Fifteen Lanes

by S. J. Laidlaw

  Copyright © 2016 by S.J. Laidlaw

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Laidlaw, S. J., author

  Fifteen lanes / S.J. Laidlaw.

  ISBN 978-1-101-91780-0 (bound).–ISBN 978-1-101-91782-4 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.A394F54 2016 jC813′.6 C2015-901054-3

  C2015-901055-1

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Tundra Books of Northern New York, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931503

  Edited by Sue Tate

  Tundra Books,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  How can I dedicate a book to girls who may never

  have the freedom, education or leisure to read it?

  How can I not?

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Noor

  2. Grace

  3. Noor

  4. Grace

  5. Noor

  6. Grace

  7. Noor

  8. Grace

  9. Noor

  10. Grace

  11. Noor

  12. Grace

  13. Noor

  14. Grace

  15. Noor

  16. Grace

  17. Noor

  18. Grace

  19. Noor

  20. Grace

  21. Grace

  22. Noor

  23. Grace

  24. Grace

  25. Noor

  26. Noor

  27. Grace

  28. Noor

  29. Grace

  30. Noor

  31. Grace

  32. Noor

  33. Noor

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Noor

  What I remember …

  I was asleep on the floor under Ma’s bed when I was awakened by the creaking of rusty springs straining under the weight of a heaving mattress. I feared it would break and crush me so I slithered out. This was not allowed. I was never to come out from under the bed until Ma said. I didn’t know why I had to stay quiet, or why I couldn’t sleep in the bed with her at night, like I sometimes did on hot afternoons. My heart pounded as I emerged.

  The terror of being caught in the darkened room eclipsed my earlier fear. Too late, I realized the rashness of my disobedience. Without looking, I knew Ma was not alone. The deep grunting of her visitor punctuated her own soft mewling. I scuttled on all fours toward the curtain that separated our small section of the room from the other three occupants. I was not accustomed to seeing it closed, though it didn’t surprise me. Its soft rustle always accompanied the heavy footsteps of her guests. I moved quickly, brushing against clothes that hung from a low peg on the wall next to the bed. They hadn’t been there when I fell asleep. I recognized Ma’s crimson skirt with the gold-sequined border. I resisted the urge to touch it, though the diaphanous fabric held endless fascination. I had no desire to touch the man’s clothes. Their smell of sweat and earth was trapped in the fetid air around the bed.

  Only when I reached the curtain did it occur to me to worry about who might be with Deepa-Auntie on the other side. I went cold when I heard an unfamiliar male voice. If it had only been Deepa-Auntie I wouldn’t have hesitated. She was kind, not like the other two aunties who shared our room. Deepa-Auntie gave me sweets and never scolded me. She called me her beautiful baby, though my too-dark skin proved her a liar. Deepa-Auntie couldn’t have babies. That part of her was broken. I liked to pretend she was my real mother. I even called her Ma, but only when my own was not around.

  I reached for the edge of the curtain, listening hard to the voices. Deepa-Auntie was using her sex-me voice. That’s what Ma called it when Deepa-Auntie shouted to the men who passed by under our window. I don’t know why Deepa-Auntie’s shouting made Ma angry. She got angrier still when the men came inside and went behind Deepa-Auntie’s curtain. Ma stood in the street, where Deepa-Auntie was not allowed to go, and cajoled the men to come inside. They often did, but when they saw Deepa-Auntie it was her they wanted.

  The man with Deepa-Auntie sounded angry. He called her bad names and said he would bring police to arrest her if she didn’t let him do what he wanted. Her voice quavered. No one at Binti-Ma’am’s house talked to the cops. Not ever. Police were wicked, even more wicked than Binti-Ma’am. They arrested mummies and put little girls in cages. Real cages, not like the barred window boxes the aunties sat in at Binti-Ma’am’s, which overlooked the street but were open to the bedroom. Police cages had bars on all sides.

  Deepa-Auntie said she’d never let anyone put me in a cage. I asked if she meant a police cage or Binti-Ma’am’s cage. Ma said it made no difference because Deepa-Auntie couldn’t even keep herself out of a cage. Besides, she said, Deepa-Auntie, with her pale-pale skin and slanted eyes, was not “our kind.” I wasn’t sure what our kind was, but when Deepa-Auntie got a beating I was the only one who could make her smile again. Nothing I did made Ma smile, so I thought Deepa-Auntie may not have been Ma’s kind but maybe she was mine.

  I held my breath and slid silently under the curtain. I did it so carefully I imagined the curtain barely stirred, but when I glanced up, Deepa-Auntie was looking right at me. Her eyes went wide and her lips pressed together. I think she wanted to say something but only her eyes told me to go back.

  Deepa-Auntie wasn’t wearing any clothes; neither was the man who loomed over her. I felt embarrassed. I’d seen Deepa-Auntie without her clothes many times but not like this, never like this.

  The man clutched a fistful of her hair and tried to kiss her. Deepa-Auntie’s face twisted away. The man yanked her hair so hard it stretched her neck back and I thought it might snap. Deepa-Auntie’s eyes rolled back in her head. She let out a sound like the whoosh of a sugarcane press. I wanted to shout at the man to let her go. Kissing wasn’t even allowed. Everyone knew that. But I kept silent. I would be in far bigger trouble than him if I was caught roaming at night.

