The Girl With Borrowed Wings

For the inspiration, Anju Suresh.

And for the Humane Society of Louisiana. Nobody seemed to mind when I flew over to volunteer and instead found myself inexplicably glued to my laptop for two weeks, just typing and living in their backyard. If they hadn’t been so understanding about it, this book might have been much harder to write.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

THE BEGINNING

In Which I Am Made

CHAPTER ONE

In Which I Introduce a Greenless World

CHAPTER TWO

In Which My Father Casts a Spell

CHAPTER THREE

In Which I Transform Into an Eighty-Year-Old Saint

CHAPTER FOUR

In Which I Cross a Land of Mirages

CHAPTER FIVE

In Which Sangris Becomes a Poet

CHAPTER SIX

In Which My Father Tells Me About Pfft

CHAPTER SEVEN

In Which Sangris Makes a Proposal

CHAPTER EIGHT

In Which We Search for Sunflowers

CHAPTER NINE

In Which a Bird Is Wadded Up

CHAPTER TEN

In Which I Jump Out the Window

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In Which I Climb a Ladder Out of the Desert

CHAPTER TWELVE

In Which I Walk Through My Childhood

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In Which I Am Not the Right Way

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In Which Frogs Are Captured

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In Which I Have My Feet Kissed

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In Which Sangris Admits Defeat

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In Which There Are Spiders

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In Which I Explain a Redless World

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In Which Anju Brews Chaos and Destruction

CHAPTER TWENTY

In Which There Is a Dark Green Room

THE BEGINNING

In Which I Am Made

I am unlike most other people because I began, not in the body of my mother, but in the brain of my father. He invented me, you see. He sat down one day and dreamed me up. I started out as no more than a figment of his imagination, and when he married my mother he set about making me real. I guess it’s always true to say that a child is a creation of her parents, but I don’t know anyone else who constructed their daughter as deliberately as my father did.

If you ask me, I’m more of an imagined person than a real one. I can feel him steering me through my spine. It’s awfully hard, knowing that I’m just a construct of someone else’s mind. The only part of me that wasn’t placed there by my father—the only part of me that is
mine
—is the part that doesn’t exist: the wings.

It’s a fantasy I’ve told myself for years. I like to pretend that I should have been born with a pair of wings. But—and here’s where reality seeps even into my private daydreams—something stopped their growth. Instead, ever since I was very young, no more than a tender little thing with a pumpkin for a head, I have had an
itch
right between my shoulder blades. It’s because of that itch that I pace around my room at night; it’s as though I have a finger in my back, pushing me forward. And I know who the finger belongs to. It’s the finger of my father that digs into my spine directly between the two wings that never were.

CHAPTER ONE

In Which I Introduce a Greenless World

I’m called Frenenqer Paje. I know it’s an odd name. It doesn’t suit me. It doesn’t suit anyone. It’s like one of those frilly, too-exotic dresses that people buy for their unwilling daughters. My father’s the one who dressed me up in it. He insisted on calling me Frenenqer because, in some language or other, it comes from a word meaning “restraint.” My name will tell you all you need to know about my father.

I live in an oasis, deep inside a desert, deep inside the Middle East. If you’ve heard of it, my current home has a proper name, Al Ayren; you could find us on a map if you tried. To the people who live here, though, it’s just “the oasis.”

To reach me, you’d have to zoom over miles and miles of crusted sand, a flat blank plain where even the palm trees shrivel up and die. Pale sky, white land; like somewhere past the end of the world. In this nothingness, the only plants are the ghostly shrubs, as bare as clouds of gray scribbles. In one branch you might spot half a dead cat curled up, killed by boys with too much free time, or a slaughtered goat, gently dripping blood, hanging from another like a surprising fruit.

Beyond that is a softer, deeper kind of danger—the true desert. The sand becomes properly hellish, dreamily red, in long soothing curves. When the wind hits the peak of the dunes, they rumble, grinding under the pressure, and sand steams up along their tips like thin hissing smoke-clouds. The whole world seems on fire.

But then at last, the desert miraculously gives way to reveal, on the horizon, a patch of almost green.

Forget the lush greenness of northern countries. Here, everything has to be bone-hard and dry in order to survive. The colors are no exception. What passes for
green
is actually khaki, the color of bathroom tiles.

This is the oasis: a cluster of palm trees and stone buildings trying to escape the heat. The land is naturally dry and dead, but at least there’s shade here, and some water. They call it a city, of sorts. My father the architect likes to think so. There’s even a private school, owned by Sheikhs, run by expatriates, placed alongside one of the main roads. It’s the only school for miles and miles around, so every child in the oasis is enrolled there. Including me.

