by James Frey
“Why do they act like that around you?” he asks, about the boys who whisper about her in corners or the girls who emulate her every move or the people in town who give her extra helpings of kebabas or fried plantains or a free scarf that she’s made the mistake of admiring aloud, and she lies.
“What do you think my father was running from?” he asks. “What is it about this place that drove him away?”
She lies.
He loves her, he tells her he loves her, but how can he love her when he doesn’t know who she really is?
Shari thinks that maybe it’s because he doesn’t know that he can see her clearly; he’s not blinded by her position or her destiny. With him she’s not Shari Who Will Be the Player. She is simply Shari. She has always kept a piece of herself separate from her job, from Endgame, a sliver of soul untouched by the demands of the Harrapan, owned only by herself, and this is the piece she gives to Jamal.
So she tells herself, when she’s feeling especially guilty.
She could tell him the truth, let him peer behind the veil of secrecy and see the world’s true workings. He is, after all, Harrapan, and besides that, he is Jamal, and can be trusted—it would violate nothing to take him into her confidence. As the Player designate, she has full discretion. She’s allowed to tell him everything.
But then he would know she’s lied to him, and he would know too much of the truth, and every time she steels herself to risk it, he touches her cheek or kisses her lips or runs soft fingers through her hair, and she stills her tongue, because she can’t lose him.
She’s the strongest Harrapan woman of her generation, but losing him is a blow she could not survive.
Someday, she promises herself. Then fate takes the decision out of her hands.
The earthquake strikes at 2:32 p.m. and scores a 4.7 on the Richter scale. Seven people die, 32 more are injured, and a block of housing burns to the ground. This is what Shari finds out later.
In the moment, nothing is so clear. The moment is chaos and screaming and terror and instinct.
One second she and Jamal are holding hands in a cable car, dangling hundreds of meters over the Gangtok hillside, naming the animals they see in the clouds. Elephant. Horse. Llama. Shari has just picked out a fluffy white monkey when the car begins to sway violently. Far, far below, the earth has awakened and given a mighty shudder.
There’s an earsplitting screech as the cable car comes to a stop.
Then it lurches alarmingly and plunges several meters. The cable catches, but the thick cords are twisting and fraying. The passengers are thrown from their seats. They panic; they scream.
Only Shari stays calm. She peers through the window, quickly understanding the situation: The earthquake has destabilized the posts suspending the cable car. The cable is still supporting the weight of the car, but she can see the tension pulling at it, knows it will only be a matter of time before the posts give, or the cable snaps, and the car plunges hundreds of meters into the hillside.
They have to get out of here.
Shari has to get them out of here.
The cable car sways lazily over the hill. The 11 passengers are all crying or screaming, all but Jamal, who has his arms around Shari as if to protect her.
“Everyone, stay calm!” she announces to the passengers. “We will be fine. I will get us out of this.” None of the passengers in this car are Harrapan; they do not know her, or what she can do. But there is authority in her voice, enough that they fall silent and listen.
“Can you climb onto my back and hang on?” she asks the one child in the car, a small girl of six or seven. The girl nods solemnly, and Shari kneels down and lets her hoist herself up.
“What are you going to do?” the girl’s mother asks, voice trembling.
Jamal’s eyes are wide, confused. “Shari . . . what?”
Shari gauges the thickness of the cable, the distance to the end, the weight of the car, the swaying of the line, does some quick calculations, and says what she hopes will be the truth. “You have to trust me. I can save you all, but you have to stay very still and very calm in the meantime. Wait for me to come back.”
“Come back from where?” the mother asks, and Jamal, suddenly understanding, cries for her to stop, but Shari ignores both of them. There’s no time to waste. With the girl clinging to her shoulders, she climbs—very carefully, very gently—through the cable car window and takes hold of the line. They dangle from the cable, hundreds of meters above the ground. One handhold at a time, she carries herself and the girl toward safety. The girl’s weight is nothing. Her cries are distracting, so Shari retreats into that calm place at the center of her mind. She will not think about how far below the ground is, or how many lives depend on this working. Emergency crews will take too long to arrive—Shari is the only hope these people have—but she doesn’t think about that either. She thinks only about her grip, one handhold and then another, moving steadily toward the top of the cable line, as if this were training, as if this were easy—and so it is.
She deposits the girl on solid ground, warns her to stay still and wait.
Thirty meters from the cable car to solid ground.
Thirty meters back again.
Shari takes off her socks, wraps them around her palms to protect her skin, and lets herself slide along the cable, like it’s a zip line, catching herself just before she slams into the car. Jamal is gaping at her in shock. They all are, except the girl’s mother, who has her eyes closed. Tears stream down her cheeks.
Shari takes her next.
Then an old man too weak to hang on by himself, so she rigs a rope and ties him to her back.
Then another woman.
