by Cara Martin
You can’t lose something you’ve never had. Tanvi Mahajan had never really been mine. We were like an optical illusion. Something that deceives by appearing to be other than it is. In our case, a trick of the heart rather than a trick of the eye.
Even if that were true, she didn’t deserve her breasts plastered across the Internet. Betraying Tanvi’s trust for a few minutes of warped satisfaction was one of the worst things I’d ever done, and now I’d done it twice in short order. Turned our entire history to steaming shit.
The femur can still fracture, but it can support up to a ton of weight before it snaps. Anything can be broken if you try hard enough. And some things shatter without any effort at all. Some things are built to self-destruct.
After long minutes of silence, somebody was leaning on my front doorbell. Slamming the wood with their fist too, as angry as I’d been earlier. Dread rising in my throat, I shuffled down to the door.
An apology would ring hollow — useless and meaningless. I said nothing as I opened the door for Tanvi. Her right arm sailed through the rift between us, her hair disheveled and her mouth set in a battlefield grimace.
I let her do it. Stopping her would ring hollow too.
The crack of her open palm against my cheek didn’t last long enough. The sting was mild. The same pain that gathered on your face when you stayed outdoors too long on a winter day. Tanvi rushed past me, into the house, while I stared at the spot she’d deserted.
“What are you doing?” I called after her.
Overhead, tectonic plates shifted by force. Thumping, thudding, smashing into pieces. I spun and ran, taking the steps two at a time. Standing in the open doorway to my bedroom, I surveyed the damage. Tanvi had dashed my mirror to the floor. Glittering shards converted the hardwood into a minefield. Bent over the top drawer of my dresser, Tanvi clawed at the pair of boxer shorts she’d given me for Valentine’s Day, ripping them to shreds and flinging the ragged remains over her shoulder.
“Stop,” I said half-heartedly.
I deserved it. Anything she could think of. But my mom didn’t. She’d be home any minute now, and I would have to explain the unexplainable.
“You shit!” Tanvi shouted while I reached down under the bed for my running shoes.
She reeled to the far side of the room, stopping in front of the bookshelf while my feet pushed their way into my Nikes. Random books morphed into airborne projectiles. My Darth Vader pencil holder scratched my chin as it rocketed toward the wall behind me and fell dead to the floor. An old set of headphones followed it, last year’s bronze medal for the 1500-meter run three seconds behind.
“All the time you talked about your dad like someone you’d make sure you’d never turn into,” Tanvi yelled, her lips going blue. “And look at you, the minute things get complicated you act like trash.” She snatched a Sharpie from the shelf, twisting to scrawl on my wall. “You were right,” she said, facing away from me.
Two long strides across the room and I could read what she’d printed, in capital letters an inch high: TANVI LOVES ASH.
Glass crushed under my shoes. The abrasive sound scraped at my eardrums. Years hurtled by me, howling inside my head, draining me into bone. My shoulder roared in its socket. A jagged memory — one of many — squeezed at my windpipe, pausing my breath. Eight and a half years old. Lying crumpled on our doorstep, like a dead bird that had flown headlong into a window. Inside our house, my dad turned on my mom. I heard him raging from the other side of the door. Taking the place apart, and her with it. With me out of the way, there was no one to stop him.
I never could stop him anyway. The only thing that ever stopped him was leaving him behind.
“You were nothing,” Tanvi said. She adjusted her arm and pressed the Sharpie into the wall again, taking back everything she’d ever given me with her words, stripping me down to pain and shame. “Nothing.”
Charging toward her, I clutched her wrist. Wrestled her arm away from the wall. If I was nothing, how could I accomplish that? If I was nothing, why did it feel so good to squeeze her wrists together to force the Sharpie from her hand?
Behind her on the wall, Tanvi had added an “L” twice the size of any of the other letters. “Loser,” she sang to my face.
