Girl Toy

Part One

I have learned not to get burned.

The year that I turn sixteen, which is a very long year, I often work the opening shift at McDonald’s. Other than babysitting, this is my first job, and I take it quite seriously. Twenty hours a week; more in the summer. I have no license, so my mother drives me, both of us heavy with the want of sleep. Arrive by 5:30, Saturday morning. Slide the punch card through the timer in the back room, which is always cluttered with unopened boxes: Happy Meal Toys, Aladdin this month. My uniform and apron (both unimpressive shades of blue) are clean, because my mother always washes them.

Count the money in the drawer, once, twice, so I don’t get written up. This time of day, there are only half a dozen crew members: one manager, two on grill, someone on lobby, a cashier, and the drive-thru. Today, I’m the drive-thru, because the morning ladies like to do cashier, and for that, I am grateful. Drive-thru is normally reserved for assistant managers, or people with more experience and more power. I am new.

I set up. Two brown-rimmed pots of coffee, one orange-rimmed pot of decaf; I set them out at the industrial machine by the window. We open at six, and all sorts of luxury cars will be lining up soon. I can’t remember the season anymore, but I wasn’t wearing a coat. When you’re on drive-thru in the winter, you are almost always wearing a coat.

I live and work in a commuter town of 40,000; it is 68% White and 23% Asian, with a median income that is double the state’s. People come to this McDonald’s because it is clean, fast, and the food is hot. The elderly folks from ungated communities walk in early, to read the Asbury Park Press while drowning their hotcakes with syrup. Young families come by the drive-thru, on their way to travel soccer or the Freehold Raceway Mall. It’s early still, but the smell of hash browns frying in oil is unbearable. I’m hungry. Everyone’s going to order coffee, which I don’t yet drink.

This particular Saturday occurs four years after an elderly woman named Stella Liebeck was seriously burned by a cup of McDonald’s coffee. Her case makes world news. Stella’s injuries were far more serious than mine will be. And to be clear, what is about to happen is my own fault. I mention Stella to differentiate myself from her tragedy. When, as an adult, I get a job working for an attorney who specializes in tort litigation, I often come back to the idea of hot coffee, and how the scald of it can change your life.

My family life is a wreck at this point. It is good to be at work.

The thing about the grounds is that they sizzle; in the filter; on the skin. You would not think they buzz, but somehow, they do. And it happens in an instant, the accident. I’m putting on my headset, looping the long wire around my waist. My head is turned away from the window, joking with my manager, a stout and efficient woman of South Indian descent. That first pot must be done by now, I reason, eager to get ahead of the game. Saturday mornings are always about staying ahead of the coffee. Thinking I should dump the grains, and make another pot, I pull the handle of the coffee funnel with some heft, a quick, sharp jerk of the elbow that sets the next three months of my life ablaze. The coffee was only half done brewing.

Someone else sees it before I do, the mudprint of boiling-hot grounds that has been ejected. I’m not sure I saw anything, not before the mess landed on my arm. My uniform, tragically, has short sleeves, and the coffee grounds cling to my skin, and I start to scream.

“What could you possibly want?” my mother asks. She thinks that it’s me calling, just after six o’clock.

My mother, right now, gets very little sleep. My father, after nineteen years of marriage, moved out last summer, while my siblings were away at camp. Dad comes by on weekends, but spends a lot of the time using our internet, chatting with his boyfriend. Mom works two low-income jobs. My siblings and I go to three different schools; somehow (neighbors and friends help out), we get to play dates, French club, and Hebrew school classes. I get to my new job. Last night, Mom worked the closing shift at the Gap. When she’d dropped me off this morning, she was heading back to disappear into her too-big-for-one bedspread.

It is, actually, not me calling. It is my manager, who is kind, but insistent that I need to be seen by a doctor. I am elsewhere; incoherent, standing over the sink by the back room, my left arm cradled under the cold tap by one of the grill guys. His cologne lingers on his collar, and I am momentarily aware of this young man’s gentle touch.

The coffee grounds pool at the bottom of the sink, clogging the drain. The skin that was covering my arm, from wrist to elbow, has started to peel. I think to myself that I shouldn’t faint, as the pain bounces from nerve to nerve. My knees buckle, and I kneel, briefly pulling my arm from the water, holding it up straight in the air. Someone must have locked the doors, because there’s not a single customer in sight.

“No, no, you have to keep it in there,” my manager yells. She is off the phone now, having summoned my mother.  I am in high school, but I weep like a toddler. I’m not sure what to say; sorry, or thank you, or help me, or this is all my fault. I cannot look at my arm, because the burns have started to blister. Instead, I close my eyes, and count to ten, over and over and over, one to ten, ten to one. Someone gets a roll of paper towels, and a tube of burn cream. No one is sure what to do with the latter; can you put burn cream on that? The first aid manual is in a file cabinet somewhere.

“Let’s go outside and wait,” my manager says, putting her arm around my shoulder. Her long, dark ponytail swishes on her back. “It’s going to be okay,” she says, “but I think I woke your mother up.” I try to laugh. We wait out back, by the dumpster, a couple of feet from the drive-thru line. The lobby guy has gotten an upgrade, and I see his pimply face in the window, wearing my headset, handing a drink tray to the first car in line. My mother drives up, and I hop into the front seat, cradling the arm.

“These are third degree burns,” the doctor says.

Not all of them, but this is the sentence that I hear. I look at Mom, nervously. We are in the emergency room, and my mother is a nurse by trade, having left the profession about a decade prior. She says too many people were getting stuck with needles; in 1986, AIDS cases were escalating everywhere, and New Jersey’s case count was fifth highest in the country. With two small children and a newborn at home, and AIDS being a death sentence, what else was she going to do?

