AMERICAN GIRLS by K-Ming Chang
My favorite game is called pee like a boy. My neighbor Stephanie shows me. Stephanie lives in a corner house with two stories and has an American Girl doll named Kirsten whose best friend died of dysentery. She shat herself to death, Stephanie says, At sea! I’ve never had a friend like that. She wants me.
Dysentery is when you have diarrhea to death. All the water funnels straight through your body, none of it diverting into your veins. You dehydrate into a handful of sand. I wasn’t sure what dysentery had to do with the sea, but Stephanie says that it’s all diarrhea, the ocean, which is why it’s brown and why we’re not allowed to swim in it. The toilet is a tunnel to other countries. Stephanie can swim and I can’t. She used to have a swimming pool in her backyard, but her parents capped it with concrete because it's not good for Chinese people to have bodies of water on their property, something about bad luck or drowning raccoons.
Stephanie’s mother teaches piano. I walk ten minutes to her house and enter through the side gate with a stain on it like a pig’s skull, and then I hop across the gray stones as big as my face through a yard filled with gravel. I remember that if I miss one, I’ll shatter my skull into brilliant bowls. My mother’s yard has a kumquat tree and a lemon tree and a clothing line and pipes and diapers and a bush of chilis that inflame birds’ wings, but Stephanie’s yard is empty. My brother says if it’s empty, it means everything’s buried; there are probably dead people beneath the gravel, or maybe the gravel is actually bonemeal. I think about this until I reach the sliding glass door. I can see Stephanie’s mother at the piano, which is brown and scarred like a kitchen counter. She sits beside a little girl in a white dress, one of her students, and balances quarters on the back of the girl’s hands. They cool and pool like birdshit. The goal is to be able to play without the quarters sliding off and dying at your feet like fish.
Stephanie lets me in and invites me to her room, which has its own bathroom. On her white-framed bed is Kirsten whose best friend died of diarrhea, her blonde hair siphoned into two braids, her white apron crackling with dried spit. Stephanie walks to the bed and flips Kirsten’s skirt up and shows me her backside, the brown stain she’s sketched with a marker. That’s where the diarrhea comes out, she says, so you don’t have to worry, I already know how she’s going to die, I’m ready for it, I’m going to bury her in a shoebox or my retainer container, and I can also resurrect her, if I make a diaper the size of the sea, she won’t lose any of her body’s water, I’ll catch it all for her.
Stephanie pulls me into the bathroom. White sink, white toilet, white tiles, white bathtub. Stephanie’s teeth are wearing metal leashes. Her canines will obey. She has a before-picture of her smile taped to the mirror, and in a few years, she will have an after-picture of her future mouth, all her teeth lined up like hounds, a perfect smile you can play like a piano. I have the teeth of poverty. Stephanie points at the toilet. In my house, the toilet wears a crown of stones that perform as molars, gnashing bad spirits into gravel. In this house there are no hauntings, except for Kirsten’s best friend who died of shit, and in memory of her, we fold toilet paper into a ship and let the toilet swallow it. Stephanie’s toilet is tall and straight-backed, no pipes exposed, and I imagine the tank transparent like an aquarium, whales leaping out of the lid and laughing.
Stephanie says we should play a game called pee like a boy. She asks if I’ve ever seen my brother pee and I say that I have, many times; sometimes he even does it outside, and he does it in the closet. Stephanie says, Don’t all your clothes get dirty?
No, I say, the toilet is in our closet. We pee behind a wooden door with slats, a night squeezed through our eyes. Stephanie shuts the door behind us and says, Why don’t we try?
Stephanie shimmies my pants down to my ankles. I stand in front of the toilet on my tippy-toes and my piss throws sparks all over the seat and the walls and my feet, igniting everything white. Stephanie laughs, slipping on the tiles I’ve glazed with my insides, falling onto her ass. She laughs and says I can’t do it like that. She shows me the right way: first, you have to take your pants and underwear all the way off and fold them and leave them in the bathtub. Then you have to waddle over to the toilet and squat really wide so that the whole bowl is between your thighs. Then you pee, but only a little at a time, injections of brine. See?
I laugh at the bowl bracketed by Stephanie’s legs. The toilet looks like a ceramic egg she’s laid. She looks like a broody hen, a mother to death. Stephanie says there’s a story her mother tells her about a bird that can change into a whale. The moral is that the sky and the sea are the same species, that we all have both wings and fins, adapted to any density of blue, and we can fly or float as we like, buoyed by breath or bladder. I don’t believe her, but Stephanie says it’s possible: our bones are hollow so we can be birds but also so that we can store snacks inside our calves and go to sea like fatty mammals. I don’t believe her. Stephanie says See, I’m peeing like a boy, and I watch in awe as she drops the sea into the toilet bowl like a trinket, never spilling or gilding the seat, my creature of the deep.
At home I practice being the bird who changes into a whale. I adapt to standing, the bowl bulging between my legs, and though I bruise the inside of both thighs, though I have to squat until my knee-hinges are rusted, I can pee in the right frequency, harmonizing with the pipes, keeping the seat pristine. Afterwards, I flush the toilet and imagine it gagging out a whale, a slippery best friend like the one Kirsten has, the girl who sacrificed all her fluids to the sea and got excised from her family.
Stephanie teaches me to brush Kirsten’s hair, a trickle of blonde down her plastic scalp. Stroke only with the palm, Stephanie says, your fingers will uproot. I obey, palming Kirsten’s head as gently as I can, imagining it is an expensive cantaloupe already rotten on the inside.
Kirsten has a pink-and-white checked dress with a different apron—frillier—but Stephanie says she can’t get changed unless we turn around and give her some privacy, because if we watch her we’re dykes, so we lock ourselves in the bathroom again.
I tell Stephanie I can do it now: I can pee like a boy, I can be her brother or her boyfriend, wear good jeans and fencepost teeth, but Stephanie shakes her head and laughs. She says what we did was just pretend: what’s real is that she has an oyster between her legs, and she pees out of a freshwater pearl, same as me. One day we will meet penises who will pry the pearls out, and then we won’t be able to pee out the sea, we’ll only pee out babies. She sits on the toilet with her skirt on and says that oysters are born shut but boil open. Someday we will no longer possess our pearls, and oysters are not precious without them. Beneath her, the toilet bowl roils with boiling water, but Stephanie stays sitting. Steam fleecing her face, cottoning her body.
Then give it to me, I tell her, give me the pearl and I’ll keep it for you. I want to be the bird who inflates into a whale, born for the sky and the sea, the bones tent-poling her skin, the soft occupant of her body. Stephanie shakes her head. If you had a penis, Stephanie says sadly, I would let you put it in me.
The toilet water shivers in its bowl, waves ironed into ice. I bite my tongue hard while she stares at me, remembering the girl who dies of dysentery, surrounded by water but unable to hold any of it, a pearl of blood rolling down my throat and into my belly. I will piss it into the toilet, beading my path to the sea. This world will die when it passes through me.
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook BONE HOUSE was published by Bull City Press. Her latest book is GODS OF WANT. She can be found at kmingchang.com.
