The Girl With Borrowed Wings

by Rossetti, Rinsai

  “Not compared to some of my friends’ fathers,” I said shortly. “But he does have a lot of control. He decides everything—he decided who I would be before I was born.”

  “Really?” he said. “Who did he decide you should be?”

  “Not the kind of girl who lets Free people into her room! Especially male ones.”

  His eyebrows disappeared into the crush of black hair, which still looked rumpled from when he’d pulled his—my—shirt over it. “Free people? Unless you have some others hidden away, it’s just me.”

  “Even worse,” I muttered.

  “I’ll go if you want me to,” he said, looking at me sideways. I couldn’t tell whether he was testing me or not. He slipped past me, closer to the window, and . . . grew wings. As casually as I would put on a hat.

  The back of his shirt tore as the bat-like wings curled out. So much for that nightshirt, I thought. But my eyes immediately went to what was important. The wings. Two smooth dark arcs sweeping out of his shoulder blades. They seemed to fill the room with curves, graceful tapering points, an expanse of blackness, and I thought of the seas I had seen long ago, far away, during a time when I lived beyond the clinging dust of the desert. Those wings resembled the nights I could explore, if I only had a pair of my own. A faint flush came to my cheeks.

  He noticed, of course. He paused at the window and a thoughtful look reached his yellow eyes. The corner of his mouth twisted. “You like the wings, huh?”

  I jumped and jerked my gaze away.

  “We could go somewhere, if you want,” he said.

  My mouth was dry. “Where?”

  “Anywhere. I’m very fast.”

  Again I wondered what exactly he had done to deserve so much good luck. He was leaning against the wall, grinning at me slantwise, and steeped in his own freedom. The loose black hair was finally beginning to fall back into place. Messy. And he couldn’t have been much older than me. No, he didn’t look particularly superior; and yet there it was, the gift of wings curving behind him.

  I wanted to answer yes. I wanted, badly, to just dive out the window. My skin tingled as I imagined it. The imaginary wings at my back beat as hard as a second heart, but there, exactly between them, digging tight into my back, was the itch of my father’s finger, and from its tip came the command. It traveled through me, right up to my throat, where my father’s voice spoke and said: “No.”

  “You sure?” he said, slipping up onto the windowsill. The line of his cheek was thin and eager from this angle, like the sharp edge of a knife. Then he turned to look back and ruined the silhouette. “I want to thank you for saving me, that’s all. You should come. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  I felt obliged to point out, “Well, you have killed someone.”

  “But I wouldn’t kill you,” he said magnanimously, as though he was going out of his way to do me a great favor. “I owe you. I don’t take that lightly, you know. If you wanted to, you could hit me across the face right now, and I wouldn’t do anything.” He paused. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t, of course.”

  I shook my head. No, that’s not how it goes, I thought. My father’s daughter could not just hop off over the horizon with a random boy. There were too many walls set up. The bricks had been laid down one at a time, day by day. Now they were built into me. And besides, “I don’t know your name,” I said. I used my stiff old-womanly voice again. I hated to hear myself.

  He leaned more comfortably against the side of the window, wings shifting like a cape at his back. “Names are overrated,” he said.

  He seemed happy enough with that answer.

  “So your name is . . . ?” I prompted.

  “Don’t have one.”

  “You must.”

  “Nope. This might surprise you, but not many people know me. I travel a lot, but I try to keep a low profile. I’ve been called, variously, Cat, That Thing, and ‘devil’ in maybe five different languages.” From the look on my face I think he could tell that this news didn’t exactly inspire confidence. “Look, if it’s that important, you can choose a name for me. Whatever name you like,” he said. I continued to stare at him with raised eyebrows.

  “So . . . what’s yours?” he said smoothly.

  I hesitated before telling him. “Frenenqer.”

  “All right, Frenenqer,” he said with satisfaction. He came forward, back into the glow of my bedroom, and his face shocked me all over again. I changed my mind about the statue. If he were a sculpture, then the artist would have to be locked up in an asylum—no sane person could create something like that. The boy wasn’t beautiful, you know, any more than something bewildering, like fire, is beautiful; but, well, fire can be magical, and isn’t that better than beautiful? He seemed to be lit with a different kind of light.

  There were the eyes, for example. They were wrong. Eyes like that shouldn’t be allowed in a human face. They broke rules just by being yellow.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  He grinned. “Go to sleep then. It’s late.” He reached out to touch my shoulder. I jumped back. “I’ll see you later.”

  He hopped out of the window before I could reply, and the darkness of the night immediately swallowed him up. “Hey!” I whispered, a split second later. No response. He was gone.

  And I was the one who had driven him off.

  I said no, I thought in astonishment. A Free person pranced into my room, offered me flight, and I said no. How stupid is that?

  But the truth was, there had never been a real choice.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In Which I Cross a Land of Mirages

  He didn’t show up the next morning while I was serving myself cereal. At the usual time, I got into the car and my mother drove me to school. We were silent the entire way. I watched the white cars pass by, and the green-and-gold date palms slide away, and the dusty bleached houses, with their tinted windows reflecting dark blue or brown, vanish into the distance. Dirty stretches of pale sand by the side of the road. Rarely, a man bicycling past through the heat, if he was too poor to afford a car. Workers in their orange jackets toiling to keep the plants alive. The grass on the roundabouts, as artificial as paint, right next to the bare wadi, which was so dry that the ground curled upward in little flakes, cracked and scaly like the hide of a dragon. Nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. No enormous cats, no boys with wings.

