THE SECRET [111 a 113]

Pag. 111

THE SECRET

The Great Comic Book Battle had an unexpected side effect—one whose importance I didn’t realize until much later.

See, the fight was the first time that Yuen Kwai and I were really put out of commission. Neither of us had ever suffered a real illness before, and so we chafed under the restriction we suddenly faced: no working out, no running around, lie in bed, don’t talk, don’t make trouble. The only nice thing about being grounded by our injuries was that Biggest Sister and two of the other girls took it upon themselves to take care of me, putting ice on my bruises, giving me their extra food, and otherwise pampering me in a way I hadn’t experience since my mother left for Australia. Yuen Kwai got similar treatment. Suddenly, we found ourselves thinking weird new thoughts.

“Hey, Yuen Kwai, d’you ever think about how boys and girls are different?” I asked.

Yuen Kwai sat up and shifted a pillow behind him, breathing sharply as he stretched a muscle that still hurt. We’d been put temporarily in a side room meant for guests while we recovered. There were even real beds in it, and it was right next to the big sisters’ room, the private area of the older girls. For some reason, Madame demanded that Master put sisters over a certain age in a room by themselves.

“Sure, Big Nose,” he said, after some thought. “Number one: boys hit harder. Number two: boys eat faster. Number three: girls apologize and boys don’t. And number four: girls share snacks without fighting.”

“That’s not what I mean, you idiot,” I said. “I mean, have you ever seen what a girl looks like, you know, without clothes?”

“You mean naked?”

“What else does without clothes mean?”

“Of course I have,” he said, trying to sound cool and world-weary. “All the time.”

“Yeah, right!” I said, wounded. “If you know so much, how are they different from us then?”

Yuen Kwai turned red. “They don’t have ‘little boys,’” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Penis. No penises,” he said.

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I laughed. “How do they pee then?”

Yuen Kwai threw a pillow at my head, “Ahh, shut the hell up, I don’t know!” he said.

Since we had nothing better to do, we decided that we’d find out for sure. It would take a little effort, but the answer to the Great Big Secret of Girls was close at hand.

You might think we were naïve, not knowing anything about men and women and sexual things. After all, back then, most kids had a pretty good idea of how their bodies worked by the age of twelve. But we didn’t go to school. We didn’t have much time to play around. And who going to explain to us, anyway? Master? Madame? If we’d even asked them an innocent question, we’d probably have been whipped within an inch of our lives.

So that pretty much left it up to us to figure things out for ourselves. And that was harder than you might imagine. For us, boys and girls were pretty much the same. That is, we knew that girls and boys acted differently—but until age thirteen or so, all of us were in the same boat, training together, getting punished together, even sleeping in the same room, side by side. About the only thing we didn’t do was go to the bathroom and shower together.

In most of our social activities, we naturally divided ourselves into brothers and sisters, but we boys basically thought of the girls sort of as weaker versions of ourselves. They cried too much—more than Yuen Biao, even—frankly, they weren’t really very interesting.

But now I was determined to get to the bottom of this whole boy-girl thing. After the other students got back from the day’s performance, Yuen Kwai and I grabbed together some of our fellow junior brothers and outlined our plan. We didn’t let Yuen Lung or the other older students know, mostly because we realized they’d tease us mercilessly for being socially retarded.

The plan went like this: the girls’ shower was outside, on a balcony across the hall. It was a somewhat badly constructed facility, and it regularly leaked, leaving large and very deep puddles in the area. Though Master had forbidden boys to hang around the open entranceway to the shower, I’d noticed that the puddles, when viewed from the proper angle, gave a pretty precise view of what was going on inside.

The older sisters usually took their showers last, after the younger girls had finished their washing up. Skipping our own showers, we quietly made our way to the edge of the balcony, to a place where the light from the shower turned the dark pools of liquid into mirrors.

“No noise,” I whispered to Yuen Biao and the other little kids. The water was running in the shower. In just a moment, whoever was inside

Pag. 113

would step into the spray, putting her girl stuff on display. There was a flash of pink, and we all held our breath—and then released it. The girl was facing the wrong way!

“Aw, c’mon, turn around,” said Yuen Kwai, jockeying for better position in case she did. I pushed him back into place, but not before he got a quick glimpse of the bather’s face.

“Oh, my god, that’s Madame!” he whispered to us in terror. The littlest brother let out a squeal and bolted, followed quickly by Yuen Biao and our other curious companions, and our other curious companions, and then, almost as an afterthought, by me and Yuen Kwai.

Unfortunately, Madame heard the noise of us attempting to make ourselves scare. And screamed.

Just as we reached the doorway, Master burst outside, nearly running us down.

The next day, Yuen Kwai and I went back to practice. Not because our bruises were completely healed, but because it hurt so much to sit down.

After the failure of our little exploration of the gender gap, it was a long time before we dared experiment with the opposite sex again. Although we were surrounded by girls our age, the shared hardships of life at the academy encouraged us to see our different-sex peers as siblings, not as potential mates or sexual partners. And we rarely if ever had any contact with boys and girls from outside the academy. Besides, when all was said and done, we simply didn’t have the time or energy to indulge in more than curiosity.

And so, after the burst of excitement that came with the onset of adolescence and the beginning of our performing careers, our teenage years went by in relatively constant fashion, one day rolling into the next. There were meals to be eaten, skills to be practiced, and operas to be performed. Occasionally, the cycle would be broken by some excitement, usually ending in punishment. But even the punishment became routine. And actually, as time went on, and both we students and Master got older, beatings became less frequent—probably because delivering physical discipline to thirty-odd wayward boys and girls was almost a fulltime profession in its own right.

Of course, every so often, new students came and others went. But the faces and names were mostly forgettable, and none were close enough friends for me really to miss them. As for me and the other Fortunes, leaving school was something we’d pretty much put out of our minds.

Until Biggest Brother had the accident.