Free Revenge of the Cootie Girls by Sparkle Hayter Page A

actors, and so forth, interning in local television, smoking joints with my profs in Washington Square.
    So much had happened to me since I’d last seen Julie. My God, I’d completely forgotten that I’d once dreamed of being a Park Avenue trophy wife. Gag. How differently my life turned out. What had happened to Julie? And what brought her back to New York?

6
    â€œG OOMEY —that must have been a hard name to have as a kid,” Tamayo said to me.
    â€œGoony Goomey,” I said, nodding. “That’s the significance of the cootie catcher. We were both cootie girls. We had cooties.”
    â€œWhat are cooties?”
    â€œFleas, lice.”
    The subway platforms below the Port Authority, a major transfer point, were jammed with people, by my estimate about a quarter of them in costume, but, then again, in New York it is always so hard to tell.
    The train came and the mobbed pressed on. An older black guy was sitting near the door, taking up an extra seat for his dinner, tuna out of a can, the lid pried open and rolled halfway back; a soft pretzel on a piece of wax paper; and a beer in a paper bag. I was tired and I wouldn’t have minded a seat, so I fixed my best guilt-inducing stare on him. He looked up at me mildly amused and took a forkful of tuna and a bite of pretzel, washing it down with a swig of beer. He was in work clothes, probably had had a long day, and he was enjoying his meal so much nobody was going to begrudge him the extra seat, not even me.
    A guy with an ax coming out of a big plastic wound in his head said, “This train stop at West 4th Street?”
    â€œYeah,” the tuna-eating guy said.
    â€œYou had fleas?” Tamayo said to me. A few people around me inched away from me when she said that.
    â€œThese were figurative cooties. Didn’t they have cooties in Japan? Cootie girls, fleabags, whatever they were called in your schoolyard. The pariah kids.”
    â€œWe didn’t have cooties at my school, but we did have pariahs. I was one,” Tamayo said.
    â€œYou were?”
    â€œYeah, me and this boy who had a very long head.”
    â€œWere you an official pariah? Or just a secret dork like most people?”
    â€œI was a real pariah. The kids called me gaijin , which means ‘barbarian,’ because my dad was a foreigner, American, and then I had another name, which, translated, means ‘bad-tempered girl with enormous feet.’”
    â€œYou have big feet?”
    â€œYeah, for a Japanese girl. I used to like to stomp the feet of the bullies when they were picking on me. Then I’d run like hell.”
    She lifted up the hem of her dress to show me her feet. She did have very large feet. I do too, size ten.
    â€œWere you friends with the boy with the long head?” I said.
    â€œGod, no. We had nothing in common except that we were hated. Besides, the other kids made jokes about him and me marrying, and what ugly children we’d have, and so I didn’t want to do anything that would associate me with him any more than we were already associated. I was a kid.”
    â€œYeah, Julie and I didn’t hang out much with the other cootie girl in our grade, Mabel. She was very quiet and always smelled like insecticide. We also avoided Francis, the cootie boy, like the plague. He was one of those little boys with slicked-back hair, a neatly pressed suit—short pants until junior high school—carried a briefcase. He got his revenge by becoming a hall monitor in junior high. He’s now a CEO and a big Pat Buchanan contributor.”
    â€œThe kid with the long head turned out badly. He joined the doomsday cult that planted the poison gas on the Tokyo subways.”
    â€œKinda like Mabel. She became a born-again Christian for a while, dated a lot of substance abusers who looked like Jesus, and had a breakdown after one of them ripped off a liquor store and made his getaway in her Gremlin. The last I