  He didn’t show up while I was at school. I brushed through the schoolwork in the first few minutes of each lesson, then spent the rest of my time staring off into space. Anju sat beside me.

  “What other classes do I have today?” I asked her.

  I had a habit of treating her like a secretary, and, for some reason, she allowed me to.

  “Double chemistry, then English,” she said, consulting my timetable. “No, wait—afternoon classes are canceled today. You only have one period of chemistry, and then we have to organize our rooms for Heritage.”

  I doodled absently. Writing down names, then crossing them out again. “Great. What nationality did I decide to be this year?”

  “Thai.”

  “Right,” I said, sighing. “Are you sure you don’t want to work on Thailand with me?”

  “I can’t. I’m Indian.”

  “They won’t care. We’ll just say you have a Thai great-grandfather or something.”

  She shook her head expressionlessly. “No one will believe me. Not everyone is from half a million different countries, you know.”

  “Whatever.” I left it at that. “Tell me, do you like the name Sangris?”

  “What?”

  I showed her one of the names that I’d doodled down.

  “It’s weird,” she said.

  “Perfect. Do we have any tests this week?”

  Again she consulted her notebook. “No. But you have an appointment with the librarian tomorrow. She wants you to make a list of recommended books for some of the Key Stage T
wo kids . . .”

  I suppressed a smile. “If you ever want to be a secretary, Anju, I’ll be more than happy to give you a reference. Just say the word.”

  She shrugged. That was another thing about Anju. She seldom spoke except in answer to a direct question.

  Class ended. I wandered off to organize the Thai room for Heritage. On a sheet of paper, I scribbled about Thailand with the thickest pen I could find, to take up the maximum amount of space on the paper. Then I spent the rest of the hour reading a book beneath my desk.

  He didn’t show up.

  And he still didn’t show up when school ended and my father drove me home in silence.

  I took no more than five seconds to run into the house. It was too hot to dawdle. In those five seconds, he failed to appear out of nowhere. A glance up showed only that an oncoming sandstorm had blanched the sky a coarse white, a few birds rolling past through the distant blankness. Over the wastelands, beyond the desert. I looked at them and a heavy, dry jealousy made my throat ache.

  He didn’t show up when I shut myself into my bedroom, picked a book at random, and read it. It was short. It only took me an hour or so to finish. I put it back and read two more in a row, like a chain-smoker.

  He didn’t show up while I had dinner in the cold white dining room with my father, and my mother ate by herself in the kitchen.

  Then I made a mistake.

  I was thinking of the sky, and of how I might have flown yesterday if I’d only been reckless enough, and as I left the dining room I closed the door behind me with a small thud.

  Mom, still in the kitchen, sucked in her breath and turned away as if she didn’t even want to see what would happen next.

  “Frenenqer.”

  My father didn’t shout. He never shouted. The call came as though he were performing a chore he didn’t particularly like but needed to finish. Straightaway I knew what I’d done wrong—I wished I could just take the last few seconds back and do it over. Cursing myself, I returned to the room.

  “You know how I feel about slamming doors,” my father said, still at the table. “People will wonder how I raised you.”

  He spoke about it so sincerely. “I’ll have to fix you,” said my father. For the next half hour I stood closing and opening and closing the dining room door over and over again, making no sound each time. My face burned. I tried to think of something else until the routine was over. I dreamed of wings.

  At last my father said, “You can practice some more later.” But his lips were still thin with irritation at letting a disfigurement remain in me for even a day.

  I went back into my bedroom and read another book until I felt less strained. My mother burst in twice to put freshly ironed stacks of clothes into my wardrobe, and to scold me for letting it get so messy. I jumped in alarm each time the door banged open and thwacked against the wall. For some reason my mother always entered my room—only mine—as noisily as possible, but without knocking. It’d get us into trouble if he heard. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lock my door. My father had taken away the keys.

  I went to sleep early that night. I thought of leaving a window half open, then blushed at myself. It would be shameful to be so forward. I kept the windows and curtains as firmly closed as ever. If he wanted to come in, he could just knock on the glass, and I might open it . . .

  But he didn’t show up.

  Typical boy, I thought to myself indignantly when I awoke the next morning after an undisturbed night of sleep. They’re all the same. Even the ones who can turn into cats.

  I didn’t actually have any experience of such things, but I had read about them in books.

  I had breakfast as normal, was driven to school as normal. The same views of dried wadis and date palms and artificial grass. I went into the school building as usual. “What classes do I have today?” I asked Anju, throwing my bag down and sitting in the seat next to her. She was reading a textbook, as studious and stolid as always.

  She told me my list of classes. “But after break, we have more time off to plan for Heritage.”

