The worst thing about starting fifth grade, besides everyone thinking I’m an actual new student, is that even when I tell everyone I’ve lived in our town all my life and gone to the same schools as everybody else except I skipped up a grade because I worked my butt off all summer, no one even pretends to be impressed or at least surprised. That I worked my butt off all summer must be true since they’re so unimpressed. Though all I remember is chewing the completed pages of my study-book and getting swatted by mama. To me that’s hard work to keep on chewing like you need to, like you promised you would, even when you knew she was coming for your head. For this reason I imagine the door-handle-shaped hole in our bathroom wall must be because when I was a baby I gnawed on it until my nainai tore me away and plugged my nose until she could pluck out the bits of plaster from my mouth. That’s why I have such an affinity for eating THINGS, because they’re all collected inside me and jostle my gut to get at each other. And that’s why I have the biggest love for the every-thing-ness and no-thing-ness of everything! I love how you can chew paper into little pulps and I love how if you fold a piece of paper twenty times you can reach the moon. I learned that in school. I also learned in school that I was a whole once, a one, a teeny egg in my mama, and that it itself was a million things, nested inside the follicle mountains of the geography of her.

And the even worse thing about starting fifth grade this year is that there’s only one other new student, not that I’m a new student or anything. But he came straight from overseas and can’t speak a word of English, so everybody keeps asking where I moved from. And worse than that, he’s ugly. His hair tangles into a horrifying waist-long stringy mess because he repels water and soap. And just as bad, his hips jut out below his skinny chest which forces his butt to such a disproportionate size that it forever catches his t-shirt hems so they bunch up on his butt. And his t-shirts are so mortifyingly large they pool at his knees in the front so you’d think he wasn’t wearing pants if you didn’t occasionally see his big butt. And even worse than that, this new student, whose name is completely unpronounceable, is such a coward that instead of just telling teachers to use his Americanized middle name which is Barney of all things, he just lets them struggle, “Ksh, zoo…ah…” until they give up, asking fearfully, “is it alright if we call you Barney?” When he nods I stifle puke noises at the relief on their faces. And when I thank my mama for giving me a name that doesn’t put up a fight every single day of my life she looks guilty somehow. But I mean it. What I really want is to move through the world with the elasticity of a trampoline. I want marbles to roll toward me. I want to make curved-down dimples into the universe.

Barney actually plays the piano. My mama ran into his mama at the Parent Night and she learned he won an international competition at age six and another at age eight and has been touring the world ever since. Just last week he procured a special extended absence slip for his tour of Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. The reason he leaves school thirty minutes early on Fridays is because his mama drives him to New York City for a lesson at 6:00 and studio class at 8:00. The reason he leaves school at noon on Tuesdays is because he has Skype lessons with a very busy teacher in Philadelphia who can only listen to him 2:30 on Tuesdays. This is much preferable to last year, his mama told my mama, because I had to wake him up at 2:00 AM for his lessons because surely the Professor would not have taken us in if we had told him about the time difference. I crashed my car on my way to work because I was so tired. Yet he never complained, not once. My mama stares me down as she says this, which is her way of saying, you should feel INSPIRED. I fume that when Mr. Potpourri calls out Barney’s name for attendance and everybody turns to look at me, I can no longer truthfully yell out “How should I know where that little twerp is??” So I fight back by saying, mama how about I clean up the table, in my nicest voice, and she says thank you bao bei.

Next thing I know, to my utter horror and completely without my consent, my mama and Barney’s mama have become best friends and we end up going to his house for New Year’s. In attendance are his cousins and some church friends and some neighbors and a few white-haired people Barney’s mama might be trying to network with. She’s wearing a dress with a gold phoenix on it and the puff of her permed brown hair sits on top of tattooed eyebrows. She speaks the shrill way that anyone who can wield a hand speaks, offering guests oranges and baggies of nuts from the three-foot pyramid on the lace doily on the coffee table. Between empty Costco boxes and a beige floral couch stands a shelf, and inside the glass-paneled doors of the shelf sit several framed photos of Barney as a baby in a peapod suit and then wearing nothing except a velvet waistcoat. The bulges of baby Barney’s fat squeeze his eyes and turn his arms and legs into sausage links ballooned over the joints.

His mama pulls him aside and whispers in his ear. He sits down at the piano in the corner of the dining room, which is covered in a plastic cloth with teddy bears and oranges in a checkered pattern on it.

