Many hours of my adolescence were spent willing gory deaths on Frog Fitzgerald. Frog, thrown off the Octopus, trampled by the crowd, and swept under the tent with the lions – all during lunch period. For his insolent drawl alone, he deserved such punishment. “Hello, Miss Moonface” the moment I stepped onto the bus. “Bye-bye, Miss Moonface” the moment I stepped off. I bet Cleo, home from college that summer of ‘76, could put him in his place. My big sister’s done-up eyes and fuck-you personality, not to mention drop-dead exotic looks that stopped guys in mid-motion like it was modern-day Pompei, trumped every racist card.
One day after summer school I was walking home minding my own business when Frog pulled up beside me on a blue moped. Like the brothers he lived with, he was bad news in a torn muscle T-shirt and frayed jeans that dragged on the street.
“Going my way?”
I walked on as though he didn’t exist, keeping my spongy armpits to myself. I was walking so stone-faced the pavement almost cracked. If Cleo was here, she’d have frayed his balls with one look.
“Looks like you finally outgrew your training bra.” He laughed obscenely, so hard his shaggy brown hair went in every direction.
Frog was used to being the center of the universe, especially when the universe was a school bus. Now, in broad daylight, he didn’t like being ignored. With a deafening vroom vroom, he jumped the curb and blocked my path.
“Want to go in the woods for a smoke? Got a pack of Marlboros we can kill.”
Fear clutched me in the throat like the Boston Strangler. Where was Cleo? Cleo! Without her, I was just the mute on the bus. It took every ounce of courage for me to utter, “Go croak, Frog.”
He laughed horribly and took off in a cloud of conceit. To the whole deserted street, he did a Jimmy Durante. “Miss Moonface loves me!”

Like a lost dog I wandered home. Miss Moonface loves me? What did Frog mean? I didn’t love him any more squished worms in the driveway. He was uglier than any frog I’d ever seen. A Frog was a Frog was a Frog forever. Right?
By the time I got home I was drunk with confusion, bumping into walls like Cleo after a night of barhopping. What did Frog mean?
Miss Moonface loves me.
I looked in my mirror. A girl looked back at me, blinking. A plain girl. A girl in need of a long, deep kiss that would leave her shivering and changed forever. A girl in need of a movie-star makeover.
I backed up and stood sideways. Even through a baggy T-shirt, they bulged out. Pulsed out. When did they grow? While I was sleeping? Dreaming?
I sneaked into Cleo’s room – a perfumed pigsty! – and sifted through a drawer flooded with bras and bikini underwear and scarf-sized halter tops. I made my choice, a halter constructed of no more than three strings and a triangle of black silk. With great orchestration I fit it on, then stood before Cleo’s heart-shaped brass mirror where she drew on her eyes every morning.
Bye-bye, Miss Moonface!

This got to be a habit, whenever Cleo left the house. She was gone most of the time, working at a record shop called Songs & Bongs or partying with the lead singer from the Degenerates who played in a club called After Hours. Cleo never had a curfew. Both my parents – my dad who, like now, was overseas for the World Bank six months a year and my mom who spent her lonely days fretting over his absence – knew you couldn’t control Cleo.
Anyway, I’d sneak into Cleo’s room and transform myself in faded denim and glittery black. I’d slip off my faded pink moccasins and slip on her silver sandals and strut my stuff against walls covered with Led Zeppelin posters. If Frog saw me like this, he’d wipe out and beg for one more long, lingering look. If he were in the path of a dump truck, even better.
Eventually I graduated to Cleo’s lipsticks. Siren Red, Midnight Mauve, Peaches ‘n’ Cream. Swiveling the lipstick up from its tube became something no less than sensual, especially when I knew what pleasure was coming next: the sexy smear across my lips.
Only one Cleo could walk this earth and part the seas, but in my own right I was a woman now, too. That I tingled from head to toe told me so. Sin dangled itself before me like a pair of Cleo’s prized earrings and day after day I found myself back in her room, trying on her gold mini-dress with the negligee sleeves, her black netted tank top. Beaded things, satin things, lacy things. I was buttoning up a jewel-studded denim vest when Cleo’s icy reflection appeared in the mirror.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“Nothing,” I lamely replied.
The heap of clothes on her bed was a mountain of evidence against me.
“You call going through my stuff nothing?”
“No.”
“I’m in shock!” she wailed, then she zeroed in on me, her li’l demon sister. “Who do you think you are? It was bad enough in the dorm with all those Petunia piglets stealing my stuff off the drying rack. All they left me was my underwear and only because their fumes would split the crotch. These are my things, not yours! When I was your age, I wore kilts and saddle shoes!”
“I wasn’t going to wear them anywhere.”
She shoved me against her closet with one arm and undid buttons with the other.
“Damn right you’re not!”

