The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

  (But what if you make mistakes? Pink would ask, but she only waved him off. “They’re never mistakes,” she told him. “Only chances to make something new.”)

  “Shush, Pink,” she said now, distractedly. “I’m trying to get this right.” She’d been seeing a picture every time she closed her eyes, as though it was seared onto the back of her eyelids, and if she concentrated, she knew she could get it just right on the page.

  Pink shrugged. Suit yourself, he said, settling into a sunny spot on the windowsill and stretching out his long grasshopper legs so that his entire body could bask in the warmth.

  So caught up was Suraya in the movement of her pen, the deft strokes bringing to life an undersea world of swirling waters and the curve of a mermaid’s shimmering tail, that it took a while to register the sounds wafting in through her open window. When she finally looked up, she saw in the distance a group of children from the village—boys and girls of about Suraya’s age, cycling unsteadily through the trees on hand-me-down bicycles they still hadn’t quite grown into. They were children she’d grown up with her entire life—Kiran, with the wide smile and the mass of dark curls; little Ariana, with her short bob and perpetual sniff, the two of them always arm in arm and whispering secrets to each other; Aiman, Ariana’s older brother, with his shaggy haircut and an ever-changing map of scars and bruises from his various adventures; David, who once covered himself in glory by chasing a snake off the playground and away from a group of shrieking younger children; and Faris, who had once disastrously tried to hold Suraya’s hand while waiting in line for the ice cream man and hadn’t really been able to look at her since.

  They’d tossed their bicycles aside now and were laughing and shrieking together in a carefree way that made Suraya wince, sending a peculiar pang rocketing through her chest. She saw these kids every day, sat with them in the classroom, knew their names and their families and the scabs on their knees—but when she was around, there was none of this camaraderie, this easy companionship they shared, Kiran’s head bent close to Ariana’s, David’s arm looped easily over Faris’s shoulders, Aiman cracking jokes to make all of them giggle. For a moment she imagined herself among them. For a moment she wondered what it felt like to belong.

  Pink hopped off the windowsill and sprang onto the bed beside her.

  Suraya.

  “Hmm?” She barely noticed, still caught up in her daydreams, watching the little group chasing each other through the trees.

  Suraya.

  “What, Pink?” She glanced at him. “Are you hungry?”

  No. You know I do not feel hunger. I am a ghost. I only need your blood for the binding.

  “Right,” she said. The last binding had been just a couple of weeks ago. It was funny; when they first began, Suraya had imagined a binding would be a magical occurrence that involved colorful sparks and electricity coursing through her veins and a sense that Something Big was happening. In reality, a binding was more like digging out ear boogers: a necessary irritation and a minor discomfort you had to get out of the way every so often so that things worked the way they were supposed to. “Then what is it?” She bent her head back over her sketchbook, trying to shake away the stubborn, lingering aftertaste of heartache.

  Listen. Suraya. LISTEN. Why do you never play with the other children?

  “What?” She looked up, frowning at him slightly. “What do you mean?”

  Well. He scratched behind his antenna with one long leg. For as long as I’ve been with you, I’ve never really seen you play with the other children. It’s always just you and me.

  She smiled at him. “You’re all I need, Pink,” she said. It wasn’t quite true, but it was worth it to see the way he held his head higher, pleased and proud. “Besides,” she said, turning back to her notebook, “the other kids don’t really like me. They think I get away with murder ’cause my mother’s the discipline teacher and she’d never punish me, or whatever. And they think I’ll tell on them and get them into trouble. And I think they just think I’m weird, and that my drawings are weird.” She felt her stomach twist at the thought of her drawings being laid bare for all to see and clutched her notebook close.

  Your drawings are not weird. They are beautiful.

  She sniffed. “I don’t mind. Who needs those kids, anyway?” And in that moment, she meant it.

  Pink said nothing, but she knew he was still thinking about it. Pink had a way of playing with his antennae when he was deep in thought, just as she had a way of working her feelings out on the paper. Now, for example, she could tell from the thicker lines, the way she was pressing the pen onto the page, that this was bothering her more than even she would admit to herself. Her art was always truthful, even when she wasn’t.

  Sighing, she went back to work, her tongue sticking out ever so slightly as she concentrated on the swoops and curves of the mermaid’s flowing hair.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Pink hop back onto the windowsill and stare out of the window at the little gang outside.

  If you were watching him closely, you might have seen his antennae flick forward. Just once. But Suraya didn’t.

  And then suddenly the laughter turned into screams of terror, and that’s when Suraya dropped her pen with a start and quickly leaped out of bed and ran to the window to see what was happening.

  The air was so thick with mosquitoes that they blocked out the sun, their shadows throwing the fields into darkness, their collective buzzing so loud it sounded like the combine harvesters that mowed through the paddy fields. They moved in a swarm, quickly and with purpose, bearing down on the shocked children until they were surrounded.

  For a moment, the world stopped, as if everyone and everything held their breath, waiting to see what would happen next.

  And then the mosquitoes pounced. How they feasted on the children, latching on and supping blood freely from any exposed flesh they could find: arms, legs, faces, necks, ears, all were fair game.