“Oh play something for us, Barney!” One of the old people says. An old lady scooches her chair and claps with her fingers jutting outward.

He does play. He plays like a maniac. He throws his head all the way back and rotates slowly from side to side. His long hair catches the light. His nostrils flare. The whites of his eyes are silvery wet, and his hands hold all the buoyant space boundlessness of altitude. I want to take him from the ends of his greasy hair and eat him down to his ankle socks, for the cannibalism of his craze hovers at standstill in the air, the stillness of a being bursting out of itself into itself.

When he finishes he leaps out of his seat and screams like he burned his hands on the keyboard. The applause covers his screams, pitterpatter tittering, fingertips hitting bases of palms, what a lovely new generation of musicians, the merit of technical ability is dead, you know they always say if you think your child does something well there’s always a child like him who could do it better, and they get younger and younger by the day…I not only hear every word around me, but I hear when Barney’s mama leans and whispers into his ear in non-English and I see Barney smile, the complete self-satisfied Buddha smile of someone who has finally got an ant to light on fire under a magnifying glass, and for the first time I realize his gigantic perfectly round ears radiate out so big they catch the light and glow bright bright red.

I sneak out of the room down the stairs to his garage the way we came, past the plastic tree, basketball hoop, vinyl hose, boxes of butter cookies and dried prunes. I sprint out the garage door to his backyard where the sky’s bruise ripples out into the ripple of the snow. A million bare branches rub against a million other bare branches to make the sound of rising. I go through the back to the woods behind and sit between two trees on a sharp rock that hurts my butt. There, with that rising hovering over the frozen underbrush, I hear the sounds of my insides, thousands of microscopic popping things dying in growth for no reason at all. The sticks on the ground cut my feet and teem with maggots moving. Shoved up tree buds groan and the snow has made a million billion screaming structures in pee-specked sheets scattered with poop and red berries, which are the same thing. Somewhere deep under I feel the quick pulse of ground-up rock and excrement and violent deaths of empty sky and abandoned packing peanuts under a log.

On the first day of school, Mr. Potpourri asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up and Barney said conductor, but he didn’t clarify, not when a guy hooted “choo choo” from the back of the room, and not when a girl with big arms smacked that guy and he cackled as she said all smarty-tarty-like, “Not that kind of conductor, like an orchestra conductor, or a band conductor, like Mrs. Dunham, stupid.” Barney just gaped, silent, and I felt ashamed.

But I know. He’s never said, but I know with more certainty than I’ve ever known anything, that Barney has the kind of love for trains that drives the growth of his cells, that kind of viscous corn-starched soupy love where the primordial spawned. But then I think again and no, that’s not just it. “I just like trains is all,” his voice says in my mind, “because once my ayi bought me a train.” What’s horrible is he doesn’t really like trains at all, he just has the faintest inclination toward them and what’s horrible is that faint inclination is more than anything he’s ever encountered. Most of all it’s his, not like the music he emits which has grown so big it possesses his entire being and makes me sad, that doesn’t even count it’s so big. In that way his preference for a toy no one remembers ayi gave him is the deepest most throat-striking groin-seizing love of all which I understand.

I understand because I play piano too. That’s why my mama talked to Barney’s mama which was what got me into this situation in the first place. When I play piano on good days, and on good days I am three gold star outstanding, I can play with a butterier and more unchickened elbow and delicate finger trail than anyone else. That’s why I could understand what he was playing and how he was shining and how somehow he understood what I meant when it was my turn to say what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said PRINCESS. Because I want to wear dresses that spontaneously combust and raze the earth! I want to exude generosity from my intergalactic estate! I want to share and share and revel in needless excess! I want to construct sinking stone boats as tall as mountains and fountains of milk! I want eyes as pale lasers and blinding white skin so bright it is pure light! And when I uttered the word Princess, I felt the laser beam hiss of my breath fall cheap and prissy on neither silence nor laughs but boredom. I didn’t hear what anyone said the whole day after that.

When I go back inside the house, it’s dinner time, and when I sit for dinner, he sits next to me. And the truth is, I’m always looking over my shoulder for Barney because he’s always too close even when he isn’t. At school I always want him a third of a circle away, where he’s far and I also don’t have to see him, but no matter where we are our gym teacher Mrs. Wonderfork will always pair us up for catch or square dancing or sit ups. And we always stand together last when getting picked for teams, and they always take a long time to let us hang there. And every time we run the mile we are the last two, and I might break as he flops beside me minute after minute as the others wait at the edge of the field and don’t look up from their phones to mutter softly “yay,” or “you can do it.”