I stood outside the dirty white school building, hair newly cropped to keep it from sticking to my neck and forehead, cheeks uncomfortably flushed in the heat, glasses slipping down my nose. I wore the unreasonable school uniform of Key Stage Four, black shirt and black pants and formal shoes. By this point, of course, they were stinging hot and gray with dust. No color lasts for long here, except for the sky.

I flopped down onto the sand by the side of the road and didn’t move, watching with dull eyes as cars wavered past through shimmers of evaporation. It had been a bad day. Absently, I pulled an important-looking school newsletter out of my bag and tore it into strips.

Another girl straggled out of the school. She was also trussed up with a uniform and a name. Because she was younger than me, only in Key Stage Three, her shirt was blue. I envied her. Lighter colors were better in this heat. And her name—Reem, I think—seemed more comfortable than mine too. She didn’t bow under the weight of it.

“Hey,” she said, choosing to lean against the school wall rather than sprawl in the sand beside me.

I nodded with an effort.

“Frenenqer, right?” she said. “Where are you from?” She tugged at her sweaty collar, screwing up her face.

“Nowhere, really.” But she still looked at me expectantly, so I counted the countries off on my fingers, choosing almost at random. “Thailand and Italy and Japan and New Zealand and some other places.”

She nodded. “I’m Syrian and Mexican.”

“Ah.”

It was the equivalent of a handshake. In my school, what-country-are-you-from was our most common way of introducing ourselves. It was right up there with what’s-your-name and the old favorite, how-long-have-you-been-here. Like prisoners, we kept track of the days. This was because very few people ever
lived
in the oasis. Most of us were children of the expats who came, worked for a couple of years, saved money, and then, contracts complete, moved on to somewhere else. Perpetual foreigners, all of us. My family landed in the desert the same way. Except my father found steady work. And so unlike most, we stay.

Reem was one of the few who had been in the school for over seven years. I felt sorry for her. I myself had been here for six years, much longer than I would have liked, but my father’s bosses loved him. Soon I would have people pitying me the same way I pitied Reem.

“I was here late for a club,” Reem offered.

She said this with pride. It was unusual for students to be involved in extracurricular activities. I just nodded. Too hot.

“I was helping to plan for Heritage. I even wrote that article in the newsletter, if you saw it . . .” She trailed off, noticing the strips of paper around my feet. Furtively, I tried to cover them with sand.

“Yeah, I read it,” I said encouragingly.

I hadn’t been able to force myself past the title. I’d seen the word
Heritage,
and that had been enough.

Reem cleared her throat, tugging at her collar again. “Well, you know how it is,” she said. “We’re running out of rooms. And half the students are the only ones from their country. This year, we’ll have to lump people together, and they won’t like that.”

I didn’t look at her. Heritage again. People wouldn’t stop talking about stupid Heritage—and why not? They hadn’t been trying a year to forget.

It was different for me. I heard the word around every corner. It ambushed me whenever my guard was down. And each time, without fail, a door in my mind thudded open, and I saw yellow eyes and burning mouths and spiders.

My father pulled up then.

His car, pure white with black windows gleaming, eased to a halt in the deserted parking lot. I got to my feet, brushed my clothes off, and reached up to adjust my wings before remembering that they weren’t there. Hoisting my heavy bag onto one shoulder, I managed to flash Reem a smile. She grimaced back. And then I escaped from the pounding weight of the heat falling down on me from the sky—I could feel it building up over my shoulders—and slid into the air-conditioned relief of the car.

I won’t describe my father. I don’t feel like introducing him yet. So leave the contents of the car unseen through its dark-tinted windows. All you need to know is that he ferried me straight home, ushering me into a house made of old white stone, flat-roofed, with huge opaque windows to keep the sunlight out, and a door that had once been blue but was now bleached white and peeling.

And that was my life in the oasis. I only ever went three places: my house, the school, and the inside of the car. It made no difference that I was seventeen. Here, youth seemed unnatural. My universe was contained in a series of boxes. And all the while I lived my sheltered little life in the artificial air of those three boxes, I could feel my father’s finger pointing into my spine, and the wings I should have had beating hard at my back.

The feeling had become worse in the past year. Caged by the heat that closed in over the buildings. Eyes lowered, avoiding the pain of looking up into the too-intense sky.

Other people seemed to bear the claustrophobia more easily than I did. My parents thought I was strange. Who could I explain myself to? I had a few friends, if you could call them that. For instance, I might have told Anju. But we always met in supervised settings. In the classroom, under the eyes of teachers; at appointed, carefully organized times in my house, with my parents nearby.

I did fight, at first. Six years ago, only a few months after arriving in the oasis, I tried going for walks when it was dusk and the heat had sunk enough to be merely stifling. I had a very narrow window of time before it became too dark. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes. I wasn’t allowed to walk far, of course. Only to the end of the block. And anyway, there was nowhere else to go. So all I did was hurry along the street that ran in front of my house, pacing back and forth, up and down, until my ten minutes were up.

