wild horses

Jenny Cho joined our class halfway through eighth grade. She had just moved from Korea, and was living with her aunt and uncle. Her parents still lived and worked in Korea, sending money and letters every month. Our teacher, Ms. Burke, assigned me to be her tutor and help her get settled.

Jenny knew very little English, and the English she did know was often difficult to interpret.

"Where are you?" she would ask me.

"I am here with you, in school."

"No. WHERE are you? I am okay. Where are you?" she would shout, frustrated.

"Oh..." I would finally understand. "HOW are you? I am fine, thank you".

Jenny would smile and nod, relieved to have been understood.

I was happy to help Jenny get acclimated. At that time, I was pretty low on the social ladder in my class. These things seemed to be seasonal. I would have friends and be told secrets one day, and the next I was an untouchable. When Jenny arrived, it had been a long, dark, friendless period. I was hungry for any type of social interaction, and Jenny proved to be a fun companion.
Jenny's aunt and uncle owned a junk shop on the avenue. They sold items ranging from fake snot to day-glow bracelets. They also had rows and rows of tooth-rotting candy, and her aunt would give us fistfuls whenever her husband was busy with customers. Jenny and I would do homework and watch television in the back of the shop. She lived upstairs with her aunt and uncle, but we rarely went up to the apartment. We preferred the small cramped space in the back of the shop, within easy reach of the candy.

I loved the smell of that back room. Jenny's aunt would feed us snacks after school. Some days she would make us a spicy soup that made my nose run but smelled fragrant and delicious. Other days we would have vegetables and rice, which we would eat with chopsticks. I had never used chopsticks before and I felt very sophisticated, though clumsy.

I would often bring Jenny to my apartment after school, and we would practice conversational skills with my family.

"How is you today?" she would beam at my mother.

"ARE! How ARE you today." my mother would correct her, smiling broadly.

"Yes thank you. Is good today."

Eventually, I would pull Jenny away from my mother and we would plop in front of the television, eating peanut butter sandwiches and watching MTV. Jenny's tongue would cluck loudly as she tried to pry the peanut butter off the roof of her mouth. Her brow furrowed as she fought with the sticky texture, but she always asked for more when she finally finished her sandwich. I had never seen someone take so long to eat something so small.

One day, we were doing homework in the back of the store. Jenny kept sneaking glances at me over her book.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," she smiled slyly and ducked back under her book. This went on for an hour. Jenny would stare at me, I would ask what she was looking at, and she would hide her face from me. Finally, she tore a page out of her notebook and handed it to me. I had to stare at the page for a full minute before I realized what it was.

"You like?" Jenny asked hopefully.

It was a portrait of me, only pretty. She drew my face the way I saw it in my head, without braces or acne. My smile was warm and my large eyes were twinkling. It was the first time I ever thought that I might be pretty. My chest swelled at the thought that this was actually the way someone else saw me, and I was so grateful to Jenny for sharing it with me.

Jenny and I spent a blissful month bouncing back and forth from my apartment to her store. My family invited her along on drives, and her aunt and uncle always gave me a small gift when I visited the store. They were happy that I was a good friend to Jenny, and they credited me for the improvement in her English. I credited the television. Nonetheless, I quickly amassed a veritable fortune's worth of junk from their shop. I had lace fingerless gloves in every day-glow color, black rubber bracelets running up both arms, and enough fart powder to exterminate my entire eighth-grade class.

One day during lunch, Prissy Krissy, who had formerly been one of my lifelong friends, approached us. She flicked a pair of long dangly earrings Jenny's aunt had given me from her store. They were hot pink and had little stars on the end.

"Where'd you get those?" she snarled.

Jenny and I were studying for a spelling test and I ignored Prissy Krissy.

"Concentrate, Jenny. Plateau. Can you spell plateau?" I enunciated the word slowly and carefully. Jenny, however, was not listening to me. She was smiling brightly at Prissy Krissy.

"They from aunt's store. I give. You like? I get more."

"Jenny!" I whispered and tugged on her sleeve, shaking my head. Jenny frowned at me in confusion.

"Oh, I very like!" Prissy Krissy squinted her eyes at Jenny. "I be you friend. You give me earring. I be you friend."

"Tomorrow I bring present. You like." Jenny nodded her head excitedly. Prissy Krissy petted her head.

"Tomorrow I be you friend." With that, Prissy Krissy walked away.

I tried to warn Jenny against Krissy and the other girls, but she was too excited to be making new friends. I understood. Even though we had fun together, it often got lonesome without other friends to interact with. Still, I knew what Krissy and the other girls were capable of, and I knew they would take advantage of Jenny. I tried to explain this, but Jenny held her ears and shook her head.