  And as the children screamed and screamed and screamed, Pink laughed.

  Suraya felt her face freeze into a mask of horror. “Pink.” He turned, and in his eyes she saw a dark, wicked glee that made the blood turn ice cold in her veins. “Pink, make it stop.”

  Fear made her voice quiver, and it was the quiver that dissolved the wickedness in his eyes. He flicked his antennae, and just as suddenly as they appeared, the mosquitoes were gone again, leaving the children bewildered, sobbing, and covered in bright red hives and welts. They scattered, running for their homes, yelling for their mothers, rubbing at the bites that were already starting to itch unbearably.

  “Did you . . . did you do that?” Suraya whispered. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel her whole body shake.

  Slowly, Pink nodded, his eyes never meeting hers.

  “What are you?”

  Your friend, Pink said softly. I am your friend.

  Was that true? Was Pink her friend? If he was, why had she never seen this side to him, this darkness, this cruelty? Had he kept it hidden from her? Or—and she felt a whisper of guilt whip around her belly—had it been there all along and she just chose not to see it? She pressed a hand to her temple, as if she could somehow knock all her racing thoughts back into place.

  “And why did you hurt those kids?” she said finally.

  You are my master, Pink said firmly. And I am sworn to protect you. And they were hurting you. I would hurt anyone who hurt you. You only have to say the word.

  For just one fleeting moment, Suraya let herself imagine the satisfaction of revenge, of being able to get back at every kid who had ever ignored her, taunted her, pushed her aside. To make them feel exactly how she felt.

  Then she thought about the way Kiran’s eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled, and the way Faris’s hand had felt when it tentatively brushed against hers, and her mouth went dry. She drew herself up straight and tall and took a deep, steadying breath. “Don’t you ever. EVER. Do something like that again.” Her ha
nds were clenched into tight fists by her sides, and her eyes were full of tears, but the anger in her voice was great and terrible, and for the first time ever, she saw him shrink back as if to hide from it. “Do you hear me, Pink? Never again. I never want you to hurt anyone, not even for me.”

  But what if, Pink argued back. What if you were in danger? What if the only way to save you would be to hurt someone?

  “What kind of danger could I possi—”

  What if?

  “Fine!” Suraya threw her hands up in the air. “Fine. If I’m in mortal danger, if it’s the apocalypse, if you need to save me from the jaws of death, then you can hurt someone.” She couldn’t keep the exasperated sneer out of her voice. “But that’s it. Do you hear me?”

  Pink nodded his grasshopper head, his eyes still trained to the floor, as though he were afraid her anger might burn him.

  “Say it. I want to hear you say it.”

  I will never hurt anyone again, Pink said. Unless you’re in danger. And, he added quickly, unless you want me to.

  She set her chin and looked straight at him. “I will never want you to. Not ever.”

  And that night, for the first time, Pink and Suraya slept side by side instead of entwined with each other, the space between them only inches wide, but big enough to feel like an entire world.

  Five

  Ghost

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND. What’s the problem?

  They were stretched out side by side on the smooth kitchen tile. It seemed an odd place to lie down, until you realized that it was the coolest part of a house that shimmered and scorched in the afternoon heat.

  “The problem,” Suraya said quietly, “is that I don’t want to go.”

  But it is a good opportunity for you, is it not? Bigger school. Better teachers. Pink turned over so that the cold tile pressed against his back, and sighed with pleasure. Is that not what you want?

  “I’m happy where I am.” Suraya’s dark hair spread around her on the floor like a halo, and her face wore a frown that had appeared the day before, when her mama had made the big announcement.

  “Since you’ve done so well in your exams, I think it’s best that you go to school in the big town,” she had said, smoothing the folds of her worn baju kurung and avoiding Suraya’s eyes, which had grown wide with shock, then dawning horror. “The village school will not be challenging enough for you. I should know, I teach there. And challenges are the best way to grow and learn.”

  Suraya had said nothing for a long time, appearing to be concentrating hard on moving the rice and fish curry on her plate from one side to the other. When she did speak, her voice was low and quiet. “When do I start?”

  “On the first day of school, with everyone else. In two weeks.” Her mother got up and busied herself with putting away leftover curry into an airtight plastic container and wiping down the kitchen counters with a damp rag.

  “And how will I get there?”

  “You’ll take the bus in the morning—there’s a school bus that will pick you up from the stop just down the road.”

  “By myself?” Pink heard the uncertain wobble in her voice, and he knew Mama did too, because she clicked her tongue impatiently as she reached up to massage her sore neck. “It’s only forty minutes away. That’s nothing. You’re twelve now, after all, thirteen this year. You’re almost a woman, old enough to take care of yourself.”

  That was the end of the conversation, and Suraya had not stopped frowning since.

  “Only forty minutes,” Suraya muttered darkly now, splayed on the kitchen floor. “It might as well be light years away. I’ll be more of an outcast there than I ever was here.”

  Maybe the new school might be an opportunity for new friends, Pink suggested. On the ceiling, they were watching two cicaks warily circle each other in a complicated dance, their little lizard eyes darting from each other to a hapless bug crawling in the space between them.

