The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

“Maybe that’s how they do it in the kampung. Hey, Kampung Girl!”

  The shout was aimed at her, but Suraya kept her eyes firmly on her book, refusing to look their way.

  “Hey! You, with the torn shoes and that dishrag of a uniform!” More giggles, and this time Pink could see Suraya bite her lip, hard. A single drop of blood pooled beneath her teeth, and she quickly licked it away.

  The book was suddenly snatched from her hand. “What could you be reading that’s so interesting you can’t even reply when someone calls you, Kampung Girl?” This girl was clearly the leader, her long straight hair tied back in a high ponytail with white ribbon, her uniform still crisp and clearly new. Her shoes were white canvas, but designed to look like ballet slippers instead of the plain old Velcro or lace-up sneakers the others had. A shiny gold K dangled from a chain on her bright pink backpack.

  “I didn’t know you were calling me,” Suraya said finally, her voice calm and even. “That’s not my name, after all.”

  “Your name is whatever I choose to call you.” Pink heard a thunk as the book was tossed to the floor. “It could be Kampung Girl. It could be Smelly. It could be whatever I want. Understand?”

  Suraya said nothing, and K’s eyes narrowed. “I said. Do. You. Understand.”

  One of the girl’s minions, a pretty girl with dark skin and a mass of long curls, tugged on Suraya’s long braid once, hard, so hard that it made her yelp and brought tears to her eyes. But Suraya nodded very slightly—at least enough to satisfy K.

  “Very good.” The girl leaned in close, and Pink smelled bubblegum-scented shampoo and baby lotion. “You don’t belong here,” she whispered. “And I’m not going to let you forget it.”

  The bell rang then, signaling the start of assembly, and the girls scattered to line up with their classes, leaving Suraya breathless, scrambling to get up and gather her things, her eyes still glassy with unshed tears.

  As she walked quickly to her line, she left a trail of white dust behind her.

  Thankfully, K and her minions weren’t in Suraya’s class, and Pink could feel her body relax as she slipped into the familiar routine of a school day: new books, new teachers, new things to learn. Suraya’s mind was a sponge, and she never seemed to mind what was put in it so long as there were interesting things to soak up and absorb along the way.

  The bell for recess sounded, and Suraya made her way to the canteen, gripping a plastic container she’d hastily filled that morning with a banana, a boiled egg that her mother had received at a wedding and left on the kitchen table, and three bahulu from the heavy glass jar on the kitchen counter. The banana was riper than she’d thought, and she had to peel it carefully so that it wouldn’t fall apart; even so, when she took a bite, she somehow managed to spill a huge chunk of banana mush down the front of her pinafore. It looked like she’d been sick.

  From a table nearby came a chorus of familiar giggles, and Pink turned to see K and her gaggle of girls looking at Suraya and laughing. He turned back, his face contorted in his most ferocious grasshopper scowl. He could tell Suraya was trying not to cry as she dabbed at the stain furiously with a tissue. Eat the bahulu, he told her gently. You’ll feel better.

  She shook her head slightly at him.

  Suraya. Eat.

  This time she obeyed, though not without a small sigh. The round, seashell-shaped little sponge cakes had always been her favorites, but now all she could do was turn it around and around in her hands, nibbling at the edges. As she did, Pink saw her steal a glance at K’s table, and at K’s brilliant turquoise lunch box, adorned with stickers of the latest K-pop boy band sensation. When she opened it, they could also see that each of the lunch box’s sections was filled with food: a heap of fried noodles, still steaming slightly; a slice of yellow butter cake; a handful of cookies studded with chocolate chunks; picture-perfect orange slices, plump and juicy. “Oh look!” K’s face somehow managed to look both pleasantly surprised and unbearably smug. “My mother is so thoughtful. Isn’t it nice when someone cares enough about you to pack you a proper lunch?”

  That, Pink decided, was quite enough. If he had to sit here one more minute and watch Suraya’s cheeks burn and her eyes water, he might actually scream.

  Instead, he flicked his antennae.

