Fight Like a Girl

by Sheena Kamal

  Blonde Lady Epiphany.

  After a few days, she changed the locks and started acting like a lesbian, according to Columbus. She even cut her hair and everything. I saw her on a date once, at a sushi restaurant near my gym. Her short hair was spiked up with gel and looked as if it could cut you if you came too close. She had her hand on a be-dreaded man’s arm and he was smiling like all his birthdays had come at once. I don’t know what happened with the man. I never saw him again and never mentioned it to Columbus, because she seemed to not be fully committed to the whole lesbian thing. Plus, guys can’t handle truths about their mothers, no matter how woke they seem. I mean, I can barely manage it with my own. And that was before I started reading the soucouyant book.

  After, it was impossible to look her in the eye.

  Soucouyants are like this: During the day, they’re fusty old ladies who somehow smell both like feet and lemon disinfectant. At night, they shed their old-lady skin and turn into balls of fire that go flying about in the sky and slip under people’s doorways and then, I dunno, become vampires that suck the blood right out of you.

  Ridiculous, right?

  Except.

  Except I heard this lady talking in Aunty K’s roti shop once and she swore the soucouyant who was biting her father-in-law was the hot chick from the next village over. Her friend agreed that this was possible, you done know, and they got another round of peanut punch to last them through a discussion of how, in some of these stories, the soucouyants are beautiful young women. They’re fluid like that.

  Young, beautiful, old, hideous…it doesn’t matter.

  The monster is female and she comes for you at night.

  The thing about the soucouyant book is that it gave me nothing but the knowledge that monsters live in our heads. Which I already knew, yeah? I skimmed through the rest of the novel looking for…what? Advice? Clues?

  But it wasn’t what I needed. It scared me because there’s so much about monsters that we don’t know, that we can never understand.

  I would have ignored the book and the roti shop talk, except the funeral happens that same week and everything changes. I see that look Ma shares with Pammy and Aunty K. I remember Ma’s face when she asked why Dad wanted to know about her comings and goings. I remember being in the car the night Dad died, and I start to wonder about Ma.

  present day

  THE MASTER PLAN:

  Get degree in Business Management

  Work at a bank

  Start saving for retirement

  Marry a banker

  Use some retirement savings for a mortgage

  Pay mortgage for the rest of our lives

  Die

  IN THE MEANTIME:

  Don’t talk about the accident

  Work on Muay Thai technique

  Win next fight

  Win fight after that

  Keep my mouth shut

  Win more fights

  Maybe die

  nine

  A week after the funeral I turn in my essay on The Great Gatsby, like everybody else. Mr. Abdi can’t hide his disappointment. His hangdog mouth hangs even further and he looks at me with those big blue eyes that look so out of place in his dark face. I mean, geez. What’s with the guilt fest? It’s just an essay.

  I hand him back the soucouyant book.

  “You didn’t like it?” he asks, trying hard to sound all casual. Failing, because it’s hard to fake casual when you’re almost in tears over an essay. “You could have written about that, how it didn’t resonate.”

  “I didn’t finish it,” I say.

  This, I think, is even worse. If I let my feelings show on my face like Mr. Abdi does, I’d be even more shit in the ring than I already am.

  “I see. I’d hoped it would spark something…well, don’t let this discourage you, Trisha. You write well and I know you enjoy the assigned readings, so I hope you consider pursuing your love for literature in the future. Even as a reader. We need more of those in the world.” He gives me a sad kind of smile and busies himself with the papers on his desk.

  I get the feeling I’m not the first immigrant kid he’s tried to beat over the head with a book on their “culture” and, knowing what little I do know of him, I’m probably not going to be the last. Everybody has dreams, even bizarre ones, like Mr. Abdi’s.

  When I leave, I try not to look back at him or the book that ruined my life and put ideas in my head. Teaching me about the evil that comes from my homeland. I try not to think of Dad. I used to think he was evil on account of him and Ma but now I don’t really know what evil is. Anyway, the book is out of my hands now.