  “Considering my track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.” The smaller cicak darted forward, and before the other realized it, he’d made off with his spoils to a dark corner, leaving the bigger one gaping in his wake.

  “I thought for sure the bigger one would get it,” Suraya said.

  Fortune favors the bold.

  There was a silence. “All right,” Suraya said. “All right. I get it.” She turned her head to look at him. “And you’ll be there with me, right? You’ll stay with me the whole time?”

  A warm glow spread through his chest, and he smiled to himself. Their relationship had shifted the day of the mosquito incident all those years ago; he’d felt her grow wary of him, felt her choose her steps carefully around him, as though he was a bomb that might go off any minute. He’d worried that it would never go back to the way it was. Now it seemed that he was, happily, completely wrong. She still needed him after all. I am bound to you, he said softly. Until the end.

  She nodded and shut her eyes.

  In the shadows, the cicaks chirped.

  Six

  Ghost

  THE BUS RIDE was long, and Suraya spent most of it sleeping, unused to having to be up before the sun in order to be on a bus by 6:20 a.m. She wasn’t the only one, either. In almost every seat, Pink watched as one by one, freshly scrubbed students nodded off, lulled by the bus’s gentle rumble. When he tired of staring at their lolling heads or glazed eyes, he looked out of the streaky windowpane instead, as the landscape changed from rolling green to brick buildings, and the world changed from the darkness of early morning to the light of day.

  The school was a sprawling old building with graceful arches for windows and an overwhelming air of gentle decay. Pink knew from the fancy brochure Suraya had read aloud to him that this was a premier all-girls school, known for its stellar reputation in academics and athletics, its list of former students a constellation of familiar names and well-known stars. But as far as he could tell, the “premier” label did nothing to hide the peeling paint on the heavy wooden classroom doors; the flickering light bulb in the corridor; the bat poop that clung stubbornly to the red tile floors; the bats themselves, which often took the opportunity to swoop down from the dark recesses of the high ceilings to make the girls squeal; the wooden chairs and tables that wobbled tipsily on uneven legs.

  The hall was filled with excited chatter and hordes of girls who seemed to greet each other exclusively in shrieks of joy. The noise set Pink’s teeth on edge, but Suraya didn’t seem to notice; she’d fished a battered copy of A Wrinkle in Time out of her backpack and had settled contentedly in a corner to read, her legs crossed, her back against the wall, the skirt of her turquoise blue pinafore nicely arranged to make sure she wasn’t flashing her “coffee shop,” as the boys back at her old school had called it.

  When Suraya was younger, her mother had sometimes brought home back issues of an ostensibly educational children’s magazine the school subscribed to, and one of Suraya’s favorite sections had been the Spot the Difference page, her brow furrowed as she concentrated furiously on marking all the ways the two given pictures didn’t match: a missing tree branch here, an extra flower petal there. Now Pink played the same game with the scene laid out before him: the deafening squeals of the other girls versus Suraya’s silence; the bright, brand-new, freshly ironed uniforms versus the faded softness of Suraya’s pinafore and the white shirt she wore under it. Both were hand-me-downs from a neighbor whose daughter had outgrown them; they were fuzzy from use and draped over her thin frame as though it were a hanger instead of a body. He wasn’t quite sure why, but the differences made his chest tight and his stomach hollow.

  Pink curled into a ball in a particularly cozy nook in the depth of Suraya’s shirt pocket and shut his eyes. The school day was long; he might as well take the time to nap.

  He was just about to drift off to sleep when he felt Suraya’s body tense, like a fist ready to punch.

  Suraya?

  He poked his head a tiny way out of her shirt pocket to see what was going on. Sura
ya was still looking down, seemingly focused on her book, and he was about to shrug and slide back into his nook when he realized that her hands trembled slightly, and that they hadn’t turned a single page.

  Slowly, he looked around her until he spotted them: a cluster of girls, shooting sly looks over at the corner where Suraya sat and whispering to each other.

  Whispering about her.

  Inside Pink’s belly, anger began to spark, warm and bright.

  They nudged each other and giggled. “Look at her shoes,” one stage-whispered, loudly enough for Suraya and Pink to hear, and Suraya shuffled her feet awkwardly, trying to hide as much of them as she could under her too-long skirt. Her school shoes were so old that they were fraying at the seams; the Velcro was fuzzy and barely held together, and there was a hole right above the little toe on her left foot. She’d tried to hide the graying canvas beneath layers and layers of the milky chalk her mother had bought, slathering on more and more with the sponge applicator until the white liquid dripped down her arm and splashed onto the grass. As a result, her shoes were so white they were almost blinding, but also stiff as wood, and as she walked, the chalk cracked, leaving bits of dust in her wake.

  On the page of her book, Pink saw one tear fall, then another.

  The girls were openly laughing and pointing now, and Pink’s anger had grown from a spark to a flame. He had to hold on to his antennae to keep himself from casting a spell he might regret. He’d seen people like this before in his travels: people who needed to step on others to raise themselves up, people who took delight in causing others pain. Many had come to the witch’s door seeking out ways to do just that; heck, the witch herself had often indulged in a good old hex or two and laughed long and hard about it. He just hadn’t realized they could start so young.