  K’s table was in the middle of laughing raucously at yet another one of her not-that-funny jokes when one of them happened to look down at her own lunch box.

  The screams echoed to the rafters and shook the bats awake from their slumber as girls jumped up and tried to get as far as they could from the table, their faces pale. Some were retching; K made a great show of heaving dramatically over the closest dustbin.

  Suraya stood up, bewildered, trying to see what was going on.

  And then she saw, and blinked, and looked again.

  Because if you weren’t concentrating, you could have sworn that the food in those abandoned lunch boxes was moving.

  Except then you looked closer and you realized the terrible truth: that every lunch box on the table was so full of worms and maggots that if you stayed quiet enough, you could hear the sticky squelch of them writhing and wriggling through noodles and fried rice and porridge and cake and whatever else those unsuspecting mothers had so lovingly put in them this morning.

  Suraya pushed her own container with its meager lunch way, way back onto the table.

  Then she walked quickly away from the shrieking girls and the chaos, past the frangipani trees that bloomed beside the cafeteria, slipping carefully into the narrow passage between the row of classrooms and an old building that was mostly used to store broken furniture and assorted bits that the school administration wanted to get out of the way. Back here, there was one more frangipani tree all on its own, light filtering through its spreading boughs and dotting the ground with puddles of sunshine, and this is where Suraya stopped. There was nobody else here; it was as if nobody even knew it existed.

  Pink felt her hand slide carefully into her pocket, and he jumped onto it so she could draw him up into the light. In the place where his heart would have been there was a hammering and a pounding that rattled his tiny body and made him jumpy. Would she be grateful? Would she understand that he did things only for her protection?

  Instead, she was frowning, and the pounding inside him turned into a strange sinking feeling.

  “Why did you do that, Pink?”

  They were harming you. He tried to maintain a defiant pose, sticking up his little grasshopper chin, but to do so to his master felt like insolence. I did only what they deserved.

  “But I never asked you to. Didn’t I tell you that before? Not to hurt anyone unless I ask you to?”

  Well. Um. Suraya’s eyes never left his face, and Pink began to feel horribly hot and squirmy. Yes, he admitted finally and—it must be said—reluctantly. Yes, I believe I recall you saying something like that, now that you mention it.

  “And did I ask you to hurt those girls?”

  Not in so many words.

  “I didn’t, Pink.”

  He sighed. Fine. You did not ask.

  “So you disobeyed me. Never again. Do you hear me?”

  In the distance, he could hear the steady murmur of chattering girls as they clustered together, waiting for the bell to ring. I hear you, he said sullenly. But why? Why not give them the same pain they give you? Measure for measure. An eye for an eye.

  “I don’t want anybody’s eye.”

  You know what I mean.

  Suraya was silent for a while as she thought about this. Then she sighed. “Because then, that makes me no better than them. That makes me a bully too.”

  The bell rang and she quickly slid him back into her pocket. Just before she began running toward her class, she glanced down at him and smiled—a weak and watery smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Thanks,” she whispered.

  Pink felt pleasantly warm all over. You’re welcome.

  “But don’t ever do that again.”

  Seven


  Girl

  THE DAYS PASSED, as they always did. Suraya survived them as best she could, working hard at her classes, avoiding K—whose name, as it turned out, was actually Kamelia—and the rest of her gang of bullies when she could, tolerating their torments when she had to.

  Thankfully, their paths didn’t cross often—Kamelia was fourteen and in form two, a whole year ahead—but they were grouped into the same sports house. Twice a week, after classes, Suraya had to change into her track bottoms and bright red house T-shirt with a gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach and the miserable knowledge that Kamelia and her goons would find new and creative ways to make her life difficult when they could. Often, she would get home and catalogue the fresh bruises blooming all over her thin body, the result of spiteful pinches, well-timed pushes, and once, a hard kick to the shin when nobody was looking.

  Pink watched grimly through it all. I could hurt them, you know, he told her. I could shatter each of their bones into tiny pieces. Make them sorry they ever even looked at you. Make them pay. It’s what the witch would have done.

