When we’d arrived back in this neighborhood, and sat inside our little building, Mom just served dinner and my father stayed silent. Impatient, I wriggled on my seat. Since I didn’t dare talk directly to him, I started chattering to Mom, raising my voice on purpose to be sure he heard me.
He said, “She’s very loud.”
I was delighted. He’d noticed me. Immediately I began babbling to him, describing everything that had happened to me in the past six months, absolutely out of my mind with excitement, not noticing as his replies grew more monosyllabic and his face hardened. When he went to the bathroom, I followed, still talking nonstop, and when he shut the door in my face, I stood there calling through the wood: “And then I told my friend Pee-Mei that I never step on ants, and she said I was silly, and I said she was silly, and—”
Then my father came out and said, “Shut up.”
I stopped dead.
“She’s grown completely wild,” he said quietly to my mom. Then he took her aside, and the two of them had a very serious grown-up conversation in an undertone, in which Mom seemed to bridle at first, but after an hour of steady murmurs from my father, finally gave up.
Well, after that he never left me alone with my mother again. Wherever he went, we followed. He started training me properly around that time too. And I think he still blames those six months of his absence for my long-lasting imperfections.
“You actually did love your father that much, then?” said Sangris, staring at me.
I flushed in the darkness. But I couldn’t lie, not here. It had taken years before I was able to purge my heart of that pathetic yearning. “I guess I did.” I shook my head. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Yeah.” I got up and scrunched my face, looking into the night where my old house was hidden. “Ye gods, I’m glad I’m not that kid anymore.”
He’d been fiddling with the pot while I told my story, but now he scrambled to his feet as well. “Cheer up,” he said, pulling lightly at my shirtsleeve.
“I don’t need cheering up,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’m not the one who was too ham-fisted to catch a single fish.”
Solemnly, Sangris pulled out one hand from behind his back. The world’s ugliest little guppy was flopping around in a small puddle on his palm.
“It’s for you.”
Its fins looked deformed, and I was sure that’s why he’d been able to catch it; but he was watching me hopefully. I accepted the gift like a bouquet, then released it reverently back into the water.
The next night it was Sangris’s turn, so we visited his country of birth—a flat, flat place where the horizon seemed so far away it made my heart ache. It was nighttime here, but he found a hole in the ground and crouched down. “Listen,” he said. I lay on my stomach and heard a song, a bubbling, high-pitched song, reverberating somewhere deep inside the hole. He explained that it was the sound of stone-creatures below the surface. In this world, nobody lived above the ground. He got on his stomach beside me in the darkness, panting slightly from our long flight. “I was born way down there, in a groundwater lake. At least, I think I was. My first memory is crawling out, so . . .”
“Alone?”
“’Course. All the normal creatures stayed. It’s like Ae. They’re too afraid to come out.”
“Except the birds,” I said, remembering what he’d told me before.
“No, there aren’t any birds in this country,” he said, but I pointed upward. High above, I could just make out a massive animal, its wings navy blue dotted with white, for camouflage against the stars.
“That’s not a bird,” said Sangris, coming convulsively closer to me. “It’s a Free person.”
“Another one?” I jumped up in excitement. “Isn’t that rare?”
“For somebody who can’t fly, maybe,” he scoffed, staying on the ground. “But we move so much, trails are bound to cross once in a while . . . Depending where you go. There’re some favorite spots that can even get sort of crowded.” He frowned up at the creature.
“Hm,” I said. We’d never come across someone else before. Keeping my eyes on the shape overhead, I asked, “What do you consider crowded?”
Sangris looked aggrieved. “Sometimes three of us on a world at a time. Can you imagine?” He shook his head as if unable to express the horror.
“Oh, the audacity of some Free people,” I said gravely. He looked at me with suspicion, but I kept a straight face. Never mind all that, I wasn’t about to miss this opportunity. I tried to tug him up. But, fanning out its midnight-colored wings, the creature had already glided away.
“Showoff,” muttered Sangris.
“Let’s follow it.”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to say hi?”
“Why should I?”
“It’s your own kind.”
“Free people are not my own kind—I don’t have an own kind. I told you—‘Free person’ is a description, not a species, all right? They’re no closer to me than any animal.”
“No need to be defensive.”
Sangris subsided a bit, enough to look sheepish. “It’s a territorial thing,” he mumbled. “Like I said, we take up an awful lot of space . . .” He shrugged as if shaking away the other Free person.
When it was time to leave, Sangris remained human, his favorite form nowadays. He simply grew an assortment of wings: sometimes dark sculptural bat wings that curled above his back and made him, with his wavy black hair and yellow eyes, look like a veritable demon; sometimes big soft feathery wings that made him look like a little boy playing dress-up. In the hot afternoons when I took naps alone in my room, I could still feel the rocking of those wings, up and down, before I went to sleep, and I’d drift off on a sea of imaginary waves. The beat of flying had become the rhythm of my dreams.
