Free Revenge of the Cootie Girls by Sparkle Hayter Page B

heard, she’d become a Moonie and married some Korean guy she knew for ten minutes in a mass wedding in San Francisco. Poor Mabel. But, then, maybe she’s happy, or thinks she is.”
    â€œWhat’s the difference? If you think you’re happy you are. Ha-ha. You have cooties!”
    â€œYou’re so mature.”
    â€œWhat did the kids call you?” she asked. “Carrot Top?”
    â€œRed Knobby until eighth grade, when I developed the worst acne in my school. Then I was Lizard Lady for two years. Seems so funny now.”
    We got out at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, in Chelsea, or, as Claire once described it, the year-long festival of gorgeous unavailable men, since it is the new gay mecca.
    The heat had subsided a bit, but it was still muggy, which made it clammy. On the next block, Sam Chinita glowed. A railway-style diner with hammered tin siding, bare-bones decor, and aqua-green curtains in the smallish windows, it specializes in Cuban-Chinese cuisine, which is fairly popular in New York, where hybrid cuisines like Cuban-Chinese and Mexican-French do well. There are lots of Jewish hybrids too, like kosher Chinese, kosher Italian, kosher Japanese, and kosher Indian.
    While we waited for our crackling chicken with fried bananas and salad, Tamayo said, “The name on the handwritten note, Putli Bai, is that some kind of American girl thing?”
    â€œShe was an Indian bandit queen in the 1950s, a scarlet woman who led an army of bandits.”
    â€œLike the one in the movie The Bandit Queen ?”
    â€œThat was Phoolan Devi, who came later, but the same idea. Julie read about Putli Bai somewhere when we were kids, and fell in love with the whole idea of her. It was a far cry better than being a cootie girl.”
    â€œI liked to pretend I was a pirate queen. That’s a bandit queen, on water. I used one of my mom’s knitting needles as a sword,” Tamayo said, miming swordplay. “Tell me more about cooties.”
    Tamayo is obsessed with finding the America she saw from a distance, growing up in Japan—the America somewhere beyond Life magazine, American TV shows, the movies—and she has an endless appetite for stories about American childhood, especially American girlhood. She would sometimes try to describe my childhood for me, saying things like, “So, Sunday evening, when you and your family were sitting around the Philco watching Ed Sullivan …” For her last birthday, I gave her a book of North American girl songs and she got tears in her eyes and hugged me so hard I thought a lung had collapsed. You would have thought I’d just presented her with the Hope Diamond.
    â€œWhat do you want to know?”
    â€œWho decided who had cooties?”
    â€œMary MacCosham was the head arbiter at my school. What a bitch she was. Little Miss Perfect. But she had help in cootie allotment from Sis and Bobby Fanning. They made me a cootie girl at the end of first grade and made Julie one when she moved to Ferrous in fifth grade. Imagine having that kind of power.”
    I took out a pen and drew a round dot on her arm, with the initials “C.S.” beneath it.
    â€œThis is a cootie shot,” I said. “The other kids had to get cootie shots to protect them from our cooties, in case they bumped up against one of us during fire drill or in the cloakroom.”
    You couldn’t give yourself a cootie shot, I explained. You had to get it from someone else, so it was imperative to find someone who could give you a cootie shot as soon as you got to school, before you had contact with any cootie kids. Because, if you got cooties from a cootie kid, you’d be a cootie kid too, at least temporarily.
    â€œAnd what did kids do if they got temporary cooties? Was there a ritual delousing?”
    â€œYeah. They went to Mary, Sis, or Bobby and got one of them to remove the cooties with a paper cootie catcher, like the one Candy saw in the