Freshwater

by Akwaeke Emezi

  The Ada watched as the boys visibly recoiled.

  “Oh, hell no!” they said, drawing out the hell. “We gon’ have to wait till you eighteen, shit.”

  Everyone laughed and the Ada smiled vaguely, but she didn’t get the joke, not then. After a few weeks with that crew, it became clear that the Ada didn’t quite fit. They disliked the white equestrians who lived on the honors floor with her, and the Ada didn’t know why, not yet. America would teach her that later. When the Black kids found out that she listened to Linkin Park, they looked at her like she was a stranger thing than they’d bargained for. The Ada drifted away from them and found the other international students instead: the long jumper from Jamaica, the soccer players from Saint Lucia and Uganda and Kenya, the Dominican cigar-smoking girl, all the others who didn’t quite fit either. They became her circle for the rest of her stay in the mountains.

  Then it was two years later and she was eighteen and her hair was long and decided and bone-straight, falling past her shoulders in heavy dark brown. We were still inside her, but she was much the same as she’d been when Saachi brought her there and handed her over to the kindly white faculty, except she now knew what everyone meant by the jokes about her age, she knew what they were waiting for. The Ada still wore a gold crucifix around her neck, a gift from Saachi’s mother, a reminder that she had kept her childhood crush on the christ. She never questioned his decision not to hold her; instead she constantly asked him for forgiveness as she tried to be worthy of his love. There had been the Panamanian boy when she was sixteen (sixteen and a half, she’d corrected, and he looked at her like she was a child), the dark muscled boy from Canarsie who ate no meat and taught her how to twist his dreadlocks and braid them, the assistant track coach from Colombia, the embarrassing crushes (the man from admissions, the skinny Trini boy who ran like wind on the pitch)—all just kisses, no one had touched her lower than the indent of her navel.

  We kept her neutral. It was strange; it had been strange even when we were home (back across the ocean, where we belonged). There was one day when Lisa had come out from her boyfriend’s room and told the Ada about the splash of white that colored his trousers from the inside, and our body just arranged her face the way it was supposed to look, as if she understood the secrets of hot teenage fumblings or the appeal of shiny condoms. She knew, logically, but we kept her neutral. It was not meant for her, the heat rising, the tricks of the body, the compulsions of flesh. She turned eighteen and nothing happened. We kept her. They watched her move in her innocence, a golden chained thing, dancing on dim dance floors and bright stages, winding circles with her waist as if she’d done so on a body before. She tried to hide it, flirting and kissing as if she had fire inside rather than us. All those boys, all that empty following it all. We kept her, we held her, she was ours.

  There was a Serbian boy with clear brown eyes who was different, who mattered to the Ada very much. His name was Luka and he was on the tennis team. He lived in the house down the hill and had dark hair, even on the gap of his chest that showed through his shirts and on his forearms and calves. Luka knew the Ada enough to see when the blood rose to a blush through her brown skin and he had been a safe place, a port, a boy who called the Ada magic and wanted more than the friendship she offered. He stopped when she chose someone else, later, afterward, when she had no safe places outside her anymore.

  The Ada used to go to Luka’s house down the hill, where their friends drank to prepare for the night out, rolling joints and snorting quick lines of coke. The house was full of volleyball players, tall Europeans who were sweet, affectionate, open.

  “Come to Iceland,” Axel said, his blond hair falling over his beautiful cheekbones, bending down to forgive his height. “Come and see the northern lights, they’re wonderful.”

  A year later, he would climb up a fire escape, rumpled and handsome in a linen suit, to kiss her, and she would be sad because he was so carelessly lovely but everything was too late. But then, back then, he was bright and drunk and high, and he and his best friend, the Slovakian, Denis, played Pac-Man with mad concentration. Together with Luka, they were that house that drew everyone in, the center. She liked them, she liked being around them, because when she came over, they already knew she didn’t drink or smoke, and so they played music she liked instead, with horns blasting, and we would dance inside her like those days when we used to dance with Saachi before she birthed our cage. We danced through her body, our body, the one that had been built so carefully for us, now winding through the rooms, her hands swirling in the air, the music repeating as the boys played it for as long as she wanted, the only fix they could offer, the only one she’d take.

