Matty has all the good ideas. Every break he comes up with a new trick that keeps us busy all summer. So the day after we finish seventh grade, I head over to our usual spot in the park behind Dreyer Elementary to see what he’s come up with. When he shows up holding a box of medical latex gloves, I ask, “What’s that for?”
He says, “We’re making fake condoms, bitch.”
These days it feels like the world is moving faster than I can catch up to, but Matty seems to be keeping pace, no problem. I commit myself to being better, cooler.
“You chew it off like this,” he says, while gnawing the thumb of a glove. We’re sitting in the shade underneath the spiral slide. I can hear the little kids playing in the splash pad on the other side of the park, running around nozzles spitting water from the ground. Heat rises in squiggles off the asphalt paths.
“Bullshit,” I say.
Bullshit is my new favorite word. Though when I try translating it for my mom, the best I can come up with is cow poop, which doesn’t pack the same punch.
“It’s true.” Matty spits out the thumb on my lap. “Jack says it’s what he does on tour.”
Jack is Matty’s older brother, who was deployed to Afghanistan two years ago. Before Matty and I became friends, I’d already heard of his brother around school. They called him “Jacked Jack.” Last winter our class sent Christmas cards to our Hometown Heroes, which is what our principal calls the alums shipped out to the war. In my card I wrote, “Thank you for saving us,” even though I was unsure what it was I needed saving from. The bulletin board outside the principal’s office is decorated with yearbook photos of Hometown Heroes mounted on construction-paper plaques. There’s a newspaper clipping of the burning towers right in the center of it.
Among the Hometown Heroes, Jack is the only one who has two photos: one in uniform and the other in his varsity jacket. Anytime there’s a fire drill, the kids fist-bump his picture and go, “Jacked Ja-ack!” I hope one day I can amount to a name like that. But for now I’m just Jin.
There are rankings of cool. I’m below Matty, and Matty is below Jack. I know this because whenever Matty wants to make something sound legit, he adds a stamp of approval from Jack, the same way I use Matty as an authority when talking to the other Korean kids at church. We have a baseline level of respect for white kids based solely on the way they talk to adults: as if they won’t get smacked. I’ve come to learn they usually don’t.
I finger the latex thumb on my lap. “So.” I pause. “He’s doing this while being blown up?”
Matty’s always explaining things to me, and I can usually follow along, but this time I’m genuinely confused. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Jack is tearing up gloves to make miniature condoms? In a war?
“He’s not getting blown up,” Matty says.
He pauses like he’s imagining his brother getting cooked by a missile. I regret my choice of words. It’s been a few weeks since Matty and his mom have heard from Jack.
“He’s blowing up farms,” he adds.
“What kind of farms?”
“Drug farms.”
“You can grow drugs on farms?”
“Opium. It comes from a flower. I think poppy.”
“You mean like the bagel?”
Matty looks annoyed, the way he always does when he has to explain something simple to me. Like the time I mustered up the courage to ask him why there was even a war in the first place. “Because of the terrorists, dipshit,” he said. We both left it at that.
When it comes to the war, Matty is the expert because he’s got a brother in it. I remember only a few things from the day the Twin Towers fell three years ago: Columns of smoke the color of pencil lead. My mom having to walk from work in the city all the way home to Flushing, across the Queensboro Bridge. Singing Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water” at a school assembly and tearing up at the lyrics “I will comfort you. I’ll take your part.”
Before Jack left for Afghanistan, Matty invited me to the farewell cookout at their house. Matty’s house is a stand-alone, not a condo like mine, located near the community pool. Everyone on his street leaves their bikes out on their lawns—it’s that kind of place. His backyard has a trampoline, cornhole boards, and a blow-up pool. His fridge is stocked with all the soda you’d ever want.
Despite how big the house looks on the outside, it feels small once you step in. The place is loaded to the brim with crap that Matty’s mom, Mrs. P., has hoarded everywhere. It’s only gotten worse since Jack left. At the cookout they had a sheet cake that read, Here’s to Our Hero, piped in cursive. The cake was decorated with red and blue roses on vanilla buttercream.