My arm is cleaned, and dressed. I am given a lot of instructions for the care of a very serious injury, as well as a bagful of medical supplies, and a note that says I don’t have to go to gym class for ninety days. 

Part Two

A lot of what happens this year is forgotten, stuffed deep in a bin of memories from 1996.  I start sixteen as a pint-sized sophomore in high school; my best friend, Jade and I spend hours on the phone every night, exploring our recently unsheathed bisexuality. In retrospect, I was drawn to Jade because she was gay. At our ninth grade orientation, oh-so-long ago, she introduced herself with obscene and raucous confidence. She wore jean overalls and rainbow socks, and that was it for me.

I don’t know anyone who is openly gay in 1996, unless you count Pedro Zamora, from The Real World, and Pedro’s partner, Sean. Pedro died of AIDS in 1994, but they still repeat his season. On General Hospital, which I watch religiously, there’s a character living with AIDS, but he is the teenage heartthrob, Stone, and decidedly straight.

That spring, Jade decides she is going to come out to an adult at school.

Our school has no Gay-Straight Alliance. I will, in another world, as an adult, work for the man who created the first GSA in America. But for now, there aren’t any gay teachers or gay upperclassmen. Even Ellen Degeneres is still straight. Jade and I spend much of the spring of 1996 wondering who we might approach. We, of course, not meaning that I am going to come out, but me not being there was never on the table. We are one.

We think through our options. We have three teachers in common: a writing teacher who is male, and roughly ninety years old (no), a young English teacher whom we privately call Hester Prynne (no), and a History teacher who appears to be not unkind. She might be somebody’s mom.

It’s a warm, sunny afternoon, after the bell has rung. The windows are open. Elizabeth’s classroom faces the front of the school, and outside, students drag their backpacks behind them, climbing onto the early bus. I can never recall how we accounted for staying late that day. I’ve never had the courage to revisit the details, or to ask my friend.

Elizabeth was, if you could put a word to it, affirming. She assured us there was nothing wrong with the way Jade felt, and that there were loads of healthy lesbian people in the world. She promised that she wouldn't tell anyone, which was enough, for us. It seems to me now that she might have assumed we were a couple. A very awkward and ridiculously obsessed-with-each-other couple. After all, we traveled the halls together, impervious to anything that wasn’t us. We were straight-A students with matching thick glasses and frizzy hair. And maybe there was some want, on my part.

It wasn't my parents that Elizabeth called that day.

Because I lived almost an hour from school, it was dinner time when I finally got home. Jade’s phone rang and rang and rang. Did I get the machine? I don’t remember. I had wanted to debrief, to document and celebrate our triumphant afternoon. At long last, there was someone on our side, although, until that very moment, we weren’t sure what the other side looked like. When someone finally picked up the phone, well into the evening, it was Jade’s stepfather. No, she couldn’t talk.

A few weeks later, Jade announced that she had to transfer schools. To what extent this was caused by Elizabeth’s late afternoon phone call, I could only guess. But this moment re-shaped the way that I looked at the world. Trust was the finite sand of an hourglass. It ran out.

When my father came out as a gay man, that summer, I kept the information to myself. That was mostly by design, because my parents forbid me from telling. And even if I had disobeyed, Jade was gone; at least gone to me. Who was I going to tell?

When my father came out as a gay man, that summer,  there was no way for me to find my way out, too. I would navigate the rest of my high school career, deeply closted, stumbling for my underwear in my sandy-haired boyfriend’s twin bed.

I inherited most of Jade’s friends, and for that I was grateful. When I’d catch them talking about her, even years later, it was in the tone of voice that made it clear that they knew her secret; knew our secret. But how happy they were to pretend that I wasn’t like that. Because I couldn’t be. There was never a question of attending to myself anymore. I was on my own at school, on my own at home, and on my own in a world that didn’t want anything to do with that sort of thing.

Part Three

I didn’t take very much time off, after the burn. My mother must have filled out a disability claim, but the best that it got me was a week or so off, and that only meant studying harder. I came back to work with my arm completely wrapped in gauze. I don’t recall how long it was before I was allowed to open the store again, but for months and months, the other crew members offered to make the coffee; wouldn’t let me anywhere near a brewing pot.

The skin on my arm turned ashen, olive, and white. For a while, I couldn’t look when my mother changed the dressings, rubbing my wounds with antibiotic cream. For a teenager, I was not very concerned with the burn’s longevity, in terms of aesthetics. Getting out of gym class was enough; not having to change into clothes I barely remembered to have laundered, not having to un-bra in a way that made it clear my body doesn’t move like other bodies. I cannot recall what I did instead; maybe I sat in the bleachers and read. It was, to me, worth the pain. I was able to hide.

-Amy Cook

 Amy Cook is an MFA candidate at Pacific Lutheran University (Rainier Writing Workshop), and participated in the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been featured in fifteen literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Bi Women’s Quarterly, great weather for MEDIA, Thimble Literary Magazine and Apricity Press. She was a finalist for the 2023 ProForma competition (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts), a finalist for the Disruptors Contest (TulipTree Publishing, 2021), and received an Honorable Mention from the New Millennium Writing Awards (2022). Amy is an award-winning lyricist (BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, 2008 Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement) whose work has been heard at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre (Easter Bonnet Competition, 2010), the Metropolitan Room and the Algonquin Salon. She is the Legal Administrative Manager of Lambda Legal. Amy was a charter member of the Youth Pride Chorus (2003), as well as a singing and associate member of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus. She holds a B.A. in Political Science, summa cum laude, with Distinction, from Rider University. Outside of her professional work, Amy is also a spin bike junkie and a marathoner. She is married to lyricist Patrick Cook.