  I crawled toward Deepa-Auntie’s bed. To get past them and reach the door, I had to slip under the bed and out the other side. I pretended I was invisible, a cockroach, just part of the landscape. If the man raised his head he would see me. I worried he could hear my thudding heart.

  As I got closer I saw Deepa-Auntie’s cheeks were wet. I wasn’t sure if it was sweat or tears. I couldn’t think of anything I could do to make her smile. I mouthed the word chootia—stupid—it was the worst word I knew. I added a few threats. If words could pierce flesh, that man would have run from the room screaming.

  I reached her bed and dropped flat on my stomach. The cold cement chilled my body through the thin fabric of my dress but its worn smoothness made it easy to slide. I was almost completely under when the mattress juddered and there was a loud exclamation of surprise. A huge hand wrapped round my ankle. Without thinking, I shrieked.

  I was jerked backwards and my head cracked on the metal bed frame. The man let go of my ankle only to grab my arm and swing me up to his eye level. I dangled helplessly in his clutch and whimpered in fear as much as in pain. (The next day, when Ma took me to
the hospital, we were told that I should have had stitches right away for the gash on my head. By then it was too late. To this day I have a bald patch under my hair.)

  Ma appeared on Deepa-Auntie’s side of the curtain and slapped me hard across the face. This shocked me into silence. I still wanted to cry so I bit down on my lip to hold it in. A man stepped out behind Ma and shouted at her. He towered over her with his fist raised. His arm was as sinewy as a buzzard’s neck. Ma would have got the better of him if he’d tried to hit her. He wanted her to give him his money back, which showed how little he knew. Only Binti-Ma’am had money. Ma couldn’t give him what she didn’t have. He shoved Ma back toward her bed. She got tangled in the curtain that was still half closed.

  Ma looked angry rather than frightened as she scrabbled behind her to push the curtain aside. I didn’t want her to leave me but I knew enough not to call her back. Deepa-Auntie was sobbing now, much louder than I was before. I wanted her to stop because this would only make things worse.

  Suddenly the lights came on. Seconds later, Binti-Ma’am and her son Pran pushed through the curtain nearest the door. The man holding me let go and I dropped to the floor. I tried to scoot back under the bed but I was grabbed again, this time by Pran. He smacked me, once on each cheek, even though I was no longer making noise and my head was already bleeding profusely. The last thing I saw, as he dragged me out the door, was Binti-Ma’am pummeling Deepa-Auntie with a mop handle. Ma was nowhere in sight.

  Pran carried me down the hall. I realized immediately where he was taking me. I struggled and pleaded hysterically. As he threw open the door to the kitchen cupboard, I heard the rats scuttling behind the wall. They’d wait for him to lock me in before they crawled through the holes to attack me. I begged for mercy one last time. He laughed.

  It was years of this before I finally understood it was what he wanted. He fed on fear like a mosquito feasts on blood. The more I fought, the more he enjoyed it. Eventually, I learned to submit quickly, but on that night, when I was five years old, I still had hope.

  Grace

  I feel I ought to give this day a dramatic name, like in a murder mystery. I could call it Before the Apocalypse or The Beginning. More than anything I’d like to give it a soundtrack. The shark’s music from Jaws would capture it nicely, except that would imply that I had a sense of foreboding, and honestly I hadn’t a clue.

  I knew I wasn’t in for a great school year. We’d been back in class only three weeks but that had been long enough to get a pretty good idea of what I was in for. I’d been trying desperately to ingratiate myself with a group of girls who’d made it very clear I wasn’t welcome. Madison, the queen bee, questioned my motives. According to her, I was a snob who, in the three years we’d all been together at Mumbai International School, had never shown the slightest interest in being friends until I had no other options. She wasn’t completely wrong.

  I was never under the illusion that I was too good for Madison, or anyone else for that matter, but it was true that for the first time in my fifteen years I was out of options. The summer break had seen not only the departure of my über-popular brother Kyle to university but the move of my best and only friend, Tina, back to her home in Singapore.

  Tina and I had been inseparable since our very first day of school, when we’d met at orientation three years earlier. Ours was by far the longest friendship I’d ever had. To be perfectly honest, it was the only friendship I’d ever had. Losing Tina had been a painful and unexpected blow. I’d had time to get used to the idea that Kyle would be leaving, but Tina and I had always talked of graduating together. In fact, we’d made a lot more plans than that. This year, for example, we were going to start dating. I wasn’t entirely sure how we were going to find boys to date, since none had ever shown the slightest interest, but that didn’t faze Tina. She said the only thing we had to worry about was finding boys who got along well with each other since we weren’t going to sacrifice our own time together just because we had boyfriends. We also had to find boys who were serious about school. Both of us were in the International Baccalaureate program, which was mega-challenging, and Tina said we only wanted boys who would not hinder our studies. She was mainly talking about me when she said that because Tina could pull straight As standing on her head. Tina was determined I was going to get good enough grades that I could apply to the same universities as her. We were going to apply only to the top schools. Like I said, we made a lot of plans.

