Mandy
Mandy said not to stay overnight in the same room with the boys. Mandy was the one we listened to. She was beautiful, precocious, toxic-tongued. She always had juicy stories about guys who chased after her to tell.
In front of Mandy I was bookish, clumsy, and always wrong.
Who would’ve known, twenty years after, I became Mandy. I deleted her from all my social media networks. I killed her in my life, in order to become her.
I loved her. I loved her as a big sister, a mother figure, and a lover. I loved her so much that I desired her. She responded by dressing like a boy to go on a date with me. In that outfit of white shirt and black suit that came from who knows where, she handed me a red rose like a gentleman. I blushed. That was the first flower I ever received. It was from Mandy, the pride of my life. Mandy did it for me. She was fourteen, I thirteen then.
The night I found myself lodging in the same room in New York City with three guys graduated from the same university, I called Mandy in Guangzhou.
“Of course not! Careful they eat you up!”
“Since they are three, nothing could happen. It would be impossible to reach agreement among them.”
“But once they reach an agreement you’d have nothing left.”
I did not like what I heard. I went to sleep in the same room with three adult men. We had a cozy chat about love and sex before we felt asleep in our separate beddings. Some on the floor. Don’t remember the rest any more.
Mandy emanated the brand of femininity that tasted like a whole ocean of pink cotton candy populated with dazzling little shiny yellow fishes made of necessary or unnecessary lies. When you had an ocean of warm tenderness just for you, you wouldn’t care if some of it might be made of lies, would you? Mandy had small hands and slim fingers which made mine look like a men’s. When we went shopping together the earrings that look good on me were twice as big as those that suit her. But she was never surprised, everything was déjà-experienced for Big Sister Mandy.
The Mandy now is stuck with a retarded son who lives in perennial blissful oblivion, without the ability to control his behavior. At the age of four his little face already showed signs he would grow up to be a handsome man. Upon meeting me he tossed himself around in the room like a mad dog, bumping into furnitures. Mandy had to yelling at him in a voice unknown to me.
“He’s like that. What can you do.”
After spending a day with her and her son, I came back to my parents’ home. In my little old bedroom for a long time I did not know what it was or what to do. Until tears came unexpectedly and violently.
My mother came to sit next to me. She did not say anything.
Mandy denied her dressing like a boy for me. No she did not do that. She did not give me a rose. We were only good friends.
(End)
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