ELLIE WAS ONLY fifteen when she lost her virginity to a boy on the empty stage of the auditorium in the music building of Taipei Preparatory Music School.
Ellie’s piano skills were above average at best, but Kai— now, Kai was a star violinist, the concertmaster, the golden boy who stood before the entire orchestra with his two-hundred-year-old Stradivarius. At the beginning of each orchestra practice, he’d make a gesture toward the pianist to pound out a crisp, resounding middle A, tune his violin accordingly, and lead the strings, woodwinds, and brass instruments in turn with his mellow, rich delivery of the A, as they turned knobs, pressed buttons, and adjusted mouth pieces. Whenever the student orchestra performed a symphony with a violin solo, Kai stood center stage, awing the audience with technique-driven cadenzas he was known for composing himself in his five-lined notebook.
Kai could have asked anybody to be his piano accompaniment for the upcoming end-of-the-year concert, but he asked Ellie. Hands in his pockets, head tilted casually, no big deal, just asked her in passing if she was interested. Sure, she said, all nonchalant, playing it cool, though inside she was screaming, yes oh yes oh my god YES, and she wanted to scream YAASS! from the well-lit stage of a packed auditorium.
They practiced during lunchtime almost every day at school, the tension between them palpable in a way both titillating and painful to Ellie.
One weekend she finally found the courage to invite Kai over to her parents’ apartment to listen to a rare recording. She had saved up her allowance to buy an imported platinum-edition CD from the classical music section of Tower Records. It included a live recording of the music they would be performing, a postmodern piece called Untitled XX IV by Zuzitte. In her bedroom, Kai kneeled in front of her little CD player, which vibrated with the sliding, abstract violin notes sprinkled amidst soft piano chords. His body seemed to hum and dance to the music, and Ellie thought her heart would burst from sheer longing, though she wasn’t exactly sure specifically what for. After he left, she knelt in the same spot that Kai had kneeled an hour ago and slowly lowered her face to the floor, imagining what it would be like to be close to him.
A few days later, Kai surprised her with an invitation. “Let’s sneak onto the stage and practice after school. The music hall will be dark since the control room’s locked, but we can play from memory. It will be good practice.”
Lies were concocted for their parents, something about a group project meeting in a fast-food restaurant. In reality, after leaving the school gate at 5:30 p.m. with their classmates, Kai, with his violin case slung across his torso, and Ellie, wearing her pounding heart on her sleeve, walked halfway around the school fence and reentered from the back gate. The music building wasn’t locked yet, and they dashed in through the unsupervised front door and up the stairs to the concert hall.
The only lights barely illuminating the concert hall were the green EXIT lights above the four doors at the four corners of the room, watching them like narrowed eyes. The audience area was a sea of burgundy velour-covered chairs. One of the seats, hinge loosened, hung down like a sagging tongue. The piano on the stage glimmered faintly, reflecting the eerie green of the EXIT lights.
“Let’s go onstage.” Kai took Ellie’s hand.
Her heart beat fast. The touch of his warm, string-calloused fingers made her tingle. She let Kai lead her to the middle of the stage, where he gestured for her to face the audience, so they could pretend to take a bow together, still holding hands. In that moment Ellie felt the rush of performing with violin prodigy Kai in front of the whole school; she pictured the applauding audience yelling Encore! loudly as they rose from their seats, all the girls’ faces filled with envy.
Something interrupted her fantasy. Kai’s hands were on her shoulders at first, but slowly they slid down to her chest, which was still quite flat. Self-conscious, she hunched her upper body slightly. His fingers lingered on her breasts briefly before shifting to her waist. Her heartbeat was deafening as she felt his hands through the pleated folds of her rough uniform skirt. Then, Kai’s fingers reached under the skirt and found her panties, nudging them down. How did he know what to do? Had he done this before? Was this why he had asked her to play the piano accompaniment for him?
Ellie was so stunned that she stood, statue-like, allowing Kai to kneel before her as he had before the CD player. He kissed her “down there,” her first kiss from him landing in a spot she had never imagined it would land. Then he stood up to kiss her on the lips. The taste caught Ellie by surprise, but it did not repulse her. Kai took her hands and put them around his waist.