Cleo had a cruel, biting, poisonous streak, but like the liquor on her breath it always wore off. A short while later she stood over my bed in her pink robe and slippers, shuffling sorrowfully. There I was, a mangy mutt, wishing I were dead.
“Sorry, I yelled at you, li’l one. What do you expect working twelve hours a day with only two cigarette breaks? I live on coffee and Tab, you know. All the caffeine and Saccharin sends me into overdrive.”
“It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have been in your closet in the first place.”
“I’m a skunk. Spit on me.”
“No, Cleo!”
She hopped on my bed. “Knock my teeth out!”
“Cleo!” I squealed.
“Break my bitchy bones,” she cried, tickling me into euphoria. “Kick me in the butt! Ring my neck! Poke my eyes out with chopsticks and drop ‘em in soup!”
Later, in a huffing, puffy, teary-eyed sweat: “I know you want to grow up, Marcy. It’s as natural as taking a dump a day. But grow up too fast and you’ll end up with an ignoramus anus.”
“But you like being grown up, don’t you, Cleo? You can do what you want. Dress up and be someone special.”
“You’re only special if you’re special in here,” she said, touching my heart. “And you’re special. You’ve been special since the minute you were born and christened my li’l sister. Catch my drift?”
“Caught.”
“By the way, when did those boobs happen?”

Later, as I lay in bed, her fingerprints and knee prints still all over me, her spirit still in the room, I realized how much I needed that tickle, the warmth of my big sister, which might not always be there. I feared it would be all over too soon quickly, already a memory if I closed my eyes. It would vanish in my dreams. She would be gone. Only her angry echo would remain.
While I was sleeping, Cleo must have sneaked into my room. When I woke up her denim vest was hanging in my closet like the Hope Diamond. I slipped it on, knowing it was mine. I looked in the mirror. I was razzle-dazzled.

One morning, two steps from my front door, something monumental happened. A rumbling in the street set it all in motion.
“Calling Miss Moonface!”
Cleo’s vest empowered me for a moment I had played over in my head like a scratched record. I turned around. There he was on his moped, shaggier than ever. Frog Fitzgerald in a black Aerosmith T-shirt and the same frayed jeans.
“What do you want?” I yelled.
“Come here and I’ll tell you!” he yelled back.
“Why should I?”
“Don’t be afraid, Miss Moonface! You won’t get a good buzz if you mix fear with fun!”
“I said, what do you want?”
“To talk, that’s all! Any law against that?”
“Talk about what?”
He shrugged his bony shoulders knowing he was trouble on wheels and proud of it.
“A four-letter word!” he shouted.
“What four-letter word?”
“Love!” he declared.
Whatever compelled me to take that long, slow, treacherous walk down my lawn remains a mystery. Walking toward Frog my legs almost gave out I was so self-conscious of the sun on my just-washed hair and my swaying hips. My walk lasted forever until a million heartbeats later, when I finally reached the curb.
“Dig the jacket,” he said.
“It’s a vest.”
“Far out.” He grinned cheekily. “Why don’t you take it off?”
“Why?”
“So I can see what’s underneath.”
“Why should I?”
“’Cause it’s steaming hot out here. Hot enough to go skinny dipping at Rainbow Run. What do you say?”
“No way,” I said.
Frog read the shock on my face and laughed horribly. Then he zipped down the street with a holler. “I love Miss Moonface!”

Not a wink did I sleep that night nor the night after that nor the night after that. With every toss and turn and peek at my clock radio whenever the grandfather clock downstairs chimed, I heard I love Miss Moonface. What I had secretly hoped for all along was true: Frog Fitzgerald loved me. I took this revelation and squeezed it with my pillow, praying it all meant what I thought it meant.

