The Lost Girl (16 page)

“Ask her,” says Ray. “Ask her who she is. Who
it
is.”

“I’m not an
it
,” I say, stung by the injustice of this.

“So he was telling the truth?” someone asks in a hushed whisper.

I force myself to square my shoulders and be truthful. “Yes,” I say, my heart pounding in my ears, “he was.”

“I don’t believe this,” Sonya says. The girl who looked at me with such affection is gone. This girl detests the very sight of me. “You lied to us for months! You stole her life, you pretended—”

Angry murmurs build among the watching faces, like wasps in a small, confined space, and I force myself not to back away.

“I had to.”

Even to my own ears, it doesn’t sound like much of a reason. When you balance duty and law against death and grief, the duty seems worthless.

No one speaks for one shocked, shivering moment.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I never wanted to trick anybody.”

“You’re sorry?” Sonya repeats. “You’re
sorry
?
Do you even know what being sorry means? Do you even understand the difference between right and wrong? If I were you, I’d be crawling away in shame. But I guess
things
like you don’t have feelings like that?”

I hear a hollow laugh. It’s mine. I want to be patient, to turn away with dignity, but the jibe about my not even being human tips my temper over.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I say angrily. “I
never
asked for this. I’ve never had a chance to choose what I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to do. Never! I didn’t come here because I wanted to; I didn’t pretend to be Amarra because I enjoyed it. I
had
to be here; I had to do this. I have
never
been able to choose!”

Before anyone can reply, a figure flies across the field toward us. It’s Lekha. I realize she’s been missing all this time.

“The teachers are coming,” she says in her high, clear voice, “and they’re going to skewer us through the brain if we haven’t started warming up by the time they get here.”

“We’re in the middle of something,” Sonya snaps at her.

“Eff off,” says Lekha agreeably. “That’s short for
efferves-cence
, you know, which means ‘do go and jump in a well.’”

A tiny, impossible smile tickles the corner of my mouth.

Everybody just stands around in a kind of angry, trembling shock. Ray makes a noise deep in his throat, like a hurt animal, and stalks off the field. Jaya starts to cry. I want to comfort her, but what use am I when all she wants is her best friend back? It’s tempting, oh, so tempting to leave the field and leave school altogether. But I don’t. There are any number of names they’re going to call me and names they’ve called me already, but I’m not going to let them add coward to the list, too.

Somehow, impossibly, I make it through the day. And the next. And the one after. Things only get worse as the week winds down. The hostile remarks evolve slowly from “liar” and “thief” to insults aimed specifically at the monstrosity that I am. All my classmates have ever been taught about me was gleaned from rumors and overexaggerated news stories. I grow steadily more torn between guilt and fury. I know they have a right to be angry. I know they are suffering the aftershocks of learning Amarra’s gone, but how long am I to be punished for?

On the other hand, the police never come. Whatever they think of me, no one has gone to the police. Not yet.

I have a feeling some of them want to, like Sam and Sonya. But if Ray told them what it would cost Amarra’s family, it’s worked. They’ve chosen not to tell. They’ve understood that it’s not just me they would be punishing. And that, at least, is a very good thing.

Having exiled myself to my room over the weekend, I concentrate on homework. I read three tedious chapters for geography and make notes on a Second World War diary extract for history. I rework the tale of the mongoose and the snake for creative writing. I finish two pages of calculus for math. I reread a few chapters of
Wuthering Heights
and the last act of
Macbeth
for literature.

On Monday, I go back to school, same as always. I try not to notice the scowling, the hostility, the humiliating comments about my Mark, my stolen face.

I get to the high school but don’t make it to the classroom.

On my way to get some water, the bell rings, and everyone scrambles to their classes. I don’t realize there are people behind me until it’s too late. I’m toppled, pushed, flung hard against the watercooler. It’s tall, and made of steel and plastic, and it bloody hurts.

One glance at the faces around me is enough to tell me they’re all young but unfamiliar. They must not go to school here. Beyond them, I see four of my classmates, Sam among them.

“You’re joking, right?” I snap.

“It’s only what you deserve,” says a voice I don’t know. Then my head is knocked back and hits the cooler again. Everything is a blur now and I scramble onto my knees. As one of them grabs me, I elbow her. She doubles over. There’s another who catches me on the cheekbone. I make a spitting sound and throw myself at him. He cries out in pain and pulls away.

I wonder if that means I won.

As quickly as it happened, it’s over. There’s light again, the shadows have moved, and the bell has stopped ringing.

