Ooh, Kimmy

[Trigger warning: cyberbullying, self-harm, implied abuse/neglect]

Kimmy hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt. She just wanted a chance. Was that too much to ask? A chance at love, for a sixteen-year-old girl, who’s never had love in her life before Jin. And now she’s sitting here, smelling like a dumpster, blood caked into her blouse, tears streaming down her swollen face. Tonight was supposed to be special, and instead, she’s in a jail cell while Jin performs in the stadium across town and she can’t even watch the livestream because the policemen took her phone. She looks toward the exit and sighs. If only she could get a message to him, he would burst in to rescue her. Instead, he must be mad and disappointed that she didn’t come to his show.

She hears the policemen laugh and sobs even harder. She knows that they are laughing at her. People always laugh at her, and she pretends that it doesn’t bother her, but it does. The problem starts with her being adopted. Her parents thought they couldn’t have babies, so they went and got her from Vietnam. For the best four years of her life, it was the three of them, and everything was wonderful, until her mom got pregnant. They did some tests, and as it turns out, her parents could both have children, just not with each other. So now she lives with her mom and twin half-brothers, and her dad is so busy with his new baby that he never has time to see her. More than sharing her parents, she has to share everything with her brothers, including her bedroom. She doesn’t have anything to herself, except for Jin, and the phone she’s bought secretly with money she took little by little from her mom’s wallet.  

Maybe being adopted wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t bear an unfortunate resemblance to a well-known adult film performer. One day at school, Sarah and her friends waved Kimmy over at breaktime. “Come sit over here,” the girls said, and Kimmy thought that this was a promising start of a friendship. “Is this you?” Sarah asked, in a friendly tone, showing a video playing on her phone. Kimmy should have known something was wrong when the girls were all giggling. She glanced over at the screen and froze, unable to tear her eyes away, from a Vietnamese woman standing on her knees, eyes closed, mouth opened, and someone was shaking something into her face, it was a… Kimmy vomited all over Sarah’s phone. The girls stopped laughing, then, but the boys standing nearby roared.

That’s when the comments started. “Me love you long time,” shouted at her in an Asian accent. Stupid; she doesn’t even have an accent. At least the in-person comments weren’t as explicit as the messages she received, before school, after school, seemingly around the clock. Links to videos, screenshots of explicit scenes, questions about sex acts popped up on her cellphone. In the beginning, she googled the expressions she didn’t know, but it made her feel sick. She blocked the users, but as soon as she did, five more mushroomed. It mostly stuck to lewd comments, but there was some vandalism as well. The worst was when someone broke her pen. Kimmy had a B4U fountain pen, with Jin’s face on the side, which she found on the ground at the subway station. It had been fate for her to find that pen. She was sitting in the library, and when she went to the bathroom, she came back to find it snapped in half, with a note that read “stalker”. That wasn’t right: She was a girl, and stalkers weren’t girls. Stalkers were forty-year-old ex-boyfriends with sleeve tattoos who smelled like cigarettes and squeezed her breasts when her mom wasn’t looking. She knew this because her mom had yelled “psycho stalker” when she’d thrown him out. Even so, her pen was broken, and so was her heart. She pressed the pen together, trying to mend it, but the plastic had bent and bristled. There was no saving it. It hurt so badly that she didn’t know what to do with herself. She pressed the broken edge of the pen into her forearm, too scared to press it into her wrist, as hard as she could, until a drop of blood emerged, and then she dragged the pen across her skin, scraping open a bleeding wound. She winced at the pain, but felt, also, strangely powerful, and rectified in the tears that streamed down her face. She dipped the pen into the blood and wrote in her notebook: “I’ll love you forever, Jin”. She took a photo of the writing, next to the bloodied, broken pen, and posted it on Instagram. In the comments, fifteen of her classmates told her to kill herself already.

That evening she grieved the pen as she would grieve the loss of a deep friendship. It might have been the worst she’d ever felt, worse than when she first saw the porno on Sarah’s phone. But then, in her loneliest hour, the best thing happened. Jin heard her. The morning after, she woke up to see that he’d posted a video. ‘My dear jewels’, he said, because that’s what he calls his fans, ‘please don’t hurt yourselves for me’. He pouted his lips and furrowed his brows, looking directly into the camera, and Kimmy knew that he was talking to her, it had to be. He does that a lot, tells her things through posts and videos and songs. Kimmy understands that he can’t admit his love to her directly, she is active in the online forums where the girls swoon over him and if they knew that he was taken, he would probably lose all his fans. Not that he’s in B4U for the fame. No, Jin is in the band because he loves to sing and dance, he’d said so in an interview, and then they’d shared a playful look through the camera. If she’d had any doubt at all, it was eliminated when B4U put out the song ‘Kimmy’. There’s a part in it where Jin sings “ooh, Kimmy,” and she listens to that part on repeat until a flustered rash spreads across her chest. Until they put out that song her name had been Bethany, but as soon as she heard Jin sing it, she knew that he meant her.

