The Girl With Borrowed Wings (16 page)

“What?”

“Stop babbling. I don’t want to hear it,” he said, and his voice was shaking. I stared at the back of his head. What? I was willing to overlook things, but
he
wasn’t?

“You can’t be angry at me. That’s completely unfair. I didn’t do anything!” I said. “Except prevent you from murdering someone.”

“Nenner,” he said, “leave it!”

“But—”

He only flew faster. I shut my eyes in the sudden onset of wind. It was very cold now. I wrapped my arms around myself and waited for it to stop.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. When we reached my bedroom window, which was half open, a single square light in the darkness, I slipped inside without looking at him, went to my wardrobe, and threw out his clothes for him to catch.

The room was still strangely uncomfortable without my books. It felt as though it belonged to a different person. Only the bed was mine. I crawled over the sheets and took some comfort in wrapping the blanket around myself. Like a child hiding in a pretend fortress.

Finally Sangris stepped inside, fully dressed. In the peaky, shadowed face, his eyes stung as sharp as electric shocks. “So,” he said. Laying the syllable down like a card on the table.

“Can we keep the argument till later?” I asked. Only a dunce wouldn’t have been able to sense the storm boiling inside of Sangris. I turned my face away, trying to look at ease, while a chilly river seemed to be streaming right under my heart.

“I’m not going to make an
appointment
to argue with you,” he snapped.

“I don’t want to wake my father.”

“‘Poor Juren’?” he said, changing the subject.

“It’s called sympathy.”

“Oh, is
that
what you call it?”

“Obviously. I just said so.”

“‘Poor Juren,’” he mimicked again. He spoke as if they were swear words.

“He was poor, and his name was Juren. So what?”

“Don’t pretend!”

“Pretend
what
?”

He paced, back and forth, back and forth, over the marble tiles of my bedroom floor. He was wearing his stolen school uniform and despite the windblown hair, he looked almost stiff, more brittle than usual. “So what is it?” he said finally, stopping. “Have you got a thing for green eyes or something?”

“Yes, Sangris,” I said in a flat voice, “that’s exactly it. How clever of you to figure it out. I insisted on saving him because of his eye color.”

“Well, what was it then? The hair?”

I lay back on the bed, staring up at the cracked and discolored ceiling. The tightness in my chest was growing. “I think you’re missing the point of nonviolence,” I suggested.

Sangris made an interesting, high-pitched keening noise I had never heard him make before.

“You pulled me off him. You protected him at my expense. That’s practically like choosing him over me!”

“Because I wouldn’t let you kill him? I love your logic.”

Sangris continued to list my sins. “And you were
nice
to him.”

“Don’t be rude. I’m always nice.”

“No, you aren’t! Not to me!”

I looked over at him and the next second my sarcastic shell dissolved away. I already just wanted things to be back to normal, if only he weren’t acting so unlike himself. “Calm down,” I said. Uncertainly, I sat up and reached out.

But Sangris jerked back. “What about when he kissed your foot?” he said, in a fresh wave of bitterness. “When I begged to kiss your foot in Glasgow, you wouldn’t let me—not even a foot! Even queens consent to have their feet kissed! But then mister curly hair and green eyes comes along and you
melt
. I’ve known you for months, but in half a second he—”

Liar. I hadn’t been melting, I’d been gaping in shock. I considered telling him this, but it didn’t seem as though an accusation would be a good way to calm him down. Instead I said, “Sangris, what could I do? Kick him off?”

“If I’d been the one kneeling there, you would have!”

“Ah, but that’s because I know you better than I know him.”

He stared. “That’s the opposite of the way it should work!”

“No, it isn’t. I can’t kick a stranger. I only feel comfortable enough to kick you.”

“Lucky me,” he muttered.

“Anyway, I’m the one who should be upset. I never told him he was allowed to kiss my foot, he just did it. Believe me, I didn’t want him to.”

“No?”