  “Again?” I wriggled in my chair. I fiddled with a pen. The lesson began, but I was a good student, so I wouldn’t get into trouble if I didn’t pay attention. “One thousand, Anju. That’s approximately how many days I’ve spent sitting in this same seat.”

  She shrugged.

  “There was a Free person in my room the night before last,” I said. “He offered to fly off with me, but I said no.”

  No reaction. Anju was used to me saying weird things.

  “Pay attention,” I ordered.

  “I am,” she said, not looking up from her textbook. “Why did you say no?”

  “Because he’s male and he scares me,” I said.

  “You should be used to that. There are boys in our class,” she said.

  As far as the Ministry of Education knew, our school was segregated. But there were only a few hundred students, so that really wasn’t practical. As long as we quickly changed classrooms whenever Ministry inspectors came by, we could get away with mixing together.

  “Ugh. They don’t count,” I said.

  “True.”

  She lapsed back into silence. That was all I could hope to get out of her. Giving up, I pulled a book out of my bag and laid it in front of her. It was one I knew she’d like. Then I pulled out another and read it beneath the table. Another old favorite. I was reading it for the fifteenth time. To my everlasting regret, there were no public libraries in the oasis. Only the tiny high school library with about three rows of English books. I’d already read all of them, so I was stuck working my way through the shelves again and again. Still, it was comforting to open a book and see familiar words rolling past my eyes, in their proper order and at their proper rhythm.

  There was one second I thought I saw something quick and dark pass the window. But it was just a palm frond.

  When the bell rang I went to stand in front of my shabby wooden box of a locker, rummaging, Anju having evaporated into whatever spirit world she inhabited whenever I didn’t need her.

  A few of my friends were talking nearby. Lots of whispers and raised eyebrows.

  “Hmm?” I said, leaning over.

  Some scandal had happened during a dinner. We don’t have parties, you see, we have polite supervised dinners. A girl called Mitzi had wanted to show her friends a new dress. But the hem was above her knee, and so her friends had refused to look. “It wasn’t even Mitzi’s house,” said one girl in an undertone. “She wanted to wear it in my house. My brother was there and everything.”

  I could understand her point. “What did you do?” I said.

  “I told her the dress was inappropriate and asked her to change back . . .”

  Suddenly I remembered myself in my nightshirt and my cheeks went uncomfortably hot. I withdrew to my locker before they could notice. My stomach began to squeeze. What would they say if they knew? And that, right now, I was actually waiting for him to come back? Dangling after him. Whatever they said, they’d be right, completely right. I walked away fast, face still burning.

  “What’s wrong?” said Anju, slipping back into place at my side, out of nowhere, in the manner of an experienced butler.

  “It’s not like I’m throwing myself at him,” I exclaimed. “He has wings. Of course I’m waiting!”

  “Um. Okay . . .” she said.

  But already the stone in my stomach, the guilty feeling of shame, lessened a bit. Because it was true, I wasn’t waiting for him, I was waiting for a chance to see those wings again.

  “Sorry,” I said to Anju, but already she wasn’t listening. She didn’t speak again until break, when she reminded me of my appointment with the librarians.

  “Come with me,” I said. She wasn’t talkative, but at least she was company.

  To get to the library, we had to exit the building and walk across an expanse of hot sand—the “garden”—before we reached the small stone hut. We walked quickly with our faces scrunched up i
n the blinding sunlight. Inside, the library was air-conditioned. I handed them my list of recommended books, restocked on reading material, and—done. Anju and I turned to go.

  “Look at that,” she said suddenly, pointing. In the dazzling, mirage-filled area of sand ahead of us, by the primary school building, was a gaggle of kids. They all wore the navy shirt and long gray pants of primary school children. Some of them were crouching. As we watched, one jumped up and burst into tears. His mouth became a small black O against the white-white sand and the bleached buildings.

  Almost inaudibly, Anju chuckled.

  “My dear Anju,” I said, “sometimes you truly are evil.”

  “It’s funny the way he was screaming,” she muttered. Nothing cheered her up like the tears of primary school children.

  “Come on,” I said, stepping out into the brightness.

  The group of kids shifted worriedly when we walked up to them. It was unusual for so many people to be outside, out of the AC. Maybe they weren’t allowed.

  The screaming boy immediately stuffed his fist into his mouth. But I could see now why he had been wailing. There were three thin red lines cut into his cheek. “What happened?” I said, frowning. I was much older than they were, and I wore the intimidating light blue shirt of a student in Key Stage Three, so they didn’t spit at me. Solemnly a little girl pointed into the middle of the crowd. They parted to let me through.

  The cat looked up at me. Two yellow eyes burned in the haziness of the hot air.

  He flicked his tail, and then I nearly fell over backward as the heavy black thing leaped neatly into my arms. I caught him just in time.

  The kids’ eyes widened. As much as they could widen in the overwhelming sunlight.

  “How did you do that?” one demanded.

  “It wouldn’t let us near it!”

  The crying one just pointed expressively at the claw marks on his cheek.

  Among kindergarteners, I would be known forever afterwards as the cat tamer. “You have to be nice to animals,” I told them, figuring that I may as well slip in a good lesson while I was at it. “Even the nasty, mean, smelly ones.”