When B4U announced their tour online, a smile spread across her face, ear to ear. That day, nothing could bring her down, not the mean comments, not the unsolicited graphic content she still received on her phone every day, nothing. Until she got home and realized that tickets were 50 dollars and she had absolutely no way of paying for it. The following days, she watched in horror as the number of remaining tickets declined on the web side, while she racked her brain trying to come up with a way to get the money. Grabbing cash from her mom’s wallet was becoming difficult. Since the psycho stalker had left, her mom spent any spare cash on vodka. After only two days, she laid awake at night and watched, like watching a trainwreck, how the last few tickets sold out. When the remaining tickets number jumped from “1” to “0” she let out a howl, like a hurt animal, and pressed her face into her pillow to quiet her pained whimpers. There was still the black market, but the tickets were even more expensive there, 100, 200 dollars. She held on to the fleeting hope that the universe would provide a way, just as it had before with the pen. In the meantime, she watched her movies of Jin, some of them clips she’d cut together from his videos, others played in her head. “Ooh, Kimmy,” he told her, and she pressed her lips against the phone screen, willing him to know that she was thinking of him. The night before the concert, things were at their darkest. Squinting her swollen eyes at her phone, she researched breaking into the stadium, but they would have top-notch security, as they should for precious Jin.

Then, like a veiled blessing, the message popped up. “I’d pay good money to f*ck you”. It was Kayden, a boy from school, two grades above her, she’d seen him but never talked to him. She’d grown quite desensitized to all the things that boys claimed that they would do to her if given the chance and found it endearing how he typed it with an asterisk, gentle, almost. She took a breath, typed, deleted what she’d typed, and typed again: “How much?” She fell asleep waiting for his response, thinking about how Jin would react. Of course, she’d wanted her first time to be with him, but she didn’t think he would be mad. He would understand. She was doing it for him, it showed just how much she was willing to overcome to be with him. It was romantic, really. He would realize that. 

She woke up to a message: “50?” She had to suppress the impulse to throw her phone into the wall.

“THAT’S NOT ENOUGH” she typed back.

This time, he answered quickly. “How much do you want?”

She felt her pulse pounding in her throat. “200” she typed, hoping that it would still be enough for a ticket. Her desperation grew as time passed without a response, but at lunchtime he finally wrote back: “ok”.

They agreed to meet behind the dumpster over by the old gym. Kimmy went there early, sweat pooling around her armpits as she waited, surrounded by foul-smelling piles of garbage and odd metal objects. Then she thought of Jin, how she was doing this for him, and found strength in that. Kayden finally got there, looking smaller than she’d remembered him.

“Let’s get on with it,” she said, and reached under her skirt to slide down her underwear, letting them fall onto her boots.

“Ehm, can I kiss you?” he asked, and she frowned.

“Why?” she snapped, and he shrugged. “Just get it over with,” she said, and he moved towards her, fiddling with his belt. When he got close, she squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her lips together firmly, bracing her body for what was to come. Nothing happened. He didn’t even touch her.

“Why isn’t it working?” she shouted, and opened her eyes to a wide-eyed, trembling Kayden. It was becoming increasingly clear that he wasn’t going to go through with it.

“Well, you still have to pay me!” she said, pulling her underwear back up.

“Forget it,” he said, and turned to leave, along with her only remaining chance of going to the concert.

“No!” she squealed and tugged at his jacket to pull him back. He strained against her, trying to get away, but she had a hard grip.

“Give me the money!” she said, yanking firmly. He stumbled and fell, right onto a sharp, rusty piece of scrap from a broken bike.

“You stabbed me!” he screamed, confused and bleeding. Kimmy backed away from him, shaking her head, and sunk into a sobbing heap on the ground. Kayden called the police on his phone, and Kimmy stayed on the ground until they arrived.

*

The concert is over now, Kimmy missed her chance. Someone enters the police station, and through her teary eyes, Kimmy first thinks it’s Jin. She’s only a little disappointed when she recognizes the figure: “Dad,” she says, and reaches her arms out like a small child, asking to be lifted.

“Let’s get you home,” he says, looking very tired. He has a new car and lays a towel over the seat for her to sit on. They ride in silence, until they reach her mom’s house.

“When will I see you again?” Kimmy asks.

“I don’t know,” he answers, and lets her out, driving off before she’s even made it to the front door.