I hopped on Frog’s moped, and we were off to Rainbow Run, a creek on the fringe of western Fairfax County. It was known to me only as a getaway in the boonies, the home of keg parties – certainly no destination of mine.
To get there, we flew over bumpy country roads. My arms were around Frog’s waist, my jeans were fraying in the wind, my Berry Cherry lips were so glossy they blinded the birds. I could never, not in my wildest, most fiery dreams, invent a moment more charged than this. This put cruising with Cleo in her yellow Mustang to shame. This defined every sweet rock ‘n’ roll lyric ever sung. I was part of the plan now, to be young and flying in the face of fear under an endless blue sky that promised to go on forever. Frog’s voice was gravel as we took a steep bend:
“Hang on tight, Miss Moonface!”
We flew over potholes and bumps and dead squirrels, never looking back. In a frenzy of moving fences and abandoned lots, I squeezed into the flesh of this shaggy rebel with startling ease. Around Frog, harm could come my way, but I was willing to pay the price.
When we got to Rainbow Run, we wiped out on a dirt trail. I saw sky and pebbles and water so glittery I must have been dreaming. Frog wasn’t fazed.
“We’re here!” he announced.
“Cool,” I said.
He gave me a hand until we were eye to eye. We said nothing, the silence spoke for itself. Overcome, he ran his hands freely over my body.
I jumped. “Stop it.”
“Just brushing the shit off of you.”
“I said, stop it!”
He held me close and breathed with an insolence that gave me goosebumps. “Can’t.”
“Frog?”
“Huh?” he nibbled.
“Let’s talk.”
“Man!” He fell apart, broke loose from me. “That’s all we do! Talk, talk, talk until I’m blue in the face. What’s left to talk about?”
“Well,” – I stalled – “like, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Me, only with my own place.”
“Don’t you like living with your brothers?”
“Naw, they fight too much. Whenever I tell them to shut up, they go, ‘Any law against raising hell under your own roof?’ When I tell them the house stinks of dope, they go, ‘One more fucking peep out of you and your butt’s out the door!’”
“You don’t smoke dope?”
“Naw, it’s wicked stuff. Don’t drink, either. My brothers puke themselves to sleep seven day a week. I told myself when I was twelve, I was never going to be like that. And if I was, I’d clean up my own mess.”
“Where are your parents?”
He shrugged. “Around.”
“Around where?”
“This very minute, you mean? Who knows? They ditched us to go to work on some farm in West Virginia that went belly up. Then they moved on.”
“Don’t they keep in touch with you?” I wondered.
“Hey, I don’t read their letters and I don’t take their calls. What’s the point? They split. Didn’t exactly leave me with no guardian angels.”
He hurt, I could tell. Brooded on his trashed-out lot in life. But I wasn’t at the age to offer comfort. It was, like so many things, beyond me. Splashes from the creek broke the somber spell.
“Want to go swimming?” I suggested.
He grinned. “I didn’t bring you up here to go swimming.”
Then he took my hand and led me to a shady spot under a maple tree. It was the most natural thing to do, crumbling under him onto the ground. In one swift move, his transistor radio emerged from his pocket, and he tuned in Peter Frampton singing, “Baby I love your way.” Frog had a disheveled crawled-out-of-the-alley look about him, so the scent of strawberry musk in his hair surprised me as he bumped and boogied his way to our first kiss. It was heaven. I heard birds and partying and Frog crooning lyrics I had only crooned to myself. His vulgar expression and hungry lips wanted more of me, so I closed my eyes, forgot who I was, and got into it, mind, body, and soul. It was like slipping into water. I was swimming, floating, coming up for air.
“I dig your Chinese face,” he moaned.
“I’m not Chinese,” I moaned back.
“Don’t matter, I dig it anyway. Your eyes are black as night. Blacker, even. And you have the goddamnest, smallest, bite-sized mouth,” he said, breathing into it.
“Frog, I can’t breathe,” I said, “Frog, get up!”
“Sorry,” he said, lifting up, then rolling over on his back.
We faced the sky, wondering what was next.
He blinked. “Want a smoke?”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
Frog lit up and offered me a drag off his cigarette. I took it and puffed my heart out.

It was so blindingly sunny I wasn’t sure it was Frog bopping toward me as I stood with my cart at the A&P, waiting for Cleo to drive up. And then it all happened so fast. He stumbled into me like it was an accident and stole a kiss. Not a real kiss, just a peck on the cheek.
He grinned. “Been thinking of me?”
“No,” I replied. “Well, maybe just a little.”
“Just a little? That’s like saying I almost don’t count.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You beautiful, bejeweled thing, you don’t get it. I’m waiting for the day I’ve got you moaning in your sleep.”
There I stood in my beloved vest, speechless, dumbstruck, and above all the most beautiful, bejeweled thing on earth.
Cleo zoomed up the pickup lane and jumped out with an angry slam.
“Dig the car,” Frog said, leaning against it. “My brothers work on them all the time. Take them apart and put them back together with their eyes closed. They own Brothers Auto Body. Ever heard of them?”
“Don’t lean on it,” she warned him, lifting bags of groceries. “I mean it, I don’t even want to see your shadow on my car. Got it? Marcy, want to give me a hand here?”
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
Frog brushed my face and said, “Ciao, Miss Moonface.”