  It appalled her that his dark streak reared its ugly head so easily these days. But she just shook her head. “No, Pink,” she said. “For one thing, I am not my grandmother. And for another . . . well, they’ll get tired of it eventually. And besides, better they do it to me than some other girl who might not be able to handle it.”

  She saw him peer more closely at her face and tried her best to rearrange her drooping mouth into a smile. But you cannot handle it, actually, he said.

  Suraya felt her mouth pinch tight together. Pink had a way of saying things that made her feel the exact opposite of how he wanted her to feel when he said them, kind of the way her mother telling her not to sing so loudly around the house made her want to scream every line to every song she knew until the rafters shook. Pink was the extra parent she’d never asked for. She could tell he wanted her to break down, agree with him, admit that he was right, and all she wanted to do right now was cross her arms, dig in her heels, and prove him wrong. “Silly Pink. Of course I can.”

  She knew that he knew she was lying.

  This is when the odd things began to happen.

  They weren’t happening to her, which is why at first, Suraya didn’t really notice them, in the way that you don’t really notice a single ant meandering lazily along the contours of your foot. But when one ant becomes two, and then seven, and then seventeen, and then a hundred, the pricking of their tiny feet and the stinging bites of their tiny teeth become harder and harder to ignore.

  This is the way it was. It began with nothing, really: one day, there was a stone in one of Kamelia’s pristine white canvas shoes that made her limp and curse, and which wouldn’t dislodge itself no matter how many times she shook the offending shoe. On another day, her geography workbook was drenched and soaking, even though she’d fished it out of a perfectly dry backpack. On yet another, the marker exploded in her hand as she worked out a math problem on the whiteboard, covering her from head to toe in black ink.

  On and on and on it went, and at first, it was easy enough to brush off as a mere run of terrible luck. Only, the bad things kept on happening, and somehow they only ever happened after Suraya had been the victim of one of Kamelia’s cruel jokes, and soon this link became impossible to ignore.

  Coincidences, Suraya thought desperately to herself, trying hard to ignore the memory of Pink’s flicking antennae, the wicked grin on his little grasshopper face. But the day they played volleyball during PE and Kamelia somehow managed to get hit by the ball nine times in a row—once as a hard smack to the shoulder, which made her squeal so loudly it echoed through the courtyard—even Suraya had to admit that coincidences could only explain away so much. Kamelia’s gang didn’t know what was going on, but they did know that somehow, whenever they did something to Suraya, something happened to them in turn. And they didn’t like it.

  I should talk to Pink, Suraya told herself firmly. Ask him what’s going on. Tell him to stop, if he’s the one doing all of this. But she never did. Sometimes she told herself that it was because she was certain he would stop by himself; sometimes she told herself it was because it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. What she never told herself was the truth, which is that she didn’t want to start a fight with her only friend in the entire world.

  She didn’t want to go back to being alone.

  Waiting for the bus home one afternoon, a shadow fell across the whirling dragon Suraya was sketching in her notebook. She tried her best to ignore it, tried to focus on the scales she was painstakingly and precisely inking on its great tail, but her trembling hands made the pen hard to control.

  “What have you got there, Kampung Girl?”

  Around her, the other girls waiting for the bus, sensing trouble, quickly walked away.

  “It’s nothing,” Suraya said, quickly snapping her book shut and fumbling with the zipper of her backpack, trying her best to stuff it inside before they could get it.

  Too late. Divya had snatched it right out of her hands and was riffling through the pages with her long fingers, nails shaped to delicate points. Divya was Kamelia’s best friend, and she took particular delight in digging those nails hard into Suraya’s arm when teachers weren’t looking, so hard that they left deep red half-moons in her flesh for days afterward, so hard that Suraya often had to bite her lip to keep from yelping.

  Divya was grinning now, her eyebrows arched, her eyes wide in exaggerated mock-surprise. “Look at this, K,” she said, tossing the book to her friend. “She thinks she’s some kind of artist.”

  Kamelia flipped through the little book, frowning. “Wow, Kampung Girl. Looks like you spent a lot of time on these. You must really like to draw, huh?”

