I couldn’t have been there for more than five minutes when I heard a sound. It caught me by surprise and I whirled around. There was a figure emerging from the kitchen. For a fraction of a second I thought of Sangris—but then I saw the glass of water in its hand. One of the inhabitants of the house, maybe one of the mysterious brothers, had come down for a drink of water. I realized that I was sitting cross-legged on their couch and that my lower arms and my lower legs were visible. I uncrossed my legs at once. But there was no way to hide my skin.
The figure came farther out from the gloom of the kitchen, and the moonlight shone on a beard. He put the glass of water down on one of the tables.
I couldn’t move. A wave of sick embarrassment went through my stomach and I wanted nothing more than to squirm out of the revealing light of the heatless, heartless moon. I was like the bugs that you find hiding beneath stones, when the stone is lifted away and suddenly they are exposed to the world. A man. He was a man and his beard was dark and curly. There was a stunned look behind it. He had probably never seen a girl, or a woman, uncovered in his house before. It must have been the last thing he’d expected, to walk out into his living room and find a strange girl sitting in the moonlight, showing him her knees.
“Sorry,” I said, my voice very small. “I didn’t think anyone would be awake. I’m Rhagda’s friend . . .” I didn’t know if he understood English. My voice trailed away. I couldn’t breathe. My knees, my knees. I tried to tug the childish, ridiculous shorts farther down. My heart had frozen. I may as well have been dancing around in a bikini. But there was no way to cover myself.
The figure of Rhagda’s brother came closer. He looked down at my wide eyes, at the smooth skin on my shins. I watched as his hand came out. He hesitated with his fingers an inch away from my foot, at the place where Sangris had kissed it once. Everything was still for a moment, as though reality hung balanced on a thin line and was not yet sure which way to fall. Then Rhagda’s brother turned and ran away. And I was left stranded, blatant, in the strip of moonlight, no better than a harlot.
I scrambled out of the light, holding my stomach and shaky with shame. I stared wildly into all the corners to make sure there had been no witnesses, that my father was not lurking in the shadows, his mouth tight with horror. No one was around. And that, somehow, was even worse. I grew afraid that Rhagda’s brother would come back and I fled to her room.
Rhagda’s sleeping form gave me no comfort. I wondered what she would say if she knew. I knew what my father would say if he knew. I buried myself beneath the blankets and stared at the cloth, concentrating on breathing. I was trembling so much, I shook the bed. It shook until morning. If anybody knew . . . But Rhagda’s brother wouldn’t tell them. He had behaved honorably. He had run away from me. The blame was all mine. I should never have left the room without covering up first. Maybe my time with Sangris had made me careless. I remembered catching frogs with him, the two of us alone in the mountains. My body was a menace. No, I was a menace.
I didn’t speak much for the rest of the weekend. I hid in Rhagda’s room, afraid to see him again. I festered in my embarrassment. When the weekend was over and my father drove me back to the oasis, I said nothing for the entire drive, still reeling from my own mistake.
This was my world. This was the background I came from, the sea I swam in. The world my father chose for me. A world where shins, exposed in the faint moonlight, were enough to make a bearded figure halt and tremble, enough to horrify us both, and enough to make me want to cut them off and throw them away. Now do you see why it was incredible that I let Sangris as close as I did? Why it was a miracle that I ever felt comfortable enough to wear a skirt in front of him? And how a kiss could make me feel so violated? Think of the moonlight and the curtains, and the disgrace of my uncovered ankles, and understand.
After the trip to Oman, I covered myself again in books. They numbed me. Soon the memory of Rhagda’s brother faded and to me he became no more than a figure in darkness. Sangris, I continued to miss, while the walls in my head stood between us. And then, out of nowhere, Anju’s hand raised up and slapped me, hard, across the face.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In Which Anju Brews Chaos and Destruction
On Monday, Anju and I sat outside on the low stone wall of our school, beneath the shade of a date palm.
“Will you be okay without me?” she said.
She unpeeled a mandarin and handed me some.
“It’s halfway through the school year,” I said.
She shrugged. “I’m a good student. I’ll learn fast.”
We both knew it was true. Anju was moving, but she would have no difficulty adapting to a different curriculum.
I took a bit of orange peel and tore it apart without looking. “Where will you live?”
“Qatar,” she said.
I nodded. Qatar was a predictable destination. “You’ll go to a good school.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Better than here, anyway.”
We were supposed to be in math class. Teachers saw us sitting there, but didn’t disturb us. We were good students. We could get away with it.
I blew air across my face. My chopped-up hair lifted, then settled again.
“I won’t know which classes I’m supposed to go to,” I said. “I won’t remember my way to the parking lot. They’ll see me walking around, lost, for hours after school ends each day.”
“You can find a new secretary,” Anju said placidly. She finished the mandarin and crumpled up the bits of peel in her dark hand.
I smiled faintly. “No one would put up with me.”
“That’s true.”
“I’ll be very alone,” I said.
