The Girl With Borrowed Wings (7 page)

“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.

“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.”

“We never do. A lot of countries will be outside.”

“I don’t envy them,” I said, squinting across the parking lot in search of my father’s car. The rows of flashing car windows stabbed pain right through my eyes.

I spotted the hard rectangular white car in a sea of other hard rectangular white cars.

“There’s my dad,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Wait. Can I call you tonight?” Anju said. We always had to do it by appointment. “Remember, I want to come over to your house this week? To study for the math test. My parents need to talk to your parents.”

I sighed. “Right. Did they give you their permission yet?”

“They’re thinking about it. How about your parents?”

“They’re thinking too.” I shrugged to indicate my helplessness. “Call tonight.”

We said good-bye and then I had to thread my way through the cars, heat steaming off them, to get to my father. Cautiously I pulled my bag off my back, steadied my face, and entered.

It was freezing.

When I shut the door behind me, the sounds of the parking lot stopped, and the calm drone of the air-conditioning was the only noise. The filtered air made the car smell of petrified sand and sour metal.

My father looked at me from behind a pair of sunglasses.

I pretended to be very absorbed in my task of putting my bag into the back. I didn’t know why he was studying me like that. I’d made sure to move calmly, normally.
There’s no way he could guess,
I promised myself, but my stomach felt jittery. Finally I said, “Anju wants to call again tonight. To discuss travel arrangements.”

“What for?” He turned his eyes back to the traffic and we squeezed out onto the main road.

“She’d like to come over to our house this Saturday.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, just as I’d known he would. He always said that.

We continued the ride in silence. My fingers ached to slide a book out of my bag. But my father might get annoyed. And there were only ten minutes left before we’d reach the house. Surely I could wait ten minutes.

But I remembered hills and purple heather. And the heart-lifting flutter of speed as I flew, out of school, straight over the roads . . .

Just wait ten minutes.

I lasted five before I found myself twisting around to grab my bag. As soon as the reassuringly solid pages of a new book were between my fingers, a wonderful feeling of relief flooded me. I had already read this one twice, and I hadn’t liked it much either time. But it would suffice. I rubbed the cover lovingly and kept my eyes away from my father.

Even so, behind the black painted squares of his sunglasses, I could sense that his gaze slid to my hands.

Turning my body a little to conceal what I was doing, I opened to the front page.

“That’s a romance, isn’t it,” he said.

I stopped at the first sentence. No, it wasn’t a romance, but the main character did have a boyfriend, and how was I supposed to read the book now, in front of my father, while he was imagining the worst? Silence and coldness seeped from his seat.

I tried to get through the first page anyway. But it was like force-feeding myself something that made me choke.

I shoved the book back into my bag.

“It wasn’t a romance,” I tried.

“And yet your face is flushed.”

I’m sure it went even darker after that. The book
wasn’t
dangerous, it wasn’t even particularly interesting; it was about a girl who learned how to knit! But now I felt as though I was hiding porn in my schoolbag.

He took a long look at me and didn’t like what he saw. “You
were
reading something bad.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said, aiming for reconciliation. In my voice I heard the empty hopeful smile of a child, and stopped, sick at myself. It didn’t matter anyway, because my father wasn’t listening.

“My daughter! You’re supposed to be better than that,” he said, with real distress. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but I know it was real, because of his voice. It was as bothered as it got whenever there was a spoon out of place on the dining table, or Mom spoke too loudly on the phone, or he caught me opening my window. “Do you realize how people will point fingers? They’ll
laugh
. You’re at the ugly age when people make fools of themselves, and fall into all sorts of degrading mistakes—”

The memory of running wildly through the grass with Sangris shot through my mind, but it didn’t seem liberating anymore. I tried not to look guilty.

“If you’re all I raised you to be,” my father said, focusing on the road, “you’ll keep yourself above rebuke.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, to end things.

We fell back into silence, but it wasn’t a blank silence anymore. It was thick and prickly and I felt as though we were both wondering what the other was thinking.