  Sayonara, Advanced English.

  Business Management, here I come.

  But his reaction to my essay bothers me all the way to the gym because Mr. Abdi is one of the decent ones. He actually cares. Once, he’d noticed a bruise on my arm and notified Mrs. Nunez. She obviously didn’t care and was visibly relieved when I explained it happened during training and, yes, I’m a fighter and, yes, my mother knows all about it. But at least he noticed. More than anyone else.

  I forget all about the conversation at sparring because the gym is packed and sweat is pouring off us. Nobody can think of anything but getting a good few rounds in. Kru is in a good mood today, so we’re working on spinning elbows and Superman punches—the flying ones. This is the flashy stuff that you don’t pull out in fights. You only do these if you get hired to do stunts on a movie set or something. Can’t spin my elbow for shit, but I get some nice height on my Superman.

  Soon we’re dizzy and airborne.

  It’s all going to our head. Jason, the guy I beat at the demo, is terrible at Supermans—

  Supermen?

  —but I think he’s having the best time out of us all. I’m even smiling, which I haven’t done since the night Dad died. I’m smiling so much I see other people doing it, too, and it doesn’t go away, this feeling, until I get home.

  My gear is so disgusting that I throw it all in the washing machine as soon as I walk in the door. There, next to the washer, I look at the sliding back door. Right. A couple days after Dad died, Columbus told me it was broken. The door blocks he put there are still in place, though. I think they work just fine to keep anyone from getting in, but we should probably fix it.

  “Ma?” I say, coming up the stairs. “We need a new latch for the back door.”

  “What?” she calls from the kitchen. Her hair is piled high on her head and she’s zoning out at the kitchen table, looking like she’s not even in the same world.

  “The back door. A couple days after Dad died Columbus told me it was broken but I forgot to tell you. Sorry. Columbus put in door blocks but we probably need a new lock.”

  She blinks at me until what I’m saying registers, even though it’s a pretty basic thing. Broken. Back door. New lock. Not complicated.

  But a whole heap of emotions flit across her face. Maybe it was the easy way I brought up Dad’s death. I should have found a different way to put it. “Did you see the door blocks Columbus put in, Ma?”

  “No, Trisha. What a question. If I knew, I would have known the door was broken and asked you to help me fix it,” she says, yawning. “Go to the hardware store tomorrow after school, get a new lock and we’ll put it in.”

  “I wonder how long it’s been like that, though. I haven’t been in the basement since the last time I washed my gear, which was the day before Dad died. And the lock definitely worked then.”

  “Is that so?”

  “So it must have broken sometime between just before he died and when Columbus saw it a couple days later.” “Alright, Nancy Drew, will you please stop with this? I just asked you to get a new lock, okay?”

  I flinch. I mean, all I’m trying to do is make a point. “Okay. Can I have some money for the lock?”

 
She passes over her purse and doesn’t even seem to notice how much I’m taking. So I pocket a little extra, because I’m strapped. And I’m gonna pay it back eventually. It’s not like she doesn’t know where I live.

  She goes to bed with a glass of water and two extra-strength painkillers and I do my homework in the living room.

  I go downstairs to do some laundry. And that brings me back to what happened with the lock on our back door. If I didn’t break it, and Ma sure seemed to be oblivious, who did? It’s not like it broke itself.

  Did someone try to break in here or something?

  I can’t think about this now. Ma doesn’t want me to and none of it makes sense, anyway.

  After homework and laundry, I watch playback of my first fight with the Brazilian girl from Buffalo. I’m trying to learn from my mistakes but all I can see is how much damage she inflicts. She’s a lighter shade of brown than me and moves so fast when she’s of a mind to do it that she’s just a beige streak of motion. But I’m stronger. You could see it from the jump. I could have stopped her at any point. She’s fast, but I’m letting her catch me. In the video I look tired, but not as tired as I feel these days.

  Why am I so run down all the time now?