  We were distinct in her head by then: we had been Smoke and Shadow since the naming, since the second birth, little nagging parts that the Ada tried to ignore, that she sometimes argued with but didn’t tell anyone about. She just went down the hill, danced until her long hair smelled of smoke or until everyone left for Gilligan’s, where she’d been going before she was legal because the club took college IDs as if they were real, as if everyone started college at eighteen. It was at the house down the hill that she met the boy who would sing the Emilia song a few months afterward. His name was Soren. He was one of the volleyball players, Danish according to his passport, Eritrean according to his blood, a skinny boy with pools for eyes and dark spilling smooth on his skin. We noticed him. He noticed the Ada because she didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, only danced, and there was something in her, something he wanted to put his fingers on. He walked beside her as they all left the house in a rowdy crowd.

  “Do you smoke?” he asked, to be sure.

  She thought he meant cigarettes. So did we. “No,” she answered.

  He’d meant weed, but he liked her answer. They danced together in the smoke of Gilligan’s that night, slowly. The club was named after a TV show that she’d never seen, very plastic and Hawaiian, with fake parrots and violently colorful drinks. The first time the Ada went there, she’d stared in shock at the way people ground against each other, ass to crotch, lost in smoke; she’d stared at the dangerous fall of jeans lower than hips, at the bad behavior of it all. They always played “Sandstorm” and, later, at the end of the night, “New York, New York” as a kind of dramatic finale. By her last semester, the Ada would be up on that stage, arms around a line of strange white girls, kicking her legs up to Frank Sinatra’s hymn to Manhattan and dreaming of the day she’d live there.

  But that night, beer was slippery under their feet as Soren touched his lips to the angles of her hand and the curve of her neck. He had the fullest eyes she had ever seen, so she let him come back to her dorm room with her. The Ada lived alone then, as a resident assistant, so she could smash mirrors and make carpets of fine glass in peace and quiet. She could feed us with cuts without having to explain or having people think something was wrong with her. That night, she brought him into her room and they kissed and fell asleep. Soren returned every day after that.

  He cried a lot, that boy, with those doe-dark eyes of his. The Ada pretended not to hear, but we listened intently as he huddled against the white brick wall and sobbed into the night, dreams driving him away from sleep. In the day, he couldn’t stand to be apart from her for too long. He held her constantly (we liked that). One day, when they were getting breakfast in the cafeteria, the Ada filled her plate with six hard-boiled eggs and brought them to the table.

  “Don’t eat that,” Soren said. “It’s too many eggs.”

  She stared at him and laughed, then started cracking the eggs against each other, point to point, like gladiators. Whichever broke first got eaten. The winner survived till the next round.

  Soren stared at her, his face blank. “I said, you can’t eat that.” He didn’t raise his voice.

  The Ada frowned at him and ate her eggs, curious about the harm she could smell in his gentleness, surprised that he thought he could command her. He said nothing more and ate his breakfast, his smooth fa
ce moody, his slim shoulders curved over his plate. The next day, he called her his girlfriend.

  “Wait, really?” she replied. “I didn’t know that.” Her answer made him angry, which irritated her.

  “How can you not know that? What do you think we’ve been doing?” he asked.

  “How am I supposed to know if you’re just now telling me?” the Ada replied, but Soren stayed angry.

  That was the first thing that made us interested in him—his anger. His rich, thick blood sap anger. His nightmare childhood trauma anger. His I was taken when I was little and the men kept me in a dirty, small room and they never found the other child anger. You could taste the sharp sting of it, the salty frantic colors it had. He was angry that the Ada didn’t know she was his girlfriend; he was angry because she performed indifference, telling him he could end it if he wanted to, he could leave if he wanted to. He was angry when she suggested he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, angry when she tried to walk out of their arguments, angry when she ran and hid in a basement to get away from him.