I feel a kick. I look at Barney and frown, and he’s looking up so I look up. His mama is handing me a floral plastic plate. So I say thank you and then stare at my mama to make sure she notices.

“I saw you go outside,” he says so quietly I can barely hear him because I’m still staring at my mama.

“I saw! You were outside,” he repeats.

I suddenly wish my chair was a bit taller so I could swing my legs. I can only cross my ankles.

“I wanted to go outside too,” he says. “But you were out there so I couldn’t go.”

I look at him again and his hair really is stringy. You can tell he hasn’t washed it because it even has lint and a tiny pillow feather in it.

“I cried a little bit when you played,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because you showed us!”

He smiles his Buddha smile and I smile too because I am happy.

As his mama serves up a whole river of fish with their mouths stuffed with turnips and peas, I sense his breathing next to mine, which I always can sense or conjure up after all this time trying to shake him off my tail. She sets down vats of pork meatball soup and platters of cold chicken, cold beef, and sausage, river shrimp, greens, cucumbers with garlic sauce, watermelon, and we both breathe, wordless, the asthmatic unsteady breaths of twin organ bellows. As we’re eating I’m imagining that we’re at the spring farm trip, but only the two of us. We’re standing there, breathing as the farmer gazes hard at us, then claps us on the shoulder and asks if we’ll cry. He leads us back to a dirt yard where two brown hens hang upside down in plastic cones. You see how they’re upside down? The farmer says. It calms them. You take her by the neck, pull down like this so it’s extended. Take the knife at an angle, near the back, right here, you see this right here? Then just do it with a bit of force at an upward angle like this. Quick and no fuss, no pain. You ready? With a grunt he cuts clean through and a stream of blood trickles out. The body flops in the cone like crazy as he throws the limp head in a bucket. And I look at the second hen in the cone and I pull a plastic cafeteria knife out of my pocket and turn beside me and press my fingers to his pulsing neck for his neck is skinny but my hand is skinnier, and I botch it. Blood spurts out as he writhes. I saw into him, deface him, not strong enough to do it as deep as I want but enough to make it stick. The knife breaks and then I saw with a shard, use the sharp new end to dig into him and spit on him, and repeat, as I saw into my face of hatred, mercy, I repeat, I love myself. I love myself. I am in love with myself.

After the meal, we all cram back into the living room. The TV is on mute so we can keep an eye out for the countdown. Barney’s mama ushers him over and puts gloves on his hands and a hat on his head and a scarf around his neck and two winter coats around his body and snow pants and ties his shoes as he sits dumbly on a stool. He and his cousins run outside with a basketball. As they stomp down the stairs, Barney says in non-English, “Can we play upstairs instead? I don’t want to play basketball in the cold,” and his cousins shout back, “Trains are for stupid people,” and then they’re out in the driveway and a dull thump begins.

“I imagine Barney doesn’t have much time to be a child and run around with the demands of his art,” the old lady who clapped first says with a half smile.

“Yes, he is very busy,” Barney’s mama says. “But he is a good boy. And he really does love the piano.”

“Greatness does not come without sacrifice, I suppose,” the old man next to her says with a sigh.

“Thank you,” Barney’s mama says.

I roll my eyes. “Stop that,” my mama says to me, “or go out and play with them.”

“Is this his sister?” the old lady says.

“No,” Barney’s mama says, “a school friend.”

“We happen to be in the same class,” I say.

“And do you play an instrument?” the old lady says.

“No,” I say.

“She also plays piano,” my mama says.

“No I don’t,” I say.

“My daughter is being funny,” my mama says and gives me a look. “Of course she is not nearly as talented as Barney, nor does she practice as much.”

“Well I’m sure any friend of Barney’s is very gifted,” the old man says. “You ought to perform four hands sometime.”

I wouldn’t mind that at all, and then I look around at the polite old eyes surrounding me. “No,” I say. “Why don’t you go outside now,” my mama says, giving me another look.

I think about the sky and the wind and the trees and remember that Barney and his cousins are out there. “I’ll stay here and be quiet,” I say and I glue my eyes to the TV, out where it is big and lights glare and the slightest shove could start a stampede that would crumble thousands.