“‘Needle of Everton’ is a story about marginalization, taboos, and belonging inspired by Unmasked, a 2016 Miami mural created by Toronto-based artist duo Clandestinos. The wall depicts a young woman holding a mask and a contemplative older man; the two are separated by a rickety home built on precarious foundations. Drawing on this imagery, I created a teen protagonist whose father is a successful psychedelic muralist. While he enjoys an artist’s dream life, Needle’s experience is dictated by estrangement and a search for identity. ‘Needle of Everton’ explores the question I saw posed in the mural: what does it mean to belong?”
“So where are you from, anyways?” Dan asks and sits up in bed. He pulls on a white T-shirt and an Everton High varsity jacket.
I invite just a hint of a Nordic twang into my accent. “I’m from Stockholm, Sweden,” I say, and shimmy into my underpants.
“Mmm,” says Dan. “Girls from Sweden are yummy.” He kisses me. “I need to pee. Can I use your bathroom?”
“Sure,” I say. “Can I come with?”
I grew up on the road. Since early childhood, as far back as I can remember, Dad and I led a roving, gypsy life. Dad’s a world-famous artist. He does these huge murals of underwater landscapes on giant windowless factory buildings, on brick walls on the side of highways, and under huge, abandoned bridges. We would spend a year or two in one place while my father left his mark in the form of paint strokes around town.
During the school year, I would go to school while Dad painted. In the summers, we would leave our temporary homes behind to travel to museums, galleries, and public art spaces for one or another of my dad’s artistic collaborations. You would think moving around would get easier the more you do it, but for me, new felt newer every time.
My dad and I arrived in Malaga, a beach town in the south of Spain, three days after the beginning of the school year. A taxi brought us to the grounds of an expensive hotel overlooking the sea, to a little cabin belonging to the owner of the hotel, who had commissioned murals from my father. We put our suitcases in the cabin, then walked hand-in-hand the four blocks from the hotel to the international primary school, where I was to start first grade. I could hear my heartbeat, quick and urgent, as we looked up at the tall black wrought-iron fence surrounding the school. Will you be okay, Needle? Dad looked worried as he dropped me off at the gate. Sure I will, Dad, I said. I’ll be just fine.
Because we had missed orientation day, I received a private tour from the school principal, Senora Carla. In heavily accented English, she showed me the small cafetería with its servers and elaborate seating; the small clases containing rows of uniform-clad Hispanic and European and Asian children; the elegantly cared-for jardins. The last stop on the tour was the girl’s bathroom: a claustrophobic, narrow corridor of a space with ten or twelve stalls lined up one after the other. Unlike the doorless toilets at my international Singaporean preschool the year before, these stalls had doors with a handle and a lock. I need to use the bathroom, I told the principal. Go ahead, querida, she said.
Two black-haired, tan-skinned girls were washing their hands at the basins and speaking in a language I was coming to recognize as Spanish. As I locked a stall door behind me and hiked up my uniform skirt, I panicked, my heart flailing in my ears again. Everything was so different here, I thought. What if they used bathrooms differently? What if, under their pressed and pleated skirts, behind their strange rollicking language, their private parts were completely different too? I waited until I heard the thick wooden main door close behind them and could no longer hear their voices, and then I pulled up my skirt and peed as quickly as I could.
Back home, when my dad wasn’t looking, I took a little carving knife from his art kit. During the first week of school, after lunch in the cafetería and before the next lección, I would lock myself in the last stall in the bathroom. I worked a tiny hole into the wooden divider between my stall and the next and waited for a girl to come in. It took three days until a brown-haired fourth grader with pigtails hiked up her uniform skirt and sat on the toilet. I was relieved to see that, in Spain, they used bathrooms the same as they had back in Singapore.
The next day I took a sealant from my dad and four different tubes of brown paint, for optimum matching, like Dad did when he ran out of one paint brand on a mural and needed to use another. I covered the hole up until it was barely visible and painted it pretty close to the original. When I got home, Dad saw me hovering near his art kit. Are you happy and well, Needle? he asked. I’m happy and well, Dad, I said.