“Ye gods, no.” Sangris’s forehead cleared. Encouraged, I said mournfully, “What a night. First—” I stopped. Complaining about his attempt to “talk” to me certainly wouldn’t help. “First,” I resumed, “stuck in the middle of the sky, then getting slobbered on, then a battle, and finally a flaming argument to top things off. Next time let’s just go to Spain.”

But he was frowning again. “Then why would you have wanted to visit Elworth?”

“Sangris,” I said, “it’s not as if I cared about
Elworth
.”

“Eh?”

“You were trying to boss me around,” I said. “Like—like my father!”

“I didn’t mean to,” he murmured, not looking at me, but at the window. “Was I?”

“If you don’t even know, then what are we arguing about?” There was a long moment. Then he looked at me and we both broke into a smile.

Sangris slipped into a cat and slithered out of the crumpled heap of clothes, coming toward me. It now seemed safe enough to reach out and pick him up. I put him onto the bed beside me and he didn’t pull away when I stroked his fur. After a long moment he leaned against me and his eyes slid shut. A light, tentative purring came from the base of his throat. I felt as if I’d just tamed a tiger. “Better?” I said.

“You . . . didn’t like him?”

“Nope, definitely not after he did that to my foot. He scared me,” I said, and Sangris’s tensed-up body softened. Without opening his eyes, he pressed himself closer and began to knead his claws into my shirt. The purring became steadier.

I relaxed. “So, next time, don’t try to order me around like that.”

“Next time?” he mumbled, in the dazed voice he used whenever I petted him.

“If we ever do meet other Free people. It doesn’t have to be Juren, okay. But maybe we’ll come across others—ow!”

His sharp cat claws had clutched into me. I don’t know if he meant to do it, but it was still a shock. I shoved him so hard that he went flying off the bed, and touched at my side where it was sore. And there was a sensation as if sparks were stuck in my throat, pressing upward, light and heady and dangerous.

“What,” I demanded, “was that for?”

“Figure it out,” he snapped, not looking sorry at all. My anger frothed up and scratched at my insides.

“That does it, Sangris,” I said, standing, getting colder and calmer the more my blood seethed. “I’m sick of your hidden agendas. Conversations that I don’t want to have, arguments that I don’t want to have . . . You bring your feelings into
everything
.”

“And you bring your feelings into nothing!”

“Maybe I don’t
have
any feelings. Have you considered that? I hope you realize that even if I did like Juren, you wouldn’t have the right to give me a hard time about it. I’m not
yours,
Sangris!”

His eyes paled, the yellow sucked into nothingness.

“I’m not even mine,” I said.

It sounded very simple. I raised my shoulders a little, and spread my hands, to show just how simple everything was. “Okay?” I said.

“But I—” Sangris said. “But I’m—”

I knew exactly what he was going to say next. I could practically see the words in his mouth. He was going to say
But
I’m
yours
.

Flushing again, with panic this time, I hurried to interrupt him. If he spoke to me like that, I’d never be able to look him in the eyes again.

“You’re a Free person. Stay that way,” I said.

Sangris’s mouth screwed up as if he’d swallowed the words and they tasted awful.

“So what
am
I to you?” he said, and he sounded clumsy.

Everything I’d been thinking for the past months, about how Sangris had given me, not a reason to live—that sounds too dramatic—but an actual life, and how he was my air to breathe and how his face had all the excitement of an unexplored horizon, and how my nights with him, not just flying but talking too, had brought movement back to the sluggish blood that had almost stopped under the weight of a desert sun—there was no way I could tell him. As it came near my mouth I felt the impossibility of saying any of it, and the words died again like a weak lightbulb stuttering, unable to switch on.

Holes opened in him where my silence went through. He didn’t move a muscle, apart from the very tip of his tail, which flicked and contorted like the coils of a dying snake. When he began to speak, his voice was steady, but after the first few sentences, his control broke apart, and though he didn’t shout, he mumbled, which was worse.

“I’m not a taxi service. I’m not your personal chauffeur. I’m not going to sit aside and twiddle my thumbs while you—and Juren—smiling—kissing your—you—I won’t let myself become . . . Get
him
to fly you around if that’s all you want. I’m not doing it like this.” Crooked bat wings appeared above his back, and then Sangris was gone, leaving me to sit alone in my hollow coffin of a bedroom and blink.

