Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Angry Kids Come and Go

   I had a wakeup call for Thursday morning that also woke Hannah. “You know,” she groused at me. “You could be more consistent. You’re the only person I know who goes to a resort and wants to wake up before it gets light.”

   I felt like telling Hannah….well you know the words. RoAnn is right about cursing so I’ll leave it to your imagination. It was my last day and I needed to be at the Official Teen Pavillion by nine am. I also wanted a swim first.

   I had forgotten about the beach crew. Red face from Indiana, my washed up sailor, greeted me, as I hung my towel over the rail by the folded up lounges. The beach crew slowly raked the sand. “How’s it goin?” sailor’s voice had a weird twang. I thought rural Pennsylvania and felt a shiver caress my spine.

   “Fine,” I answered. I was too tired for this. This lacked the dignity of all the supreme confrontations that had stored themselves up in my mind.

   “You been to Club Tiqi yet? All the hot kids go to Club Tiqi.”

   “I’m not hot enough for that,” I replied. “All the hot kids are still in bed.” I walked toward the water, and then I ran. The water was warm. I felt like a coward. I had to come out eventually. I could make the excuse of showering off at the outside hose and changing down near the Pavillion and being in a general and disgusting rush, but something stopped me.

   “How’s your daughter?” I asked.

   “Good… Her Mom wants her back.” Sailor laughed. “Let her come here and get her. All she’ll do is stick her in that school and day care after because she’s busy cleaning up patients shit and piss in a nursing home and working on that nursing degree. That’s not life.”

   “No,” I answered. I thought of Piper and what he said about adults, but I also felt like telling Piper that it was really harsh and that the harshness drowned out everything else because looking at someone like Sailor and thinking about him was like staring over a cliff. You got sick. You backed away and in the end, you had no memoryof what you saw.

   “Can your daughter read and write?” I asked.

   “Yeah…I guess.”

   “How old is she?” I realized I had no idea.

   “Twelve.”

   “She goes to Club Tiqi?” I asked. Now I was getting somewhere.

   “Yeah…but they don’t always let the young kids in. They give them their own club though. It’s nice, computer games, pool, water sports, fun stuff.”

   “Does she miss her mom?”

   “Not really…yeah, sometimes.”

   I imagined finding Sailor’s daughter and sending her back to Indiana, but I did not even know the child’s name. I tried to picture her, pale skinned, freckeled, round cheeked with weirdly angry eyes, a kind of a cross between my step-cousin, Liana, and sailor. The thought made me shiver as I showered.

   I changed to dry clothes in the bathroom near the food court in Building 2. I got a Dr. Pepper and made it to the Official Teen Pavillion by five minutes before nine. I did not recognize half the kids but there were close to a dozen of us. Haley explained the choices.

   Four kids volunteered to go to the nature preserve in the state park. Pock marks, a fat girl in a fashionably torn t-shirt that looked faintly ridiculous and a lot like a work of art, and a boy with a head of nearly shoulder length, bleach blonde hair. Half the kids did not have sunscreen. Haley kept a big bottle in her satchel.

   We stood on the deck of the ferry saying nothing though the ride to Provodenciales proper in day light was beautiful. We did not even make the beginnings of conversation. Pock Marks no doubt knew the score, but the other three kids were just getting used to their second rate status. I felt like explaining to them that it would only be for a few days, and they were still paying customers at a resort. In the real world this would have been different. It could mean no support and the wrath of an adversarial, adult world.

   Kids in Young Achievers who had no such support had to be careful how much they fought with adults. Then I wondered if the new kids knew about me. It was possible. I hadn’t handed out my business card, but someone could have shown them the copy I gave them.

   By the time we reached the dock in the harbor, I realized I hadn’t looked at any of the adults on the nature preserve tour. They outnumbered us by a good five to one ratio. They packed special buses. We didn’t take jitneys this time, and there was no time to buy soda or get more foreign currency.

   The park was beautiful. We toured by bus and then I chose to take the hike which meant that I was with half a dozen adults.  The rest of the kids stayed behind to hang out on the beach and tour the museum and listen to a story teller. I imagined the stories they would tell of how bored they were. Well, they had a choice, I thought.

   I looked among the adults, but could not find Ms. Marmelstein. Well, it was not safe to look for her, and I had her business card. I made up my mind to email her an apology when I got back to New York. I listened to the guide talk about tropical climate and vegetation. I realized we’d learn about some of this stuff in school when my biology course finally got around to teaching ecology. I felt ignorant and voiced my thoughts.

   “It’s good to see kids interested in science,” said a man with combed over half black-half white hair. He had a nice smile and a weird, square chin.

   “Why shouldn’t kids be interested in science, or foreign languages, or anything else?” I asked. Boy did I sound combative.

   “I was just observing. Most kids are lost in their own little worlds.”

   “And most adults are FAILURES!” Piper’s words screamed in my head.

   “I’m not like most kids here,” I said. Politics was not going to go away. I handed the stranger my business card.

   “Wow,” he sighed. “How’d you wind up here?”

   “It’s too complicated to explain, but we hosted an ECBAS kid for Christmas and her family is paying back the favor.”

   “Your parents do work for Star Corps then…”

   I blinked. I hadn’t expected this and also “do work” is different from “work for.” Sailor worked for Star Corps. Dad consulted which is the pretty way to say “do work for.”

   “Yes,” I replied.

   “What kind of work?” asked the man.

   “Why should I tell you?” I wondered. “Why do you want to know?” I felt myself go on guard.

   “Just curious. I’m a former journalist. These days I teach college. My grandchildren are involved with ECBAS.”

