dad moved to Missouri for work, the TV had been on. Mom only worked part time now and preferred to have noise in the house. The Swiffer snaked its way past my room.

“You have science homework?”

“No.”

“Math?”

“Yes.”

“OK. You do math.”

Goodbye, Swiffer, go to another room. The broadcaster recapped the news: Kelly Clarkson had just won American Idol, hate crimes against Muslims were rising in American cities, George W. Bush something something Iraq.

I knew then that I should probably break up with Jason. The kiss had not been very good. It was like what my friend Shannon said about her first kiss with Sean: “I felt nothing.” Fifteen was too young to be settling for bad kisses, bad anything. I would find a boyfriend who had a full license, who could take me places that I could never go alone. Jason had another year before he could drive passengers without an adult in the car, legally speaking.

As soon as I opened my math homework, I got dizzy. I wanted to be on AIM, where I could see what my friends were doing. We were learning quadratic equations, but it was hard to focus when our teacher with the knit beret always reversed the numbers she wrote on the board. Forty-seven was “seven in forty.” She thought that we should learn math the way she had learned it: “In my country, to grasp concept, we write on forehead.” Or maybe she said, “We write for head,” like writing something down helped you memorize it. Or maybe she was joking, like math was the joke and someone would walk in one day holding the Absolute List of Things One Needs to Know. Who could take kids seriously? A few people in that class, not me, actually wrote things on their foreheads in erasable pen.

Someone was trying to grasp the concept by making their Away Message twenty copies of the quadratic equation.

OK, smart guy.

Was Sk8borg91 smart? I had forgotten his name, but I knew who he was. His face was unmistakable because he kept it covered with a sleek, diagonal shield of black bangs. I could picture it clearly. He sat to my left in our biweekly after-school movie club. All right, so maybe it wasn’t a movie club. It was more like detention but for people who hadn’t done anything bad yet.

I’m making out with him now. I push his bangs aside and glimpse his face for the first time. A couple of pimples but otherwise strong-boned and dewy. Could Sk8borg91 be my next boyfriend? All these years, he’d been just to my left. Just a little older than me. And he could drive. And his vampiric canines could puncture my jugular. I messaged him to confirm.

“Are you going to movie club tomorrow?”

A minute passed.

“Aye >.<” he replied.

Of course he was going. He had to go. The key thing was that he knew what I meant. Our first inside joke, surely the first of many. Movie club was like sex ed but worse because the films were about the perils of drunk driving or maintaining a balanced social life. They always ended with a message that repeated, “If you or anyone you know has thoughts of hurting themselves or others, know that help is on the way. Call this hotline.” Blah blah blah.

So many after-school movies together, only Sk8borg91 knew what I had been through. Only around him could I truly be myself. I was transported out of my body—into a hotter, sexier one—thinking about all the things we would be together. I would never have to pad my bra; my chest would just grow. I would never have to do homework; I could just copy his. What good was homework anyway if we were all going to die? He and I would die together. Should I message him about the problem set? No. I’d ask him in person. And then plant my lips. Word problems asked me to solve for things like gravity and area and how long it took a ball traveling at a certain velocity to hit the ground. My plan was to put aside thoughts about death and making out with Sk8borg91 and concentrate on balls hitting the ground.

***

It was in seventh grade, four years earlier, that I’d thought I was going to die. My parents were both working over the weekend, so my cousin came over. She was twenty-six then, and she took me to the theaters to see The Ring. Everyone said the Japanese version was scarier, but the version we saw was plenty scary. A girl with long black hair draped over her face crawled out of the television set every time a tape was played. My cousin and I huddled together and peered through our fingers. In the movie, if you watched the videotape of the girl, you were going to die in seven days. On a technicality, by watching The Ring, I had watched the cursed videotape. My death date was in a week, along with my cousin’s. I told my parents.

“Movie no meaning,” my mom said, chopping cabbage.

“How do you know?”

“Your life no meaning.”

The speed of her chopping was astounding. There should be an Olympics for wielding a cleaver that fast.

