Free Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok Page B

sniffing her hand. She put her finger under the thin collar he was wearing. “This keeps all the feet away.”
    I must have looked confused because then she pretended she was scratching herself under her arms like a monkey. I’d never seen an adult, let alone a lady, do anything so undignified before.
    “No scratch,” she said. She took her hands away. “All okay.”
    The little brother had already disappeared into the kitchen and we followed him. I was introduced to the housekeeper, an angular white woman wrinkled like a piece of beef jerky.
    I said, “How do you do,” and shook her hand.
    She cocked her head to one side and said, “Aren’t you something.” She made us a snack. It was Ritz crackers, which I’d tasted in Hong Kong, but then she took a block of pale yellow cheese from the refrigerator. She used a metal slicer, which I’d never seen before, and carved thin bits of cheese to put on the crackers. I remembered that taste for a long time: the strange, alien sharpness of the cheese against the buttery crispness of the crackers.
    The little brother piled a few crackers in his hands, grabbed the comic book out from under Annette’s arm, and raced toward the staircase in the entryway.
    “No crumbs on the carpet!” Mrs. Avery yelled after him.
    Annette’s face started to turn blotchy. “Mom! He took-”
    “Stop it, Annette. You’ll have time to read it later, and now you have company.” Mrs. Avery turned to me. “Kimberly, you’ll soon see, it’s just a disaster around here.”
    Annette turned her concentration to her snack and when we were finished, we headed upstairs to her room. As we passed the living room, I saw a black grand piano and next to it, the dog stretched itself out on the large sectional sofa, which shimmered with gold and red stripes. Even from a distance, I could tell the plump cushions were fuzzy with a matted layer of animal hair.
    Annette’s room was almost as big as our classroom at school. There was a wall jammed full with toys: stuffed animals, board games, building blocks. She had a bunk bed with a ladder for going up and a slide for coming down. No one slept on the bottom bunk, she said, but she had a bunk bed because she liked sleeping high. I climbed up after her and at first I was afraid of getting too close to the edge of the mattress, despite the wooden rail. Once I got used to it, though, it was glorious, heady, to be so close to the ceiling, with my shoes off, a friend at my side, and the anticipation of a slide to return to floor level. It was so warm in their house, I could take off several layers and I lay on her bed in just my undershirt. I felt weightless and happy, as if I were in Hong Kong again.
    “Ooooooh… the girls are playing in their tree house! Better watch out for bugs!” Her brother’s little head stuck out like a dandelion from behind the door.
    “I’m going to kill you!” Annette yelled, and she started down the slide but he disappeared before she got to the bottom. She ran to her bedroom door and poked her head out. “You come in here one more time and I’m telling!”
    She slammed the door. “I wish I could keep him out, but we don’t believe in locked doors in the house.” From the way she said it, I could tell it was a phrase she was quoting from her parents. I wished Ma had the luxury of worrying about my behavior; she could barely do more than keep the both of us alive.
    I glanced at the clock by her bed. Snoopy’s hands showed the time and it wasn’t long before I had to leave. “Maybe we start work now?”
    Mrs. Avery had set up all our materials on Annette’s desk. Everything was new and clean: a large shoe box, sheets of colored cardboard, green and gold glitter paint, watercolors and two types of markers, glue and scissors. Alone at home, I would have needed to do things differently: taking boxes out of other people’s garbage, cutting figures out of old newspaper to stick to the box with packing tape, drawing