The Girl With Borrowed Wings

by Rossetti, Rinsai

  “What?”

  I ran.

  For someone who had not done more than walk (and walk slowly, at that) for five years, I was fast. In the back of my mind was a flicker of surprise. The ground swept past, thrumming lightly like the taut string of a guitar, beneath my feet. I suppose that, in the oasis, in my caverns of stone walls, I had forgotten how young I was. But my body hadn’t forgotten. Somehow, in hibernation, it had managed to grow fluid and long and light. Ye gods, I thought, running faster and finding with joy that I could do so, I’m young. Who would have guessed? It was almost like discovering I could fly.

  And I was out of the oasis. Past the desert—hah! I laughed without slowing down.

  A jaguar loped beside me. I jumped before spotting the deep yellow eyes and realizing that it was Sangris. I expected him to look as surprised as I felt, but he seemed to think my mad dash was perfectly natural.

  “I’m young!” I shouted at him in exhilaration.

  “What?”

  “I’m young!”

  His gaze flickered over me. From my free-flying hair—I became very aware of it as soon as he looked at it; I felt it lifting off the base of my neck where the spine is tender, and streaming out behind me in tendrils—to the tightness of my stomach—I realized for the first time that I had a narrow waist and hips rather than the straight lines of my childhood; when had that happened?—and down to the legs. At that point he pulled his gaze back up to my face. “Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “No! And I—I’m strong! How’s that possible? I’m light, I can run!”

  This time his gaze wavered all the way down to my feet. “Yeah,” he repeated, turning his face away. “Didn’t you know?”

  “How could I? I never left my bedroom! And I always wanted to look like my friends!”

  A hint of amusement came to his voice. “What do they look like?” he said, keeping pace with me effortlessly.

  I ran faster. The blood was pounding now, but I didn’t want to stop, not yet. “They—ah.”

  “They’re fat and lazy?” he guessed, beginning to grin.

  “No! But they favor—more womanly forms, you know. They always say I’m too skinny,” I said. I concentrated on my flying feet. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not it was proper to tell him this. “A girl ought to be plump.”

  “I bet they’re plump,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “No wonder they say so, then.”

  My legs carried me up a hill. I was amazed they could still move, but move they did, and it wasn’t even difficult. Then I hurtled down the other side, the heather billowing all around me, like the sea shocked by a storm. “They say I look like a boy,” I panted.

  “That you do not,” he said, with another sideways glance.

  “I know!” I said gleefully. “I look like a horse!”

  He braked. “What?”

  I went on for a while longer, shooting alone, a comet over the grassy world, and then finally, when my head was so light it was dizzying and I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, I threw myself into a heap of hazy purple heather. I rolled over. The sky swam above me. My entire body had become a pair of lungs, heaving, but my breaths were luxurious, enjoying the fresh, impossible, unbaked air.

  Sangris approached my head. I saw his face—a black cat’s again—upside down. “Did you just say you look like a horse?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?” he said, his tone baffled.

  “Because I do. The way a horse looks when it runs.”

  “Oh. I think you mean ‘graceful.’”

  “No.”

  “Agile?”

  “No.”

  “Glossy?” he said, obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  “I was thinking more a baby horse. Long legs, bony body, you know, but at least it’s fast and it can run. My friends can’t run. I didn’t know I could.” I grabbed at the plants all around me, holding on to them in fistfuls, to make sure they were real. I would never take grass for granted again. Breezes, like currents of water, slid lights over the heather as I lay there.

  “Your body isn’t bony,” Sangris said blankly. “It’s as soft and slenderly curved as the throat of a swan.”

  What?

  I stared at him for a full minute.

  “Um,” he said.

  I continued to stare.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “Did you prepare that phrase in advance?” I was genuinely curious. “Do you sit awake at night and write secret odes to the bodies of girls you’ve just met? Or was that stolen from somewhere? How many times have you used it?”

  “I can’t help it if I’m eloquent,” he said. He studied one of his paws, grooming it.

  “It sounded rehearsed,” I said.

  “Why would I rehearse? How could I have known that you were going to call yourself bony? Like you said, I’ve just met you.” He fussed over the paw, licking it with a small red tongue tip. “You’re the one who brought up the subject. It just so happens that I thought of the phrase a little while ago. I resent your accusation of plagiarism,” he added virtuously.

  “Were you in a particularly poetic mood when you thought of it?” I said, beginning to smirk. I felt as though I should have been embarrassed, and it was probably coarse of me to keep asking questions, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease him. And besides, those concerns were far away, sitting with my parents in the distant oasis.

  “I wouldn’t call it poetic, no. Not particularly,” Sangris said. He was still licking his paw. Having clean paws was evidently the most important thing in his private universe right now.

  My smirk slipped away then.

  Not because of what he’d said. Not because of anything logical. No, I stopped talking and scrunched up my nose because it had just occurred to me how easy it would be for him to turn human right now.

