The Girl With Borrowed Wings

by Rossetti, Rinsai

  It didn’t make sense. I’d been sure that the milk wasn’t dripping.

  “Don’t let the milk drip,” he said.

  Losing my head, I put the spoon down, back into the bowl. At least it definitely wouldn’t drip that way.

  But he wasn’t satisfied. “Show me again.”

  This time even I noticed the drop of milk that plopped from the wet underside of the spoon.

  I couldn’t do it right this morning.

  My father began working on his computer with his forehead ominously creased, convinced that I was being this way on purpose. I left the rest of my cereal untouched and threw it away in the kitchen.

  A loud, disapproving tut from the corner made me jump. I hadn’t realized Mom was there. She looked at me, and then at the empty bowl, shaking her head once.

  “Frenenqer,” came my father’s voice, peevishly. I was supposed to be waiting at the door five minutes early. I returned to him.

  We got in the car to go to school.

  “You’re not wearing socks,” he said.

  I hated wearing socks. They were part of the dress code, which the school administration had copied straight from England without considering that socks were worse than useless in the oasis—they only made you hotter.

  “Nobody wears socks,” I said.

  He switched the car off and in the abrupt silence, there was something huge and dangerous. I stayed seated for an instant. My father tugged out the keys and threw them onto my lap, where they fell with a chill clink. The message was clear. I wasn’t going to school unless I repented.

  I hurried upstairs and put on some socks.

  During the drive to school, my chest suddenly heaved, and all I wanted was to break the stiffness between us. This cold weight wasn’t worth a quibble over socks.

  “Sorry,” I said, looking over.

  “Words are cheap. There’s something not right about you lately.” Without taking his eyes off the road, he pulled a neatly folded piece of paper out of one pocket and tossed it to me. Not the way Sangris tossed things, but accurately, like a missile.

  “This morning I printed out a list of rules for your benefit. You’ll study it, memorize it.”

  So that was what he’d been doing on the computer. I looked down at the paper in my hands. “Frenenqer’s rules.” The list began with “1. You will smile and act pleasant when spoken to,” and ended with “10. You will not make a fool of yourself in public anymore”—a reference to the bird incident. There were other commands too, basic things like “You will not be selfish” and “You will not act out for attention.” As I read, my cheeks burned as though they were being stabbed by a million tiny pins. I said, “Oh.”

  “Was that a complaint?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re going to be better,” he said to the windshield, not like a promise, but like a resolve without alternative.

  My pulse thudded. The thing about being treated as a child by my father is that I always believe him, and it makes me a worse person instead of a better one. When he calls me selfish, I always think, All right then, I’m selfish, and I have no choice but to proceed with my selfishness. That’s what I hate most. He turns me into whatever he thinks I am.

  I studied the list with my face still flushed. I memorized it. I absorbed each hated line. I needed to. When my father quizzed me later, I couldn’t fail.

  The bad feeling would have gone away after a few chapters of a book, but I was stranded in the real world. Staring out the window when I was done, I caught sight of my own reflection. I turned so my father wouldn’t see my face. If he spotted my expression, he’d probably despair of me ever becoming his ideal daughter.

  Neither of us said good-bye. I don’t think he wanted me to speak to him anyway.

  I went through the straggling crowds into school, holding my bag tightly in one hand, and the list of rules in the other. Anju was the only person already in my homeroom, reading the book I’d left on her desk so many weeks ago.

  “I wish I were over eighteen,” I said to her.

  “That’s nice,” she replied.

  When attendance was done, I got sent to the empty classroom I was meant to be transforming into the Thai room for Heritage. But Heritage was the farthest thing from my mind. I kept looking at my father’s ten rules. I wished for a pool of deep water, an enormous bath, which I could jump into and come out completely clean, my heart washed as wonderfully blank as the desert after rains.

  Sangris had made a habit of sneaking in to meet me at school sometimes, especially when I was supposed to be working on Heritage, since it was basically a free period. So I wasn’t taken off guard when the door whammed open—he had never been taught not to slam it—and a weirdly light-eyed and messily good-looking student came bouncing in.