She twisted as she yanked backwards, sliding one of her hands free from my grasp. Wildly, she swung, her hand catching me under the eye while I weaved, missing the worst of it. She came at me again. Propelling herself forward like a slam dancer. I flung out my arms to stop her from knocking me off balance. She struggled against me, skirting left. Glass shards shifted under her heel like a current, sending her down.
Tanvi gaped up at me from the floor in shock, her eyes searching for something familiar and comprehensible to hold on to, and not finding it. Her upper body had fallen safely away from the scattered glass. The shards lay grittily under her jeans and her shoes, where thick fabrics would have offered protection.
I stood over her, understanding streaming through me with a fullness that burrowed into my core. It twinged along my back and filled up the spaces between my ribs, making me whole. This is what it felt like to have power over someone. To know if they hurt you, there was always a way you could hurt them more. They could never really win.
The warmth oozing inside me died as swiftly as it had materialized. A chill sped in after it. Disgust. Self-loathing deeper than any fracking well and equally toxic. I hated myself more than I’d ever hated Tanvi. Hated with a cold, sinewy vengeance that although I hadn’t shoved her to the floor — and had never hit her — for the briefest second or two, it had felt good to watch her fall.
Sick.
I was sick. Destructive. Weak. Pathetic. I was ten times worse than the people I’d shunned for the past few years, telling myself I was superior, that I had changed.
Tanvi was right. I was a loser. I was the kind of trash that couldn’t recognize itself and believed she was the problem.
But it was me. Under the surface, I was broken. Under the surface, I was shards.
Frowning, I lowered my hand to help Tanvi up. Silently, and with surprising grace, she took it, rising nimbly to her feet. Then she swept the pieces of glass gingerly from the back of her jeans and exited my bedroom without another word.
Weeks later I heard through the grapevine that she wasn’t with Ashish. That had only been her rage talking.
I was never alone with Tanvi again. Never any closer to her than a July day she edged by me in a Baskin Robbins parking lot, her eyes bulldozing me into rubble with the potency of an atom bomb.
Not until we were taken.
PART 3
10
WHEN I COME TO, I’m lying face down on hard plastic, my eyes blinking back gritty tears and blood and stomach pain twisting me into a fetal position. My hands want to fly to my abdomen, to protect it from something that’s already happened, but they can’t. They’re frozen behind my back. I thrash around like a fish out of water, my mouth gone like a horror movie creature — solid flesh where the opening should be.
“Easy,” a male voice tells me. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Maybe he can’t breathe with his nose fucked up like that,” a second guy suggests.
My head flips frenziedly back and forth, my nostrils inhaling clots where oxygen should be and the world sliding away from me while I plummet toward something else.
“Hold still,” one of them growls, yanking the fleshy covering from my mouth. I splutter and cough, then gulp down air. I’ve barely filled my lungs when something smacks my lips. Wriggling and heaving I sit myself up like an old man, breathing raggedly against whatever they’ve used to reseal my mouth — layers of duct tape, probably. I can almost see its silver gleam, and I keep fluttering my eyelashes, fighting off the onslaught of wet, but it’s like driving through a monsoon without windshield wipers. Nearly impossible.
They’ve left a s
mall hole in the center of the tape this time; a fine stream of air seeps in where my lips part. I’m not going to drown in my own blood in the back of a stranger’s van.
Shifting my weight, I accidentally knock against the figure next to me, who nearly topples me with a shove to the shoulder. I regain my balance before I hit the floor, knees forming a tent in front of me and my hands scraping against plastic behind them. My brain’s skipping double dutch, overclocking as my vision finally begins to clear.
White Kia. Utility van with whited-out rear windows. Men in ski masks.
They kidnapped Tanvi and whoever else was at the Mahajan house, including me. They thought I saw one of their faces. In truth I didn’t see anything, but being in the van is the better case scenario. Better than being left behind. But where are they taking us? The ski mask floating close to me is the first thing to come partially into focus. White skin around the eye and mouth holes. The guy’s gripping something in one of his hands, his posture tense. Tanvi’s furthest away from me, but she’s the one I see next. Sitting cross-legged, hazy brown legs disappearing into volleyball shoes. Hair hanging in her face, partially obscuring the slash of duct tape over her mouth, and her body swaying slightly from the movement of the van.