The next night we found that we’d both once lived in Glasgow, so we went there. Dying leaves shivered down from the trees along the street, falling around us like showers of sequins. We were running, in a rush, toward the city’s cold milky river, when I stopped suddenly. I’d spotted a bush so transparent in the wan sunshine that people on the other side were visible as floating shadows, like ghosts. “Here! I used to walk here,” I exclaimed. “When my father was at work, every day, after school.”
“Really? I was a pigeon just over there . . .”
On the other side of the city, for a couple of weeks. But he’d been so nearby.
“And just think,” Sangris said, “I felt completely pointless at the time! If I’d known—”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure your feeling was accurate,” I said kindly. But I had a superstitious thrill too, and I couldn’t help adding, “I always fed the pigeons here. If only you’d come to this side of the city instead, we might’ve met sooner.”
Some dog took a dislike to Sangris and barked madly, chasing him along the river as I giggled and refused to help. Finally we took refuge in a shop that for some reason sold only Nepalese skirts. He insisted I buy one—“In Scotland, nobody will care if they can see your knees, Nenner.” I remembered the days, before I went to the oasis, before my father got extra-protective, when I used to wear normal clothes, even shorts sometimes, and, in a moment of weakness, I did buy a skirt. But then I was too embarrassed to wear it in front of him.
“Don’t be dumb,” he said. “I’ll drag you into the changing room and put it on you myself if I have to.”
On being threatened, I finally went away and changed. When I returned, in my floaty short-sleeved shirt and new Gypsy-like skirt with its ragged hem that swirled around below my knees, I watched as Sangris’s eyes slowly flushed dark amber. He looked away and didn’t speak to me again until we reached the river, although I caught him sneaking glances. When he lifted me up to fly me home, I could feel the heat of his skin against mine. Without a word, he turned into a gargoyle-thing for the first time in weeks. “Why did you do that?” I said.
“Being human is a bit too complicated right
now,” he muttered, then added, “But I think I could be a slug and it still wouldn’t help.”
“You’d look better as a slug, though.”
It was an unthinkable thing to tell someone with a face as clear and keen as his. But he was being gushy, and he was the one who had forced me to wear the skirt in the first place, so I thought he deserved it.
He groaned. “Could I please have permission to kiss your ankles? Just your ankles.”
“No,” I said, my insides leaping with something like fear.
“A knee?”
“No.”
“A foot?”
“No.”
“Oh, come on. You won’t allow me to kiss your feet?”
“No.”
“You’re cold, Nenner.”
“Yeah. You should learn from me,” I said.
I have the suspicion that some girls would’ve been thrilled by Sangris’s attention. But I’m not like that—I never have been—and I’d feel disgusted with myself if I were. I don’t belong in Pfft. I don’t gush and allow boys to . . . That’s as much a part of me as my bones are. Really, I ought to have kept my distance from him after that—withdrawn as soon as he mentioned kissing. And yet I didn’t. I had to grab what freedom I could while it was there, or that would be the end of cool, clean, wet skies waiting untouched and untouchable over another world.
. . .
The nights were magical, the days remained tight. But who cared what happened in real life? Day was only a murky moment of sunlight, soon over; then I could escape through my window again.
Back in the classroom, going through the motions of Heritage preparations with the taste of the chilly sky air still in my mouth, exhausted and giddy, my distraction must have showed. Anju continued to regard me with suspicion, as if she thought I might have caught some rare tropical disease. “You’re smiling!” she kept saying, jumping out of nowhere and surprising me at random moments, when I was doodling in the classroom, or eating my lunch, or talking to the stray cat that was Sangris. “You’re smiling!”
I said, “Well, sorry, but you don’t have to look so disgusted.”
She stared at me in shock.
My other friends, the beautifully plump ones, told me, “You shouldn’t go around smiling like that. It’s as if you’re trying to get attention.”
“You should learn how to hold it in,” one of them said. “A boy back there thought you were smiling at him. You weren’t, were you? You don’t want to be a . . .” Delicately, she didn’t finish the sentence.
“I’m not,” I said, my eyes widening.
They looked at each other. “Hmm,” was all they said, and then they left, in a cloud of heavy perfume.
It should have been a reality check. But it was easy to disregard them, because Sangris was very much on my side.
“‘Plump and curly-haired’?” he spat at me afterward, quoting something I’d once told him. “Fat and frizzy, more like! Who are they to lecture at you?”
I was sitting cross-legged on top of a table at the back of the school, its surface all dust and peeling paint. I’d gone there to hide from my friends. Sangris sat beside me with his tail curled around himself, the light almost blue where it hit his fur. “What do they know?” He paused, his venom momentarily distracted. “Ah . . . you weren’t actually smiling at that boy, were you?”
“No idea,” I said truthfully.
There was a pause at that. After a moment I looked up from my lunchbox to find Sangris studying me. He didn’t seem angry anymore. A new expression was there, incongruous on his cat-face.