I understood every word he’d said, and I could even understand fragments of the emotion behind them, but when it was all put together, I still couldn’t find any answer to make. It was too big to fit inside. The anger was gone as quickly as it had come. There was nothing in me now, just a bit of a chill. Unable to move, I stared at the window as if he might reappear.

The next night, he didn’t show up.
It won’t last,
I told myself. But he wasn’t there the next night either. Or the next.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In Which Sangris Admits Defeat

I spent the first couple of days relaxing. I can be very heartless sometimes; it’s a useful talent to have. So I didn’t pine. I caught up on my homework, I laughed with Anju about how Heritage had been postponed yet again (proof that my school couldn’t do anything right), and in art class I got inspired and painted a face that made my teacher shiver.

“Where’s the cat?” Anju asked me in the back of the classroom after break.

“Sulking somewhere,” I said, trying to write an entire essay using only my left hand. I wobbled all over the page at first, but by the end of the year I would learn to be ambidextrous.

“Oh,” she said. She turned back to her own essay without asking why.

On the third and fourth days, and especially nights, I began opening my curtains at odd times, hoping to find Sangris sitting there. When he wasn’t, I became a bit disappointed; I told myself that this was because I wanted to fly to other countries and I couldn’t without him.

At those times, I wished I could own the sky without needing to wait for him first. This was what came of relying on Sangris, reduced to borrowing his wings. I didn’t
want
to depend on him.
I
wanted to be my freedom, my air, my light. What kind of freedom is it that has to be given to you by someone else?

Every dinner I watched myself closely. Ever since the wadi in Oman, I’d been so afraid I might give something away to my father that I hardly dared breathe. Still, it was a strange, guilty thrill to sit there, knowing I’d never be the daughter he imagined even though he was so determined to believe it. Just existing was a small form of rebellion.

“Your mother needs help. You should wash the dishes tonight,” my father said to me on the fifth day.

“Why don’t you ever wash them?” I said.

He looked at me impassively for a long time. “Because I’m the father. You’re the daughter.”

“But if Mom needs help—”

“Go wash them,” he said. I went and washed them.

On the sixth day, it rained for the first time all year. I was in class when it happened, but we all got so excited that we poured out of the buildings, leaving our pens and notebooks and bags behind, and milled around as heavy droplets of water plopped in a jagged pattern onto the dust. We tilted our heads back and allowed the miraculous rain to hit our faces. It was light at first, but it kept going, and by dusk the wadis were rushing with fast brown water.

That night, I told my parents I was going on a walk.

“What?” my mother said in alarm. I hadn’t gone on a walk for years. She’d thought the phase had passed.

“If I stand on the edge of the street, I can see the wadi. It’s flooding. That hasn’t happened in ages.”

“You can’t go off the street,” she said. “Take a mobile phone! Be back in ten minutes. Isn’t it too dark?” She looked to my father for help, but he just watched me. Calm and brittle, as though he wanted to observe what I would do next. But this was his rule; he had made it years ago. I decided to plunge.

“The sky’s light,” I said, and set off into the heat. It wasn’t so bad with warm water soaking my shirt. My prison was flushed and animated beneath the blasts of rain—the hammering had softened it, and for once in all these long empty years, movement came to the thin leaves of the trees. It was like seeing a strict spinster aunt begin to dance. The air, usually dry enough to feel starched, was alive in my face now. I breathed as much as I could, taking this one chance to suck it in. No cars were out today because hardly anyone knew how to drive in the rain. I felt my spirits lift. Ten minutes of freedom. My own, for once. I didn’t have to rely on Sangris or my parents for this—it was mine, I had won it, and nobody could take it away.

I didn’t just go to the edge of the street. I walked a little way off it, a few steps across the damp sand, and then I was at the side of the wadi that curved behind our house. I sat down on the edge and dangled my legs into the floodwater, feeling it pull at my feet, trying to whisk me away. Right now the wadi was swollen, but that wouldn’t last long. The sun would have its way in the end. I had to enjoy the flood while it lasted.

