How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,40

anything. He was an adult man. He was stronger than the both of us.

The next afternoon, when we got to the building and we heard him say, “Sexy,” she looked up at him and yelled, “We’re TWELVE! You creepy fuck!” And because she’d said something, I felt I had to say something too. So I shouted, “I’ll cut it off! We’ll see what’s sexy then!” and we quickly ran inside the building and laughed maniacally in the stairwell. I liked the sound of our laughter then. Even though it was just the two of us there, the way it echoed and multiplied made us sound like more.

THE SCHOOL WE WENT TO was a forty-five-minute walk from our building. We rarely took the bus, except when it was terribly cold outside, but even then, we would try to walk if neither of us could manage to get the fifty cents for the fare, which was most times. Asking for fifty cents was like asking for a million dollars—when you don’t have it, you just don’t have it. Once, though, to teach me some kind of lesson when I asked for bus fare, Dad said, “You know how hard it is to make fifty cents? Why don’t you go outside and try to find one cent.” So I did. I went outside and searched the ground for some change but found none. When I came back inside, I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t even find one cent, so I understood how hard it was for him to make fifty of them. And yet, as I went to bed that night, I felt a coldness underneath my pillow. It was two shiny quarters.

THERE WAS A CHAIN-LINK FENCE in the back alley of the building we lived in, and behind that fence was a dense green forest. It’s what separated our building from all those nice houses farther down the street. There was a small creek running through the middle of it, and from Katie’s balcony it looked like the side-part in a head of dark hair. We would grab at the metal fence and pull ourselves closer and closer to the top to get to the other side. Then we would find an area to lie on the grass and describe to each other what we could see. We went there to waste time and to avoid our usual path home.

One day, when we were in the forest, Katie told me the police had found a dead body back there. A girl about our age.

“You ever see a dead body before?” she asked me.

I thought of my grandmother at her funeral. She looked so peaceful it was like she was only sleeping. When I told Katie that, she said, “Yeah, that’s when it’s natural.”

Then Katie lay down on the ground, spreading out her arms and legs into the shape of a starfish. Her face went blank and she stared up at the sky. She lay there for about ten minutes, not moving or saying anything. In the shade, her skin appeared blue, and her collarbone stuck out. I didn’t like the quiet, or feeling like I was alone in the forest. The trees hovering over me seemed human, and I could almost feel their branches reaching out for me.

“Katie! Stop it!” I yelled. “Get up!”

She didn’t move.

I kicked her leg.

She started laughing. Small, soft chuckles like someone was tickling her. And then she let out a loud scream. She continued to scream and scream, blotches of red covering her face, and then I began to scream with her. We muffled our giggles in between. We knew our screaming was just a joke because we were doing it together, but I tried to imagine what someone hearing us would think.

“Scared you, didn’t I,” she said when we finally stopped.

“Why’d you go and do that for?”

“Just to see what you’d do. See how no one comes when they hear you screaming? You’re on your own.” She sounded a lot like Dad when he was giving me advice about how life was.

She went on: “Someone dumped that girl’s body here. You know, it could have been me. I saw a picture of her in the paper.” Then she sat up and brushed off the leaves from her clothes. She laughed again and said, “C’mon, it’s getting dark.”

We headed back to our building, but then Katie stopped and told me to stand still. She removed the straps of her red knapsack from her shoulders, unzipped a