I can see shapes by the wall. My classmates. The strangers have disappeared. There’s a girl who looks sick; so does one of the boys. Sam can’t seem to look at me. I’m reeling in pain, in fury that I could have let this happen. I should have reacted faster, kicked harder. I want to shout at Sean. He told me echoes could be angels among mortals, but I can’t imagine I look like much of an angel now.

Then I hear a new voice. I hear a trace of French and I tense.

“What the hell just happened?” Ray demands.

Someone mutters a reply.

“Weren’t they expelled last year?” asks Ray. His voice is scathing. “I remember them. Really charming. Stayed friends with them, did you, Sam?”

“I play tennis with them,” Sam says in a low voice.

“And they agreed to come and do you a little favor? That’s sweet. If you were so pissed off you wanted to hit her, couldn’t you have done it yourself? To do it like this—”

“Why didn’t
you
hit her?” Sam asks. “Make her face look less like your girlfriend’s? You hit
me
during football last year.”

“You were cheating. That’s like
asking
to be punched. And I don’t hit girls.”

“She’s not really a girl.”

“I don’t care. What if they’d gone and killed her by accident?”

“It’s not murder if it’s one of those things,” Sam mumbles, but he sounds uncertain.

Ray sighs. “Grow a brain, Sam. It can still get us all expelled. And those people who made her, the Weavers, they could get you for damages. You idiot. What d’you think she’s going to do now, smile sweetly and forgive you?”

“Why isn’t she getting up?” says one of the other boys. “Shit, did they kill her?”

I see someone kneel down beside me. I jerk away.

“They didn’t kill her,” says Ray. He sounds angry. Because I’m alive? No, I don’t think so. He’s angry they did this. He hates me, but he knows what’s right and what isn’t. I feel a great pain deep in my chest. For a moment I hate him, too. I never wanted to care what he thought of me.

If you pretend you love a boy, maybe after a while you start to care. If you spend months with the traces of someone else’s love and memories inside you, maybe those traces become a part of you. Or perhaps Amarra has nothing to do with this. Perhaps I care because I’m jealous of what she had. That kind of love. That kind of freedom
to
love.

I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.

“Ugh,” I hear a girl saying, “don’t let them ever come back on campus, Sam. There’s a reason they were kicked out.”

They disperse until there’s only one shadow left. I turn my head away. I try to get up, but my legs feel weak and my head is spinning. There’s something warm and wet in my mouth. It tastes rusty; it has a smell like roses gone bad.

A pair of arms hoists me to my feet.

“Get off me,” I snarl. If I were a wolf, I could have bitten his hand off. Pity.

Ray releases me without comment, his face tense, his eyes darker than those of the boy who sat in the sun and smiled at the girl he loved. That photograph feels like a dream now.

“Why don’t you leave?” he asks me. “Sam only did this because he’s angry. He wanted to tell the police about you, but I made him swear he wouldn’t. Nobody wants you here. How can you be sure someone else won’t try to hurt you?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Of course not,” he says irritably. “I just want you to go. It hurts like hell to look at you and see her face.”

I straighten up. “This is my face.”

“Just leave. Go, pack, do whatever. Haven’t you realized you’ll be better off that way?”

That puzzles me. “Why do you care whether or not I’m better off?”

Ray gives me a look that feels like burning. “Wish I knew,” he says under his breath. “Good-bye, then. Have a nice life.”

He stalks away. My body aches. What now? Ring Neil and tell him I’ll be quitting school, thank you very much?

No. Of course not. I am not about to run
or
do the sensible thing. I will win this one.

I glance across the courtyard, at the classroom with the puke-colored door. My heart is still hammering. I’m so tired. I go to the bathroom to wash off the blood. It’s not as bad as I thought. Only a bit of swelling and bruising.

I go back to class. Mrs. Singh will have just started Monday’s double English Lit and
Wuthering Heights
. Her dry inquiry about my ability to read the time has no effect on me. I take my seat, enjoying the flabbergasted expressions on people’s faces. Most of them, like Lekha, are simply shocked by the state of my face, their eyes huge. Nobody expected me to come back. I’m glad I did.

Mrs. Singh launches into a lecture about Heathcliff’s apparently indisputable status as “a being of ultimate evil” in the novel.

I speak before she can ignore my raised hand.

“I don’t think he’s evil,” I say. “I think he was sad and angry and he did some horrible things because of it, but he wasn’t evil.”

“I didn’t ask you, Amarra—”

“I think,” I continue, determined to be intrusive, “he’s like Victor’s Creature in
Frankenstein
.”

“You mean the Monster,” Mrs. Singh corrects irritably.

“No, I mean the Creature.”

“Frankenstein himself referred to him as a monster.”