“Undo my belt,” he said.
Ellie did as she was told, and down came his uniform pants. Through the green fabric of his fitted underpants, Ellie could see the shape of what looked like the stalk of a shitake mushroom.
The mushroom did not stay firm for long. Soon it turned bright red and slimy and was hidden away again. It all happened so quickly and quietly in the dark that Ellie felt like she had only dreamt it.
They both acted as they normally did the next day at school and practiced like usual during the lunch hour. Secretly, however, Ellie felt like she was floating in cottony clouds, on a warm river, in thin air. She was in love. Kai winked at her in math class and she spent the rest of the hour doodling his name along with musical notes and hearts in her textbook.
Weeks later, with some horror as the euphoria subsided, she wondered why she had not needed a sanitary napkin for so long. But it was just once—what were the odds? Was Kai such a genius and prodigy he could impregnate on the first try too?
Ellie tried two different pregnancy tests: one inconclusive and one positive, the tiny plus sign like the cross she felt she would be crucified on once her family found out. This was exactly the kind of luck she had in life—drawing the short bamboo stick from the teacher’s cup to clean the girls’ bathrooms, never winning anything in a raffle, called first for physical exams in PE, and now, having barely had sex once, fumbling and passive in the dark, and bam, knocked up! She wished she could undo the conception, without undoing what she and Kai had shared. She knew she didn’t want a baby. At fifteen, she had barely grown out of stuffed animals and dolls. Totoros and Tarepandas still lined her bed. She had a Sailor Moon anime poster featuring a magical wand-wielding girl with yellow pigtails in a schoolgirl uniform on her wall. Hers was not the room of a mother.
Ellie decided not to deal with it for as long as possible. There was a wisdom to the method of ostriches—once upon a time she thought they were the stupidest creatures, evolu-tionarily unfit, etc.—she now understood. Sometimes, life was just too much. It was better to hide and pretend.
She missed one period, two periods, three periods. Her stomach barely swelled against her thin frame, her morning sickness was minimal, and nobody suspected anything or asked any questions. She wondered about telling her parents, telling Kai, telling somebody—anybody who could help. She was too scared to have an abortion because she’d heard all the stories about the blood-soaked ghost fetuses that followed around women who’d had them. She didn’t want to be haunted by a sad baby spirit for the rest of her life. Ellie was terrified of ghosts, more terrified than she was of labor or of her father beating her to death when he found out the truth. She was not even supposed to hold hands with a boy, let alone have a boyfriend or become impregnated by him. Unthinkable.
The night of the end-of-semester concert, Kai performed beautifully on the violin. Ellie did not hit one wrong note on the piano. Kai reached for Ellie’s hand when they bowed together, and they held hands tightly for a few seconds. The audience’s applause was deafening, the stage lights blinding. In that moment, Ellie thought everything would be alright: she and Kai would become a young married couple, the baby would be incredibly independent and easy to take care of, possibly a musical prodigy like its father. They would all live happily ever after.
But her belly was beginning to show. It did not take long for her mother to corner her and extract a confession. The school sent a letter ordering that Ellie be transferred to another institution. The board of the exclusive music school did not want a pregnant teen in their classrooms, nor did they want her walking around in Taipei with her belly bulging beneath the school logo on her uniform, sullying their reputation. At home, Ellie’s mother covered for her for as long as she could, but when Ellie’s father found out, he came after Ellie with a cleaver.
Following the advice of a family friend, Ellie’s mother transferred Ellie to a boarding school for girls in rural southern Taiwan, partly for her safety. At her new country school, all the girls stared. Most of them had never had a boyfriend in their lives, and they called Ellie names: Slut, Trash, Worn Shoe.
The baby girl died within a month of being born, ten weeks premature, weak and unable to breathe on her own. Ellie never held her and turned away when the infant was offered to her, covered in tubes and tape, attached to beeping monitors. She tried to forget its face: a pink, raw blur with closed slits for eyes. It did not look like her and did not look like Kai, whom she never saw again.