“You’re the man of the house now,” Jack said to Matty during his speech. He held Matty by the shoulders and rested his forehead on Matty’s. It was the kind of thing that only happens in the movies, meaning it was the kind of thing that only happens to white people. It made me uncomfortable. I sat on a broken folding chair, staying very still so as not to produce a horrible squawk that could ruin the moment for the two all-American brothers.
My slice of cake had a blue rose on it. It seemed strange that they’d put flowers on a cake for a guy going off to drop bombs on babies, which is what my mom said all the American soldiers were being shipped over there to do.
“White people have it so good, they sign up to die in another country,” she said.
I thought that was pretty grim. I mean, there are such things as heroes. But it’s hard to imagine a real war with people who look like Jack and Matty. The only war I ever hear about is the one my mom was born into and grew up in the aftermath of, the Korean War. The one she uses every excuse to squeeze into a conversation. Every chance she gets, she tells me how rough it was then and how much better we have it now.
That’s why when I think of wars, the people in them never look like Matty’s family. Instead I imagine people who look like my mom: Asian and confused. I learned about white-people wars in history class, sure, but those are different. Somehow their wars feel a lot more glorious and worthy, like fighting Hitler. There’s always some clear reason.
Lately I’ve been very into the words glorious and worthy, which are my favorite words used at church. Like bullshit, translations can’t do them justice. I try explaining my love for these words to my mom, who takes out her pocket dictionary and finds their Korean twins—blocky words that make me feel like I’m talking with a piece of hard candy in my mouth. I wonder if the God I pray to in English is the same one my mom prays to in Korean. I figure American God is concerned with things like war and glorifying his name, the one people mean when they say, “God bless our troops,” or “God bless America,” whereas Korean God is the guy you hit up so your family’s new deli does good business or when your dad gets a DUI crossing the George Washington to see his other kids in Jersey. Two Gods with very different specialties.
I worry there may be even more Gods than that. A God for each country, each language. But if there aren’t, and there is just one, what happens when both sides of a war ask the same God for help? What’ll he do then?
My mom talks about God like he’s the only thing holding back disaster. It’s on us to be obedient and keep him happy, so he doesn’t let everything topple down on our heads. It’s like she forgets the war she was in is over. Whenever I leave a grain of rice in my bowl, she asks, “Do you know how long it takes for a grain of rice to grow?” When I say nothing, she says, “A year, Jin. A whole year.” Then she pours water into my bowl and scrapes the remaining dry morsels off the sides. This is how she tries to get me to eat every grain, even when it feels like my stomach is burning into my throat.
The stories get so bad, sometimes I’m convinced she’s bullshitting. She’ll go on about how she and her six siblings used to stick a piece of gum on the wall and take turns sharing it. How she ran after US Army tanks, begging for food. How my grandmother got married at fourteen because girls were being snatched and sold. How a neighbor girl who tried escaping the war by hiding on a ship couldn’t get her baby to stop crying and was forced off by the other stowaways. When she talks this way, even if I had the language to speak, I would have nothing to say.
I don’t know how much of what she’s saying is real and how much is made up just to make a point. Sometimes she’ll misremember a detail, or a story will get an alternate ending. Other times it’s obvious that the stories aren’t even hers, but my grandmother’s.
Meanwhile, the few times Matty’s mom shares anything about her childhood, it’s always something cool, like bumming joints to smoke behind the high school, or the time she had two dates to prom. She had one pick her up at her house and met the other at the dance, then swapped them out all night without them catching on.
As far as I know, there is no Mr. P., though Matty’s mom still insists on the “Mrs.” It’s just the two of them, like it’s just me and my mom. Mrs. P. works nights as a nurse at North Shore Hospital. When she’s home, she’s asleep most of the time. Once, I walked past her room when the door was open. There were shoeboxes stacked to the ceiling and binders all over the bed. She was sleeping curled up on a pile of towels. She looked really calm, like a small dog.