The sky was overcast, hot clouds lowering on me, so night came more quickly than usual. I had barely five minutes at the edge of the wadi before I had to return home. I walked back along the bare street, catching raindrops on my finger-tips, and, without warning, a long slow ache for Sangris, which would continue straight through the night up until morning, swept from my feet to my head. I didn’t need him or his wings in order to enjoy this sudden, rare rain, but I wanted him to be there anyway. That night my dreams were dark and wavering, and I kept awakening to feel the pain of the wave passing through me, before sinking back to sleep.

In the morning, I looked at myself in the mirror matter-of-factly. Almond-shaped black eyes looked back at me from a gold-brown face. From my face alone, a Westerner would have called me Eastern, an Easterner would have called me Western. Wherever I went, I always looked like a foreigner, a stranger from across the seas. Some of the ambiguity of that hung in my sheets of black hair, straight enough to be Japanese; my eyes were slanted enough to be Thai, but wide enough to be Scottish; the long lashes of India, the wide forehead of Italy; the facial structure that kept high cheekbones and long eyes, but also a nose that curled slightly up at the tip. It was all so mixed together that nobody who didn’t already know my background would have been able to place me. I’d always thought that it made me look slightly inhuman, as if I didn’t belong anywhere at all, as if I could be an elf who simply had taken the wrong turn somewhere.

Now it reminded me of Sangris. I liked that idea. I would be reminded of our common ground, the alien nothingness that we shared, whenever I looked into a mirror.

“Good morning,” I said to myself. I had no discernable accent. I had lived in so many countries that the accents had canceled each other out.

I looked back pitifully.

“Cheer up,” I said. “It won’t last. He’ll be back soon.”

I leaned closer and saw that my eyes showed traces of my uneasy night. There was nothing to do but splash them with cold water. Nobody would look at me closely enough to notice anyway, I told myself.

I was right.

My father left early, so my mother drove me to school through the dying rain. When the car stopped, she did stare at me sideways, and I thought maybe she’d spotted my eyes—but then she turned her gaze away and frowned at the windshield. “Have a nice day,” was all she said.

“We have two periods of biology,” Anju told me as I was fetching books out of my locker. Obediently, I reached for the biology textbook.

During class, the rain continued to fade outside, and there was a gust of wind. I heard the frond of a palm tree hitting the window and looked around quickly, but Sangris wasn’t there. I didn’t want to study after that. “Anju,” I said, “I’m sad.”

“Because of the cat?” she said. Anju knew me better than anybody in the oasis.

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s about time.”

“What?”

“I was beginning to think you didn’t have a heart,” she said, in a voice as monotonous as though she were reciting mathematic equations.

She graded my papers for me.

After school, while driving me home, my father said, “You’re spending too much time in your bedroom. Tonight you will not stay inside for more than two hours.”

He didn’t bother to come into my bedroom to check on me, because he knew I would obey. I hid for exactly two hours. Then I spent the rest of the evening staring at the living room wall and imagining that figures were dancing across it as if it were a television screen, moving and acting out stories.

“Help your mother and wash the dishes tonight,” he said after dinner. I did so without question.

The ache inside of me was growing heavier and heavier. I didn’t miss flying or traveling or exploring anymore. I missed Sangris himself. I carried it around like a stone inside of me.

The very last of the rain died and the oasis was dry once more. Since I couldn’t read, I sat at a table and sketched. Not anything much. I tried to draw a perfect circle with one sweep of my hand. Over and over. I was determined to master this, the same way that, a few years ago, I had taught myself to draw straight lines without the use of a ruler; the same way that I was training myself to be ambidextrous. My circles improved, but they still weren’t perfect.