“Homework first. Then college. Then you watch movie, I don’t care.”

My cousin didn’t believe it either, but what did she know? I logged into my AOL. Bing. Bong. Blurrrhhhhrrg. I emailed my whole address book, almost everyone in my grade. I made the background black, picked a font that looked like it was dripping blood, and wrote in red forty-point caps.

“I SAW THE RING AND NOW I’M GOING TO DIE IN SEVEN DAYS.”

The next day I followed up in case anyone was curious. My body pulsed with life as I typed the next email. Anything could happen. Neon green text this time.

“I’M GOING TO DIE IN SIX DAYS.”

I was just letting people know. I sent out another one the fifth day. Hot pink text.

“I’M GOING TO DIE IN FIVE DAYS.”

No one responded. They were all waiting, like I was waiting, to see if I was going to die. I almost forgot about it on the fourth day before my death, and the third.

“You clean dishes. Then homework.”

“One sec. I have to write an email.”

It became a drag. A chore. A part of me decided to quit the updates, but really, they’d slipped my mind. Another part of me remained afraid, just a little bit, that death was around the corner, not for me but for my cousin, and that it would be my fault for not heeding the movie’s warning. When she walked down the stairs, I pretended to need something downstairs, too. When she drove to the store, I told her that in America the speed limit was actually ten miles per hour, slower than the signs said.

“Thanks for the tip! I didn’t know!” The Ring was some distant country to her—far, far away.

That week, during a math lesson at school, a messenger delivered a red slip of paper to the teacher. It was for me. I was to report to the counselors’ office.

“Should I wait till after class?”

“No.”

“So I should go now?”

“Yes.”

I had never visited the counselors before and in fact had no idea who they were. I couldn’t ask the teacher because I had already asked a lot of questions. The slip of paper said, “Library 202,” which took me a while to find. Did counselors teach classes?

It turned out that there were two counselors for the whole school. They were both named Ms. Smith, and their doors were adjacent—a word we had just learned. Above one door was a sign that read A-M. The door on the right had a similar sign, N-Z. I entered the room on the right, where two blond women sat in chairs facing a leather couch.

I expected them to announce that I had won some kind of award for the poem I’d written in English or the 99 percent on my last math test. I figured it was something that they didn’t want to say in front of others that would make them jealous. But that was not why they’d called me. Waving her spectacles like a wand, Ms. Smith told me that a parent of one of my classmates was very concerned about me. I could tell from the Ms. Smiths’ serious faces that they were waiting for me to speak.

One of the Ms. Smiths opened her mouth to say something, and I almost opened my mouth to imitate its shape and jinx her. Her words came out slowly, as though they contained a secret meaning. “How have you been feeling recently?” she asked. The other Ms. Smith got up to close the door. I told them that social studies was hard but otherwise, things were great. “Anything you’re worried about?” I mentioned the chemistry quiz that week. I thought about asking them how they were feeling, to keep the conversation going. How did adults talk?

From under a pile of files, Ms. Smith loosened a stapled packet of papers. “Did you author these emails?”

She handed me the packet. My stomach clenched. My whole body clenched. I considered this a pure violation, that my emails should turn up in the hands of someone I had not sent them to. Blood rushed to my brain. Alas, the packet was incomplete. Colors were missing. The last page showed the email I had sent on day four, which meant my classmate’s parent had yet to see the countdown from day three. Whose parent read their child’s emails?

“Oh, that,” I slapped my thigh and chuckled. “I saw The Ring. Supposedly, the Japanese version is scarier.”

A back-and-forth ensued: the Ms. Smiths explained to me why this was a grave situation, and I explained to them that it was a joke.

“Do your parents know you sent these emails?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“And they are okay with it?”

“Yes,” I lied again.

Then Ms. Smith phoned my dad at his work, relaying the whole thing.