Mrs. P.’s car, an old Subaru hatchback, is packed like a clown car, except instead of clowns it’s filled with crap like old VHS tapes and yellowed rolls of paper towels. It’s got a crunched-up bumper from the time Mrs. P. backed out of the car pool lane at school, and into a concrete pole she couldn’t see on account of all the junk. When it happened, Matty and I heard a muffled fuck from the car, like she was underwater.
Another time, when Mrs. P. dropped me off, my foot got stuck in a box of power strips on the floor. My mom waited as I wrestled my foot from the mess, pulling one of the strips onto the ground. She picked it up and placed it back in the car without a word, then closed the door and waved them off, smiling.
“Look at that disgusting car,” she said as Mrs. P. and Matty pulled out of our driveway. “That woman is depressed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Depression is when the sadness is trapped in your body. She should take some pills for that.”
What does my mom know about pills? Mrs. P. is a nurse. My mom does nails and cuts women’s hair on the side at our kitchen sink.
“When it gets bad, they forget to take care of themselves.” She tutted. “Some people are so sad, even with all this food and money.”
I hated the way my mom talked about white people, including Matty and Mrs. P., who were nothing but nice to her and never corrected her English like some teachers did at parent conferences.
“If there are pills for sadness, then why do people go to church?” I asked.
She gave me a pained look. Neither my Korean nor her English was good enough for this conversation. We shared so little language that it was easy to say one thing and mean another.
But this isn’t just with her; I feel misunderstood everywhere. It’s the reason why body worship is so important to me. When the teachers at church first introduced it, we followed along as they swayed and made hand motions to the worship music. The movements incorporate real sign language, like the signs for love, sorry, and thank you. My favorite sign is the one for Jesus: You touch each middle finger to the palm of the other hand, as if you were being nailed to a cross.
“We glorify God with our body,” my youth pastor says. “Because He gave His body for us.”
I can tell the other kids hate it, but I like moving my body to the music, closing my eyes to the song. It’s the only time I feel as if God sees me, as if we are moving as one and every feeling is understood completely, instantly. No need for translation. It isn’t like prayer, where I’m just trying to make myself sound sorry. With my body I speak to God perfectly, without stuttering like an idiot.
I know this is a part of me Matty could never understand, the same way he’d never understand what it’s like to speak in half sentences at home, or for your mom to always ask, “Jin, what more could we ask for?” even though there is a lot. Body worship is the one thing I have on Matty, who doesn’t care for prayer or God but knows about everything else before I do.
He’s the one who taught me how to jack off. We were looking for spare coins in his mom’s Subaru last summer when he said, “Hold up, I gotta show you something.” He gripped the gear stick between us and started jacking it off with his hand.
“Try it out at home,” he said.
I did. It was great, like a light flicked on in my body. Like giving myself the best kind of hug. A way to be without feeling so stuck—stuck without words, stuck in a place. I reported back to Matty the next day.
“How’d you learn to do that?” I asked.
“Jack taught me before he left. Said not to mess around and get a girl pregnant.”
“How’s jacking off going to stop a girl from getting pregnant?”
“If you take care of yourself, you won’t go looking for trouble.”
I gave him a blank stare. Matty sighed, then walked me through it step by step. I’d just finished sixth grade, and this was the first time I’d heard anyone break down the details. A familiar feeling of shame ballooned in my stomach, the sense that I was late to everything. In movies they’d show two people kissing in a bed, and next thing you knew, someone was pregnant. How was I supposed to know there was more to it than that?
“So you’re saying my mom and dad had sex?” The thought grossed me out.
“Mine too.” It was the first time Matty had mentioned his dad.
I felt grateful. Apart from Matty, I couldn’t think of anybody who would have taught me this. I thanked him for it.
“Ew, you weirdo,” he laughed.
But I meant it. To me it made a lot of sense: Loving without words. Trying to reach someone only through your body. No mix-ups with language. Simple.