"Krissy nice friend. She like me now. You see."

Dread settled in my stomach. I knew this would not end well for either of us.

The next day, Jenny came into class with a shopping bag full of gifts. Krissy and the other girls gathered around as she handed out earrings, necklaces, bracelets and gloves. I wondered if her uncle knew how much merchandise she had taken. The girls patted her on the back and played with her hair, telling her how pretty it was. Jenny glowed with all of the attention. I hung back, watching the circus parading around her.

At lunch that day, Jenny excitedly relayed all of the compliments the other girls had heaped on her. Just as I was about to bite into my sandwich, Krissy marched up to us and grabbed Jenny's lunch out from under her. We both looked up in confusion.

"Come on, Jenny. You eat lunch with us now."

"Okay!" Jenny stood excitedly and motioned for me to follow. Krissy put her palm in my face.

"Not her. Just you." Jenny looked torn, glancing at the table full of girls beckoning her over, and then back down at me.

"Go ahead." I shrugged. "Eat with them." I feigned nonchalance, but my stomach shrunk when she actually walked away.

"See you for homework!" she shouted back to me. I finished the rest of my lunch in silence.

While we were in the back room working on math problems later that day, I began to feel better. Maybe I had overreacted to the other girls. Maybe we could all be friends again. I didn't have to worry about Jenny being like the others. She was too nice for that. Just as I began to relax and feel comfortable with Jenny, we were interrupted by a loud group in the front of the store.

"Yo Jenny, come on out here." Jenny looked at me excitedly and ran to the front of the store. I followed behind her sickly, poking my head out of the curtain to see what was going on. Krissy and the other girls were crowded into the store. Jenny's aunt and uncle looked nervously from one girl to the next. They were pushing one another into display cases and pocketing candy.

"Hello! These my friends." Jenny pointed to the girls as she spoke to her aunt and uncle in Korean. Their faces frowned at the loud girls, and they looked back to me for reassurance. I shrugged my shoulders.

Jenny was swallowed up into the group and led out of the store. I picked up my book bag and walked out of the store. Jenny's aunt and uncle smiled apologetically as I waved good-bye to them.

The next day I watched Jenny eat lunch with the other girls. I smiled over at her, but she looked away quickly. As the other girls giggled, Krissy sauntered over to me and crossed her arms over her chest.

"Jenny says she's not your friend anymore. She doesn't want you hanging out at her store anymore either."

"Yeah, right," I said confidently. My resolve cracked, however, when I noticed that Jenny would not meet my gaze. I stood up and walked past Krissy towards Jenny. The other girls formed a protective barrier around her.

"Jenny. We're doing homework today, right? I'll see you later for homework, right?" I tried to look over and through and around the girls, but Jenny was lost in their midst.

"We'll teach her English now," Krissy assured me.

"Hey Jenny, tell Noreen what we taught you."

With that, the girls parted and I stared down at Jenny, whose eyes were focused on the table in front of her.

"Go ahead, say it," Krissy goaded. I waited expectantly, holding my breath.

"Ugly bitch." Jenny had said it right to my face, out loud. She had picked her head up from the table and found my eyes. Her words were perfectly formed, and I could tell she knew what they meant. The girls exploded all around her, slapping her on the back and throwing their heads back with laughter. I quietly walked away.

Jenny began to dress and speak more and more like the other girls. She got into trouble for not doing homework and for talking back to teachers. I watched it all from a distance, sad for her and for her aunt and uncle. The girls and boys in our class all took advantage of Jenny now, putting in orders from the store and threatening to withhold their friendship if she didn't comply. I figured half of the store's merchandise ended up in the hands of our classmates.
The girls encouraged Jenny to call me names whenever she saw me, which she obligingly did. I stared blankly as the new words fell clumsily from her mouth: "fucker", "bitch", and "slut" were words she became more proficient at using. In a strange way, I was proud that her English was improving so rapidly.One morning at the start of class, Jenny came and stood over my desk, smiling sweetly. She looked like the Jenny that I had known, and I felt a stir of hope in my chest. She held out a folded piece of paper and nodded. I opened it and immediately balled it up and stuffed it in the bottom of my book bag. Apparently, the rest of the girls had already seen it and they roared with laughter as my face turned scarlet. It was a drawing of me, very unlike the first drawing Jenny had done. This portrait was grotesque-looking, with exaggerated braces and rampant acne. I concentrated very hard on the blackboard and dreamed of graduation, just a few short months away.
I still have the first portrait, the pretty one that Jenny drew of me. I know that was the real Jenny, and I don't blame her for the way she behaved. Not really. The girls in our class were like a stampede of wild horses. You either ran with them, or you were trampled under their feet. Sometimes, you ended up doing both.