- No blood.
Not true.
You got pushed down by Wilson Reemers after making it to first base fair and square during kickball on the roof playground. He cried like you had hit him. Ms. Chow the paraprofessional with the bright turquoise scarf like beetle wings took you to sit on the big blocky cement bleachers as a punishment you didn’t deserve at a recess that you had waited for a week because the rainy season floods blew out the road to school and made recesses indoors. Then you had to play chess or crossword puzzles and couldn’t even talk. And whispering was impossible when Karl Leung was doing his imitation of the teacher Ms. Lyon. Also, because Wilson pushed you, your knee was bleeding, a line of blood running all the way from your scraped knee to your sock and onto your new Reebok Pumps your dad just brought from a business trip to Seoul. You didn’t see it yourself until Lizzy Alton, the blonde girl from New Zealand, pointed it out as she walked to the front of the line to go to music class. She was the week’s line leader, a decision you agree with.
She is so pretty. She could be the president of New Zealand.
- No guns.
This works until the British kid who lives below you in Shouson Hill says he wants to play “goodies and baddies tag.” It turns out it’s “goodies and baddies gun tag” which he explains once you get past the carpark. He has an Uzi-shaped pellet gun hidden in his dark blue Members Only jacket. He yells “Miami Vice!” and shoots as you scramble up the concrete-covered hill and find a thick drainage pipe with sections and bolts sticking out you can climb up.
You are so scared. You’re wearing your new stone-washed Lee jeans and later get slightly in trouble with your mom for getting them dusty because they are real Lee jeans, not knock-offs from Stanley Market, but thankfully the only shots he gets in hit you on the back of your jeans-covered thighs and are painless.
One shot does zing by your head as you escape to safety, right before you pull open the chain-link of the tennis courts. The pellet boings off a very hollow part of the drainage pipe. The sound does make you think, “Crocket and Tubbs. Cool.”
You don’t ask the British kid to play again, even though your mom pesters you about it because his mom tells her he’s lonely when your moms, or “mums,” see each other by the pool at the Hong Kong Country Club.
- No murders. Only disappearances.
Your big packet of Super Lemon candy disappeared from your school cubby where you had stashed it to share with Karl Leung on the bus. You know Wilson Reemers has it. You would murder him, maybe, if this were a gangster movie like the wild violent Chinese ones you see on the TVs at the video place where you go to rent Red Dawn for the tenth time. If he was a Russian invading the U.S. like the enemies in Red Dawn, then you would have to kill him because that’s how it goes in war even if he’s also a nice guy with kids like in the Sting song your dad listens to on the cassette deck in his car. Then they don’t call it murder. It’s called policy.
- No real monsters.
How is this even possible? The world is filled with monsters. There’s Wilson Reemers, who keeps you in a headlock in the stairwell coming back down from recess, cutting off your oxygen until you elbow him in the gut. Your mother gets called and you’re sent home from school but when you get that square blow to his gut in, you do think, “Crocket and Tubbs. Cool.”
There are also real monsters like Pol Pot. You saw the movie Killing Fields. You shouldn’t have kept watching. Your dad was watching it on video and didn’t notice you next to him on the green silk sofa until more than a half hour in. Afterward, you couldn’t sleep alone for about three days and slept in your parents’ bed which made your dad groan like a monster and is something you worry about Lizzy Alton finding out even though you know it’s impossible for her to find out. In your head you imagine running into her at the pool at the Hong Kong Country Club and you shielding her from pellets fired by the British kid who turns out to be a nefarious agent—in this case the pellets are rounds from a real Uzi—and when the two of you reach safety after you hot wire an Aston-Martin and zip through the Aberdeen Tunnel and make it to a look out on the road up to Victoria Peak you’re forced to tell her your deepest secrets and surely this will become unavoidable.
- You’re allowed one scream.
Yes. You get to ride next to Lizzy Alton on the fifth-grade field trip to Ocean Park—right next to her and her pretty, freckled face and warm arm and you look once as the Dragon rollercoaster takes off—once before the first corkscrew turn and her hair like rays of golden perfect sun whip out and then across her face and yours. You scream a lot and so does she. You kind of know what’s ahead because you’ve both been on the rollercoaster many times before.
That’s like a horror story. At the end something will be gone forever but someone will also survive. What’s gone is you and her. Your dad says you’re going to move. Again. Someday you’ll wish you could scream like that day, feeling like everything could end—you might get flipped right off the track of the coaster and off the mountain top and into the South China Sea but at least when it happened you felt so alive.