We spend the rest of the afternoon sitting cross-legged in the park, chewing up the gloves until our jaws are busted. By dinnertime we both have gritty powder on our teeth and pockets full of rubber fingers and I’m starting to think Matty is bullshitting me. I know nothing about war, but I know something about dicks, and there is no way Jacked Jack’s would ever fit in a finger.
Matty has this power over me. I’d like to say it’s because he’s a great leader, but really it’s because he rescued me. Back when my mom and I moved to Little Neck, I had nightmares of my dad dying, including a recurring one of him trapped in a burning car. In the dream I’d run back and forth trying to put out the fire with nothing but a small bucket of water.
The truth is a lot less dramatic. He died of lung cancer a few months before 9/11. He went slowly and very ungloriously. The timing really sucked. No one at school felt bad for a kid whose dad chain-smoked his way to the grave when others lost parents who were just trying to earn a living. It felt like there was a right way to die—tragically, through no fault of your own—and a wrong way: because you had it coming. My dad spent his last few months taking his fear of death out on my mom, who spent every morning praying for his recovery. In the end he could barely speak with all the chest pain and phlegm, but still managed to use what little breath he had to let my mom know God wasn’t coming to save him.
His death confirmed a fear I’d always had of my parents dying suddenly. They were older than the parents of most kids my age: By the time they had me, my mom was forty and my dad was forty-six.
The winter after he died, my mom stuffed all the clothes we had into contractor bags and said we were moving out of Flushing.
“But why?” I asked. I had just lost my dad and watched my city collapse. I wanted only to burrow into my bed, into my skin.
“Bad gi,” she said. “The bad energy will eat us alive if we don’t start moving.”
A deacon from church offered to rent us a condo for dirt cheap in Little Neck, a better school district. It was my first time living in a place with more than one bedroom. There was even an in-unit washer, which meant we no longer had to scrounge for quarters in the parking lot.
Back in Flushing you couldn’t go two blocks without seeing an auntie squatting on the sidewalk selling bean sprouts and mugwort off a tarp, or a fruit stand with a dozen grannies inspecting the bruising on a melon. But in Little Neck they have a Cards & Gifts store with air-conditioning and metal hooks along the walls holding shiny bags of chips and roasted peanuts. The store has everything you could ever need: greeting cards, little ceramic figures of angels kneeling in prayer, single Rolos for a nickel. On hot summer days I’ll lean my whole body against the drinks fridge in the back, then peel away to look at the human outline left on the cool glass. I love watching the shape of my body slowly disappearing. It’s the closest I get to understanding what they say at church: that we are souls with bodies, not bodies with souls. I imagine I’m an angel who never has to worry about the right thing to say.
When we first moved here, I stopped talking much. I just ran out of words. Whenever someone asked me a question, I stared straight through their eyes and tried to picture a blank wall inside their heads. At my new school the rest of the kids stayed away from me. I ate with the lunch aides, who spoke to me like I was slow and not just a kid who’d watched his dad spit up blood and grow clubbed fingers on his way out.
Matty was the only one who didn’t make me feel like an idiot. Or he only did in the way all boys try to make each other feel like idiots. He walked up to me one day at lunch and pointed at my snack: dried squid balls with peanuts.
“That looks gross.” He snatched one and popped it in his mouth. “Tastes like ass,” he said. “But, like, in a good way.”
I busted out laughing. It was the first time I’d laughed at that school. He was right. Squid does taste like ass, but in a good way.
Matty has a way with food. He’s a good cook, on account of Mrs. P. never being around. The other night at his place we were prepping frozen lasagna and Costco chicken bakes. I had thrown the chicken in the microwave on a plate, and Matty said, “Hold up, that thing is going to be cracker dry.” He ran a paper towel under the kitchen faucet and laid it on my chicken bake carefully, as if he were tucking it into bed.
I had never heard “cracker dry” before. Matty knows all these phrases because his family speaks only English. He doesn’t have to mash together languages or thump his chest when the words don’t come out right. Instead he gets to say things like “Easy does it” and “It’s not rocket science.”
