by Rasmenia Massoud

This is the first time we’ve made eye contact, but I’ve been looking at his face my entire life. I know those narrow, close-set eyes almost as well as my own. Eyes so blue they almost glow in direct light. Eyes I always had to turn away from because of the way they constantly laughed at me.

All these years, they’ve never stopped laughing at me.

He shakes my hand and in that brief moment, I catch a flicker of surprise at my firm grip. His face searches mine, trying to identify the source of familiarity. I offer a polite smile. A professional nod. My inner voice snaps, “Yeah, motherfucker. It’s the weird little girl from the end of the street. I still exist, you piece of shit.”

But another smaller, younger voice confined in that place where I stuff down everything that hurts, whimpers and whisks me away. In a breath, I’m back inside the thin walls of that gray house with the dry, yellow grass for a front yard. Dad used to say he was going to paint it because he was tired of our “grandma gray” house. He never did, but we had fun talking about our freshly painted imaginary house over our grilled cheeses or spaghetti. We had a patch of cracked dirt for a backyard enclosed by a short wooden fence with faded and flaking burgundy paint where my old man locked up his bicycle every night. His bicycle the color of a sliced open pineapple that he rode to work because ever since his accident, he was afraid to get behind the wheel of a car. Cars were an added expense, anyway.

We never talked much about how the accident transformed him into a widower with a limp and an odd dent in his forehead. We felt no need to speak of how that night changed everything, leaving the two of us alone and in debt. Me and Dad made our own little world from the wreckage of what we endured and were content to live in it.

One morning, Dad drank his coffee and stepped outside to discover a broken slat of wood in the fence where his bicycle had been secured. Someone had lifted it right over the fence and walked away with it, lock and all. For well over a minute, he stood there staring at the place where his bike had been before zipping up his coat and turning away. He ruffled my hair and said, “Well, walking to work’ll give me some exercise.”

I watched my dad limping along the sidewalk, carrying a plastic grocery store bag with his can of soda and bologna sandwiches for lunch. I just stood there, a useless sobbing mess at the living room window, powerless and small, making angry promises to myself that I’d grow up and fix everything.

***

A few days later, walking to school, I passed the two-story pink house with wine-colored trim at the end of the street. The garage door was usually open, with loud guitar music pouring out all day and night. Teenage guys talking loud, playing air drums and smoking. Furniture, boxes, piles of junk and dismantled bicycles scattered all around them. I caught a glimpse of my dad’s pineapple yellow bike, in pieces.

Taking a few small, tentative steps up to the open garage, I said, “Hey.” An older boy, maybe 15 or 16, turned around.

“Yeah?” His expression had the amused, expectant look of someone about to hear the punchline.

“Where did you get this bike?” I pointed at the broken yellow fragments.

“None of your fucking business.”

“This is my dad’s bike. Someone stole it from our yard and now it’s here.”

He laughed. “Get out of my garage, weirdo.”

A second kid entered the garage from the house. A skinnier kid with a poofy blond mullet and a translucent mustache. “Who’s this?”

“The weirdo’s kid from that shitty house down the street.”

The kid with the mullet only laughed with his glacial blue eyes. “Oh. What’s up?”

I wanted to cry. I felt my legs start to tremble. “That bike was stolen from my house.”

“No, it wasn’t.” The mullet kid took a step toward me.

I realized how stupid I’d been, approaching older boys all on my own as though they would be kind and reasonable. My cowardice took over. I spun on my heel and scampered away.

Every day, I passed by the pink house, daring a peek inside the garage, and seeing the boys smirking and sneering at me. They never said anything, they just stared and laughed.

***

Months later, my dad got a used bicycle that he brought inside the house every night. It was the color of dirty snow and speckled with rust spots. One afternoon when he was still at work during Christmas vacation, someone knocked on the front door while I was laying around on the couch watching Saved by the Bell. I got up to answer it but stopped in my tracks when I saw a puff of blond hair through the window at the top of the door.

I was too short to look all the way out the window, but that puff of hair, and the sound of boys laughing on the other side of the door told me everything I needed to know.

I crouched down, put my back up against the door and slid down to the floor. I sat there, hiding and listening to their horrible laughing. Laughing at me. At my dad. At my house. Then the sound of something hitting the door. Like someone spraying something on the wood. It increased, almost like a garden hose splashing. Their laughing escalated to hysterical giggling. Then the wet sounds ceased, replaced by the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow and their laughter fading away.

Daring to peek out the front window, I watched the two of them as they trotted back up the street toward the pink house. I opened my front door and was immediately hit with the stench of piss. They pissed on our front door. They pissed on the little snowman we’d put on the porch next to the door. They pissed on our little welcome mat.

They pissed on our home. While I cowered inside.

Now he’s laughing at me again, I’m sure of it. Every time he looks me in the eye, I hear the sound of his piss splashing against my front door. The stench of it fills my nostrils. He skims my application. Asks some standard questions about my sparse resume. He alludes to my lack of experience and makes a glib comment regarding my lack of education beyond high school. I’m struggling to keep the quaking out of my voice. I’m no longer in his office, but standing in his garage again, trying to get back what’s left of my poor dad’s bicycle.

“We’ll be in touch,” he says, rising from his chair. He shakes my hand again as I force myself to look into his glacial blue eyes. I escape outside to the parking lot, back to my car. I close the door, and it does nothing to block out the laughter.

***

I start the engine, then ferret around in my bag for my phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Dad. It’s me.” I smile, hoping it makes me sound happy.

“Hey, Kid. How’d the interview go?”

I dab at the corner of my eye with my sleeve. “It was okay. Not sure if it’s for me, though.”

“They probably aren’t good enough for you anyway,” he says. “What do I always say?”

“That I’m interviewing them just as much as they’re interviewing me.”

“That’s right. Wanna come have dinner with me tonight? I’m thinking, Hot Pockets and cocoa. With marshmallows.”

I whistle. “That’s a five-star meal.”

“You bet it is. Nothing but the best for us.”

“Nothing but the best. I’m on my way.”

And for a while, the laughing stops.

 

Photo by Chris Becker on Unsplash