I’d been so obedient for so long . . . but my
no
in the souk had flashed through the cracks, and now he was imagining a deep and concealed rebelliousness burning beneath my surface. I wondered if he’d always be suspicious of me now.

I had a quiet shriveling sensation inside. Heart curling up like the ferns in India, which close their leaves when touched.

When he spoke again, he sounded stiff.

“You should feel lucky you have a father who shows such concern for your welfare. Not all fathers do, and where do their daughters end up?” He made a dismissive noise with his mouth.
“Pfft
.
”

That was where they ended up. In
Pfft
.

I only nodded.

Wordlessly, I pressed my nose to the window and watched the painful blue sky roll past. I didn’t think of Sangris. I allowed my thoughts to approach him, in a roundabout way, and then at the last moment, just before I saw his alert yellow eyes, I jerked myself away.

If
Pfft
were a place, I thought, I probably deserved to be there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In Which Sangris Makes a Proposal

The car stopped and I got out. I didn’t own any house keys, so I had to wait until my father opened the front door and allowed me to escape from the oppressive heat, into a long, narrow hallway with cool white tiles on the floor. Mom was nowhere in sight. Both my father and I stooped to take off our shoes near the door. Then he disappeared to his computer and I hurried to my bedroom down the hall.

My room was painted yellow—no, not the same shade as Sangris’s eyes—his were the bright yellow of those Danger signs you sometimes see on the side of the road—this yellow was more subdued, more feminine. Creamy yellow. But the paint in the corners of the room was beginning to peel in the dryness of the air.

There was my bed in a corner, surrounded by its fortress of books. I lay down and skimmed furtively until I finished the book I had started in the car. It was short, and just as dull as I had remembered.

“Frenenqer,” my father said from down the hall.

He had a certain way of calling me, just saying my name without raising his voice, as though he was sure I would hear.

It was like he’d
sensed
me finishing the book.

I scuttled over.

He was holding the phone in one hand, switching it off with an efficient click, and frowning at me. “I’ve decided to deny Anju’s request,” he said. Like a bank.

I nodded. Half turned to leave. And—

“Dad,” I said on impulse.

“What?”

Something really odd happened then. A thought hijacked my mind:
I’ll tell him everything
. Not that I’d flown with a boy (I was too scared to admit that) but that Free people existed, and that there was a place called Ae, and that I could give my father the sky. If he seemed interested. In the shock of something magical like that, he couldn’t continue like this, he’d have to talk to me. I’d give up my secret for that.

“The cat—” I began.

“The cat!” he said, eyes narrowing. “You’re still thinking of the cat? Is this more of your behavior from the souk?”

I shook my head.

His mouth was one tight line, restraining his fury at my imagined rebellion. “Frenenqer, I’m not going to waste my time listening to the complaints of a sulky teenager.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

My breaths were shallow. I went back to my bedroom.

It was only five in the afternoon. I closed the door, lay on my bed, and stared at the ceiling. His words stayed in my head, and I felt compressed, kind of queasy. Like I was floating on top of a flood. I waited half an hour until the feeling was gone.

I could have read. I could have painted. If I were desperate, I could even have done my homework, although I usually had enough time to finish it in the few minutes before class began. I could have whistled. I could have sat on the floor and studied the wall. I could have paced. There were many things I could have done, but instead I fell asleep. For about an hour I dreamed of confused things. Halfway through, my mom burst into the room, but when I raised a bleary head off my pillow she said never mind, I could sleep. The next minute my head was full of blackness again and I thought I was racing through the sky. Until a tapping at the window, from behind the heavy folds of curtain, woke me up.

My contact lenses had slid around in my sleep. I rubbed at my eyes hard until I could see again. I was lying in bed, wearing the dusty school uniform I had worn all day, with the lights on and the curtains drawn closed and Sangris tapping behind them.

I got up and slid the curtains open. Sangris was sitting on the other side, cat-shaped. It wasn’t even sunset yet; he was early.

