Always they find us inappropriate, but today especially so. Here we are with nowhere to go and nothing to do, sitting in a rusty pickup truck, the one leaking oil, the one with the busted transmission that sounds like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Here we are with the engine running for the AC, the doors wide open for our bare legs to spill out. Because this, right here, to survive the heat, this is all we have.
An hour ago we became outcasts. One of us—not me—would not shut the fuck up. And since the grandmas are prepping for the monks and need to focus, we've been banished outside to choke on traces of manure blown in from the asparagus farms surrounding us, our hometown, this shitty place of boring dudes always pissing green stink.
And according to the Mas, everything about us appears at once too masculine and too feminine: our posture—backs arching like the models in the magazines we steal; our clothes—the rips, studs, and jagged edges—none of it makes sense to them. The two of us are wrong in every direction. Though Maly, the girl cousin, strikes them as less wrong than the boy cousin, me.
"Ma Eng can suck my dick," Maly says, still not shutting the fuck up, her long hair rippling in the gas-tainted breeze of the vents, her blond-orange highlights dancing, or trying to, anyway. "What is up her ass? Seriously, I should have a say in this party's fucking agenda. It's my birthright!"
"At least Ma Eng gives a fuck about you," I say, my chin resting on the steering wheel. Under the truck, the cracked concrete of Ma Eng's driveway seems to be steaming, and I swear the very dust in the air is burning, it's so hard to breathe. We can't even listen to the radio, you know? Can't focus on anything but our own sweaty boredom. I look up at the harsh blue sky, how it crushes the squat duplexes of G Block. I am trying to deprive Maly of my full attention, but her vivid presence, that vortex of cheap highlights, it exhausts my energy. Plus, she's slapping the side of my head.
"Ves, Ves, Ves!" Maly says. "Look at me!"
"Jesus," I whine, batting her hand away. "I thought you 'gave zero fucks' about this party. Why do you care if they're making amok or not?"
"It's what I want to eat, okay, and it's my dead mom." She violently throws her head sideways, cracking her neck. "I mean, apparently she's not dead dead, anymore, but still . . ."
Unsure of what to say, I clench my teeth into a lopsided smile. I can't help but admire her looks, as I always do. Almost with pride. Maly's got it going on, no matter how disheveled. Even today, on this random August Sunday, as we wait to celebrate the rebirth of her dead mother's spirit in the body of our second cousin's baby, she looks good. Her left leg's thrown up onto the dashboard, and I wouldn't be surprised if she started clipping her toenails. She's in a pair of jean shorts she stole from our other cousin, who was too chunky for them anyway, and a white T-shirt cut into a tank—also stolen—which she's stuffed down her panties so you can notice her thin waist. Hard to say if it's intentional, the way her clothes fit, all these hand-me-downs, which is the effect she uses, I guess, to chew up guys too dumb to realize she will spit them right out.
Through her cheap sunglasses, I see her bug eyes looking at me and past me at the same time, an expression affirming how I feel sometimes, like she's my responsibility, like I'm a dead broom reincarnated into a human, my sole purpose to sweep away her messes—whatever Maly happens to shatter next.
"Stop being dramatic," I tell her, my hands tapping the steering wheel. "You know it's all bullshit—the celebration, the monks, our third cousin or whoever the hell she is." I'm not sure I believe what I'm saying or if I'm just trying to make Maly feel better. "It makes zero sense, right?" I add. "Like, I'm no expert, but why would your mom reappear over a decade later?"
Maly shrugs her shoulders, indifferent now, too full of herself to entertain my attempts to console her. It reminds me of our sleepovers. Whenever my dad got stupid drunk, my mom would send me to Ma Eng's. He was never violent in front of me, but who knows what happened between my parents when I was sleeping on Maly's bedroom floor, especially in those years when my dad was jobless—after his restaurant failed and before he started cooking lunch for a rich-kid school—and when it became obvious I wasn't, you know, a normal boy, that I was a girly wimp who despised sports and watched weird movies. I was a precocious freak who came out before puberty, and I was clearly doomed. It's hard enough for people like us, my mom would say. All very cliché, in that gay sob story kind of way, but I can't explain it any better than that. They are my immigrant parents.
Anyway, every night of what my mom called "bonding time with grandma," even though technically Ma Eng's my great-aunt, Maly would nudge me awake with some fake urgent question, like was she actually pretty, or even that funny? For weeks, she obsessed over our eighth grade English teacher, how he claimed she wasn't ready for the high school honors track and then refused to write her a letter of recommendation. Why do teachers always hate me? What if that stupid dirtbag is right? Every night I told her, You're awesome, everyone's a dick, and so on, only to discover that she'd fallen asleep before I even stopped talking.