“That was probably why Frankenstein lost everything. If he’d given the Creature a chance, taught him and raised him instead of rejecting him, well, things would have turned out differently, wouldn’t they? If he had loved the Creature, they might both have had a much happier ending.”

“
Loved
the Creature?” Mrs. Singh’s glasses almost topple off her nose. “Gothic novels are not Hollywood extravaganzas! Why would anyone love what was made so unnaturally?”

Somebody laughs. Mrs. Singh appears to realize what she has said, and she flushes scarlet. My face grows hot under the pain.

Then an arm shoots into the air.

“I agree with Amarra,” says a high, clear voice, without waiting for Mrs. Singh to call on her. “There was some good in the Creature. He even loved Victor. Same with Heathcliff. Doing a bad thing doesn’t necessarily make someone evil. If you expect the worst, you’re only denying someone a chance to be better. That’s pretty much what Amarra said, and I agree. I,” Lekha reiterates, lest anybody have failed to grasp her meaning, “
agree
.”

Nobody knows what to say. I realize something that at once jolts and amazes me. By making my point far more eloquently than I did, Lekha has done something nobody expected. She has chosen a side.

Mine.

Mrs. Singh also seems to see that, somewhere along the way, battle lines were drawn. Her lips purse as though she has an especially sour lemon in her mouth. She sniffs and immediately sends me to the nurse to get my face looked at. But it’s too late to quell the whispers or put out the fires. I go off to the nurse, smiling for the first time in days. Someone has chosen my side, and that is more than I ever expected.

9
Sculpture

I
t’s weeks before I think of Lekha as anything but Amarra’s classmate. But one afternoon after school, when I find myself sitting with her in Coffee Day, at the very table where Amarra sometimes sat with Sonya and Jaya, it dawns on me she’s not just a girl in my class. She’s a friend.

She makes me laugh, often
at
her, but she doesn’t mind. She also tends not to listen to me. No matter how many times I tell her that “Palestines” are not what she thinks they are, she insists I must be wrong and that “Philistine” is in fact a country in the Middle East. I don’t give up. She has no talent for metaphor, either, but insists on using it.

I realize she’s also incredibly perceptive when she admits one day that she knew almost from the start that I wasn’t Amarra.

“It’s the way you move,” she says. “You’re too light on your feet. Like you’re ready to run. Or you’re about to growl and defend yourself. Like a hurt wolf cub. Lost but wolfy, you know?”

She shows me places in town I haven’t yet visited. Restaurants, rooftop cafés, cute little shops, and enormous stores. We go see movies at the multiplexes, buy peanuts off street vendors, visit shiny bars and hope no one questions our age as we order drinks with long, exotic-sounding names. We can never manage more than one or two because they’re so expensive and we’re poor teenagers. We sit under the hot sun and design costumes for famous literary characters: Lekha comes up with them and I draw them for her. We splash through puddles as we desperately try to hail rickshaws in the rain. I learn very quickly that the price a rickshaw driver will charge is directly proportional to the amount of rain rocketing down on the city at the time.

“Times like this,” I tell her one hot April evening, during the last week of school before the summer, “you remind me of one of my guardians.” She’s pirouetting on the step in front of me, striking a ridiculous pose as I try to sketch her. “She’s as dopey as you.”

“A new word! Dopey. I like it. Like the dwarf. Does it mean charming and beautiful?”

“If you know the dwarf, you’ll know it doesn’t.”

“Did you not think Dopey was adorable? Shame on you.” She stops pirouetting, moving on to a contorted imitation of a plié. “Well? What does it mean?”

“In Ophelia’s case,” I say, smiling, “it means she has her heart in the right place, but her head is definitely full of dust and feathers and has a few necessary ingredients missing.”

“Her name is Ophelia? Good grief. Has she done anything to ward off the evil eye?”

“Her father is a Weaver. I don’t think she
can
ward off the evil eye.”

“Creepy?”

“No,” I say, “but I saw him on telly once and there was something cold about him, like he wouldn’t let anything stop him from getting what he wanted.”

Lekha abandons her posing. She sits down next to me. “Eva,” she says, having by now coaxed my real name out of me, “I overheard someone in class talking the other day. About the Weavers. And hunters. You. All kinds of stuff. And normally I don’t listen to a word anyone says about you but they did say
one
half-sensible thing. Ray used that Mark thingy-wingy”—she points to my neck—“to give you away.”

I make a face. “We’re supposed to hide them. Ray proved that doesn’t always work, though. I think the Weavers decided it was worth the risk of exposing us.” I give her a tiny smile. “See, this way we never forget who we belong to.”

“Then . . .” Lekha hesitates. “Then you
do
belong to them? Completely?” I nod. “And they could destroy you if you didn’t
be
Amarra properly?”

