“O,” Chon says, buying time. They’re pals, buddies. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“Maybe that will make it better,” O says. “And I’m nineteen now.”
Not a kid anymore.
“O-”
“Look, if you think I’m, like, hideous or something-”
“It’s not that,” Chon says. O is the opposite of hideous-whatever that is. “I think you’re beautiful.”
He means it.
“And you love me,” she says.
He nods.
“And I love you, so…”
He shakes his head, smiles stupidly. “O… I don’t know…”
“Chon,” she says, “you’re going away… and I don’t know if
… and it’s my fault-”
“No, it isn’t.”
32
O’s first conscious memory was of a boy pissing on marigolds.
“Ophelia” then-it would be years before she dropped the “phelia” and became just “O”-sat in the playground of the little school and watched the older boy water the plants.
The school in Laguna Canyon was one of those neo-one-room schoolhouses-kindergarten through eighth grade-that operated under the theory that children learn best when not arbitrarily separated into rigid grade groups but allowed to find their own levels among kids of various ages.
This was during one of Paqu’s progressive phases, so every day she hauled her four-year-old daughter from their seven-digit home in gated Emerald Bay to the funkier environs of the canyon. The house and the money for the private school came from her settlement with O’s father, who divorced her in the sixth month of her pregnancy.
Even the teachers at the school thought that Ophelia was too young to start kindergarten.
“She’s precocious,” her mother answered.
“But still four,” the principal said.
“She’s an old soul,” the mother countered. Her psychic had told her that her daughter had had many previous incarnations and that her astral age wasn’t four, but four thousand, which made her older than her mother by a good seven hundred years. “In very real ways, I’m actually her daughter.”
The principal decided that Ophelia would probably benefit from getting out of the house for a few hours a day, and besides, the little girl was such a darling, already so beautiful, and so smart.
“I think we made a huge mistake sending you to that school,” Paqu would say years later when O was flunking virtually every class at Laguna High.
By that time, Paqu was in one of her conservative phases. And, by that time, Ophelia had changed her name to O and had started calling her mother Paqu.
But that was all later, and right then O was watching the boy water the flowers. At first she thought it was just like the gardener at home, but then she observed that the boy wasn’t holding a hose, but something else; then she heard a short, sharp shriek and a teacher ran over and grabbed the boy.
“John,” the teacher said. “Our private parts are what?”
John didn’t answer.
“ Private, ” the teacher answered for him. “Now zip up your jeans and go play.”
“I was just watering the flowers,” John said.
O thought that was very fun, that this magical boy could water the plants all by himself.
“What’s that boy’s name?” she asked when the teacher came over to her.
“That’s John.”
“Chon,” O mispronounced, and then got up to go look for the magical boy who, penis safely returned to his jeans, had wandered around toward the back fence searching for an escape route.
“Chon! Chon! Chon!” O hollered, wandering around in search of him. “Chon, play with me!”
The other kids quickly picked up the chant.
“Chon! Chon! Chon!”
The name stuck.
O became his shadow, followed him around like a baby duckling, a real pest, but it wasn’t long before Chon learned to put up with her, to become her protector, even to like her a little. Chon wasn’t particularly social, he didn’t “play well with others,” preferred to be alone, so the teachers were glad to see him make a connection.
O adored him.
The problem was that he disappeared from time to time-sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week-and then he’d be back at school again.
“Where you been, Chon?” she’d ask him.
Chon would make up fantastic stories for her:
He was out fishing and had been captured by pirates; elves who lived in the canyon took him for a trip to their secret world; aliens from another galaxy flew him into outer space and back again. Chon took the girl to China, to Africa, to Mars and the Mountains of the Moon, and he was her magic boy.
Then, one day, he disappeared for good.
When she realized that he wasn’t coming back, O cried all night.
Her mother consoled her with the words “Men don’t stay.”
O already knew that.
33
“So you’re saying, what?” she asks Chon now. “No?”
“No, I’m saying not now.”
“What a totally wussy answer,” she says.
“I’m a total wuss.”
She backs off.
“Okay,” she says, “you missed your chance, Chonny boy. That was it.”
Chon smiles. “Got it.”
34
It’s funny Chon doesn’t talk much, because he loves words and word origins.
He even knows the etymology of the word “etymology.”
(Google it.)
But O gets that you protect what you love and hold it close. Defending his reticence one day, Chon posited a question to them “Words,” he said, “are:
(a) A means of communication
(b) A means of mis communication
(c) Tools
(d) Weapons
(e) All of the above.”