The first time I did it, I was elated. Even being stuck on that one street was better than nothing. There was a goat with its throat split open like a second red mouth, hanging in the acacia tree outside my next-door neighbor’s house, and a pool of nearly black blood, with a stern, sick smell, was seeping slowly through the dirt and out onto the pavement where I might step in it. But at least the sky was wide open above my head. I spread my arms in glee, at the joy of being outside, alone, practically free.

Then I turned around and saw my mother standing over my shoulder.

She’d been there the whole time. My father had sent her to follow me. It gave me the shock of my life to see her. She’d kept impossibly close, walking when I walked, stopping when I stopped. Just watching. Mouth brittle. Hovering.

The next time, I fought—I still fought then—until my father said, “Fine, go alone. And whatever happens, blame yourself.” So I left the house for my ten minutes of limited freedom. As I walked, I kept checking over my shoulder to make sure my mom wasn’t sneaking after me. She wasn’t.

Instead, there were cars.

Expensive-looking cars would follow at my heels, one by one. The windows would unroll, and men would lean out and shout at me in broken English. It was the other expats, men who had left their wives and children behind in their home countries, men who hadn’t seen a girl up close in years. Sometimes I ran, and they laughed. Or cheap cars with no windows at all would stop, and the men inside would try to chat with me, asking where I had bought my clothes, what my number was, where I lived. Then I’d have to act deaf. Or boys on bicycles would stare an inch from my face. I’d act blind. Nothing worked.

I stopped going on walks.

“Frenenqer,” my father said in secret triumph. “The sun is setting. Why don’t you go walk outside the way you wanted to?” He looked at me steadily, and the breath was squeezed out of me. “Now you can’t complain that I don’t give you freedom. This is your choice.”

I didn’t tell him about the cars. I let him think I had merely lost interest, because otherwise I would have had to admit he was right. It wasn’t safe for an almost-teenage girl to walk alone, even if it was right outside her house, even if it was up and down the same street, even if it was only for ten minutes each day.

For months after my “choice,” I had a recurring nightmare. I would sit up in bed and see that my bedroom curtains were open, and that a man had climbed up outside in the darkness, a flashlight in one hand, the beam of light trained on me, and he was peering in through the glass, with a grin, watching me sleep.

Then I would panic.

I would feel the full weight of the heat above me, pressing in on my little bedroom, and I’d be too aware of the fact that, for miles and miles around, no matter where I turned, I was inside a circle of desert, and there was no place to escape. If I ran, I would find myself in an expanse of emptiness and sand and hell-heat.

So I got up each midnight and paced instead, around and around my room, rubbing nervously at my hands. It didn’t help. It only made me more restless. I missed the color green. I missed fresh air. I missed grass that would grow naturally, without having to be planned and artificially sustained. I missed running. The itch flamed deeper into my back. Sometimes I climbed out the window, closing the curtains behind me, and just sat on the ledge, several stories above the ground, balancing dangerously and sucking in the air that almost isn’t too oppressively hot in the middle of the night. I wanted to burst away.

The nightmare doesn’t come anymore. But the claustrophobia is stronger than ever.

Because, a year ago, things changed. Just for a while, but they changed. I had a space of freedom.

I’ve pretended to have wings ever since I was a little girl, and when I sat on my windowsill in the oasis at night and took huge hungry gulps of air, I clutched hold of that daydream harder than ever. But last year, something happened that made it so real, I now have to constantly remind myself—whenever I’m alone, or leaning out the window—I can’t fly off anymore, because he’s gone.

He. Does there have to be a he? It seems weak and unoriginal, doesn’t it, for stories told by girls to always have a he? Well, not in my life, nor in the lives of my friends. It’s a very unusual thing for us. For my friends at least, their first relationship begins on their wedding night. It’s a culture of arranged marriages—now, look, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and keep in mind that an arranged marriage is not the same as a forced marriage. Most of my friends are looking forward to the day when they will be shown a picture of their future husband.

But I won’t have an arranged marriage, at least not officially. We all know that my father won’t
arrange
anything for me, he’ll simply . . . guide me, pulling the strings in the background, his finger pressed into my back, and everything will magically turn out the way he wants it to. So you see, for there to be a
he
in my story is a very unusual thing indeed, but then, the circumstances were unusual too, and the boy himself, if you can call him that, even more so.

When he came, things changed. There was no longer the shadow of my father in the background—or, at least, for a time, it was less noticeable. There was no longer the maddening proximity of walls on all four sides. Instead there were black skies, and sharp, stinging stars, and a window creaking open.