I nod again.

“Does that mean you’re stuck here forever? But Amarra would have gone off to university. She was thinking of applying to places in the US and the UK and Australia. She used to talk about searching online for the best archaeology courses.”

“It means I’ve pretty much got to go to university and study archaeology,” I tell her. “Echoes are generally expected to do what their other would have done. I
could
study art instead. Or not go to university at all. But if I did that, Neil or Alisha could report me to the Weavers. They’d show them how different my choices are from what Amarra’s would have been.” I shrug. “Or maybe no one would say anything, maybe they’d just let it go.”

“But that’s unlikely. They’ll want you to be like her.”

“Exactly,” I say. “So there’s wiggle room, but they made me for a reason, Lekha. I have to stick by that.”

“What about Ray?”

“What about him?”

“If he decides after all that Amarra
is
in you somewhere and he gives you a chance—would you have to be with him? Romantically?”

I nod. I think about Ray, winking at me that first lunch at school. The way he smiled, the way he looked at me. He was gorgeous. Temperamental, moody. He told me I was beautiful. He thought
she
was. He was rash and hot tempered and he was hers. He loved her. For a little while, he thought he loved me. And I pretended to love him.

Lekha stares at me. “Would you really be able to forget the guardian you told me all about? Sean?”

Would I?

Would I have loved Ray, really, truly, if I had just forgot-ten Sean? The sunlight dances off the pavement, making the air shimmer. I try to put Sean in this setting, imagining him with sweat in his hair and the sun in his eyes. His crooked smile broke my heart every time. He had the most amazing green eyes. He was irritatingly practical, grounded, clever. He broke the small rules for me but never the big one. He was there when I needed him and he was there when I didn’t. I’d have loved him if he’d let me. But I will never know if he could have loved me. If he did.

I never forgot Sean. He was always there, a breath away, every moment I spent with Ray. He never left me alone. And I’m not sure he ever will.

“I don’t know,” I tell Lekha truthfully.

She shakes her head. “I think I’d have a coroner if I were you,” she says. “I have a
very
low tolerance for turmoil.”

“Coronary.”

“No, sweetie pie,” she says tenderly, “that’s someone who works in a morgue.”

I sigh.

“What are you doing out here with me, anyway?” I ask her. “Didn’t you tell me last week that it’s your mother’s birthday today?”

“It is,” she says, “but she’s out of town, so I am as free as a daisy.” This is a familiar refrain. Her mother is often traveling. “I always stay with my father when she’s away. I like him. He never gives me veggies with my dinner.”

I laugh. I stretch out in the sun, yawning on the steps. “I know we have exams starting in the next few weeks,” I say, “but I’m
so
happy this is the last official week of school. I’m sick of being there every single day.”

“You mean you’re sick of everyone acting like you personally shot their dog,” says Lekha.

I snort out a startled laugh. “That
is
rather how is it, isn’t it?”

When it starts to get dark, we share a rickshaw back to our houses. I go in without any sense of homecoming. It will never be home to me, though it has become reassuringly familiar. The atmosphere never changes. It’s peaceful, filled with the hum of conversation or Alisha clattering in her attic or Neil shuffling through papers in his study. But the peace is a tenuous thing, hovering on the surface, and if you shift too suddenly you could pop it like a balloon. And underneath is fear, and pain, and grief.

I stop long enough to thoroughly muss Sasha’s hair before going up to Amarra’s room. My last Lit essay of the school year is due on Friday, and I want to finish it tonight.

I’m halfway through when Alisha knocks on the door. “Busy?” she asks, surveying my neat handwriting and diligent attempt at homework with an amused look. It took me years to copy Amarra’s handwriting.

“A bit,” I admit. “I’m just stuck.”

“Need some help?”

“It’s this poem.” I show it to her. “The question talks about truth and lies and how everything in the city is a mask, but all I seem to notice about the poem is how sad it is.”

Alisha smiles faintly. “I know this one. It
is
sad.”

“All I can see when I read it is that there’s this man and he lost his world and now he wants to go back to the place he once belonged to. And it’s sad because he
can’t
go back; that world’s not there anymore.”

“Then say so,” says Alisha. “Write that.” But there’s an odd note in her voice, and I look up at her. Her mouth trembles. What have I said? She tries to smile. “It’s nothing. What you said just made me think . . . of something . . .”

I wait. She glances down at me before explaining.

