Free For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu Page A

a donkey. Large-bodied with sharp Nordic features. Yet he seduced my sister away from medicine and then away from the continent; she returned with him to Germany without finishing her degree.
    Adele sent postcards addressed to Bonnie and me. We had to be quick and fish them out of the mail before our parents got to them. I couldn’t understand why she had gone to this place full of dead buildings and gray waters. Even the postcard pictures were taken on overcast days, as though the sun never shone there.
    At first, Bonnie and I stayed up late dissecting the postcards, constructing a life for Adele. The morning she left premed biology and just couldn’t take it anymore—London, Ontario, like Fort Michel with a Costco and a Walmart. Maybe she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the Ontario Thames. We pictured her wasted and lovely with despair. Milky water closed over her head. Then blond, robust, life-loving August reached in and pulled her out. He laid her on the riverbank. He nursed her back to health. Through a fevered haze, she heard him speaking in German, telling her these small Canadian towns were killing her, she must go to Berlin to heal her soul.
    Bonnie and I acted out this scene. She played August and I played Adele, throwing myself backward onto the bed with my hand over my eyes. I read aloud from the postcards in my best imitation of Adele’s voice, and Bonnie spoke in Germanic nonsense, hacking her
k
’s and
v
’s. Sometimes we had Adele save August’s life: He got lost, was unprepared for the harsh Canadian winter, the long roads to nowhere. He passed out in a snow-filled ditch, aching for the dense, crowded Old World, where the snow was kicked up by millions of feet, where you were never so alone. And then Adele appeared in a white fur-lined parka, his angel of mercy.
    Â 
    I woke from a recurring nightmare: I had grown an extra head. It craned its neck to look back at me. It had scraggly hair on its chin and neck. Extra arms popped out of my armpits; hideous growths and tumors appeared on my back and inner thighs, weeping pus. The thing between my legs grew. It
grew.
The second head crowed with laughter, its voice deepening away from Adele’s musical lilt with each laugh.
    I sat up in bed and looked outside for the sound that had woken me. Bonnie was climbing out her window. She wore a denim miniskirt, and her thighs looked moon-white as she landed in a crouch in the front yard, testing the silence. Earlier that night, she hadn’t been in the mood to go through the postcards again. “She’s our sister, not a saint,” she’d said, irritated. “Who says it’s some big love story? Maybe he was just her ticket out. Maybe he just liked her tits.”
    I stared at Bonnie—her new breasts strapped into place, lacy bra straps showing through a diaphanous shirt, the abrupt, fleshy curve of her back—and was struck with envy so hot I could have killed her. She’d broken a promise, done something alone that we were supposed to do together.
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    I wrote dutifully to Adele, filling the blankness for all of us: news from Helen at school in Los Angeles, Bonnie’s latest boyfriend. Eventually her postcards were replaced by letters addressed only to me. They grew longer and more intimate as Adele started to forget. She missed these in-between years, my nightmare years. When I read her letters, full of grown-up confidences, I felt the way Bonnie suddenly looked—Adele’s glamorous, sparkling equal. Like the young boy she’d left behind was a different person.
    One afternoon, I borrowed
Sabrina—
the Audrey Hepburn film Adele had taken us to see during her last summer at home
—
from the Fort Michel library. I renewed it twice and then never returned it. I told the librarian that I’d lost it and paid the fine. I was devastated by the jaunty advertising copy on the box, about Hepburn’s
most hilarious
role. I