The top was down but Cleo hit the roof.
“What did that punk call you? Miss Moonface? What is that supposed to mean?”
I shrugged. “It’s just a nickname.”
“It’s derogatory.”
“Derogatory?”
“Yeah, like you’re some Hong Kong caricature. Some moonfaced madam.”
“It’s just a nickname!”
“He kissed you. Deny it and you’re dead meat.”
“So what if he kissed me?”
Cleo spun off the main drag and into the parking lot of a bank.
“I’ve seen that runt round town. He practically ran me off the road with that stupid scooter. Stay the hell away from him. He doesn’t give two shits for you or anybody else.”
“You don’t know him,” I said.
“What’s to know? He’s a damn dropout. A redneck without a cause. A future flunky from Fuck U. He doesn’t know the meaning of respect. I know the type. If you were hanging from a cliff, he’d crack open another beer!”

Every day after summer school, Frog and I would scoot off to Rainbow Run. Frog was a daredevil, freewheeling in the path of honking cars, mooning death with a howl.
“My calling is to break all the rules, Miss Moonface!”
Once there, we’d go at it in view of any willing watchers and a sun so hot its memory is piercing. At last, God was shining down on me! I fit into this blessed microcosm called Earth. I was a worm, crawling out from under a rock. No, a tie-dyed butterfly, free from her cocoon.
“Let’s blow this boring burb, Miss Moonface. Make a break. Skip town.”
“You mean run away?”
“Miss Moonface got the message!” Frog hollered across Rainbow Run.
“Forget it. No way.”
“Why not? Who would miss you? Your old lady’s waiting for your old travelin’ man to come home from Timbuktu land and your sister’s a full-time bitch working overtime. Hang around here and you’ll grow up to be a chick with no place to go.”
“Shut up, you moron. Cleo’s not a bitch.”
“So why does she flip me off from her bedroom window?”
“She can flip off anyone she wants.”
Frog sighed. “According to the Bitch’s Bill of Rights, I guess.”

Frog dreamed of building a boat and sailing down to the Caribbean. He dreamed of bumming around Ocean City and rummaging through McDonald’s garbage. He dreamed, too, of hiding in a shack way deep in the woods where no one could find him. His dreams were the dreams of a faceless hobo. Even then, I knew that. Frog would end up in the gutter, despite his genius, which was vague and rambling but pervaded every word uttered from his smoky lips. Who cared? That summer he was the boy kissing me, eating away at my neck until it was raw meat, not caring if all his dreams died in my arms.
“We can’t do this forever, Miss Moonface. Let’s go all the way.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because it’s only natural to want to get naked with a willing chick.”
“Why do you have to talk that way, you jerk?”
“It’s the only way I know how to talk, you sexy bitch.”
“Well, who says I’m willing?”
“Your wet little tongue says it. Your little black eyes say it. Your bra-locked boobs say it,” he said, fumbling with the buttons on my vest.
“Get your grubby hands off of me!”
This time Frog hollered, “Miss Moonface is a virgin!”
So was Frog, I learned a moment later.
“But I’ve done it in my head so many times I could teach sex ed with my eyes closed. Plus, I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s Saturday Night Live at the Fitzgerald Farm! My brothers do it dead drunk in their sleep on the couch with the closest chick at hand.”
“You watched them?”
“It’s a crowded house,” he said, making no apologies.
A rapturous sex state came over him. He groaned like it hurt in a really good way.
“Your lips taste berry good but I want to taste something sweeter, Miss Moonface,” he whispered. “Once we get started, you’ll open up like a flower, swear to God and the angels, too. You’ll feel like a flower, all pretty and perfumed with me inside of you.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
Frog knew I was wavering. Unsure of my footing on this earth. He got up and led me to a spot in the woods far from the safe, splashing sounds of Rainbow Run. It was shady, damp, dangerous. When he set me down on the ground, twigs broke in my ears. He wrapped his arms and legs around me like vines, strangling me.
“I don’t like it here,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
“Uh-uh,” he purred feverishly.
I bit his hand and managed to break away from him. He pinned me against a tree. Hot panic speared through me.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he said.
“Let go of me.”
But he couldn’t stop himself. His hands were traveling freely under my vest, my T-shirt. He unhooked my bra and squeezed me with half-conscious moans. A moment of murder could not have been more terrifying.
“Let go of me!”
“No can do.” He panted and pushed until the wedge of light above me that crept between the trees was my only way out. Down here I was screaming but I zoned in on that light like it was all I had to hold on to, held on to it like a flame. Frog had his hand down my pants and split me wide open in a place so virginal not even a tampon had touched it. With a fistful of electrified fingers, he jammed away, moaning and drooling for a dear sweet life. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt so much. At some point I stopped screaming, looked up at the light. Up there, I was still alive. Down here, I was dead. Frog stopped abruptly, flared his horny nostrils at me.
“It can be fun, you know.”
I turned to stone and his hand wilted out of my pants.
“Man” – he shrugged – “you’re lucky I like you.”
Despite the sight of his blood-streaked fingers and the throbbing between my legs, I held my head up, silently defiant.
“Come on! You’re different. Most dudes don’t dig Chinese chicks. My brothers told me to lay off the egg rolls and get my head examined!”
“I’m not a Chinese chick, you stupid hick,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter ‘cause I dig you anyway. You’ve got a chance at love right here, right now. Let me prove it to you.”
“Go to hell, you ignoramus anus.”
“What did you call me?”
“You’re nothing but an ignoramus anus. And you’ll end up with a big fat pink Petunia in a white shack and your kids will wash their cooties off in the sprinkler.”
“Man, what tongue are you talking?”
I slapped his face; sweat flew. He looked so stunned I slapped him again, this time so hard he lost his balance, bumped into a tree, saw stars.
“Korean!” I cried.
I have no memory of hitchhiking home, only getting out at the curb.