No, actually, I realized, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was a cat. It was incongruous on his face because he was Sangris. Sangris the Free person, who could fly, who shrugged as he talked about being constantly lost—this same Sangris was studying my face with eyes as canary yellow as ever, but different in one way: For the first time since I’d known him, he looked tense.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Which I Am Not the Right Way
I snuck out the window with Sangris one night, straight after dinner.
Just quickly, I thought. Fifteen minutes of floating between the stars, then I’d come back around bedtime, show my parents my face to prove I was still in the house, and whisk away again.
But the sky was so wonderfully cold, and the air so open, and Sangris so exuberant, we took longer than I’d planned. Finally he swooped us back down outside my window. It looked square and black at this hour, not at all like a return to normality. More like a tunnel to some underground world.
I’d left the window open, but closed the curtains so that my parents couldn’t see, just in case. I reached out to pull them apart.
Sangris jolted us back. I wasn’t expecting it and I went crashing against his chest. When I looked up to complain he hissed between his teeth.
Then I heard it. Inside the room, just on the other side of the curtains, was the sound of breathing.
It was distinct and slow. There was almost enough time to die of suffocation between each breath. I couldn’t move. I thought that at any moment my father might pull back the curtains and see us, but I still couldn’t move. Then I snapped out of it, and I had just put my mouth to Sangris’s hair, to tell him to fly us away, when there was movement behind the curtain and I heard the familiar footsteps going away. The door inside shut gently.
Immediately Sangris deposited me on the windowsill. He was very dark in the starlight, except for the eyes, which always burned, and the gleam of the whirring wings behind him. “Quick,” he said. “He’ll be looking for you. He probably thinks you’ve left the house.”
“I’ll handle it,” I said, steeling myself. “You’d better not come back tonight.”
Sangris nodded and hesitated as if he wanted to say something more. But he only watched as I slipped through the curtains back into my bedroom. I closed them behind me, shutting off the sight of Sangris and his wings. The room was empty. I changed in a rush, throwing on my nightshirt, ran to the door, and then went sedately out. My father was in the corridor, and when he saw me he turned around and gave me a hard look.
“Where have you been?” he said quietly.
“I was in my room,” I said.
“You weren’t.”
“I was sitting on the windowsill,” I said. “I like the fresh air.”
He was very still for a moment.
“You realize how dangerous that is?” he said.
I hesitated.
“You realize what could have happened?”
“Yes,” I said, discovering that he was worried, “you’re right, I could have fallen—”
“And if you’d fallen, then what?” I could only see his outline in the dark corridor. With a click, he folded and unfolded the delicate metal legs of glasses he held in one hand. “Do you know how much effort I’ve put into raising you? And would you like to waste all that?”
A needle-pain slid into my heart. Okay, so he wasn’t worried.
“Frenenqer,” he said sharply. “You’ve been sheltered in the oasis, you’re lucky not to know much. I’ve traveled, I’ve seen. If you manage to grow up right, you can add a true beauty to a world that desperately needs it . . . Or you can plunge out the window and end with stupidity. Which do you think is better?”
Without waiting for an answer, he strode away. A dim figure down the corridor poked its head out to watch me where I stood. Mom must have overheard the whole thing, but when my father went past her, she only nodded at him and followed.
And I slunk back into my room.
My throat swelled and I swallowed down a lump tasting of sour iron. Staring up at the blank ceiling, I lay flat. Too tired to move. I had a hanging, unfulfilled feeling. Like the sky had a hole in it. Like, all at once, everything was wrong. I don’t know why I’m not used to my father saying these things, why I’d expect anything else.
I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I’d grown too used to taking naps during the day. For a while I distracted
myself by reciting a story in my head—one of the books I’d memorized by reading it too many times. But after a few minutes I lost track. I wished I hadn’t sent Sangris away.
I closed my eyes and passed the time by thinking of him as he was in Spain, his mouth puckered in a self-satisfied smile, like a child’s, eyes gleeful, flying over a gold-tempted field of wheat hiding the breathless blue flowers underneath. And the clouds deepening the sky over Ae, a pink gray like a sheen of icy purple, a color without a name . . . and the carp curling like underwater flames in Thailand. All those things we shared together in our private impossible world. He was my air, and that was, I told myself, enough.
But when I finally fell asleep I dreamed of my old house in Thailand.
. . .
In the morning:
“You look tired,” said my father.
I jerked my head up from about an inch above my cereal bowl. “I’m not really.”
His mouth became one tight line.
“Just didn’t sleep well,” I said.
The line grew tighter.
“Honest,” I said.
I was shy of him this morning. The dark air from all my travels was still around me, I was carrying the memory on my skin. He’d only have to look at me here in the light and he’d see it.
And he was looking. Over the newspaper, observing me mechanically, he saw just about everything except my face. As I raised my spoon from the cereal to my mouth, careful not to let the soy milk drip, his eyes checked that my fingers were placed properly on the handle, that I was sitting with my back straight, that I chewed with my mouth closed. I tried to concentrate, but he was watching me too closely.
“Don’t let the milk drip from the spoon,” he said abruptly.
The Girl With Borrowed Wings Page 12