I promised myself things. One day I’m going to be a librarian, I decided. Then I’ll be able to spend all day reading and teaching myself useless little skills that nobody else cares about. I’ll start the first public library in Phnom Penh. (Or does Phnom Penh already have public libraries?) Maybe somewhere else. Cagliari. Or Negombo. Somewhere you can’t find a school that doesn’t misspell its own name, and can’t find proper bookshops in the entire stupid city. But when I’m older—I’ll expand my collection, I’ll have not just hundreds, but thousands of books, and they’ll become not just the
first
library, but the
biggest,
one of the
best
in the
world
—

I passed the time by promising myself things like that, even though they were impossible. (My father, you see, wants me to be an engineer. Predictable, isn’t it.)

I went to sleep early. It took me hours to rest my head on the pillow comfortably. Then another hour to close my eyes. There was a sliver of hot steel pulsing inside my right temple. It wouldn’t go away. I felt the heat creeping around the house again, beginning to close over and reclaim its territory now that the rain had died.

At midnight a
tap-tap
broke through my headache and my parched dreams.

I got up slowly, turned on the light, pulled back the curtains, and opened the window. Sangris entered without a word.

He was human, wearing one of his stolen school uniforms. The wings vanished as soon as he stepped into the light of my room. He looked at me for a moment, and I looked back in silence.

Then he sank down the wall, onto the floor, hung his head, and said, “I give up. You win.”

I studied him. He did look exhausted, defeated. His eyes were screwed up as though he had a headache too. “A week,” he said hoarsely. “That’s all I could manage. A lousy week.”

I continued to be silent. After a week of trying to imagine it, having him here again felt like a blow to the stomach. So solid, so familiar.

“You win,” he said again. He rested his head against his knees and didn’t look at me as he spoke, as if he was ashamed. “I’ll be your chauffeur. I won’t say a word to you if you don’t want me to. If you’d like my wings, then they’re yours. I can even take you to see Juren.” He took a deep breath. “If you want.”

I said, “I win?”

“Yes. Completely. I— Yes.”

My fingers twitched. I wanted to brush the hair off his forehead, but at the last minute I stopped myself. He was looking at the floor, and he didn’t see. “How did I win?”

He shut his eyes. “I couldn’t stay away. I can’t. I wanted to prove . . . or at least make you think . . . that I could get along fine without you. And now I’m creeping back like some groveling little
pet
with its tail between its legs. But you—you’re obviously fine. I saw you chatting with Anju in class today. I was going to tell you all this then, because I couldn’t wait for nighttime, like the poor sap I am. But that hurt my pride . . . So I went away. But I couldn’t wait out another night, and I realized that I don’t care about my pride, or anything, as long as you’ll let me . . . I don’t know. Talk to you. Look at you. Be in the same room.” He shook his head. “I’m pathetic, aren’t I? For pity’s sake, a week—that’s nothing. It used to be hard to keep my attention on anything for more than an hour. But now that I
want
to be unreliable, I can’t. I’m a cringing
tamed
thing.” He said “tamed” with disgust. It must have been an insult for a Free person. “But please, let me stay. Let me be your private chauffeur. Anything. Just not nothing.”

To give my hands something to do, I fiddled with my hair. Sangris didn’t realize how far removed he was from my reality. We lived in different worlds. But at some point, he had become the real one, and without him, the walls of my desert and my metal-hot sky and the gold spikes of my palm trees, and everything else that composed my reality, was like a cardboard cutout of a life.
I’m in way over my head,
I thought, looking down at him. I wished that he
had
just remained a pair of wings. It would be so much easier than this.

The waves of last night were passing through me again. Warm and billowing and I don’t know what else. I waited until they had subsided before I spoke. It was hard to breathe when they were at their peak.

“Sangris,” I said, “it’s not like that at all.” Good grief, this was hard. As if I were pulling my ribs apart. “You’re my best friend. Forget the wings. It’s you. Um.” Why wouldn’t he look at me? “I only said those things to you because you’d made me angry.”
Sorry,
is what I meant, but I felt that I’d gushed enough. I closed my mouth.

“I know I made you mad. I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I was . . . upset.”

I knew I ought to mention Juren, and explain that I . . . I don’t know exactly. When I tried, I kept coming up against a difficulty with my voice, and I ended up mumbling only, “I gathered that much.”