Ms. Smith waited with me outside the school sign for Dad to pick me up. The day was only half over. I could hear the lunch bell. A wave of chatter filled the air as classroom doors opened. When Dad arrived, we drove home saying nothing. After a while, he asked “What’s a counselor?”

That first day, he stayed home with me. He told his boss that I’d fallen ill at school, that he would make up his shift on the weekend. I finished my homework early and had nothing else to do. After discovering that it was Miryam’s mom who’d tattled to the counselor, I vowed never to be Miryam’s friend again. The next day after school, I stayed at home with Mom, who phoned her family while I kept busy in my room. I usually went to the public library until my parents got off work. When my friends asked why they didn’t see me at the library anymore, I couldn’t tell them that I was on Suicide Watch because it didn’t feel accurate.

One of the Ms. Smiths had even said, “If it’s a joke, you should issue an apology. Not all jokes are funny.” And so I did, to prove that it was a joke. I copied the best apology I knew, the president’s apology, and pasted it into a new email: “I don’t think there’s a fancy way to say that I have sinned. It is important to me that everyone who has been hurt knows that the sorrow I feel is genuine. My family, my friends, my staff, and my cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I did something that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. I deeply regret that.” I deleted the part about Monica Lewinsky and changed some other words and sent it to my address book. Swooosh.

I lied to my friends about having to babysit my sister after school. But the story got mixed up as it made its way around. Pretty soon everyone was being extra nice to me, letting me borrow their CDs out of the blue or complimenting my top, even if I wore the same one three days in a row. Rumor got around that I had tried to kill myself but failed. Others thought I was terminally ill, and their mothers sent my family ambiguous holiday cards saying “Our Condolences” with donations to the American Cancer Society. Behind my back, I knew they all called me Death Girl.

Suicide Watch followed me to high school, where it became Custodial Attention. A counselor wanted to meet with me once a semester just to talk. I had to watch educational videos about mental health and adjacent topics every two weeks. When teachers took roll, they called my name twice, almost like it was on two separate lists. Technically, I still had to have a parent or guardian pick me up and watch me after school, but my parents couldn’t be away from work that long, so Mom would drop me off at home and tell me not to answer the phone until she got back at 5:30 p.m. My parents preferred to take shortcuts with English, so they just called it “your suicide,” as though I had actually passed.

“Because of your suicide, counselor call me every month.”

“Because of your suicide, I fill paperwork.”

I did everything I could in those years to convince the world that I was happy so that I could get off the watch list. I threw birthday parties with face paint. I dressed up as Snow White’s dwarf Happy for Halloween. I broached sober topics seriously, like wanting children of my own one day and disapproving of nuclear weapons. Anything on the side of life, I was for. Anything on the side of death, I was against. But Suicide Watch continued, and the false flattery of my peers along with it. The whole thing made me so depressed I wanted to die. But there was nobody I could tell.

***

I ran out the door when I heard Jason and his dad honking the car horn.

“Bye, Mom!” I hollered, over the sound of W. Bush proposing a budget increase for the Department of Homeland Security.

The inside of the navy Toyota was a mess: coins and receipts bulging from every crevice, ballpoint pens engraved with the radio station name, SNXG, and a few packets of wet towelettes that looked travel size. I gripped my clarinet case while Jason beat his drumsticks on the back of the driver’s seat. When our eyes met, I showed him my teeth, indicating that he had part of a spinach leaf stuck in his braces. He shot me a smile back. A person is the most beautiful right before you’re going to break up with them. It’s because they don’t know the future and only you know the future. I thought this, and  I realized then that this was what it must feel like to be a god. Or a dog. A dog would have been able to sniff the tension and know what was going to happen next. Now was not the time to be a pebble. I had to be the stream and change my life, my course, my lover, if I wanted anything like real happiness. But my heart knocked on my ribs; I did nothing.

I would do it after the football game, which was where we were headed to play with the pep band. As I pondered how I would say it, the radio drowned out my thoughts.

“You are listening to SNXG, your local station for free-form jazz and global news.”

Jason’s dad laughed. He liked having the news playing, too.