I was always there for Maly, right where she wanted me, on the floor beside her bed, doling out reassurances until she sank into her dreams. Though maybe she's getting worse these days, needier than usual. Because in less than a week, I'm heading to a four-year university in LA, while Maly's stranded, stuck with Ma Eng for another two years, at least, as she makes do with community college.
Maly has closed the passenger door and is now sticking her head out of the window. She leans her right hip against the door, presses her left foot onto the center console, holding herself in place for a moment, grabbing on to the truck's roof, until she steadies herself into a stillness, like she's posing for a famous photographer. I watch her, skeptically, as she dares to go handless, crams her fingers into her mouth, and whistles a deafening sound.
"Get over here, bitch!" she shouts, and my limbs tense up.
Jogging toward us now is Rithy, his arms bulging around a basketball, baggy gym shorts flopping. He looks like he always does, all brown-kid swagger. He's the kind of guy who recites 50 Cent lyrics and loves Boyz n the Hood and 8 Mile even though he doesn't—I suspect—get their political themes. This summer Rithy and Maly started fucking, which makes sense, as both of them have dead moms and shitty dads, but now I have to remind myself that I've also known Rithy forever. That he's not just Maly's personal plaything. Her boy toy, as she calls him.
Maly returns to her seat and tilts her sunglasses down while licking her teeth. Rithy's not even at the truck yet, but there it is: Lolita. Neither of us has read the book, and only I've seen the movie, but working at the video store, we both stare at that fading Lolita poster. Usually stoned. Stoned enough we get sucked into those heart-shaped glasses, that chick's wild, don't-give-a-fuck look, the crazy bravado of that tagline—HOW DID THEY EVER MAKE A MOVIE OF LOLITA?—as we burn illegal DVDs for our dipshit uncle to rent out.
"Aren't you supposed to be, like, setting up a party?" Rithy teases as he leans against the truck's door and stretches out his legs. He's sweating all over, probably from shooting hoops at his cousin's house, and I can almost smell him. Everything Maly says about his body swirls in my head.
"We've been exiled," she tells him flatly. "'Cause every Ma has been a psycho since the genocide. It's like, as long as they don't overthrow a government and, you know, install a communist regime, they aren't being total dicks." Pleased with herself, Maly laughs.
"Your Ma's hella rad, you know it," Rithy responds. "Old lady comes through with the beef sticks." He raises the bottom of his shirt to wipe the sweat off his forehead, flashing that flat stomach of his. I don't even care if it's intentional. "What time's the party again?"
Maly flings both her hands toward the duplex, as though pushing it all away. "Go ask Ma Eng yourself. I'm fucking tired of her bullshit."
"Girl, just tell me," Rithy says, biting his lip.
"Look, we can be late for my dead mom's birthday bash, okay, it's fine." She closes the distance between her face and Rithy's. "We're young and beautiful and the concept of time is a fucking buzzkill."
"Six is fine," I chime in.
"Oh, hey, Ves," Rithy says, oblivious to my focus on the veins of his forearms. "Excited for college?"
"You got any weed, Rithy?" Maly interjects, slamming back into her seat.
Rithy twists his face into an even bigger smile. "You know I do."
With barely a nod, Maly tells me she'll be right back, that if I leave she'll be pissed. She gets out of the truck and walks Rithy to his uncle's duplex, just down the block, as if leading a disoriented puppy home. His hand slides down her back to hover over her ass, which sways just enough with every step. He cocks his head slightly, to witness Maly by his side, before looking forward again. Even from here, I can tell how enraptured he is by her, how much his own dumb luck astounds him, that he should be so blessed this early in his life, all of us only three months into adulthood.
AND HERE'S THE PART WHERE shit gets common, right? Or rather, here's the part that makes outgrown Power Rangers twin sheets feel pretty awesome, allowing the srey to understand how men see her thick eyeliner and her fake nails, letting the proh assert power, for just a moment, over his own dark skin and his addict father with the bad, broken English. Here's the part that seems like a revelation until it's forgotten as life is lived, because nothing's special about an adulthood spent in the asshole of California, which some government official deemed worthy of a bunch of PTSD'd-out refugees, farting out dreams like it's success intolerant.
This is the part just like the thai lakorns, those soap operas from Bangkok dubbed into Khmer and burned onto wholesale discs from Costco. The srey—raggedy and poor, flush with the blood of forgotten royalty, angry from the backstabbing of wills and inheritances—cons her way into the arms of the prince whose family is the very cause of her misfortune. She allows the scheme to redeem her family's name to blind her to the feelings of real love developing beneath the high jinks, the pratfalls, her awkward but whimsical personality.