  We were fascinated by the ease with which he slipped into his rages, how much he looked like a little boy when he stormed off down the hallway, his slippers thick and plastic and slapping against the carpeting. None of it really touched us. The Ada was performing other things, acting the role of a normal girl in college, selling kisses in order to be held. She had many conversations with her christ, always one-sided, trying to decipher what he wanted. The abstinence was easy for her; she had always been interested in sex only from odd, indirect angles, reading the Bible for perversions, trying to learn all the words, all the pieces of it that only fit in the mind. Her body, our body, was indifferent. When the other girls talked about their lusts, she listened curiously to these hungers she didn’t have, a need neither she nor we understood. When Soren tried to fuck her, she did not understand. We didn’t understand either. We were only interested in his pain.

  He was full of shame and apologies when she said no. The Ada smiled and explained her vow to the christ, explained how important it was to her while fingering the gold crucifix around her neck. Her grandmother on Saachi’s side would have been proud. After that, the Ada watched with a mild interest when Soren slid his penis between her breasts. She found herself still watching as she moved into his dorm room for the May term, still watching when he raged about his father, when he punched the walls till his hands swelled. We watched with her, observing this furious human and his hungers. One evening, Soren stood up from the bed and looked down at our body.

  “You need to get birth control pills.” His voice was calm, a pool of quietly congealing blood with a skin forming.

  The Ada didn’t understand. She blinked and there was a pause, a teetering moment. She had no idea what he was talking about. Then slowly, information started filtering through, edged with alarm. Plain details at first, like it was afternoon and the trees outside the window were green in the sunlight. Like he was naked but she had no idea what she was wearing. Like his penis was out and it was brown like his eyes. Like how she didn’t remember taking anything off or putting anything on. He pulled on a pair of shorts as she sat in the cheap Wal-Mart sheets, knowledge trickling like warm urine into her head, traveling down to her chilled hands. The words swirled in nausea around her. Birth control pills, because this boy, this boy with the doe eyes and the sad skin, had released clouds into her. But she couldn’t remember any of it and she couldn’t remember saying yes because she couldn’t remember being asked.

  She was confused. There had been so many refusals in the weeks before, piled up like small red bricks, the weight of an apartment building that got torn down, things she thought would be heavy enough to hold him away because he knew, he knew, he knew she didn’t want to. She couldn’t remember anything, like was this the first time, was it the fifth, oh god, how long had he been moving unwanted parts of himself in her? The rush of unknowns propelled the Ada out of the bed and she slid her feet into sneakers and laced them up as fast as she could. Her burst of motion alarmed Soren; he hated when she left, so he grabbed her arms, forcing her to stay, shouting words, more words than she could listen to. She moved blindly against him, thinking only of the door, of away. He wanted her to say something, so he kept shouting. The Ada opened her mouth and all that poured out were large shapes of pain that flooded the air as her legs gave out. She crumpled to the floor and he dropped down with her. They sat together in shambled sheets as he shouted blank words at her.

  She started to scream. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Her vision was numb. There was a window in front of her but it opened into a nothingness like the one yawning from her mouth. Somewhere she could hear a building sound, a wind, huge and wide, rushing out of the void, rushing toward her. The walls, the veils in her head, they tore, they ripped, they collapsed. The wind rushed over his empty voice and the Ada thought with a sudden final clarity—

  She has come. She has come for me at last.

  ASỤGHARA

  Chapter Six

  Ọbịara egbum, gbuo onwe ya.

  Asụghara

  Of course I came. Why wouldn’t I? Let me tell you, Ada meant every world to me. But I can’t lie; this third birth of a thing was a shock. I had been there, just minding my own business as part of a shifting cloud, then the next thing I knew, I was condensing into the marble room of Ada’s mind, with time moving slower for me than for her. The first thing I did was step forward so I could see through her eyes. There was a window in front of her face and one useless boy beside her. It was cold. I looked around the marble for Ada and there she was, a shred in the corner, a gibbering baby. I didn’t touch her—that wasn’t my style. I’ve never been the comforting type. Instead I sank my roots into her body, finding my grip on her capillaries and organs. I already knew that Ada was mine: mine to move and take and save. I stood her body up. The boy was crying and angry, still sitting on the floor.