Moments like those, when we’re both silent and he’s sprinkling shredded cheese on our lasagna or wiping his hands on a kitchen towel or cutting a sandwich into perfect triangles, I can see that despite Matty being cooler than I am, he’s still just a kid like me, wanting to do all the little things the right way. These are the moments I feel as though I might belong somewhere with someone after all.
Matty is very clear about the way we’re supposed to use the condoms. We’re heading back to his place so he can show me when we run into Dylan coming out of the Cards & Gifts shop with a soda and a bag of gummy worms. Dylan is a foster kid in our class nobody likes.
“You hear from Jack?” Dylan asks Matty.
He holds out the open bag to me. I reach in and pull out a half-blue, half-orange worm.
“He’s blowing up farms,” I say. I know it’s been weeks since Matty and Mrs. P. have heard anything from Jack.
“He scared over there?” Dylan asks.
“Fuck you, Dick-lan,” Matty says.
“I hear people are coming back with their ears cut off and legs blown up.”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t shut up.”
“Or they come back like zombies, all demented. Like messed up in the head.” Dylan makes a finger gun and jabs it at his temple.
“At least I got parents,” Matty says. A low blow, coming from a kid who doesn’t have much of a father.
Dylan looks unfazed. “Boom!” He claps his hands loud right in Matty’s face, which makes us both flinch. The rule is: If a kid can get you to flinch, you are beneath him. Dylan laughs and backs away, flipping us off. “See you boobs later.”
I look at Matty, whose entire face is splotchy red. “Are you OK?” I ask.
“Shut up.”
“Dylan’s just—”
“SHUT UP.”
I fall silent, and Matty walks a few paces in front of me. I follow him the whole way to his block without saying a word. When we come up on his house, he spins around.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” His eyes are wet.
“Say what?”
“Why’d you let him talk shit about Jack?” I’ve never seen Matty so mad. “You never have my back. Silent-ass Jin. Always standing around saying nothing.”
That one hurts, but mostly I’m confused. What does he expect? I thought he knew I’m not in a position to stop anyone from doing anything. Matty always takes the lead. I don’t understand why he seems to think I have more power than I do. It’s like an adult asking a kid why there isn’t enough food in the fridge. Isn’t that the adult’s job? Aren’t we walking back to his place with a pocketful of finger condoms because he said so?
I follow him inside and sit at the dining room table in silence while he heats up some leftover spaghetti. He heads for his room and tells me to go home.
Matty stops talking to me after that. For two weeks I call his house every day. Sometimes I get the answering machine; other times Mrs. P. picks up.
“Sorry, Jin. He’s still not right today.”
I find out about Jack the same week we get the sex talk in youth group. They divide the girls and boys into separate rooms. In ours, two male Bible-study teachers talk to us for an hour in the most serious voices they can muster. The whole time I’m waiting for them to break down the details, like Matty did for me, but all they do is talk around it. They make us read out loud the verse in First Corinthians that says your body is a temple. We’re coming up on the last few minutes of the talk when Mr. Park, Justin Park’s dad, breathlessly says, “It is a sin to touch yourself with pleasure,” then books it out the door. Only he botches the pronunciation, and I hear touch yourself with pressure.
My heart sinks. This is news to me. One more thing I’m late to know; one more time I’m a step behind. I pray God won’t be like Matty and leave me over a misunderstanding.
I feel so ashamed that when my mom asks me if I heard what happened to Matty, my first thought is that he was caught jacking off.
“Matty isn’t talking to me,” I remind her.
“Jack is hurt badly,” she says.
“He got blown up?” Except I don’t know the Korean word for blown up, so I ask, Did he pop? Explode?
Jack was caught in an ambush, cornered into a minefield. My mom got the news from Steven Carson’s mother, who’s Korean and married to Steven’s white dad. Mrs. Carson is the only Korean mom who speaks with the white parents. I think about the poppies. Jack walking through a field of flowers.
“We need to go over there now. That woman won’t know what to do with herself,” my mom says, though I can barely hear her. My mind shuttles to Matty.
We drive over to Matty’s place, and my mom knocks on the door. When Mrs. P. opens it, I can tell she’s been crying.