   “You’re just a paying customer then?” I asked.

   “Not really. I’ve helped Star Corps on some of their publications. It was freelance work but it pays well and sooner or later you get pulled in.”

   I stared at the ground. “My father is a civil engineer,” I replied.

   “That makes sense. Any time I got sent abroad I’d always see the technical crew, sensible, straight laced, hard working. They’d play chess, cards, talk about collecting, come home with souvenirs, swap war stories. I wish I could have written about them rather than some of what I cranked out.”

   “We can write about ourselves,” I answered.

   The journalist smiled. Then he handed me his business card. We got back to Rialitee about 1:30pm. Haley took me aside. “I need your help Kore,” she said. “Can you take Simone and Kaci out to lunch.”

   I did not know who Simone and Kaci were. Simone was the fat girl with the torn t-shirt which was fringed art work and Kaci was a girl with a very, fashionable silver belt and two-tone hair bleached nearl white at the tips. I had nothing to say to either girl who both looked hot and bothered.

   I was also very hungry. “Do you eat dumplings?” I asked either girl. The girls looked at one another as if I had said: “do you eat poison?”

   “Chinese dumplings, dim sum,” I rephrased myself.

   “Everyone loads up on carbs in these places,” sighed Kaci.

   “Do they have that here?” asked Simone.

   I said they did and soon we were trooping toward the bowels of Building 3 to go to a dumpling and noodle specialty Chinese restaurant. I helped us pick out a platter of assorted goodies, not so much to make ourselves sick, so we could swim. “I’m not putting on a bathing suit in front of everybody,” complained Simone.

   “How are you going to get in the water then?” I asked.

   Both girls giggled. Then the laughter died away. Simone came from a small town in Oregon. She had a tutor and studied secretly at night because she was still going away to college. She was going to major in art though. Her parents said she could and she put up with the tutor.

   Kaci winced. Then she sighed. “Everyone’s really a hypocrite at heart,” she told us all. “I mean, the hot girls still get all the boys.” Kaci came from just outside Austin, Texas.

   I thought of the boys in my own life, Piper, Alvarez, Micah, Frank who was not as useless as we complained he was. “A boyfriend is not as important as all the boys you know,” I told both girls.

   “You mean just a friend friend boy,” answered Simone.

   “Yes, but a bunch of friend friend boys,” I explained back. “I’m in Computer Club back at school.”

   “Computer Club?” asked Kaci. “There’d be boys there.”

   “Where do you live?” asked Simone which was asking where I went to school.

   “Manhattan but I go to Brooklyn Tech,” I explained. The girls looked at eachother.

   “There really are nerd schools!” Simone cried out.

   I decided it was time to enlighten both girls. I handed them each one of my business cards. “Shit!” screamed Simone.

   “Fuck,” sighed Kaci. “No wonder you don’t care about carbs.”

   “Why are you with Young Achievers?” asked Simone.

   “I believe in school and learning,” I answered. “I think its fairer to have something where if you work hard, you do well, than just the hot and popular kids being important. Any one can work hard, but not everyone can be beautiful or hot.”

   “Everyone is beautiful if they feel beautiful inside!” Simone cried. Kaci laughed.

   “The world is full of bullshit,” Kaci explained to Simone. Simone hung her head. “You can’t say that kind of shit around grownups because it makes them uncomfortable,” Kaci drove her point home.

   “So you just gave up and joined the nerds,” Kaci completed my story.

   “No,” I replied. I told the girls about studying for the New York Specialty High School exam. I told them how no one believed I could do the math. I hadn’t fully believed it myself, but I wanted to get away from that Fast Crowd at Houghton and the way to do that with my dignity intact and riding high was to get into Stuyvesent or one of the other public, entrance examination high schools.

   “Couldn’t your parents just find you a new school?” asked Kaci.

   “I would have had to admit I failed,” I replied. “I wasn’t going to do that,” I finished up.

   None of us said much of anything as we finished lunch. We walked slowly back to the Teen Pavillion. I wanted a swim and then I wanted to study. On the porch with the Christmas lights, a fellow teen, a girl, cried. I looked up and was glad that it was neither Kaci nor Simone. The girl was small and pretty, with flowing back curls. The world is full of pretty teenage girls, I thought. Being pretty doesn’t mean you are hot.

   Kaci had her arm around curly’s back. Simone stood beside her in a sympathetic huddle. Other boys and girls looked on. “You know a kid can kill themselves if they get bullied too much,” Kaci doled out the advice.

   I went for one more swim and then went inside to change. Amanda was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom. She did not look happy. “What had I done?” I wondered.

   “Come in my office,” Amanda told me.

   I stood there waiting to get dressed down. Amanda looked at me hard and then almsot laughed. “I need your help, Kore.”

   I did not have to ask why. Half of me knew. “Can you show some of those new girls around during the dinner break?”

   It was a strange request. “I don’t think half their guardians will come and get them,” Amanda sighed. “When we get a big influx of kids, we get status issues. And these kids were good wherever they were. You can see that in the clothes and the hair, but Rialitee is competitive and it shuffles people, and some of these kids, well you know, their parents and teachers spoiled them a bit. Inflated ego and self esteem.”

   “Bait and switch,” I spat back. “A meritocracy is fairer than deciding who’s hot and who’s not.”

   “I’m not going to argue that. I’m asking your help.”

   “I’m sorry,” I answered. “Can you suggest a good place to take them.”

   “Do like you did at lunch. Maybe if they see more of this resort and get a bit of a tour, they’ll settle down. Take them as much above ground as you can.”

   “Thankyou Amanda,” I replied.

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