Cleo and I were driving back from the Korean store – my dad was coming home the next day. My mother had sent us there with a list of his favorite snacks – jelly candy, seaweed leaves, and dried fish. Now a pungent bag bloomed in the back seat.
“Cleo,” I nervously blurted.
“Yeah?”
“I have something to tell you.”
She turned off the radio and zoomed in on me, with her, in this car. “What is it?”
“Frog attacked me.”
Cleo slowed down to near halt while cars honked behind us. She flipped them off, then took my hand.
“Details,” she said.
“He took me in the woods and put his hand down my pants.” As the words spilled out of me, I regretted my whole life.
“He put his filthy hand down your pants.” She quietly smoked. Not on a cigarette but something much more deadly. Nineteen years of rage. “Marcy, did he rape you?”
“No. He just kept pushing his fingers in and out of me, over and over. It really hurt a lot. I was bleeding.”
“Oh my God,” Cleo breathed.
She stripped the gears and screeched into eighty miles per hour.
“I’m going to fucking kill that ugly little sonovabitch punk!”
“Slow down, Cleo!” I cried.
She was smoking up a storm now. Fury spewed from her nostrils while she blasted the godforsaken sky. “He just wanted to see if you slanted up!”
“If what slanted up?”
“Oh my God, you don’t know anything, do you? You’re so naïve, so pure. How could you let that gross-out untouchable touch you with his grease-monkey paws? His kind – and all white bastards – talk about our kind and not in the most flowery terms. We’re just a bet at the card table.”
“What do they bet?”
“On our cunts being as slanted as our eyes. The more perverted ones try to find out.”
I sank into the seat, sank below the dash, while Cleo continued ranting. When we got to Glover, she picked up speed driving maniacally without stopping at red lights, stop signs, pedestrians.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t run into that punk on his scooter and today I’m running over him,” she warned the world.
“No, Cleo. Let’s go home,” I urged her.
She ignored me, still smoking.
“The fish is starting to stink up your car,” I said out of desperation.
“Then hold your nose, because we’re not going home!”
We drove around endlessly, with me begging her to stop. I was hysterical, but sedate compared with her.
“There he is!” she shouted.
Frog was loitering at the 7-Eleven, doing nothing. Cleo honked.
“Hey, Frog!”
He looked up. Mortal fear clouded his face. He pleaded. “Marcy! I need to talk to you!”
“Marcy doesn’t talk to homely hicks anymore!” Cleo cut in. “Now hop on your tin can before I flatten it like one!”
Frog hopped on his moped and tore off out of the parking lot. Cleo was on his tail, yelling, “Let’s do the Bump, baby!”
“Cleo, don’t do this,” I was crying. “Let’s go home! Please, Cleo, let’s go home now!”
“Shut up!” she roared back, chasing Frog through intersections,
strip centers, main roads, side streets. Yelling as loud as the sky was high:
“I’m going to run over you like an old brown shoe!”
“I’m going to put you in a pauper’s grave!”
“I’m going to leave you for the vultures to feast on the grease under your fingernails!”
Cleo could have crushed him at any point, but that was not her plan, to have any rush-hour witnesses. What she wanted to do – and what she did – was maneuver him into a now-deserted industrial park. She taunted him with unspeakable insults – Party hearty in hell, jackass hole! – as she ran him off the road and into a ditch so deep the bottom was not visible from where I saw.