What’s Wrong
- Jul 26, 2019
- 4 min read
by Alex Simms
I’d stolen one hundred dollars from Mom’s purse yesterday evening. Her purse sat there in the dark, underneath the dining room table, like an encased artifact in a museum at night. I flicked the fringe on its sides, expecting it to tingle and clamor throughout the house. I positioned my arm like a crane and reeled my hand down to fish around the inside. I took whatever first felt like money — thinner than a credit card but not as noisy as receipt paper — thinking about the last time I likely met a twenty dollar bill from a birthday or Christmas card. I plucked something — crisp as sandpaper — and stretched my legs like a spider’s to crawl upstairs to me and my sister’s room where I hid my secret in my pillowcase.
I knew it was still night, not yet even deep blue morning, when my parents awoke me and my sister to inspect our room. I could hear my parents’ voices wreck into each other before they even turned on the light. I pretended to snore because Mom told me once it’d make her laugh when I did. I thought of an earlier weeknight when Dad tucked me into bed while whispering, practically proud, about how tired I was.
Our room was saved for last, perhaps the least suspicious in comparison to our three older siblings and their rooms. “Middle Marissa” dipped her drowsy lopped head in the shadow of the hallway like she was resting in a guillotine. Dylan and Erika, the two eldest of our sibling troupe, stood behind Mom and were old enough to have their pajamas be t-shirts referencing shows they liked. Kassie, my roommate and twin sister, hid her doe eyes behind her craft scissor bangs.
Words shoved themselves against Dad’s underbite. “Where the hell is it?” He checked underneath Kassie and I’s steel bunk bed, clanging its legs. I was afraid he would find a video game rental I hid down there that was two weeks overdue. Dad retracted his head from underneath the bed and twisted his neck around to look up at Mom. I felt the carpet, squished beneath me, dampen from the sweat on the soles of my feet. I imagined the laughing baseball players on my pajama set mocking me.
I wince when Mom talks. Her anger taints her accent and words come out like they were made in a blender. When she speaks in Tagalog, I’m not sure how to understand what she wants or when I know she’s done talking and my siblings, and even Dad, don’t know either. The quietest moments are whenever Mom switches languages, as if any possible potential sounds don’t remember how to function around her. I look at her and see her chest heaving but can’t hear her breath because it, too, becomes foreign to me. I thought about how her chest rises and falls when she laughs when she talks to her parents on the phone, in Tagalog, while they’re across the world. “Where is it?” Mom asked, the words drooling from her mouth.
The three steps alone from the foot of my bed to my pillowcase felt like its own labyrinth. Everyone’s stares at my back felt like shards cushioning into my skin. I rummaged in the case, unearthing the hundred dollar bill I’d folded in the dark as many times as I could like bad origami. I handed it back to Mom while it was wedged between my thumb and index finger like I was making an “OK” sign.
“I really thought it was a dollar,” I said.
“Why did you take it?” Mom asked, the words now drooling down the sides of her lips like churned cement. My siblings looked at me with their heads tilted up like how my math teacher might when calling on me to answer an equation.
“I wanted to buy an ice cream sandwich at lunch tomorrow.” My family got a reduced lunch.
I’d always carry Kassie’s forty cents in my left pocket — with mine in my right — and give it to her at her classroom before lunch because she’d always forget it on the living room table. I thought about taking the dollar bill, holding it out while waiting in the ice cream line, while keeping Kassie’s money and jingling it in my pocket to show my classmates that I had money to spare. That I could be American and I could have money and I wasn’t poor.
Dad dismissed us all to go back to bed and no one lectured me about the wrongdoings of stealing. Now, the next morning, I’m downstairs trying to clean the graphite smudges on my spelling homework, waiting for Kassie to get ready for school. Two tiny stacks of dimes sit parallel to each other on the living room table. I take short strides to the other side of the house, passing the kitchen. My most recent report card is still on the fridge since I’d gotten straight A’s, clinging on behind a Philippine Islands magnet. I peek my head around the wall leading into the dining room. Mom’s purse is gone, she already left for work. But maybe, with a flashlight, I could try again tonight.
Alex Simms is a storyteller from West Virginia, USA. Since completing his MA in English, he now writes fiction and nonfiction inspired by growing up as a gay Asian American man in Appalachia. His visual and written work has appeared in Rookie, Oh Comely, Et Cetera, and elsewhere.