One by one, she ferries them up the cable, deposits them on the ground, praying to the Makers that there will be enough time, because she must save the most able-bodied for last, and Jamal is the most able-bodied of all, and every time she climbs up the cable and the distance opens between them, she imagines what will happen if the cable snaps and the boy she loves falls and breaks.
The cable holds.
The passengers hold on.
Until, finally, there are only the two of them left, Jamal and Shari. He doesn’t want to, doesn’t think it’s right, but sees that there is no other way—climbs on, hangs on, lets her tow him the 100 meters to safety, whispering only, “You’re like a superhero,” once, midway up.
At the top, he kisses her, holds her in his arms while the passengers lavish her with gratitude, but he says nothing more, only, “I have to go make sure my mother is okay,” and then, with a squeeze of her hand, he’s gone.
In the wake of the earthquake, the city buzzes with gossip. Many speak about the cable car, and the mysterious girl who saved its passengers and then slipped away before she could be identified and rewarded.
Shari says nothing to anyone about it. She goes straight home, makes sure that her house is intact and her family safe, and then she waits.
That night, Jamal comes to her.
They sit in her yard beneath the stars, Tarki wandering through the grass, flashing his feathers as if to distract them from what is to come, but there can be no more delaying.
“So, what was that back there?” Jamal asks, finally. “Are you Wonder Woman? Batman?”
She forces a laugh.
And then, finally, she tells him the truth.
“This is going to sound insane,” she begins. “But you have to trust me.”
“I will always trust you,” he says. “And nothing you tell me could be more insane than what you did today. That was . . .” He shakes his head. “That was incredible. You were incredible. And I mean that literally, like beyond the credible. Beyond belief.”
She sighs. He has no idea how far his credibility will need to stretch if he’s to believe what she has to tell him.
“The story, my story, starts thousands of years ago,” she says. “When our Harrapan civilization began. When the beings came from the stars.”
“Com
e on, no jokes, this is serious,” Jamal complains.
She quiets him with a look. Then tells him the whole story. The Makers. Endgame. The oath sworn by generations of Harrapan. The Player.
When she finishes, there’s a long silence.
“Did you hit your head or something?” he finally asks.
“No.”
“You’re just screwing with me, then.”
“No.”
“So you’re telling me, seriously, that you’re part of an ancient bloodline—”
“We,” she says. “You are Harrapan too. I will be your Player too.”
“Okay, that we are part of an ancient bloodline that someday soon will be wiped out, along with the rest of humanity, when aliens come back and pit a bunch of teenagers against each other in some perverse global cage match, and you’ve spent your entire life training to be one of them? And in less than two years you’re going to be this Player thing, and then you’ll have to give up everything in your life to work and train and maybe get yourself killed by a bunch of murderous teenagers, or maybe some masochistic aliens, if it comes to that?”
“That’s not precisely how I’d put it,” Shari says, “but yes.”
“No,” he says. “No! This is the twenty-first century, and you’re a smart girl; you can’t possibly believe this crap.”
“I do,” she says. “As do my parents, and my entire family, and many of the families you’ve come to know well. As, I believe, your father did. I’ve asked around. He was afraid of Endgame. Had he stayed, he would have been asked to devote himself to preparing for the final battle . . . to helping me. He wanted a more normal life, beyond the shadow of apocalypse, and thought if he ran away, he could find it. Even if it shamed his family. Even if it meant leaving everything he knew and loved behind.”
Jamal stiffens. He nearly leaps to his feet. “Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t bring him into this lunacy.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But that’s true. All of this is true.”
“If it were true,” he says slowly, “if that were possible, which it one hundred percent isn’t, it would mean you’ve been lying to me, about everything.”
“Not everything.”
He laughs harshly. “Right, not everything. Just everything that matters. My father. You. Us. Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you’re asking me to believe?”
She lowers her head, wishing down to her core that she could say no. “Yes.”
“I have to go,” Jamal says.
“Please don’t. Stay. Let’s talk about this. I can answer your questions. I can make you understand—”
“No,” he says. “Enough for tonight. Enough lies. Enough truth. Enough.”
She calls to him as he strides past her, out of the yard, into the street. “Jamal, please, what happens now—are you coming back?”
He won’t look at her, won’t even pause. “I don’t know.”
He’s right after all: that’s more than enough truth for one night.
Three days pass.
Three days, three nights, no Jamal. He doesn’t come to school. He doesn’t answer his phone. He doesn’t come to her home, and when she goes to his, he won’t see her.
Shari didn’t know it was possible to be so afraid.
She’s faced bandits and jaguars, scaled cliffs, and endured pitiless desert sun, but nothing has terrified her the way this does.
Before Jamal, she could accept being alone—she knew no other way. But after Jamal?
No.
There is no after Jamal.
He has filled an emptiness in her; they did that for each other. He is her soul mate, her other half, the completion of the sentence that is Shari Jha. Without him, there are only jagged edges and silence.
On the fourth day, the phone rings, and his voice sounds strange, closed off. For the first time since they’ve met, he is walling himself off from her, wearing a mask.