  I bet I just need to be faster. Yeah, that’s it exactly.

  “Kru,” I say, the next day. “I need some speed training.” I came to the gym right after school, almost bursting with this insight. I couldn’t sit still in economics and narrowly avoided being handed detention for trying to get away early, but important things like speed training can’t wait.

  He looks at me for a moment and then takes me into his back office where we set up a schedule. Amanda sticks her head in to say something and he motions her inside. “I’m starting you girls on speed training, all of you.”

  I can’t keep the disappointment off my face. Amanda can’t stop grinning, the bitch. Soon Noor will get in on this and I’ll have to share him with someone else.

  But Noor is the least of my problems because two days later Imelda Isaacs shows up and things get from bad to worse.

  * * *

  Some people might not like to hear this, but it’s a common myth in Scarborough, the east end of Toronto, where I live, that white girls are easier than every other kind of girl around—and there are lots of different kinds of girls, because it’s Scarborough and you can’t throw a stone without hitting someone from a country you’ve never even heard of before. Even though it’s not true (I’ve personally seen plenty of skanks of both the male and female variety in every colour of the rainbow), the myth exists. I mean, I thought everyone knew about it, but apparently nobody ever told Imelda Isaacs, the new girl at the gym. Imelda’s a ginger so pale that her eyelashes are invisible. All you see of her eyes are wide open blue. She has a kind of Noor effect because everyone who spars with her has to stop themselves from drowning in them.

  Everyone around her is spun, even me, and I can’t hate her even though I want to because she’s so much better than me.

  “How did you get so good?” I ask her.

  “Oh, I used to do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, so I’m used to really intense training,” she says, and she’s smiling for no reason at all because that’s the kind of person she is and we’re all finding it impossible to hate on her for it.

  Now everyone wants some BJJ classes at the gym and everyone is asking Imelda for tips on how to improve their ground game. Kru is a staunch Muay Thai guy, but even he sees a financial opportunity when one slaps him with a speed bag. So we’re doing BJJ now, recreationally, and some idiot tells Imelda the whole white chicks are easier thing and she knocks his ass straight into a wall of mirrors, which is understandable but unfortunate. The mirror cracks, sending the whole thing crashing down. Shattering into a thousand little pieces. There’s glass everywhere and the whole gym is a lawsuit waiting to happen…I mean, if this wasn’t Kru’s gym. Nobody would ever sue Kru. Wouldn’t even dare.

  The gym is closed for a couple days while the mats are being replaced. I think Kru is mad at us, maybe the comment even got back to him, so he’s punishing everyone for the idiot (who’d also said some unflattering things about the Punjabi contingent of middle-schoolers that come to train Saturday afternoons). Flags from all the countries represented at the gym hang from the ceiling and if there’s anything that bothers Kru it’s the kind of talk that makes anyone feel unwelcome. He doesn’t stand for it. We leave personal shit at the door and only the dumbest of fucks mess with that. But now someone did and I’ve got nowhere to go after school.

  Racism, damn. It affects everyone’s training schedules, I mean, lives.

  Ma has forgotten all about the back door, but I can’t open my wallet without looking at all the extra money in there. After getting a new lock from the hardware store, Columbus and I watch videos online on how to install locks. We smoke some weed while we mess around with the door. Finally, we get the new lock in.

  Columbus wants to smoke more, but I’m looking at my fingernails and imagining them growing longer, sharp enough to do as much damage as my razor-like teeth. There’s a cut on my thigh, probably from the glass at the gym, and I can’t stop staring at it.

  I tell Columbus to go home.

  “You have no chill,” he says, rolling his eyes. But I’m plenty chill right now. That night I dream about nails that lengthen into claws, pointed and sharp, and wake up with my fingers on the cut on my thigh. There’s no more sleep for me tonight, so I go downstairs and find Ma at the kitchen table.

  “How was work?” I ask her.

  “Same thing every day,” she says. She’s still in her nurse’s uniform. “Did you eat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still hungry? Want me to make you something?”