  Suraya stayed mute, her eyes never leaving the book in Kamelia’s hands. She had learned early on not to trust the older girl’s seemingly pleasant tone or inane conversation. Her words were like a still river; crocodiles floated just beneath the surface, ready to catch you with their sharp, sharp teeth.

  “It’d be a shame if . . . whoops.” A sick ripping sound tore through the afternoon air, and Suraya stifled a gasp of horror. “Oh dear. However did I manage to do that?”

  Divya snickered. “Here, let me take that before you do any more damage . . . uh-oh.” Another tear, so harsh it seemed to pierce right through her heart. Divya stared right at Suraya as she crumpled the paper into a little ball, smiling a nasty smile. She tossed it over her shoulder into the open drain behind her; as it sailed gracefully through the air, Suraya caught a glimpse of ornate dragon scales.

  “We’re just so-o-o clumsy,” she said, and Kamelia laughed.

  “Stop,” Suraya whispered. “Please stop.” But all this did was make them rip faster and laugh harder, and soon nothing was left of the notebook but its thin brown cover, bits of paper dangling pathetically from its worn spine.

  “Don’t worry,” Kamelia said soothingly. “We’ll get rid of this trash for you.” And they tossed it into the deep, dark drain and ran off home.

  Suraya walked slowly over to the drain’s edge and watched for a long time as the stinking water carried the little white pieces away, like pale ships on a filthy sea. She never even wiped away the tears that coursed silently down her cheeks.

  Eight

  Ghost

  IT WAS THE demise of the notebook that sent Pink over the edge.

  He’d spent the rest of the day trying his best to make Suraya smile. He’d gathered her favorite flowers—wild jasmine—and sprinkled them all over so that her whole room was filled with their sweet scent. He’d enticed the bees into giving him some of their fresh, golden honey, which he collected in a cup made from leaves—Suraya loved honey and lemon in her tea in the evenings. He’d even slipped away as she did her homework to go to her old school, creep into the teachers’ lounge where her mother sat marking papers that afternoon, and whisper a suggestion in her ear. That evening, Mama came home bearing piping hot packets of Su
raya’s favorite nasi lemak from the stall near the post office, the coconut rice, sambal, hard-boiled egg, and fried chicken all still steaming as they sat down for dinner.

  It might have worked. It might have made Suraya’s heart just a little lighter. But for Pink, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  That night, he sat on the windowsill staring out into the inky blackness as Suraya slept. He did not move for a long, long time.

  When he finally did, it was to rub his long back legs together. The familiar chirp of the grasshopper’s song echoed out into the darkness. If you were listening, you might have dismissed it as just another part of the soundtrack of midnight, along with the buzzing of the mosquitoes and the chirping of the geckos. But then again, this song wasn’t meant for you.

  Then, there was a tiny skittering sound that grew louder, as if hundreds of little feet were running, then they stopped right beneath Pink’s window. He bent his head low and whispered his instructions. It took a long time.

  Eventually the little feet skittered away again into the shadows, and Pink curled up with Suraya as he usually did, a satisfied look on his face.

  The next day, Kamelia and Divya weren’t at school. And when they did return, days later, they sported new identical short haircuts and sullen expressions.

  “Why did they do that?” Pink heard Suraya whisper to a classmate. “I thought they loved their hair.”

  “They did,” the classmate whispered back. “But my mom was at the pharmacy the other day and she met Divya’s mom and Divya’s mom told her that they had the most TERRIBLE lice infections. Like, so bad that it looked like their hair was MOVING, all by itself. Divya’s mom just, like, had no idea what to do.”

  Suraya touched her own long hair, in its neat braid. Pink knew she loved her hair and couldn’t imagine cutting it all off. “Couldn’t they just have used some medicine? Did they really have to cut it?”

  “It was so bad the medicine wasn’t even working anymore! They both had to get their hair cut, and I heard they CRIED.” This was said with a particular relish; everybody in the lower school feared the two girls, and they certainly didn’t mind them suffering, at least a little bit.