“Globe-al news. Get it, kiddos?”

“For all you listeners just tuning in to the Shake Report, our weather reporters are estimating between 9:00 and 10:45 this evening. That’s three o’ clock globe time. It’ll be a small one, but you won’t want to miss it.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“It’s the snow globe theory of time,” Jason said.

“What’s the snow globe theory of time?”

“It’s the idea that linear time is just a psychological experience and we actually live in a universe that is encased in a snow globe with no time. The only real marker of time is when the Great Shaker shakes the snow globe.”

I still didn’t get it. And was honestly getting kind of annoyed. Did Jason believe this stuff? What did I really know about him? Another sign that our relationship was hopeless.

We arrived at the football field. The lights were interrogating.

“Shall I pick you up after the game?” his dad asked.

“The world is rounder than you think!” the radio broadcaster said, fading into an erratic beat.

“No, we’ll walk.” Jason said.

“Enjoy the shake!” his dad said, driving away with a wave.

I wanted to drive away in that moment, from Jason. Break up with him already so that I could move my life forward and be with Sk8borg91. Together we would leave the chains of Suicide Watch behind. Be sad when we wanted but mostly be glad. Glad that we could shape our lives to our liking. In the snow globe theory of time, nothing would change. Everything would be the way it was. Stuck. Stuck forever. Jason would forever be drooling on me. My dad would forever be in Missouri. He would never come back. And my mom would live out her days watching CNN alone. We would never have a real conversation. And I would never be able to die in the way I wanted to die, which was not by some girl crawling out of a television set but in the arms of Sk8borg91, who would stroke my hair and ensconce me in his cape and whisper to me, “Shhh, shhh. Everything you are looking for you will find.” Dating was like shopping for the parent you never had. Finding the person who would make things feel true that you never knew were possible. Things you never even dreamed of. If I found that, then I could be in a stream again.

I assembled my clarinet and marched toward the band.

***

On the track along the football field, I spotted Sk8borg91 right away. He was carrying a giant tuba. Well, regular sized. I was electrified the whole game, like a toaster falling into a pool. As we marched up and down and rallied the home crowd and whooped and stomped, my skin sizzled. I thought, My life starts now.

We won the game. The band abandoned the traditional victory song and played a brassy rendition of “Yeah!” by Usher. I stuck my tush out, pointed my toes in opposite directions, and began wobbling my butt up and down like it was dusting powdered sugar on a cranberry crumble.

And then Sk8borg91 walked up to me. The music had stopped. The field had cleared. Only the pom-poms of cheerleaders littered the track now. The sweat on my skin was evaporating into steam when Sk8borg91 hovered his face close to mine. I had always wanted my first time to be outside on a picnic blanket under the stars, but Astroturf would have to do.

It was cloudy above, but I knew the stars were there. I placed a palm on his chest and felt a hard pec. Maybe it was the plate of his marching jacket. I took a deep breath and tugged his collar to show him I was ready. He bent at the waist like he was going to hoist me up so I could wrap my legs around him as he laid me down. I was a dying girl, and he was a dying boy, and I didn’t care if Jason saw us; I was dead already.

Sk8borg91 tied his shoe and then stood back up.

“So, did you do the algebra homework?”

“What?” I released his collar.

“Wait. Were you about to kiss me?”

“No. Maybe.”

Sk8borg91 leaned in and tilted his head. I tilted mine. The warm breeze of victory created a vortex around us, and Sk8borg91 placed a thousand little pecks on my lips, one after another. They were gentle and small, and that area under his nose smelled like coconut body soap. I opened my eyes to see if his eyes were open and they were. We both shut our eyes and he proceeded with a thousand more. And a thousand more after that.

***

“Why you late?” my mom asked when I got home at 9:30 p.m.

“We won the game. Sorry, Mom.”

“Don’t be late. I go to bed.”