In Spain, our surroundings were grand and our amenities lavish. But in Larissa, Greece, where we spent third grade, we lived in an ancient, barely renovated ruin in the fields two miles from the outskirts of town. Our only neighbors in Larissa were the Anastases, a farming family with four little girls. Dad would drive me to school before going to work every day, and after school I would play with Isabella Anastas.
Isabella, who was also eight but went to a different, Greek-language public school, would come over to our ruin-house. We liked each other right away, even though we couldn’t use words to communicate. I was used to interacting without language: Isabella would jabber at me in Greek and I’d reply in a chimerical blend of English and Spanish as we climbed trees, dug treasure holes in the ground, made dolls out of grass and twigs or explored the riverbeds.
One time, when we were playing too far from home, Isabella announced that she needed to go to pee and went to hide behind a tangle of bushes. A familiar doubt thrashed inside my ribcage. Isabella was nice enough, and the parts that I could see of her were normal-looking enough, but that wasn’t any guarantee. I held my breath and peeked; there was underwear around her ankles and a skirt hiked up and a yellow-clear stream of urine flowing downhill. I was hugely relieved. In Greece, like in Spain, people went to the bathroom same as me.
“What is that name your dad calls you?” Isabella asked me one day as we headed up to the fields from the ruin-house.
“What does he call me?” I paused. “Oh, Needle?” I explained with the smattering of Greek I had learned and a lot of hand gestures that “needle” was the English word for the sewing accoutrement, but that was as much as I knew about that.
“Why do you call me Needle, Dad?” I asked later that night, running a floret of broccoli through the white sauce on my plate.
“Needle is the antenna on top of the old Everton water tower,” Dad said. “It’s long and skinny and flat, just like you when you were born.”
“What’s Everton?” I asked.
Dad hovered a fork-speared strip of eggplant halfway to his mouth and stared. I had never seen him look so puzzled. “It’s where you were born.” A perplexed half-frown slipped up and down his mouth. “Where have you been telling people you were from?”
“Spain,” I told him.
“And what did you tell people in Spain?” He asked.
“That I was from Singapore.”
Dad shook his head slowly, in amazement. “Everton is home,” he said.
But it wasn’t possible, I thought, for home to be a place I couldn’t even remember.
I got my period in the eighth grade in Stockholm, Sweden. Attitudes about puberty were very matter-of-fact, it seemed, when you traveled that far North. Menstruation education was businesslike, and everyone was open about sex. This is how you used a pad, a special teacher came to school and explained. This is a tampon: insert it with your finger or an applicator. Always have safe sex, she added, which meant using a condom and hormonal contraception like the pill, an IUD or the sponge. She illustrated the act with explicit hand gestures and a technical, straightforward short film.
At fourteen, kids around me were starting to go down on each other, sleep together, form relationships. My best friend Mara Eliasson fell thoroughly moon-eyed over tall, freckled, platinum-haired Tage from the tenth grade. One afternoon in the Eliassons’ living room, Mara’s mom drew us pictures of our private parts and explained that we had a right to orgasm during intercourse. I was a little glad, and a little sad, that my dad wasn’t there to participate in the conversation. I wondered what my mom’s opinions on the subject would have been. At that point I hadn’t gotten my requisite glimpse of Swedish underparts, so I was happy that Mara’s mom saved me all the sleuthing around.
I started high school in Accra, Ghana. Browsing the market or walking home from school, I looked more exotic in the African town than I had anywhere before. Men and boys alike stared but rarely approached me or dared to start a conversation. I spent most afternoons helping to paint one of my dad’s underwater murals. Some days, we were joined by young people from the local art scene, students from the local art college and even some curious passersby.