I count all the figures inside the vehicle. Two guys in the front seat, one of them at the wheel and the other in the passenger seat, both of them in baseball hats and all-black clothing. Another two are crouching among us in the back of the van, one with white skin under his mask and the other black, each of them cradling a gun. Four abductees total: a young white girl who can’t be much older than ten, Tanvi, me, and a black guy about our age with a grown-out buzz cut whose chin and neck are smeared with red. He must have tried to fight off the kidnappers too. His face is vaguely familiar, and when he stares pointedly back at me his eyes are beaming a message.
I can’t know what it is; I can only guess. Be cool. We’ll have a chance to clean up this situation later. Wait for it.
My eyes hold on his, making sure he knows I hear him. Cal, I think suddenly. He goes to Holy Trinity with Tanvi; they shared a class last year. Tanvi and I were at a pre-New Year’s Eve party with him. He was the one who de-escalated the snowball war, but back then I didn’t think she really knew him outside of school.
Clearly, it’s different now, and that ceiling of unbroken black is closer than the sky; it’s crammed into the van with us, smothering me with the facts. Cal was hanging out at Tanvi’s house until a few minutes ago. They’ve gotten close enough to sit next to each other on the Mahajans’ sectional couch, her long legs stretched out so that her feet can rest on top of the coffee table as they joke around, or worse, lower their voices, building secrets together.
But that would be the good news, comparatively. They could be so much closer than that. Lips on lips and skin on skin. Her tongue between his teeth. One of his hands gripping her naked waist. The two of them sliding into an easy groove together in the dark.
It’s too easy for me to imagine. Way too easy, and none of my business. I did this to myself, months ago. All in like a born loser who’d rather go down with the ship than try to swim for safety.
My eyes leap to Tanvi again. Her arms have been secured behind her back, same as Cal’s and the white girl’s. The girl’s wide eyes wing around the van, taking everything in as she leans into Tanvi and Tanvi leans back in response. The girl’s long blond hair spills onto Tanvi’s shirt as though it belongs there as much as Tanvi’s does, and I automatically think of Natalya.
Things were good when my dad came home. But the bad showed up soon after him and lasted longer. Years longer. I’d hear my father’s voice splinter, and my sister would run to my room before he could split open like a force of nature and rain down havoc. The first few times my dad lost it Natalya pulled me under the bed with her. “Do this,” she’d say, pressing her hands over her ears and humming. “Don’t stop until I tell you.”
You could still hear him. My mother’s voice too. The pleading when he splintered and the screaming when he broke and let his hands do whatever they wanted. Even with my palms clamped to my ears and the muffling effect of my own hum, I could hear them. But it was like being trapped inside a corner of your own skull, with everything else happening miles away where it couldn’t touch you.
After the first few times Natalya didn’t have to tug me under the bed; I dove in there with the dust and waited for her to shove in beside me, both of us humming like an old refrigerator or a hive full of bees.
“Everybody sit tight,” the guy in the passenger seat barks. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. Don’t give us any reason to. If you follow instructions, we’ll all get along fine from here on out.”
Tanvi glances at me from behind her hair, less easy to read than Cal. The white girl coughs next to her, folding her chin in close to her chest, trying to vanish. Tanvi’s gaze falls away from mine, resettling on the girl as the air expelled from her young lungs jams against the duct tape, forcing her to chug it down again.
Outside, thunder groans. The low, bassy rumble reverberates inside me like a fist barreling into my gut afresh. My legs tremor, my cheekbones hollowing out with the effort of sucking back a whimper. My head tips on my shoulders, the top of my blood-drenched T-shirt jeering up at me.
“That’s what happens when you try to be a hero,” the guy in black closest to me says, his syllables tart with indifference.