  “Notice what I’m wearing?” he said, popping his collar. “I’m going to start making a collection of these school uniforms, just to see how many I can get away with. They suit me, eh?” He slowed down in front of me. “Why aren’t you yelling yet? Go on, lecture me about the immorality of theft.”

  I handed him the sheet of paper. He read it.

  “What is this?” he said after a moment. “‘You will bear yourself with composure’? ‘No more ugly faces; smile when you are looked at’? What’s that supposed to mean? No, let me guess. Your father wrote this?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s stupid,” he said, and held it out to me.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh. You’re actually upset about this thing?” After a second of studying me, he read it more carefully, raising his eyebrows when he got to the end. “Well, in that case—” He began to tear it.

  I lunged forward. “What’re you doing?” I snatched it back. “Are you crazy? Do you realize how much trouble you’d get me into?”

  “It’s just a sheet of paper, Nenner.” He leaned back against one of the abandoned desks, watching as I folded the list and shoved it safely into my bag. “I don’t see why you care anyway. We’re at school, no one else is around, you can turn that paper into confetti. It’ll be good for you, I promise.”

  I burst into tears so violently that Sangris stood up, alarmed.

  “Nenner!”

  The next second I’d swallowed the pressure down again. The tears were gone. But the storm behind them was still shaking. Sangris was right, I ought to be able to laugh at the list my father had made.

  Sangris moved closer and lifted a finger as if he was going to touch my face, hesitated an inch away from the skin, and then, awkwardly, lowered his hand again. I’d slapped him the last time he’d tried; he’d learned his lesson. And it was a pity. “What did I say?” he was asking, not in his usual voice, but a worried one. “I didn’t mean to, I was only joking—”

  I wished he’d stop being nice. It was making it harder not to cry. I sealed myself up. There were three images in my head, and my thoughts kept flashing between them. The glimmer of light coming through the window slots of my old house in Chiang Mai, that was one. And a cracked khaki sink, the cool, clean floor shining, me on my knees in the bathroom. The third was the look on my own face when I read my father’s list in the car.

  But it wasn’t true. I couldn’t possibly be so stupid—I had more control over myself than that. I might still have managed to get my mind tidy and composed again, if Sangris hadn’t chosen that moment to murmur:

  “I don’t understand, Nenner, you told me in Spain that you’re fine with the way things are.”

  “Well, I lied, didn’t I?” I snapped, then stopped dead. Why had I said that? “No, I didn’t lie,” I said.

  Gingerly, Sangris petted my shoulder. I pulled away, still feeling the hot itch of tears in my throat, and I was horrified. Crying, here in school—in front of Sangris. I scraped at my face. It would be fine as long as I didn’t talk.

  But keeping quiet meant that Sangris was allowed to fill up the silence.

  “If someone gave me a list like that, can you imagine I’
d ever take it seriously?” he said, giving my shoulder a little shake. “Just think of that night in Thailand. You were all right then, weren’t you? We’ll go back, and you’ll remember what you told me, and you’ll see—”

  “I don’t know,” I croaked, and what I felt when I heard my own words, above all, was terror.

  “What?”

  “I’ll never be the right way, will I?” I whispered.

  No guppies to hand over and cheer me up this time. Sangris’s hands hung helplessly. “What?”

  “I’m not the girl he imagined. The one on that list. But he won’t give up. He’s trying to—” Then I got it, the best way to make a Free person understand. “He wants to pin me down into one shape, Sangris.”

  Sangris promptly abandoned the no-touching rule, wrapping his arms around me and holding me in. He felt warm and solid and I wished I could enjoy it, but I didn’t know how. I think it was the first time I’d been hugged.

  It was too hard to look at him; I fixed my eyes on the wall. I didn’t have the first clue how to respond. So I just kept mumbling. “If I improve in one direction he’ll only pick on something else—trying hard doesn’t work, not when there are a million tiny ways to be wrong. It’s impossible; I’ll never be the right way, he’ll never be satisfied.”