  And the thought was more vivid than I would have liked. I had a mental image of Sangris grinning up at me through a screen of wavy black hair, eyes slanted and yellow the way they had been in my bedroom, and the way they were now. He was a cat. It didn’t make any sense, except . . . well, except for the fact that, at a moment’s notice, he could become something else, and—oh, gross. I thought the word loudly enough to drown out everything else. Gross. Maybe I made a noise, because he glanced up at me, and that made it worse. His eyes weren’t catlike at all, at least not as far as their expression went. They were intelligent and far too male. That look was almost enough to make me go back to the oasis and shut myself in my cage, never fly again, and allow the cords of heat to bind me down to the ground—just because Sangris happened to have a knack of making me uncomfortable. I glared until he looked down again.

  Then I had a cheering thought. He couldn’t have been talking about me; it must be someone else. I rolled over onto my elbows, preparing to be vindicated. I was up to my chin in the heather. “Who were you with at the time?” I said.

  His eyes flashed up at me from his self-appointed task. “What?”

  “I know it wasn’t about me,” I said. I tried not to sound hopeful. “What do you know about how soft, or how hard, or even how spiky I might be? I’m always swathed in clothes right down to my wrists and ankles. So who was that phrase really about?”

  A pause.

  “Um,” he said at last. “A girl I knew. Before.”

  There. My shoulders relaxed. I’d been right.

  “How long ago?”

  “Months?” He said it as if it was a question.

  I propped up my chin on my hands. He wasn’t telling the story very well, I thought. “What was she like?”

  “Beautiful, of course. She had fur like shining duckweed and big round eyes that almost popped out whenever anyone called her name.” (There’s no accounting for taste, I thought, but I was careful to keep my expression blank for fear of offending him. Duckweed, indeed.) “Her name was Loll,” he continued.

  “Loll?” I couldn’t help but sound a bit dis
dainful now.

  “Because of the way her tongue lolled out. She was a dog, you see. Sadly, she’d been spayed, but we decided that it was for the best . . .” He broke off, struggling.

  Startled, I said, “I—I’m sorry.”

  “You idiot,” he gasped out. He fell onto his side laughing. “It was you! I thought about orchid’s stems and swan’s necks and all sorts of other nonsense while you were cuddling me in your room, remember, because you thought I was a cat. You weren’t swaddled in clothes then. You weren’t even paying attention—you were reading Of Human Bondage. A tattered copy with a boring brown cover and so many pages that it was thicker than most religious texts. But you were absorbed in it for hours and hours, as though it was the most interesting thing in the world. I’d just woken up, and I had to wait there, held against your—ah—your nightshirt, until you finished the book and went to sleep, before I could try to sneak away.”

  I hid behind my hair. So he’d been conscious after all. I thanked my luck that he wasn’t in human form right now. It was disconcerting enough to have a cat speak to me in this way. “But you didn’t!” I said to the grass. “You didn’t try to leave until hours later. I went to sleep at midnight, and you woke me up around four.”

  “I fell back to sleep when you did,” he said, not laughing anymore. His gaze slid away from me. “You were—” He stopped.

  “I was . . . ?”

  Mumble.

  “Was what?” I demanded.

  “Warm.”

  That did it. I began to inch away. I hoped that maybe, if I did it slowly enough, he wouldn’t notice.

  “What?” Sangris protested. “It isn’t dirty. I was comfortable, and I still hadn’t recovered properly from the souk, so I thought, a few more minutes, and when I woke up it was almost dawn.”

  “Argh,” I said. It was the only way I felt I could fairly sum up the situation.

  “I should’ve stuck with the story about the dog, huh?”

  “Mm.” I hesitated. “That one was a lie, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Good. I didn’t think I’d be able to handle any more revelations.

  “We should probably head back,” he muttered, pulling himself up to his paws, “if you want to be at school by three forty-five.”

  “I don’t want to be, I have to be,” I said. “My father’s going to pick me up. If I’m not there . . .”

  “Pity,” he said. “You sure I can’t just drop you off at your house? We could get around your father.” Sangris had a way of saying things as though his suggestions alone were enough to solve all the problems in the world.

  “My father,” I repeated. The word sounded strange here, with the open sky and the purple-gray grasses, the green hills, and the black line of the forest just clinging to the horizon behind us. But it was as powerful a sound as ever, the strength of the rising fa, then the graveness of the ther bringing it back down to earth. Sangris didn’t seem to understand that want was irrelevant beside the word father.

  Without having to be prompted, Sangris changed back into his feathered dragon form. I climbed up gingerly. What if he was thinking of more embarrassing phrases? The taut instep of each tiny fairy-like foot . . . or worse, the orchid-petal smoothness of the skin on her palms was . . .

  “You’re freaked out, aren’t you?” He didn’t say it as if he was looking for reassurance. He said it in acknowledgment of a fact.

  I said, “No more secretly describing me in your head.”

  “It’s called thinking,” he said.

  “Are your thoughts usually that flowery?”

  “No, but I was trying to find a way to describe . . . You know how sometimes you just need to find a sentence that . . . Oh, all right. Fine.”

  He gave up.