The van picks up speed, veering right. We could be getting on the highway, putting distance between us and the Mahajan house.
How long until someone notices we’re missing and starts looking for us? We could be miles away by then.
There must be other cars on the road. Not many because of the weather, but some. They’ll be white-knuckling their way home in the storm; a nondescript utility van is the last thing they’ll remember.
My head bobs repeatedly, like a ball on a string. I force my eyes open wide, fighting the ache spiraling out from my center like a Catherine wheel. Nothing good can come from passing out a second time, and you can never believe someone who says they don’t want to hurt you. Whatever necessitates the words makes them a lie.
Woozy, I see my dad’s fists float in front of my face like mist, the skin on the back of his hands smoother than you’d expect. Paler too, without a single freckle and only the faintest vertical scar marring an area just above the wrist of his left hand. The stink of his stale cigarette smoke wedges into my nostrils — nostrils unable to suck up air but that plummet back into history. I blink violently, resisting the vision and squirming in my restraints.
“Calm down,” a muffled voice snaps from far away.
Closer, my father’s wiry voice worms into my ears. Don’t let the world kick you in the teeth the way it’s done to me, Misha. You still have a chance. I fought, but not hard enough. It wore me down, and I let it beat me. Don’t let yourself get so tired that you let the world win.
My dad didn’t always explode when he was drunk. Sometimes he threw himself a pity party and invited me along. The two of us against the world. A team you’d never want to belong to.
“Calm the fuck down,” the voice repeats, a hand whacking into my chest, pushing me backwards. I go over like an upended turtle, organs rearranging themselves inside me like puzzle pieces made of barbed wire.
One of the guys in the back of the van with us erupts into laugher.
“Shut up,” a voice from the front seat admonishes.
The laughter stops dead, its ghost hovering in the air.
It would hurt less to stay down, curl up like a slug, and give the puzzle pieces a chance to settle into their rightful places, but I force myself up again with a grimace.
Can’t let myself be pulled under. Have to stay lucid. The weaker they think we are, the worse things could be for us.
The wind whines shrilly against the windows, and I fasten my gaze to Tanvi while I sip in air through a
slit that must not be any wider than a fingernail.
If anything can keep me grounded here, it’s her.
Tanvi stares back at me, a long, unbroken moment — the dark eyes and high cheekbones I’d recognize in any crowd breaking me in two and putting me back together in the same instant.
We’ll get through this. It’s going to be all right. That’s what I try to say with an unfaltering gaze. But with my face bathed in red and rearranged like a Picasso portrait, the message must not look anything like I intend. My lips sting under the scrap of punctured duct tape, chafing with the unspoken words. Tanvi reflects them back to me like a carnival mirror, a hail of thunder punctuating her expression. It’s going to be tonight. This will cut through us.
Lightning throttles through the van’s front windows, hurling stark shadows into its recesses. For a split second I imagine I see him again. Dad and his smooth hands, skulking by the rear doors. His mouth gapes inanimately, and his back arches in a way I’ve never seen before. Unnatural. A puppet with its string pulled cruelly.
You still have a chance.
Then the light fades and he goes with it, leaving the eight of us in the van to our fates.
Shit. If I had a CT scan it would show a concussion. I’d put money on it. I’m zoning in and out of consciousness like a drunk cascading across highway lanes.
When my eyes drift back to Tanvi they’re revealing something new, whether she can decipher it or not. The truth. It contracts at the corners of my eyelids and lengthens my chin.
There aren’t any sirens in our wake. No one is coming for us.
We’re disappearing.
11
THE VAN SKIDS SHARPLY losing traction on the wet road. Every one of us in the back goes tumbling, the young blond girl flung the furthest. She lands in a heap with one of the kidnappers, the gun springing loose between them on the van floor. Cogs spin swiftly in her mind, her face a flash of possibilities. I know what she’s thinking. Grab the gun. Shoot the bastard.