  The one thing we never planned on was the possibility of her moving away. It never occurred to us, though I don’t know why. Before Mumbai, my family had moved every couple of years. I’d gone to four different schools on three continents by the time I was twelve. I was so used to the idea that relationships, like schools and homes, were at best temporary that when we first arrived in Mumbai and Dad announced we wouldn’t move again until I graduated I thought he was joking. And I was not amused.

  To my mind, spending five years in one place was unbelievably risky. What if I didn’t like the school? What if no one liked me? The latter was a distinct possibility. At my previous schools I’d always hung on the fringes of groups, never really fitting in. No one ever picked on me; it was more like I was invisible, which at the time I thought was almost as bad as being bullied. I knew it was my own fault I had no friends, especially since Kyle slid into every new school like he’d been there his whole life, proving it could be done. I was just too shy.

  The one thing that kept me from giving up completely was the chance that things would be better at the next school, that I’d hit the right combination of kids, or I’d figure out the secret to fitting in. Moving gave me hope. Dad’s decision to stay in Mumbai meant the end of hope. Perhaps that’s what gave me the unprecedented courage to make the first move with Tina.

  I liked the look of her immediately long black hair tied in a messy knot on top of her head and cherry-red, horn-rimmed glasses. She looked dorky and bold at the same time. I didn’t approach her immediately, though. I waited through the tour of the ground floor (gym, pool and playing field), the second floor (offices, cafeteria and library), the third floor (humanities classrooms), the fourth floor (foreign languages and arts classrooms) and the fifth floor (science labs). Only when we got to the top floor, Fine Arts and Theatre, did I finally work up the nerve.

  By this time I’d had more than ninety minutes to prepare my opening line. I was convinced it was the perfect combination of witty, yet sincere. I sidled over to her and waited until I caught her eye.

  “Rockin’ goggles.”

  That’s what I said. You can see why I wasn’t more popular, right?

  She burst out laughing.

  I couldn’t believe it. It was like a solar eclipse or a meteor shower. Not only had she understood my humor but she’d laughed out loud. No one had ever done that before, unless you counted my parents’ dutiful fake laughs or my brother’s bemused groans. But this was different. Tina laughed for real.

  So Madison was right when she said I wasn’t interested in being her friend until I had no other options. There was even a grain of truth to her accusation that I thought I was superior. I did feel elevated. But I never thought I was better, just luckier. I didn’t care that Tina and I weren’t part of any particular group, or that some kids probably considered us losers. I never even thought about it. I had a friend, a best friend. I never wanted another.

  Uppermost in my mind, as I dragged myself to the cafeteria on a Friday, the day after saying good-bye to my brother at the airport, was how much I wished Dad would get transferred again. I wanted to leave this school, these girls and this country. I wanted another do-over. I could see Madison and her posse at the usual table. There wasn’t a chair for me, though there was room for one. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. I suspected they got rid of empty chairs before my arrival, to discourage me. It worked. I was discouraged. I almost walked right past them to the library, but then I remembered Kyle.

  My brother loves t
o give advice. It’s partly an inherited trait, being my mom’s favorite pastime as well, and partly his conviction that, with guidance, I, too, could become popular. It’s irritating and flattering at the same time. The night before, as we drove to the airport, he’d given me a final pep talk. Though I was mired in my own misery, one thing he said stuck.

  “You don’t try hard enough, Gracie. You assume people aren’t going to like you. You’ve got to take more risks, put yourself out there.”

  I didn’t state the obvious—that it’s a lot easier to put yourself out there when you’re smart, good-looking and athletic, like Kyle—because I knew he was partly right. My heart pounded with anxiety even when I was called upon in class to answer a question I knew the answer to. I hated being the center of attention, at any time, for any reason. Even at home I was happy to let Kyle monopolize our parents. He cast a long shadow, and I was content to hide in it.

  With Kyle in mind, I dragged a chair from a neighboring table, dropped my schoolbag on the floor next to it and sat down. For the past week, Todd Baker, a boy in the year ahead of us, had been the subject of lunchtime conversation. Today was no exception. I did my best to look interested.

  “He pretty much asked me out,” said Madison. “I’m just not sure I want to go.”

  “What did he say—exactly?” asked Kelsey. You could tell she was trying not to sound skeptical. While Madison was undeniably the queen of our little group, her popularity quotient was nowhere near Todd’s. Not to mention the fact that he was a senior. I also thought he had a girlfriend.

  “Isn’t he going out with Anoosha Kapur?” I asked, immediately wishing I’d kept quiet. Despite Kyle’s advice, it was rarely a good idea to join in their conversations.

  “Are you saying I’m trying to steal someone else’s boyfriend?” Madison glared at me.

  “No, I—”

  “Or maybe you think I’m not in the same league as a girl like Anoosha?”

  I hesitated. I’d never thought about it till she brought it up. Anoosha was really gorgeous, and nice as well. She and my brother had dated, only for a short time, but even after they broke up she always said hi to me in the hallways.