  But when we were safely in the air, another flush of warmth spread up through me, from the pit of my stomach this time. I thought, The throat of a swan? And I ran the phrase through my head once or twice to make sure I had it memorized.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In Which My Father Tells Me About Pfft

  Sangris lowered me back into the desert. Even though my eyes were closed, I could tell when the oasis began to crowd around me again, because of the heat. But it was more bearable now. I’d had my gulp of fresh air.

  The daze of flying sank away and I set my feet down once more on the pale cracked stone behind my school. My watch read three forty-three. The sunlight was almost solid around us in walls of blinding white gold.

  “Are you glad you went?” Sangris asked. Attentively. Like a chef taking the finished plate away from a diner whom he’s not sure he has impressed.

  There was no question about it. I said, “Yes.”

  With a talon, he picked up his stolen school uniform from where he had dropped it before. A film of fine sand had settled into the creases, and the fabric had already begun to bleach. “Ah,” he said, “you might want to—” I swiveled around to stare in the opposite direction while he changed, and when I looked back, a very dusty and rumpled-looking boy was grinning at me. The white sand had stuck in his hair. “All right, what’s next?” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  “I’m going home. My father is picking me up.”

  “Okay, I’ll wait with you.”

  “What? No.”

  He looked amazed. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want my father to see you.”

  “I’m a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  He blinked, growing thoughtful. “What kind of secret? The embarrassing secret that you don’t want anybody to know about, or the sort that’s just too good to share?”

  “The embarrassing kind that would get me into trouble.”

  “Oh,” he said, looking a bit put out. “Well, all right then.”

  The bell blared over our heads.

  “Bye,” I said, and, because that seemed to be it, I turned to leave.

  I was a few steps away when he caught at my shirtsleeve. I turned. Abruptly, he said, “Could I come again tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Could I come again tonight?” he repeated.

  I couldn’t help smiling. “You have to ask?” I said.

  “Oh,” Sangris said, momentarily taken aback, before a pleased smile came to his face. He let go of my shirt. That’s when I realized what I’d just said, and how it had sounded. Ye gods, I thought. I sounded cheap. Like those girls on TV my father always sneers at. I turned and hurried inside before I could say anything worse.

  The halls were packed from wall to wall with the struggling, uniform-clad bodies of students. I slipped through the crowd, a fish through water, agile after years of practice, down the hall and up the stairs, my head seeming to float far above my body. At the familiar green door of my locker I paused to scoop up my bag. I was still thinking of heather and running and exhilaration. And tonight there would be more. Maybe this could be a regular thing. A new rhythm to my life, like the songs of the mosques.

  “Frenenqer,” someone said behind me. Anju slid into her accustomed place at my side. “Mr. Abass went around telling everyone that he forgot to give us homework,” she said. “We have to do all the odd-numbered exercises on page ninety-one.” She looked at me sideways with heavy-lidded, long-lashed black eyes, weary as a babysitter. “What did you do to the cat?”

  Not Where is the cat, but What did you do to it. Anju always expected the worst.

  “I didn’t do anything. It turned into a feathered dragon and we flew off.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. We started back down the stairs. “How are your preparations for Heritage?”

  “Done. I finished them yesterday. I’m not sure why everyone else takes weeks to prepare.” I shifted the bag from one shoulder to another. It felt as if it were packed full of bricks. I peeped inside. Ah, that was right, I had ten novels stuffed in there. I’d forgotten that I had picked them up at the library. It was strange that the world hadn’t changed while I was away.

&n
bsp; “Everyone takes as long as possible because they want more time out of class,” she observed.

  “Sensible of them,” I said, conceding the point. It was difficult to argue while my head was still full of the sound of rushing wings. I tried to focus. “I heard the South Africans are going to bring a grill and have a barbecue outside.”

  “So what? The Emiratis are bringing a camel.”

  “Camels are easy. Everyone has a friend of a friend who owns a camel . . .”

  “But it looks impressive,” she said.

  “In our school, anything would look impressive.”

  “True.”

  As if OESS could buy our approval with camels, of all things. That’s what my school is called: Oasis English Spoken School. OESS for short. The grammar may be worrying, but the “English Spoken” part is supposed to indicate that all students must have a fluent grasp of the English language. The sign in front of the gates, however, is misspelled, and proudly reads: “Oasis English Spaken School.” Now you can guess the quality of the education I received.

  But it was the only school on this side of the desert, so we had no choice, and we knew it. If anything, we were supposed to be grateful. “You can’t expect to be pampered,” my father had said when he’d enrolled me five years ago. “We’re expats.” I’d stared at the sign in front of the school and just nodded.

  And Heritage always set my teeth on edge. Why should it be obligatory to proudly display our cultures? What about people like me, who came from everywhere and nowhere? And what had the administration ever done for us? But it was a chance to get out of lessons, and anyway the food was always good. I think it was the food, mainly, that made us go along with it.

  “How many countries this year?” I said distractedly, hitching my bag higher. We stepped out of the building and, following the flow of students, went across the sand, out the main gates into the gaspingly hot parking lot. An airless, twisted haze of evaporation permanently swam over the rows of parked cars. Our faces were screwed up in the heat.

  “Fifty-six,” Anju said.

  There were only two hundred students in secondary school.

  “We won’t have enough rooms.”