  “Nenner, please,” said Sangris, leaning his head against mine. He sounded almost as miserable as I was. “I only wanted to know why—”

  “So are you happy, Sangris?” I said in a hoarse voice. “Are you glad you know now?”

  His eyes widened and that’s what made me get a proper grip on myself at last. “No, it’s not your fault,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”

  Sangris let go of me and went to shove open the big classroom window. Heat and dust streamed in. For an awful second I thought he was just leaving. But no sooner had his wings spread out, huge gray wings fanning out the tips of their black-barred feathers against the dazzling sky, than he twisted around and reached for me.

  Taking his hand, I stepped onto the sill next to him. The next second we fell out of the window, plummeting upward, and the air was roaring around me; leaving behind the stone vault of the air-conditioned classroom, and my schoolbag with my father’s ten commandments inside.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In Which Frogs Are Captured

  My heart thundered. There was no way I’d be able to sit opposite my father at the table every day, wanting to please him, and stumbling. It would be like going into battle without a shield.

  All he’d have to do was flick a finger and I’d fall.

  I’d have to work harder at not caring.

  I felt steadier once I’d made my decision. It was something solid to grip.

  “I’ve thought of an ideal place,” said Sangris, unaware of the resolve I’d taken. Curled up in his arms, I nodded. Already it was working, I really did feel stronger. But this wasn’t enough. I needed a way to reach out and turn off the last light inside me, like flicking a switch: something absolute and reliable.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “It’s in Oman.”

  The sky around us was now so feverishly bright that I had to shut my eyes. When the painful light subsided a bit, I was able to look down and see enormous dusty white plains and mountains, with a few thin mountain goats and some shriveled gray trees.

  Sangris swerved toward a peak, then set me carefully, in my ridiculously formal school shoes, down onto the flat, dust-coated stone.

  “I suppose,” he ventured, “that if I ever asked for your hand in marriage, your father would say no?”

  I shook my head at the idea of Sangris ever meeting my father. “He’d kick you out the door.”

  Sangris brightened. “We’d just have to elope, then.”

  “Actually, I’m planning to be a spinster, if I can.”

  “What,” he said, “even if I took you somewhere as amazing as this?” He took my face in his hands and lightly turned it so that I could see what he meant.

  We stood on the cliff at the edge of a wadi. Not a dried-up, cracked river like the one behind my house. This wadi was set deep into the valley walls, a smooth, hollowed-out area hidden from the heat of the sun. The water lay folded into those crevasses, gray and deep, as though the mountain had secretly bled it out. It didn’t have the blue brilliance of a lake, but it was protected by the valley walls like something pure and precious, a cold pocket of liquid. It was as miraculous as a living world in deep space.

  All around the edge of the water, green plants grew. Three date palms, dark in the shade, long grasses, and even a little shrub that bravely spat white flowers out into the world. There was something like glitter in the air, which might have been the wings of a dragonfly. And the faint sound of water lapping over stone.

  The instant my eyes focused on the wadi, I lit up. I imagined jumping into that bottomless pool of water and coming out clean, washed colorless, a ghost.

  “Ah,” I breathed. “Then I might have to reconsider.” His hands were still holding my head in place. I turned, and he withdrew his fingers, more slowly than he should have. We stood face-to-face.

  “I was hoping for somewhere new,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “I guessed.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I guessed that you needed a place without memories,” he said, watching me. His eyes were almost translucent in the strong light, like amber. Because of the heat, there were drops of sweat on his temples, staining the skin a richer brown. “No human’s ever even been in this wadi before. It’s completely untouched.”

  The idea, uplifting and airy, like a wave of cool water, lapped through me again. I stepped up to the edge of the rock. Sangris automatically grabbed my arm to keep me back. “Don’t worry,” I said without looking around. “I just want to see the water.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to jump in.” I twisted around to look at him. “Do you think I could swim?”