I didn’t let him in. “Can you wait a while?” I said in a low voice through the glass.

He gave me a look. “Why?”

“I’ve been asleep, and, see, I’m still wearing my school uniform. I need to change.”

“You’re fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“No. Just fifteen min—”

My door banged open. I dragged the curtains closed and spun around.

My mother again. She regarded me closely a moment. “Dinner,” she said.

“Okay.”

She clicked the door shut, and I exhaled. There was silence.

Then from behind the curtains Sangris went on complaining, “Fifteen minutes? I bet if you said ‘five minutes’ you’d really mean twenty. I don’t want to think how much time you’re going to take if you say
fifteen
.”

“Shh,” I whispered, and left him outside on the window ledge. I heard him begin to paw against the glass as I left the room, but I was focused on slowing my heart rate.

I emerged to sit at the formal white dining table with my father, and didn’t once ask what he would do if he checked my room tonight and I wasn’t there. The little blue pulses in my wrists were still flickering quick. In the kitchen, Mom avoided us, only her silence seeping out.

“You must have had time to consider your attitude about the cat. You look ashamed,” said my father, studying my face, and seeing his imaginary version of me. “Good.”

I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I’d ever thought of handing my secret over to him.

We chewed for the next half hour without talking. Finished, I took care to look sleepy and say good night. I went out and shut the door gently behind me.

I grabbed some clothes from a spare closet in the hall and made my way to the bathroom. Lightly, for fear of drawing attention from my parents, I slipped inside. The bathroom had khaki-colored walls and a cracked, discolored sink, but I liked it; sometimes I even brought in a book to read on top of the washing machine. In here, at least I could lock the door.

By the time I returned, Sangris had managed to ease the window open. I walked into my room to find a wavy-haired boy lounging around, wearing the stolen school uniform with his shirt left untucked. I caught him leafing through the papers on my desk.

“Hey!” I whispered. “No!” I hurried over and snatched them from him. He looked at me in surprise. “You can’t go through my stuff like that while I’m not here. I’m serious. This is just schoolwork, but it could have been something private—”

“Maybe it isn’t so bad to wait,” he said, softly enough that he might have been speaking to himself.

I opened my mouth to argue, then paused and realized I had no idea what he was talking about. I put the papers aside and looked up at him.

“You’re wearing normal clothes,” he said.

I glanced down at myself. “Yeah. I always wear normal clothes. Back to the issue of privacy—”

“No, you don’t. You wear ugly loose cloth that could cover an elephant.”

I couldn’t take offense at that, because it was true. “These are clothes I wear around the house. I wouldn’t walk on the streets in them, but, I mean, the only difference is that the sleeves are shorter.”

He stared.

The clothes honestly weren’t that different. The pants were exactly the same as normal. And the shirt was made of light, floaty material, not for fashion’s sake, but because it was the best design for the heat. That was why my mother had bought it for me. But I usually only wore it indoors, since the sleeves were more like straps.

“I only cover up in front of strangers or people who come from that sort of culture,” I said in confusion. “I thought you’d be used to seeing shoulders.”

“Not
yours
.”

My skin began to burn under his fixed gaze. I hate being stared at—I’ve hated it ever since that old nightmare of the man and his flashlight. My nervousness must have showed.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “I only . . . Um. Honey?”

In shock I said, “Don’t call me—”

“Not
you,
” he said. “Sticky gold stuff. Honey. Am I right?”

“And are you being more incoherent than usual?” I was staring back now.

“No, really,” he insisted. “Warm honey, or is it honeysuckle, and . . . musk?”

“Oh. Milk and honey. That’s the scent of the soap I use. It’s the soap I’ve
always
used,” I added, in case he thought that this was something different too.

“Milk,” he said. He was still hovering near, and still staring. “That’s it. You smell like milk and honey. And warmth.”

“How can someone smell like warmth?” I said sensibly.

“Maybe that part’s you, not the soap.”

