Deandra hated it when things got too serious. She’d always pull up her tracksuit bottoms and let out a laugh.
She kicked Zorka on the ankle with a smile.
“Besides, ain’t you supposed to be a dyke anyway?”
“Come on, Dee, don’t use that word,” Tiff said.
“I’m just playing, I mean ain’t none of my business if you into girls, unless you got a problem with it, then it’s my business, but – I mean, come on, girl, what’s up with your hair?”
“It’s no good?” Zorka asked touching her hair.
“You got like a mullet thing going on…”
“This is dyke hair?” Zorka asked.
Both Tiff and Deandra burst out laughing, covering their mouths and bending over to their knees.
Finally, when the laughter subsided, Deandra spoke.
“Nah, it’s cool, girl. Keep your hair like that. But everyone gonna be thinking you into girls, that’s all. Are you?”
Zorka thought about it.
“Yeah,” she answered.
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
Tammie had an old student of hers who was now the manager at the Marcus Southgate Cinema on 30th Street, so she pulled a few strings and got Zorka a job there on the weekends, switching between collecting tickets and indicating the direction of Theatre 1 or Theatre 2, or working behind the concession stand, asking customers if they would like sweet or salty popcorn, or a combination of the two, and if they’d like to save fifty cents by getting the menu with the large Pepsi.
At first Zorka was embarrassed and tried to make fun of her job to Deandra and Tiff, but Deandra sang out “She work harrrrd for the money, so haaaard for it honey!” and Tiff said, “You get to see some films for free then?”
Zorka snuck in Dee and Tiff whenever they wanted to see a film, and always gave them the large sweet-and-salty popcorn and two Sprites “on the house”.
Tiff told Zorka that if she really didn’t like her job she could ask her granny if they were looking for anyone to help out part time with the cleaning in the building where she’d worked as a custodian.
When the manager caught on to Zorka’s favours, he pulled her aside and told her that he didn’t want to have to call the police about this.
“Bout what?” Zorka said.
“About you getting your friends into the cinema for free to do drugs.”
“They don’t do drug, they just watch film…”
“Alright listen, I’m doing this as a favour to Tammie…”
“Why?” Zorka snuffed. “You fuckin her behind my uncle’s back?”
The police brought up Zorka’s alien status and hinted that she was still a guest in this country and should behave accordingly, otherwise she’d risk deportation.
When Zorka came by the cinema that summer, they already had some blonde chick working the cash register – Zorka recognised her from the bus stop. Just when Zorka was gearing up to make fun of her goody-good look, Deandra pointed discretely in her direction and said to Zorka:
“She a dyke too, by the way.”
Zorka looked her over carefully.
“Oooo, you like her, don’t you,” Deandra continued.
“No, she is simple looking.”
“Nah, girl, you totally crushin on that Mickey Mouse club over there.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m a go over there and tell her that you wanna get with that.”
Zorka pulled on Deandra’s T-shirt, whispering, “Stop, I kill you, Dee, I swear! I do not like her, I just looking.”
Deandra stepped back and Zorka let go and Deandra began smoothing out her T-shirt.
“Damn, girl, why you stretch out my shirt like that. Whatever I don’t need to play no Mickey Mouse matchmaker for nobody.” She shrugged her shoulders so that her T-shirt would fall right again.
“But she is kinda cute tho.”
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together… intricately woven in the depths of the earth…”
A couple of months before graduation, Zorka decided she needed a new look. She went to Good Will and bought herself a tight pair of black jeans, a tight black T-shirt and a men’s leather jacket. In the end she looked like a rock ’n’ roll scarecrow. She didn’t want to layer up her skinny body, she wanted to show it off now, like a blade. She spotted a used push-up bra with the black lace on each cup bunched and fraying. It was seventy-five cents. She bought it. For the first time, she felt that her breasts rose out of her shirt, like two knuckled fists.
Then she snuck Gejza’s electric razor and shaved her head.
There were black buckets of flowers outside of the Pick ’N Save grocery store, so she pulled a thin bouquet of soft pink roses wrapped in clear plastic and a magenta ribbon and walked off.
The Union Cemetery was between North 20th and Teutonia Avenue.
She crossed the street into an open plain of grass, with graves spotted throughout the green like handfuls of stones thrown upon the earth. As she walked uphill, the tombstones were arranged with more disciplined intent, in rows, by twos, no longer slightly crooked, but upright and all looking in the same direction. Tall cedar trees and ash trees covered the graves with netting shadows. Zorka spotted an old woman carrying a dark blue bucket uphill with a grey German Shepherd walking behind her.
“Excuse me!” Zorka shouted at her.
The woman turned around and set the bucket down, the dog stopped at her side. She put a hand up to her brow to cover the sunlight and peered out at Zorka.
“How I find a grave, please?” Zorka shouted, her voice curving up, trying to be as polite as she could shape it to be.
The wind blew a piece of the old woman’s hair out of her bun and the white strands flailed at her ear. The woman lowered her hand, picked up her bucket, made her way downhill towards Zorka, the brown and grey dog walking at her shadow.
“Well, it depends which grave you’re looking for…” the old woman said.
“My brother,” Zorka replied without thinking.
“Oh I’m sorry, sweetheart. What was your brother’s name?”
“Ray-Ray. I mean, Raymond Thomson.”
The woman looked at the pink roses then up at Zorka’s shaved head.
“Sure, I remember him. The runner. Nice boy…”
“He was super fly,” Zorka said, nodding solemnly downwards.
“You’re his sister?” the woman asked with a slight squint.
Zorka shrugged.
Zorka got Tiff a necklace she stole from Claire’s and Deandra a Tommy Hilfiger leather wallet she pulled from the Burlington Coat Factory in Brown Deer and placed a twenty into it. She wrapped the presents and took the 14 bus, got off in front of the Taqueria, and walked to the grey and red building on the corner of Lapham, pulled hard on the glass door that jammed, then stuffed the package into Tiff ’s granny’s mailbox.
“Leaving? I’m sorry but that’s the dumbest shit I ever heard. Wait till you graduate at least!” Deandra said.
“I do not wanna graduate.”
“Come on, Z! You ain’t dumb, I know it, so why you playing it like that?”
But Zorka didn’t answer. Instead, she sniffed loud.
“Shit, Dee,” she mumbled. Then the tears began to form in her eyes.
Zorka hummed a tune as she walked, the meaning distant from the melody, the melody a glaze down her throat.
It was like music for a silent film, where a woman turns the corner and the light dilates and we see with her eyes what will become love at first sight. Except this was music for a silent world, where a woman walks onto the stage and the sky dilates and we see with her eyes what will become—