I Tried to Eat an Apple by Billie Chang

I tried to eat an apple whole the other day. I spit it up on the tile, watching as my saliva bubbled atop the cracked checkers. Vince and I laughed hard at this: my attempt, the fall, the wet sound of bruised apple flesh. We stopped only after Vince sat on the wicker chair so hard it splintered. I put a blanket over it and Vince biked home, using his jacket sleeve to gather my spit-stained apple and throw it outside – for the squirrels, he said. Three days later, Mom took the blanket to wash and when she screamed, I told her that Hurricane Nancy must’ve done it. Mom said that wasn’t funny; last month’s hurricane had taken Grandpa’s beloved chicken coop and now he had to buy the factory-farmed eggs they sold at the grocery. I said, “Wow, what an inconvenience!” and was grounded for a week.

I could tell Vince liked me. He was the only person I knew that would look me straight in the eyes when speaking. We met one Wednesday, when he cut me off in the parking lot outside the Walmart and I’d flipped him the middle finger. It was my first time being so bold. I felt invincible then, until he’d rolled down his window beside me and started yelling so loudly I could see his tongue. I drove off, crying. The next day, he sat beside me in the school cafeteria. I found out he was one year younger than me. He bit off a slice of my pizza without asking and up close, he didn’t scare me at all. He had a soft jaw and a shaggy haircut: that in-between that made it hard to tell if he was trying to grow it out or if he was just lazy.

His mom had immigrated from the same place mine had. It wasn’t a hard thing to figure out; it was just them and Mr. Chin, who liked smoked pork and wanted to move to Arkansas because that’s where good soil was. This fact made Vince feel familiar, made me think that he understood. A few days after the cafeteria, our moms fought at the gas station. Mine had cut Vince’s in line. They both were buying lotto tickets. I remember Vince laughing when the cussing started. Mom had never taught me Chinese, so I sat there pushed against the wall, watching the words fly and mean nothing – and thinking about how this is what Mom must feel like everyday. The manager pushed us out after, a wad of gum hard in his mouth. Later on, Vince offered to teach me some words; he went to the Chinese school down the street, the one by the graffitied mall. I agreed, only because I liked the way his eyes looked when he asked, as though he was trying hard to catch something. We spent a lot of time together because of that.

A Saturday comes and Vince takes me to a party on Sumter St. It’s a chipped house with a dust-bowl backyard, the grass thinning to reveal blurred faces all around. Five minutes in, I smell of cigarettes and dirty laundry. Vince leaves me when we enter, his hair bobbing above the heads as he snakes his way to the beer. I’m left standing, pressed up against the nailed fence, next to a tree that’s starting to shed. I can feel each beat of the music pump in my chest. I look around nervously for Vince and am deep in this search when someone approaches. He is attractive in the way that rotten fruit feels soft: I don’t think he would be capable of hurting me. He clutches a can in his hand. Staring at it makes my mouth dry.

“What’s up?” He smiles. One of his front teeth are chipped.

I don’t answer and instead yell, “How’d you get that?” I’m talking, of course, about his teeth.

“Bit into a hard candy.” He takes a swig, then offers me some. Vince isn’t coming, so I accept. He talks some more and I listen. At one point, his hand grazes my knee and I wonder if Mom will be able to smell him – his damp, wood-like scent – when she does my laundry tomorrow morning.

At the end of it all, he asks for my name. I tell him, even though it was one of the first things I said to him. He nods, his eyes glazed over, and tells me I’m pretty. He starts to say something else, his tongue wetting his lips, but it is then that I feel a rough hand tug mine. I know by touch that it’s Vince’s, wanting to leave. I sink into it and let him take me away. I don’t bother asking chipped-tooth-guy for anything; I know it’ll be easy to find him later, if I really wanted to, on Instagram or something. Vince and I weave through the crowd. I can tell he’s tipsy by the way he walks. There’s no rhythm to it and his left foot clangs into his right. Towards the front, by the beer pong, a group of boys are doing push-ups. Their arms pump up and down, sweaty, glistening in a way that makes me think of rinsing a muddy peach with water. Mom used to make us do that – rinse peaches – after we’d stolen them off of the tree in Mr. McCarthy’s backyard. Dad refused to plant her one for herself. Outside, on the corner of Sumter St. and Cormac Ave, Vince turns to me and kisses me. It is wet and quick. I blush and we walk home together.

A week later, I notice Mom’s ring is not on her finger. I wonder aloud if she lost it in the garbage disposal again.

“I don’t use that thing anymore. I fish everything out with a spoon. The wooden one, with the burn.” She stares at me. Her eyes are darker than before.

“Oh.”

“You know, your dad always loved another woman.” Her voice is slow. I’m making a grilled cheese on the stove. It simmers as she speaks.

“What?”

“My mom was the one that put us together. I didn’t know him, not really. She thought I was getting old.” She bites her lip. I think about how she told me, once, that she would have loved to get a lip piercing when she was younger. I had laughed in her face. “It wasn’t a choice I made.”

My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. Mom continues, as though she’s a river: “It’s okay. We’re so similar. It feels as though we came from the same place. Like he remembers the things I do.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I can smell the cheese burning and I shift my feet. We have never really talked this intimately before.

“He loves someone else.” She says this with no urgency, as though she doesn’t care, really, if I understand. “Always has.”

“But what if that was a long time ago?” I ask. I look down and realize that I don’t like how she’s sitting. Her feet are swinging underneath her on the kitchen island stool, casually. She picks her teeth, sighs, then says, “That means it matters more.”

I drive myself to the shopping mall downtown. Vince says he is busy. I park and spot a cat by the bushes that line the lot. When I open the door and hang my foot out, he scatters, his eyes too-big, reptilian almost. I look up and it is then that I see Vince, across from me, talking to someone else. Her legs are draped over his; she takes a sip of his drink. He lays his head against her shoulder, in a way that means he cares. I don’t recognize her; she must not go to our school. As he kisses her, open-mouthed, I think, briefly, about how easy it would’ve been, if my parents were born now, for them to love multiple people at once.

I walk into a shop, my face hot. My sock has begun to curl in on itself, under the heel of my foot. A mannequin stands in the corner. His arms are thin and smooth, and he has a fat grin. His smile is cut off, slightly, by the knit scarf wrapped tight around his neck. Before I can think, I run up and slap him once, hard, against his cheek, the plastic thudding my palm. I am gone before anyone can flinch at the sound.

We receive a letter in the mail. It is addressed to Mom, but I come home first. Inside lies one, crisp lotto ticket and a note I can’t read. I leave it there, all open on the kitchen counter.

Billie Chang

Image: a rosy red apple hanging on a branch from pixabay.com