“How should I know?” There isn’t much to say about soap, but Sangris seemed to be suddenly obsessed with it. Slanted eyes taking in my wet hair, my throat, the shape of my shoulders. Only his pupils weren’t so slanted anymore—they had widened, almost swallowing up the curve of color. Hold lit candles behind amber and you might get the same dark-bright yellow as his irises. I edged back. “Could you stop that, please?”

“Stop what?” he said, not listening.

“I don’t like it.”

That got through. He stepped back slowly. “I—sorry.”

“You’re kind of strange, aren’t you?”

He gave a little laugh, pulling his eyes away awkwardly. “Well, I did spend the last six months as a cat.”

I wasn’t afraid anymore. It was sharp and sweet to see Sangris discomposed for once. He looked along the floor, at the desk, at the walls, everywhere but at me. It was rather like—having power.
That
was something I had never tasted before.

“You look very nice,” he said finally, lamely.

“I thought you were supposed to be eloquent.”

“Well,” he answered, beginning to recover, “as a matter of fact, that hollow at the base of your throat does put me in mind of petals, and I’d probably use the words
tender
and
vulnerable
and
kissable
a couple of times too, but I thought I wasn’t allowed to do that.”

“You’re not.”

He had recuperated enough to grin at me. Sangris, I was learning, was nothing if not resilient. “Sorry if I freaked you out.”

“Again.”

“It’s the last time, I promise,” he said. He wandered back to the window, where he’d left the curtains hanging wide open. “Can we still go?”

My choice had already been made: The moment we’d lifted off, leaving school behind, it was decided. He could have jumped on me now and it wouldn’t have stopped me from wanting to go. But I pretended to think about it. “Where do you have planned?”

“We could go back to Ae. Or any world you want. Or—I was thinking—maybe I could show you some of the other places I used to live.” He looked at me tentatively. “You already saw Ae, and that’s where I grew up. I could show you the place I ran away to after that. And the place after—and the place after—all the places that mean the most to me.” He stopped. “Why are you smiling?”

“Places . . . not people?” I said.

He made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, well,
people . . .
”

I had to laugh. Whenever I thought of my childhood, I didn’t miss people, not even friends—it was always places.

Sangris nodded, fiddling with the curtain. “It could be like a project, each night. Retracing my steps. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while, anyway. I planned it while I was stuck in that cage in the Animal Souk.”

I paused. I understood what he was offering me. The enormity of it stunned me a bit. Then I said, “That’s not really fair.”

From the anxious look that crossed his face, I could tell that I’d guessed correctly. This project meant much more than he had admitted. It was his way of offering me—what? He was handing his childhood memories over to me like a gift. I knew I had him off guard. “Why not?”

“You have to give me a chance to retrace
my
steps too. It can’t be all about you,” I said, feeling the same lightheaded rush that had come earlier at school, when I’d let him take me to Ae. “Besides the oasis, I’ve lived in Italy, India, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand, Costa Rica, and Fiji. And for shorter times in some other places as well, of course. I’m from a long line of country-less people. My father grew up all over the place, like me, so we moved around a lot when I was younger, before he found steady work as an architect here. I’d like to see my old houses again . . .”

Sangris had been grinning wider and wider with each word, and, when I finished, he asked, “You’d do that for me?”

“It’s not for you,” I said defensively. “You egomaniac. I want to see them too, you know.”

From his reaction, I may as well have been shouting “Yes!” He burst into laughter and reached out for me. “Nenner, may I please pick you up and twirl you around?”

“No.” I couldn’t trust him after that whole milk-and-honey episode.

“Could I at least kiss your hand?”

“No.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll shake it then,” he said, doing so. “Nenner, you’re absolutely right. Tonight you show me somewhere from your past. Where were you born?”

“Actually, I began before I was born . . .” I said. “My father first had the idea of a Frenenqer Paje in Spain.”

“We should go there, then,” Sangris said, refusing to relinquish my hand. “We don’t want to miss any details.”

“But I’m not sure where exactly he was. Somewhere along the Camino de Santiago.”