Neither of us cried. We accepted the way things were. Nobody stayed in the oasis for very long. After my travels, and after all my time in the oasis, I was used to watching friends disappear into the distance. Other than Sangris, none of them ever left a lasting impression. The fact is, you can’t be sad every time someone leaves—you’d have no tears left. The only way to adapt is by turning away. After the first few times, it stops hurting.
I thought that I would forget Anju soon enough.
She threw the mandarin peels onto the sand. “Listen,” she said, with an energy that was unusual for her. “I’ve looked after you for two years.”
“You put up with my weirdness for a long time,” I agreed.
“Yes. Like your stories about Sangris.”
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded. I had told her everything about Sangris—several times, whenever it needed to come out—because I had wanted to, and because she didn’t believe me anyway. Anju was accustomed to shaking her head and ignoring my wild, invented stories. It was one of the things I liked best about her.
“Listen, Frenenqer,” Anju said. “You always need me to sort out everything for you, don’t you? Your timetable. Your homework. Your life. You’re useless at keeping things straight without me.”
It was true.
“I’m going to help you again before I leave.”
I listened.
“Last night,” she said, in her plodding, monotonous voice, as stolidly as she would say: “Plus or minus the square root of b squared . . .”
“Last night a cat came to see me.”
I didn’t move.
“Every week,” she said, “for months now.”
I looked at her. She met my eyes for once. Her face was black and inscrutable against the background blaze of sand; it gave me the impression that light was shining out from all around her, as if she were a sun-goddess. I screwed up my eyes but didn’t look away.
“He made me promise not to tell you,” she said. “The very first time he showed up, he made me promise. But . . .” she sighed. “But you’re my friend.”
“. . . Sangris?” I said. It was the first time I’d said his name out loud for months. It slid off my tongue just as easily as it used to.
She rolled her eyes. “I recognized him from whe
n he used to hang around you like a stray. I always thought your stories were just . . . I don’t know. You being weird. But he spoke to me.”
“Tell me faster,” I said.
“Don’t be impatient. We have half an hour.” Ah, Anju. Always solidly sensible. She continued.
“He wanted to hear about you. He made me give him news.”
I was immediately alarmed. “What news? You didn’t tell him . . . ?”
“That you slope around as if you’re half asleep all day and never look up from your books? No.”
I relaxed.
“Of course I wouldn’t. We’re girls.”
Translated: female solidarity. Sangris was a boy, therefore an outsider, and Anju wouldn’t have given him any real information.
“I’d tell him little things. He liked to hear them. He didn’t care how little.”
“What kinds of things?”
She smiled. “I told him about the day you came into school with your hair all chopped off. I told him about how you’d gone along with it because your mother had wanted you to.”
“And because I didn’t care one way or another,” I reminded her eagerly.
“Yeah, that too. His claws dug into the windowpane so hard, they left marks.”
I laughed. It felt sweet to be able to laugh at Sangris again.
“Mainly he just wants to know if you’re all right, though. That’s what he asks me. Every week.”
“What do you say?”
“I say you’re fine, of course. Even when you aren’t.”
“Thanks.”
“I told him he should ask you those things himself.”
I bit my lip. “What did he say?”
“That you wouldn’t want to see him.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Typical Anju.
“Did he say anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She gave me another sideways stare. “He said he didn’t want to see you either.”
I stopped breathing. The heat clutched around me. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“Because it was too hard,” she continued.
“Hard? He knows where I live!”
“Not that kind of hard, Frenenqer,” she said. When had Anju grown so much wiser than me? “It would be hard for him. That’s what he meant.”
“How do you know?” I said, still not breathing. “What if he hates me because of what I did to him? What if that’s what he meant?”
“It wasn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s in love with you. Duh,” she said. And her voice was so matter-of-fact that I wanted to shake her by the shoulders.
“Still?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s bad,” I said. I thought about it. “If he stopped loving me, then we could be friends again and everything would be fine.”
“He’s not going to stop.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s not going to stop because he can’t,” she said indifferently.
“How do you know?”
“Just trust me. It’s obvious. He asks ‘How is she?’ as though the universe might blow up if I answer wrong.”
She paused. Studied the sand.
“Why don’t you love him?”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
I thought for a moment, trying to find the right way to put it. “If,” I said finally, “a dog has water squirted into its eyes every time it goes near a tray of food, since it was a puppy to the time when it grows up, then even if its master is out of the room—even if it is hungry and the tray of food is left lying temptingly on the floor—even if the squirt gun isn’t around—the dog won’t be able to approach the tray. The fact that it’s alone in an empty kitchen doesn’t make any difference to the animal.”
Anju has many good qualities. Imagination is not one of them.
“You’re not a dog,” she observed. “And anyway, lots of dogs are disobedient.”
“Anju, I know this is difficult for you, but try not to be literal, okay?”
She just looked at me.
“Nothing’s changed since last year. I haven’t changed. And you know me.”
At this, Anju nodded. She did know me.
“Heritage is coming again,” I said, “and I haven’t grown at all.”
She said, “Maybe that’s because you’ve been in hibernation all year.”
“Hibernation is the only way to survive life in the oasis.”
I poked her henna-laced hand.