  “No, Ma.”

  “You can speak in full sentences, you know.” But there’s a tired smile on her face when she says this. “I’m going to bed.”

  She hugs me when she gets up, so quick that I’m unprepared. Before I can fight her off, the hug is over and she presses a kiss to my temple. It goes straight to the hurt there, that I hadn’t even remembered until this moment. She never does stuff like this and I think she must be upset over Dad so I tell myself I should watch her more. I’m not gonna ask about him—we don’t talk about him now any more than we used to—but I’m gonna pay more attention.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m home after school these days, watching for Ma, so I don’t miss the next big imposition in my life. Maybe even bigger than Imelda Isaacs and this BJJ nonsense, because who shows up next is the man who will bust more than just a wall of glass. It will be my life. In a thousand sharp little pieces.

  ten

  I come home after training and voila. A whole new problem in my life in the form of a stranger inside the house with Ma. Without any kind of explanation, nothing. He’s just there, eating a mushroom pizza from the freezer that I’ve been saving for one of my carb-overloading days. Ma isn’t eating. She looks a bit tense, to be honest, as she introduces him to me. His name is Ravi. I’ve always hated that name. I’ve never met a good Ravi in my life, or even a useful one.

  “Did you know my dad?” I ask Ravi. I mean, I’m so confused. Ma doesn’t let people into our house easily. Sometimes I was surprised Dad got past the front door.

  The look that passes between them is charged. Ravi reaches for Ma’s hand and I’m so shocked that I can’t even speak.

  “No,” he says.

  I sense Ma is furious at me, for some reason, so I shut the hell up and lock myself into my bedroom for the rest of the night. They go upstairs together later, and I can’t even believe it.

  I hope she’s washed Dad off her sheets.

  * * *

  I remember something from a while back.

  Two months of hard training for a fight in Buffalo left me exhausted and near-starving. But cutting weight is no joke. I fight a
t 115 but I’m naturally 125. I heard my opponent came in at 130 when she’s off weight, so I was at a disadvantage anyway, but what the hell. I had three pounds to go and I’d been running in saran wrap every day. I was nothing but muscle, sinew and bones—and a lot of hair, which I pulled ruthlessly into a braid every day, or waxed off, if it was on the wrong part of my body, if you know what I mean. (You know what I mean, right?) But I couldn’t stop cutting because Amanda and Noor had already made weight with a week left and were looking fierce as fuck. They were keeping up with the guys on chin-ups, too, an ability I lose when I get too skinny. It’s the light-headedness that unbalances me.

  So I went downstairs after midnight for something quick to eat. I’d heard Ma in the shower earlier so I knew she was home from the hospital.

  She should have been asleep in bed, but she wasn’t. I ate peanut butter with a spoon, straight from the jar, and caught a glimpse of two shadows in the parking lot right outside of our corner unit, the last unit on our block. The shadows parted and a man walked to a car at the far end of the lot. That would have been the end of the story right there if he didn’t pause before getting in. Paused right under the streetlight so that he could get one last look at her. I could feel his smile even from a distance. I crept back up the stairs and was in bed by the time Ma came back into the house and creaked open my door to check that I was asleep. I wasn’t but my back was to her so she couldn’t possibly have known that.

  My back turned, eyes open, mouth gummy with peanut butter and confusion. Dad wasn’t up from Trinidad. Who was that man? And what was Ma doing with him so late at night?

  * * *

  I want to see if there’s any mushroom pizza left, but I don’t want to run into Ma or Ravi. So I just do homework until there’s no more homework to do, then I lie in my bed and think about the soucouyant book. It’s not like I can think about Gatsby, because what I wrote in my essay was true: it was kind of boring and about people who make no sense to me. The soucouyant book, though, it makes a lot of sense. Mr. Abdi was on to something when he gave it to me. Maybe he knew I would find some uncomfortable stuff in there, but it’s not like I can actually admit that.