  His hair ruffled in the same breeze that had spread the idea through me. “Your uniform,” he reminded me. “It’ll get wet, and we have to be back by three forty-five.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “You’re going to have to promise not to look.”

  Sangris gaped.

  I smiled at the expression on his face. I had never before seen anybody who could accurately be described by using the word flabbergasted. “I’m not going to swim naked,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  Sangris didn’t look worried. He looked disappointed.

  “But I need to borrow your shirt,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I do have to take my own clothes off,” I said. “I can’t swim in them. Even if the uniform dries in time, my mother will be able to tell when she does the laundry—”

  Sangris wasn’t listening to my treatise on laundry. He had already pulled off his shirt. “Here you go,” he said quickly, thrusting it at me.

  I was very steady. I’m sure of it. I didn’t even look at him. As a matter of fact, I impressed myself. Rock and ice couldn’t have been more indifferent. I gestured at him to go away. “Turn around and close your eyes.”

  He did, but not without complaining, “Why do I have to close my eyes if I’ve already turned around?”

  “Just to be safe. Do it.” I waited. And then, with a furtive look around at the bare white mountains, I changed, savoring the warm air that moved over my skin. I tucked my own clothes out of sight beneath a bush, where I could retrieve them later.

  His shirt fell down past my thighs, just like one of my nightshirts. It was, on the whole, I thought, much more modest than a swimsuit. The cloth had the light, woody smell of Sangris. I was never sure whether that was his natural scent, or whether he just had a habit of prancing around in forests a lot and the smell happened to rub off on him. Either way, I wasn’t about to ask. Glancing over, I saw the subtle shadows under his shoulder blades. Beneath the skin, between the muscles, there was a suggestion of his spine.

  “Okay,�
�� I said, looking away quickly.

  Sangris turned and an ill expression crossed his face as he stared at me. I call it ill because it looked unnatural and flushed, as though he had a fever. I stepped forward instinctively. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. Ah. Actually. Give me a second.”

  I waited for ten. Then, when he continued to study the ground without saying anything, I said, “Are you dehydrated?”

  “Maybe. That must be it,” he said, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice. He must have been starting to recover.

  I took that as a no. “Well, what is it, then?”

  “Nenner—you’re wearing nothing but my shirt,” he said huskily.

  “But it covers everything—”

  “Nothing but my shirt,” he repeated, in exactly the same tone as before.

  “I’m wearing stuff underneath,” I said indignantly.

  “Stuff?” He looked as if he was going to faint.

  Oh. This could be a problem. I watched him for a moment.

  There is a hardness inside of me. I know that better than anybody else. When all’s said and done, the bit of me called Frenenqer is an impenetrable lump, and it’s almost a comfort to feel it there, because if it’s cold, then it’s also strong. I chewed at my bottom lip. I tried to see if the telltale shadows beneath his eyes had darkened. They had.

  “Sangris,” I said, “maybe you should go away. Pick me up later?”

  No. He shook his head without looking at me. He wasn’t going to leave me alone in the mountains.

  So that was the choice. Sangris’s peace of mind, or—I glanced back into the wadi. More than anything, at this moment, I wanted to wash away my father. Inside the water was everything I needed. If I could just be free for this moment, and leap—that was the way to ease that old, old itch on my back, to shake off Thailand. It would be my good-bye to caring. Just at the thought, I lightened; the heavy parts of me rolled away.

  Sangris was still unable to face me. Briefly, I wondered if I was sacrificing him. And the thought felt knife-sharp, but . . . at least it wasn’t heavy. I made my choice. And everything that followed afterward was my fault, I admit that. But at least I got to clean myself in the dark water of the wadi first. And, at the time, it didn’t seem so bad. It was easy to decide. This was silly, wasn’t it? I’d just had a breakdown, didn’t that entitle me to attempt a recovery? Anyway, Sangris had already seen my legs. And, most of all—he was being a bit of a pain, wasn’t he?