  “Go then!” he said, sulking. “Go!”

  I made Ada pick up his jacket, and then she and I walked outside. Once we were away from him, I released her and focused on the rush of being here. I felt drunk and full of life; it flooded the pockets of my cheeks. I was a me! I had a self! I spun in the marble, giddy and ecstatic at existence, before remembering the reason I’d arrived. I swung around to check on Ada.

  She was stumbling in front of Hodges Hall, dialing the phone number of one of her friends, an older Nigerian girl called Itohan, who lived in Georgia. I listened because honestly, it was just fascinating to have ears, to hear how Ada’s voice reverberated inside her skull. She was sobbing as she told Itohan what happened, or at least what she could remember of what happened. I didn’t interfere until Itohan told Ada to pray, that their God would forgive her. That didn’t even make sense to me. Forgive her for what? I slid in gently and made Ada end the call. I could already see that she was clearly better off with just me.

  Ada ran her arms through the bushes under the boy’s window and the thorns scratched her skin bloody. She wept. I didn’t mind the bleeding; it made me feel good, just like it always had, back when I was only a drift in the shifting cloud of the rest of us, floating through her. She walked across the road, over a small green hill, where there was a church and a graveyard. In the center of the graveyard, there was a cross that was seven feet tall. Ada wrapped her bleeding arms in the boy’s jacket and lay on the concrete base, staring up into the sky as she cried some more. I lay down there with her, stretching through her. I wondered if she could feel that she wasn’t alone. Her thoughts were translucent streams fogging up the marble—how she had disappointed her christ, how she wouldn’t be able to pray again, not now, not ever. She knew what she was supposed to do—forgive herself for fucking and talk to the christ—except that she couldn’t do either and she didn’t think it mattered; she didn’t think she was worth forgiving anyway. I watched her thoughts and frowned. She seemed very lonely. Poor thing, I thought, to be so in love with this christ. Why disturb herself with him if it w
as giving her so much pain?

  But I liked her other choices, like the graveyard and the drying blood on her arms. Ada stayed there until the sun set, then I moved her to the house down the hill. She seemed to have good memories of that place and her friend there, Luka. He had left for the summer so his room was empty. It still smelled like him, though, and it felt like a safe place for Ada, so she hid in it. But the boy, Soren, he came looking for her there. It was something I was going to have to teach her, that there were no safe places left.

  He was angry that Ada had disappeared and furious when he saw the crusted scratches on her forearms. He took her back to his room, and the wounds on her arms didn’t stop him, the memory of her sitting in the sheets and screaming didn’t stop him. No, the boy fucked her body again, that day and every day afterward, over and over. He would look into her eyes and swear in time with his thrusts as he fucked her, never bothering with a condom, always coming inside her.

  “I fucking love you. You have no idea how much I fucking love you.”

  Except Ada wasn’t there anymore. At all, at all. She wasn’t even a small thing curled up in the corner of her marble. There was only me. I expanded against the walls, filling it up and blocking her out completely. She was gone. She might as well have been dead. I was powerful and I was mad, he could not touch me no matter how hard he pushed into her body, he could definitely never touch her. I was here. I was everything. I was everywhere. And so I smiled at him, using only Ada’s mouth and teeth.

  “You love this,” I corrected. “You love fucking me.”

  He got angry again. The boy was so predictable, so easy to provoke. Human beings are useless like that. I liked making him angry, sha. I would hold him with Ada’s arms and smile in the dark while he cried after his nightmares. It was good that he lived with pain. Ada was never there when there was a bed. If I made sure of anything in my short life till then, I made sure of that.