I had full-on sex for the first time in Dad’s supply van with Kobby. Kobby was a young bespectacled art student who was sufficiently unintimidated by my looks to flirt with me, telling jokes as he spray-painted the fins of a giant goldfish being consumed by a squid. By that time I had studied human anatomy in at least three different school systems, so I knew logically that Kobby would be the same as Guillaume who had turned out to be the same as Aloisio. But still I found myself holding my breath, half-anticipating foreignness, as he pulled his pants down. After we were done (and, Mara’s mother would be pleased to know, I had achieved my requisite orgasm), he apologized and pulled his pants down again to pee in the alley. I watched as his urine streamed diagonally, yellow and pattering, splashing the upper half of the wall behind the van.
That was the only thing Dad saw: me watching Kobby peeing diagonally on the alley wall. Dad must have come to get more paintbrushes or some thinner from the van, but instead he took one look at me, and then at Kobby, and left the way he had come. Later that night during dinner at the house, I could tell he knew we had had sex because he sighed and said, I guess I can’t protect you anymore, huh Needle. I said, You’ve done an okay job, Dad. Then he asked, Are you happy and well, Needle? And I said, I’m happy and well, Dad.
After that night, things started changing. Dad showed me a portfolio of some of his old work. It was weird and radical, loose and explicit, and, I couldn’t explain it, it was so much more him. We finished painting the mural of the giant goldfish being consumed by a squid and moved to paint the side of a bridge in another part of town. The new mural featured, alongside the standard fish and the seaweed, topless mermaids and mermen complete with mer-genitalia. What do you think, Needle? Dad asked. I like it, I said. For the first time in my life, he started bringing his dates home.
One day at dinner, Dad got the look on his face that said we would be moving again, his mouth grave with the weight of change but with flickers of excitement pulling at his eyes. Where to this time, Dad? I speared a tomato on my fork and chewed it. How would you like to spend your senior year in Everton, Needle? he asked. The Everton? Water Tower Needle Everton? I asked. Yep, Dad said, and speared a baked potato on his fork. The Everton.
On my bed, Dan picks at the E on his varsity jacket. “You want to come with me to the bathroom?” He repeats doubtfully.
My heart is wild in my chest. “In Sweden, girls watch boys when they pee. It’s, like, a territorial dating thing. Everybody does it,” I say as evenly as possible, slathering an extra serving of Swedish-accented nonchalance on the words.
Dan seems relieved. “Okay,” he says. “I guess I don’t mind. But you probably shouldn’t go around Everton telling that to everybody.”
Later that night, after Dan leaves and we have dinner, Dad takes me on a walk around the neighborhood. We walk past a yard filled with old, rusting car parts and an abandoned warehouse, its windows gaping like surprised, toothless mouths. After three minutes we pause on the corner of Clarewood and Pine before an old porch sitting, ghostlike, in an empty lot with no house attached. Surrounding it is a low, disintegrating brick wall. The wall is painted with a fading, dirtied mural; the style is a primitive version of Dad’s, the forms coarser, the colors louder and more clashing.
“There used to be a house tacked on to this porch here, Needle,” Dad says. “It was the first house you ever lived in.”
I move a step closer to Dad. “What happened to it?”
“It burned down while we were in Greece,” Dad says. “The house next door burned too, but they’ve rebuilt it.”
I have too many questions, so many that none of them can come out. How did it catch fire, and how did Dad find out, and how long has he known. Did anyone die in the fire, and how could they have let the place that I was supposed to call home disappear.
“And this is my first mural, Needle,” Dad says.
On the wall, in faded psychedelic colors, is an underwater scene. Crabs and fish hide behind patchy red-blue seaweed. In the center of the painting are two merpeople, torsos exposed, genitalia bursting from between shiny, fishy scales. Behind the grime, I recognize the faces of the merpeople: this one is my dad when he was younger, and that one is my mom. In between, grasping a tiny green seahorse, a skinny, long-limbed little merbaby floats.
“Is that me, Dad?”
“That’s you, Needle.”
Beyond the wall, beyond the abandoned warehouse, in the background stands the Everton water tower antenna, tall and thin and flat.
“That makes sense,” I say, and it does. “Now let’s go home.”