She switched off CNN, and I raided the refrigerator for a snack. The most convenient thing I could find was a carrot, which, without thinking, I started to chomp whole. I was ravenous. My body still tingled with the shock of a thousand pecks. I logged onto the computer to see if Sk8borg91 was on AIM. Instead, I had a message from Jason.

“I waited for you by the gate. Where were you?”

“Sorry! I forgot.”

“Want to meet up?”

“It’s 9:30.”

“So? We won the game! Meet at the bush?”

He was steaming with victory, too. I felt nauseous and euphoric at the same time. My head swirled with the scent of sweaty coconuts until spirals replaced my eyes. Now was the time to break up with Jason. I could do it in person like I wanted. Or should I just message?

“OK.”

We met at the bush on Paloma and Chester. Our spot. Well, my spot. I had been sneaking out to the bush for years. It was the only place I could be myself. I got there before Jason, and when he arrived, we faced the street and stood at the bush’s edge holding hands. Three. Two. One. We fell backwards into the bush. Above us was a tangle of oak tree branches and a grid of electrical wires. Behind us was the house that the bush belonged to. The front porch light was on, but otherwise we were in darkness. We’d often considered asking the homeowners for water when one of us got thirsty, but it was hard to leave the bush once you were in it, plus I couldn’t give away my spot.

A silence overcame us, as it always did, for the first few minutes we were there. We’d entered the cone of honesty. You had to tell the truth when lying in the bush. This wasn’t a rule. It just happened of its own accord. There should have been chimes and bamboo flutes, a war horn, and a rattling rain stick to convey the openness of this cone, the sanctity of its space. Instead, the birds were asleep and the wind was hardly whistling to itself if at all.

That did it. Silence for long enough swallows you, and the only thing you can do is spit out what you’ve got. We started speaking at the same time.

“I meant what I said about our kiss” mashed up with “I have to tell you something.”

We turned to each other in the dark but could only see shadows.

“Can we do it again?” he asked.

He asked so sweetly. We were still holding hands. I thought back to our kiss and felt a knot in my throat. It was a chestnut, and it was growing, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to cry or vomit.

Then it all came tumbling out. I told him about The Ring and the two Ms. Smiths. I told him about Suicide Watch and the meetings and the goth boy who watched the films with me. I left out the part about wanting to break up and feeling nothing. But I told him about kissing Sk8borg91 on the track. And I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t even know his name.” And I cried. I let go of his hand to wipe my wet face, and I cried.

Jason didn’t say anything for a good long while. My sobbing slowed to just a few tears, but I continued to make weeping sounds a) to fill the silence and b) to show just how sorry I was. “So,” he said, eventually, “can we do it again?”

“What do you mean?”

“The kiss.”

“You’re not mad?”

“You’re sorry, right?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. So, you’re the President.”

“Huh?”

“And I’m Monica Lewinsky.”

My pants were sliding off. I felt a nose between my thighs. A spot on my underwear grew damp, and I began to slowly grind. My underwear was sopping now, and there was one culprit. Jason’s slobber. Jason’s drool. He licked the fabric. He used his teeth and bit the fabric. I gasped. I held my breath. I alternated between gasping and holding my breath. Then I gripped the bush like they do in the movies, like I could rip it out of the earth.

What did I really know about him? He peeled my underwear to the side, but I told him I wasn’t ready.

“I know,” he said. From his jeans pocket, he pulled out a packet of wet towelettes and wiped my under front to back.

“Hey, what do you think about the theory, by the way?” He shimmied my pants back up and flopped himself beside me.

I was about to ask, “What theory?” but, for the first time that night, his face was in the path of the porch light and close enough for me to see the writing on his forehead: THE WORLD IS ROUNDER THAN YOU THINK. Was that Sharpie? No. It was washable.

I was about to say, “I don’t know,” but I wasn’t sure what I didn’t know. So I waited. Jason waited. Would it be a tremor? A twitch? A vibration that only we could feel? The ground beneath us swelled as if to heave a great sigh. I can’t say how much time had passed, or if it passed at all.

***

 

G. B. Qinzi Yu lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. This is her first published fiction.