“This city used to be a different world. When Neil and I were younger, we could get in the car and go driving late into the night, stop at an ice-cream shop or at the Imperial for biryani. This one time . . .” She laughs. “Your aunt Hema and I decided to be silly. I was eighteen. She blazed into my room late at night and said, ‘Come on, Al, let’s paint the town red.’ So we got some red paint out of the shed, drove all over town, and painted random walls bright red.”

I laugh. She smiles, too. “Do you remember when you were about four and we took you to the disco? We danced. You held my leg because you were dizzy and then you giggled and looked up at me and said, ‘Mummy, the song’s called “Dizzy,” too,’ and we found that so funny.” She hums the song quietly. “It was a whole world,” she says, “and it faded away.”

There are tears creeping down her face, leaving glistening trails like the wet left behind by a snail. My throat is tight, and it occurs to me that she’s crying because she can. Because she was once young and happy and silly and never knew anything about laws, or loss, or risks and sacrifices and desperate pretenses. Her whole, unfractured world is gone. And it’s clear how fragile her belief in me is, how little of Amarra she must actually see when she looks at me.

I want to make her feel better, but I don’t know how Amarra would have done it. I give her an awkward hug. She sniffles out an embarrassed laugh and looks around for a tissue, trying to compose herself. At the dresser, she finds the box of makeup Ophelia gave me when I left home. She brightens.

“Ooh, where did this come from?”

I tense, forming my reply carefully. “Someone gave it to me.”

We spend the next half hour being silly with the makeup. Sasha joins in and demands we paint patterns on her face with lipstick. For the moment, at least, the pretense remains intact.

I’m in a good mood on Friday. I’ve been waiting for the end of the school year for weeks. I’m going to have to spend most of the holiday studying, until our exams are over, but I don’t have to be back in school except on exam days. Not until July, anyway. Sean always started school in September and finished in June, but here we run from July to April; it won’t be long before we’re back for the new school year.

The last class of the day is English Literature. Mrs. Singh divides the class into pairs and asks each pair to talk for five minutes about a writer we’ve studied this year. I wait, fully expecting to be paired with Sam, which would be a very Mrs. Singh-like thing to do.

I’ve underestimated her. She pairs me with Ray.

I stay very still, arms folded on the table. In front of us, Ray’s profile is dark, brooding, and Hamlet-esque in expression. I can almost picture him tearing his hair out.

Sam, who is supposed to be working with Lekha, comes to sit by her. He edges away from me, apparently convinced I’ll choose this moment to wreak vengeance for my black eye and bruised face. I ignore him, watching Ray instead.

“And what do the two of you think you’re doing?” Mrs. Singh demands, glaring at Ray and me. “Did I or did I not tell you to work together? Amarra, come forward.”

“I’d rather stay here, Mrs. Singh,” I say politely.

“Ray, move back, then.”

“I’m staying here,” he says through gritted teeth.

Mrs. Singh sends us both out of the classroom and slams the door after us.

“That was childish,” snaps Ray.

“Ever heard of a pot and kettle?” I snap back, irritated.

I’m still aggravated hours later. He has a remarkable knack for getting under my skin. I scowl out the window on the bus, stomp loudly into the house, and bang mugs together as I make myself a drink. Trust him to ruin my good spirits. Nobody else is home. Lekha is at the dentist’s. There’s no one to distract me.

Then I think of the attic. If Alisha’s studio can’t make me feel better right now, nothing else will. I go upstairs.

It’s as beautiful as I remember. I’ve been here plenty of times since my first visit, but it never gets any less awe-inspiring. I stand in the middle of the attic and turn, absorbing each piece of this world as slowly as I can, savoring it hungrily, joyfully.

There are boxes in a corner of the attic. One is marked
JUNK
, so I look through it and find scraps of paper, wires, brushes, feathers. I pick out some tough wire and long black feathers.

Hot summer air flutters through the windows. I smell salt and earth and baked concrete, and it makes me want to be outside, high up in the air.

I twist the wire into a shape. At first I start to make a bird, a seagull or a crane, like the wax birds I used to give Sean. But I keep seeing something else in my mind. I stop to imagine the sculpture I want to create.

Wings, I think. Not a whole bird. Just the wings. I put my hands back to the wire and get to work. My supple fingers thrive beneath the coil as I pick apart separate pieces, heft them, twist them, shape them into the frame I need for the wings. I lose track of time, lose awareness of the real world beyond these walls. After I’ve made the frames, I retrieve a tube of superglue from a shelf. It’s crude, but I’m not working to make something perfect. Slowly and meticulously, I stick feather after feather to the wire, blending, layering, the dark wings in my mind becoming clearer as they become real. It’s fitting that the feathers are so ragged, unformed. Fitting for an angel the gods want to tear from the sky, who must ride on a bird until her broken wings heal.