“Please, will you meet me at the tea shop at four this afternoon?” he asks her, so agonizingly polite, as if he is speaking to her grandmother, that a fault line in her heart splits open, because this must be it, the end.
“Of course,” she says, then adds, “I’m sorry,” but he has already hung up.
“You seem distracted today, child,” Pravheet says as he aims a sharp kick at Shari’s kneecap. She darts out of the way just in time, a beat too slow. Pravheet is right: she’s been slow all morning. Pravheet, the most respected living former Player, is not her official trainer, but sometimes they spar together. She likes to test herself against someone at his level, and she likes to talk to someone who understands the peculiarities of her life; Pravheet likes to give her advice. But he can’t advise her about what to do when she sees Jamal this afternoon, because he doesn’t even know about Jamal—none of them do.
She whirls on her heel and kicks her heel into Pravheet’s face, but he is already somewhere else—behind her, pinning her arms behind her back.
Shari goes limp in defeat, and Pravheet lets go. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I suppose my mind is elsewhere.”
“You’re supposed to be beyond such problems,” Pravheet points out.
“I know,” she says, ashamed.
“Shari, why do you look away from me?”
She is staring at the floor, trying not to cry. She is soon to be the Player, after all—she is far beyond the weakness of tears.
“Shari,” he says again, quietly insistent.
Shari looks up to meet his fierce gaze, steadying her breath and calming her nerves. She draws strength from the look in his eyes, which suggests he knows more than he’s saying, and understands.
“You don’t have to worry,” Shari tells him. “I’m distracted, yes, but I’m dealing with it. After today, there shouldn’t be a problem. There will be nothing left”—she won’t let her voice catch on the words—“nothing left to distract me from what matters.”
Pravheet takes her hands in his. They are large and calloused and strong, and make her feel very small. “Shari, you know that no two Players are alike, do you not?”
“You’ve told me many times,” Shari tells him. Pravheet is the only one of her trainers who has been sympathetic to her desire not to kill, at least not until it becomes absolutely necessary. Pravheet himself swore never to kill again, after he lapsed. He defended her choice to the other Harrapan, and has always encouraged her to stand up for what she believes, to Play the way she feels she should.
“There are some Players who feel they need to purge their lives of everything beyond the game,” Pravheet says.
“Of course,” Shari agrees. “Absolute focus.” That’s what she’s always been taught, and, until recently, it’s what she has always practiced.
“But you have to find your own way.” Pravheet gives her a strange, kind smile. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure.”
His smile widens. “Don’t worry. You will be.”
She shows up early; Jamal is already seated and waiting for her. He has ordered her a mug of chai, prepared just as she likes, with milk and three spoons of sugar.
Shari has spent the last two hours meditating. She’s ready for whatever Jamal has to tell her.
The session with Pravheet has convinced her that she will be better off without Jamal. This relationship has been a distraction from her training, from her duty.
The fact that she actually let herself think she couldn’t live without him? That was melodrama and weakness that should have been beneath her.
There’s only one thing she can’t live without, and that’s her responsibility to the Harrapan line.
She reminds herself of this unshakable truth, then sits down.
“So,” Jamal says.
“So.”
They watch each other.
Even now, under these circumstances, it’s good to see him. Her eyes have been thirsty; now, in the long silence, they drink.
She likes to imagine he is doing the
same.
“I believe you,” he says.
“Okay.”
“About all of it. The things from the stars, the game, the Player, your weird secret superhero life, the thousand-year conspiracy, my . . . my dad, all of it.”
She sips her tea. “I said okay.”
“You don’t want to say anything else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, don’t you want to ask me why I believe you? Or what I think? Or what I want to do?”
She sighs. If he thinks he can sucker her into breaking up with herself, then he doesn’t know her at all. “What do you want from me, Jamal? I told you what was true; I told you why I lied to you before; I told you I was sorry. I told you I loved you. I told you everything I had to tell. I came here because you said you had something to tell me.”
He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Shari readies herself. This is it.
“Not tell you, exactly,” he says. Then he puts a small cardboard box on the table and removes its lid. The thing inside sparkles. “Ask you, really.”
Shari reaches for the box, takes out the sparkly thing.
“What . . . what is this?” It’s a stupid question; it’s obvious what the thing is: a ring.
“It’s not real,” he admits. “I mean, it’s not exactly from a gumball machine, but . . . close enough. Best I could do on short notice.”
“Is this what I think this is?”
“Marry me,” he says. “Please?”
It’s the last thing she expected, and without thinking, she bursts into laughter.
Jamal grins. “Not exactly the answer I was hoping for.”
“Is this a joke?” she says. “Marry you? Why?”
“Why not?”
“Now, that’s romantic.”
“Give me a break, it’s not like I’ve done this before,” Jamal says.
“That’s comforting, at least.” She could banter with him like this all day; she could banter with him like this for the rest of her life.