“Anju,” I said, “help me. Sort things out for me one last time.”
And Anju snapped.
I’d finally found her breaking point without even trying to.
It was like witnessing the explosion of a long-dormant volcano. Her eyes narrowed to slits, which shone flat and black, sucking all the light out of the air around us. She actually growled at me, and I blinked when I saw the flash of white from her teeth. She leaned toward me. I leaned back. “No,” she said. “No. Do you know how I’m going to help you? I’m going to give you a week. That’s the last time Sangris is coming to my house. We’re moving after that, so it really is the last week. When he comes, I’m going to send him straight to your room. I’m going to tell him that you want to see him and that it’s a matter of life or death. So you’d better be there. And you’d better be in love with him by then.”
“Anju,” I said reasonably, “don’t. You know I can’t force myself to love someone.”
Anju whacked me on the arm. Hard. I couldn’t believe she even had the muscles to hit like that. I jumped up. I’d always known that I was the dominant one between us. I was the more energetic, the more creative, the more outspoken. But all the while, Anju had been looking after me, sweeping away my messes, propping me up, unseen, from behind. Did that make her stronger? I had no idea, but my arm was stinging incredibly.
“You won’t be forcing yourself,” she said.
“But—”
“It’s already there,” she said. “Well, it’s there, but it’s not there—”
Poor Sangris, I thought. Just about everything in his life boils down to that. Including me.
“—because you won’t let it be! You’ve dammed yourself up. You would be in love with Sangris, if you didn’t have so many limits in your mind.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know that. But I can’t help it. It’s who I am.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s who your father wants to make you. You’re so mixed up with your father’s idea of you that you don’t even see . . .” She said, “You know where the real problem is? It begins and ends with your father. Go to your father and . . .”
“You know I can’t confront my father.”
“You won’t be confronting him,” she said.
“If you mean I ought to reason with him—”
“You won’t be reasoning with him,” she said.
I waved my arms around in exasperation. “I won’t be forcing myself to love Sangris, I won’t be confronting my father, and I won’t be reasoning with my father. What will I be doing, then?”
“You’ll be fixing everything,” she said. “You’ll be untangling the wires that he crossed when he created you. Your father isn’t a very good God, you know. He made you wrong. You’re going to have to sort it out.”
“How?” I said, hesitating. Anju was sensible. And she was, apparently, wiser than I’d known. Maybe she did have a solution.
“Tell your father that you love him,” Anju said.
I looked across the low wall, against the wavy, spiked shadow of the date palm, at the emotionless face of the girl who looked back at me. She was framed against the blinding whiteness of the sand.
“Some fairy godmother you are,” I said sarcastically.
“I mean it.”
“Anju, you don’t realize what you’re asking me.”
She just raised her eyebrows.
“No,” I
said. “It’s impossible.”
“Well,” she said coolly, crumbling flakes of paint from the wall between her fingers, “I suppose that depends on how much you want Sangris, doesn’t it?”
There was a flat silence. I writhed.
“But—” I tried, “even if I do say that to my father—how’s it supposed to help?”
“It will.”
“How?”
“Frenenqer,” she said, “when I write down your timetable for you, do you ever ask me if I’m sure I’ve got it right?”
“No.”
“And do I always get it right?”
I was still squirming. “But I don’t love my father. I don’t see how lying to him will help me with Sangris.”
“Try not to lie,” she said. “Really. Try to love your father. Just for a moment. Your father thinks that love is dirty, and he taught you to think so too. Turn it against him. Make sure you tell him, Daddy, I love you.” She gave her evil laugh, the almost-cheerful one that suggested tears and destruction were imminent. “You’ve got until midnight at the beginning of next Monday.”
She was like a wicked witch brewing a potion.
“Ye gods, Anju,” I muttered. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Consider it a parting gift,” she said. “You said you should have been born with wings. So take them. Your own. If you don’t, then you don’t deserve any, and it’s just as well that you were born without them.”
I winced at that. She knew I was sensitive about my imaginary wings.
“Now,” she said, “you should start walking to art class.” She handed me her notebook with the timetable inside.
She didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the day.
I went through my classes thinking that Anju must have gone mad. She had snapped under the stress of moving to Qatar. Or her brain had fried in the heat. I would have to be extra-nice to her for the next week to keep her from breaking down in hysterics.
But that afternoon, my father picked me up after school. And the second I got into the car, I knew that she had pinpointed the source of the problem. Because the minute I saw my father and sat in the same air as him, with my mind still echoing Anju’s easy words, Daddy, I love you, I started to choke and my heart seized up under the stress. I was ashamed of even thinking those words. They were like maggots in my head. I thought my father would be able to sense them as something unnatural, monstrous, inside of me. I shut my eyes and leaned against the car window. It was worse than being kissed by Sangris. This was the swollen, beating heart of my inhibitions, right here. He can’t hear the words in my head, I reminded myself. I forced myself to breathe. But I wasn’t convinced. I let the words, quickly, run through my mind again. Daddy, I love you.
The Girl With Borrowed Wings Page 20