“We heard about Jack,” my mom says. I cringe at her bluntness.
“Hey, Mrs. Lee. Hey, Jin.” Mrs. P. looks more tired than usual. “We’re OK. But thank you for coming.”
“You should not be alone right now.”
I yank my mom’s arm to get her to stop. I’m scared Matty is within earshot.
“We’re OK,” Mrs. P. says again, trying to wedge more of the door between her and my mom, talking to us from the slit in between.
“Stop being stubborn and listen,” my mom says. “The wars, they are not so different in the end. You cannot be alone.”
My mom is almost a foot shorter than Mrs. P., but the way she’s talking, you’d think Mrs. P. was smaller. It’s like when a cartoon hero taps into some dormant superpower that was there all along. This is it, I think. I will never be friends with Matty again.
Mrs. P. starts to cry. She is crying so hard I’m convinced that whatever sadness was trapped in her is making its way out. She opens the door and leans her whole body against the frame, then begins to heave, then shake. The only other time I’ve seen adults cry this way is at morning prayer. It’s the kind of crying that could get God’s attention, could really get him to listen.
My mom pushes her way past the door and holds Mrs. P. upright, as if she is rooted to the ground. Mrs. P.’s blond hair drapes over my mom’s small, sharp shoulder. My mom tells me to go upstairs and get Matty, says we’re taking them to our place.
The whole way home the car is silent except for Mrs. P.’s hiccups. Matty and I sit in the back seat with the armrest folded down between us. He’s never been in our car. The car was my dad’s, a white Cadillac DeVille that still reeks of his cigarettes. The name was a running joke between us; my dad would botch the pronunciation on purpose, call it the Devil. He worked at a call-up taxi company and took care of the DeVille like it was his firstborn. After the diagnosis, he spent more and more time in the car, picking up as many extra shifts as he could before it got bad.
I want to reach for Matty’s arm. He is turned away from me, staring out the window.
When we get home, my mom puts Mrs. P. in her bedroom. Through the open door I see Mrs. P. lying on the bed with my mom at her side, patting her back like she’s a kid. My mom is humming an old Korean nursery song.
In my room I set up my bed for Matty, who is wiping tears off his face. He doesn’t refuse me when I lay a blanket over him. Seeing Matty curled up, I think: He really is Mrs. P.’s son. I slip into my sleeping bag on the floor.
Matty and I don’t say much, but in light of everything, I feel like whatever beef we have is squashed. I wonder if this night will become one of those things we know never to talk about, like our dads. For almost an hour I listen to him cry with the blanket pulled over his head.
I think about Jack naked somewhere in the desert. I know the finger condoms were something Matty saw online, and he only brought his brother’s good name into it so he could try them out without looking dumb as shit. But it felt important to believe him. Like my faith was the only thing standing between Jack and a blown-up leg, or a missing eye, or any one of the screwed-up things we see every night on the news.
Matty’s breathing slows, and I know he’s finally asleep. I get up off the floor and look over him. His eyelids are bloated. His curly hair is sprawled all over my pillow. I want so badly to touch him. For once, I tell myself, you gotta do something. For once, say something. For once, help Matty. But how? Already I feel the words clumping in my chest. I feel the juice from my stomach in my throat. Who is Matty’s God? How can I reach him, get him to understand?
I extend one hand toward Matty—not touching, just hovering—when suddenly the body worship comes to me to the tune of my mom’s nursery song. Silently I make the moves I learned at church: I tap the nails into my hands. I pulse two crossed fists on my chest. I move my feet gently across the shag rug. I turn my palms up to the ceiling. I channel all the love in my body like a beam into the sky. I imagine it traveling at supersonic speeds around the world to Afghanistan, to Jack. My arms are turning numb, but I tell myself to hold still.
I am a soul with a body. I’m Jack in the desert. A wad of gum on the wall, swapped between mouths, feeling the insides of everyone. I’m the baby on the boat. I begin to cry.
Shut up, shut up, I tell myself. If you just keep still, you can save them all.
