The Girl With Borrowed Wings (12 page)

“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.

It didn’t make sense. I’d been sure that the milk wasn’t dripping.

“Don’t let the milk drip,”
he said.

Losing my head, I put the spoon down, back into the bowl. At least it definitely wouldn’t drip that way.

But he wasn’t satisfied. “Show me again.”

This time even I noticed the drop of milk that plopped from the wet underside of the spoon.

I couldn’t do it right this morning.

My father began working on his computer with his forehead ominously creased, convinced that I was being this way on purpose. I left the rest of my cereal untouched and threw it away in the kitchen.

A loud, disapproving
tut
from the corner made me jump. I hadn’t realized Mom was there. She looked at me, and then at the empty bowl, shaking her head once.

“Frenenqer,” came my father’s voice, peevishly. I was supposed to be waiting at the door five minutes early. I returned to him.

We got in the car to go to school.

“You’re not wearing socks,” he said.

I hated wearing socks. They were part of the dress code, which the school administration had copied straight from England without considering that socks were worse than useless in the oasis—they only made you hotter.

“Nobody wears socks,” I said.

He switched the car off and in the abrupt silence, there was something huge and dangerous. I stayed seated for an instant. My father tugged out the keys and threw them onto my lap, where they fell with a chill clink. The message was clear. I wasn’t going to school unless I repented.

I hurried upstairs and put on some socks.

During the drive to school, my chest suddenly heaved, and all I wanted was to break the stiffness between us. This cold weight wasn’t worth a quibble over socks.

“Sorry,” I said, looking over.

“Words are cheap. There’s something not right about you lately.” Without taking his eyes off the road, he pulled a neatly folded piece of paper out of one pocket and tossed it to me. Not the way Sangris tossed things, but accurately, like a missile.

“This morning I printed out a list of rules for your benefit. You’ll study it, memorize it.”

So that was what he’d been doing on the computer. I looked down at the paper in my hands. “Frenenqer’s rules.” The list began with “1. You will smile and act pleasant when spoken to,” and ended with “10. You will not make a fool of yourself in public anymore”—a reference to the bird incident. There were other commands too, basic things like “You will not be selfish” and “You will not act out for attention.” As I read, my cheeks burned as though they were being stabbed by a million tiny pins. I said, “Oh.”

“Was that a complaint?”

I shook my head.

“You’re going to be better,” he said to the windshield, not like a promise, but like a resolve without alternative.

My pulse thudded. The thing about being treated as a child by my father is that I always believe him, and it makes me a worse person instead of a better one. When he calls me selfish, I always think,
All right then, I’m selfish,
and I have no choice but to proceed with my selfishness. That’s what I hate most. He turns me into whatever he thinks I am.

I studied the list with my face still flushed. I memorized it. I absorbed each hated line. I needed to. When my father quizzed me later, I couldn’t fail.

The bad feeling would have gone away after a few chapters of a book, but I was stranded in the real world. Staring out the window when I was done, I caught sight of my own reflection. I turned so my father wouldn’t see my face. If he spotted my expression, he’d probably despair of me ever becoming his ideal daughter.

Neither of us said good-bye. I don’t think he wanted me to speak to him anyway.

I went through the straggling crowds into school, holding my bag tightly in one hand, and the list of rules in the other. Anju was the only person already in my homeroom, reading the book I’d left on her desk so many weeks ago.

“I wish I were over eighteen,” I said to her.

“That’s nice,” she replied.

When attendance was done, I got sent to the empty classroom I was meant to be transforming into the Thai room for Heritage. But Heritage was the farthest thing from my mind. I kept looking at my father’s ten rules. I wished for a pool of deep water, an enormous bath, which I could jump into and come out completely clean, my heart washed as wonderfully blank as the desert after rains.

Sangris had made a habit of sneaking in to meet me at school sometimes, especially when I was supposed to be working on Heritage, since it was basically a free period. So I wasn’t taken off guard when the door whammed open—
he
had never been taught not to slam it—and a weirdly light-eyed and messily good-looking student came bouncing in.

“Notice what I’m wearing?” he said, popping his collar. “I’m going to start making a collection of these school uniforms, just to see how many I can get away with. They suit me, eh?” He slowed down in front of me. “Why aren’t you yelling yet? Go on, lecture me about the immorality of theft.”

I handed him the sheet of paper. He read it.

“What
is
this?” he said after a moment. “‘You will bear yourself with composure’? ‘No more ugly faces; smile when you are looked at’? What’s that supposed to mean? No, let me guess. Your father wrote this?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s stupid,” he said, and held it out to me.

I shook my head.

“Oh. You’re actually upset about this thing?” After a second of studying me, he read it more carefully, raising his eyebrows when he got to the end. “Well, in that case—” He began to tear it.

I lunged forward. “What’re you
doing
?” I snatched it back. “Are you crazy? Do you realize how much trouble you’d get me into?”

“It’s just a sheet of paper, Nenner.” He leaned back against one of the abandoned desks, watching as I folded the list and shoved it safely into my bag. “I don’t see why you care anyway. We’re at school, no one else is around, you can turn that paper into confetti. It’ll be good for you, I promise.”

I burst into tears so violently that Sangris stood up, alarmed.

“Nenner!”

The next second I’d swallowed the pressure down again. The tears were gone. But the storm behind them was still shaking. Sangris was
right,
I ought to be able to laugh at the list my father had made.

Sangris moved closer and lifted a finger as if he was going to touch my face, hesitated an inch away from the skin, and then, awkwardly, lowered his hand again. I’d slapped him the last time he’d tried; he’d learned his lesson. And it was a pity. “What did I say?” he was asking, not in his usual voice, but a worried one. “I didn’t mean to, I was only joking—”

I wished he’d stop being nice. It was making it harder not to cry. I sealed myself up. There were three images in my head, and my thoughts kept flashing between them. The glimmer of light coming through the window slots of my old house in Chiang Mai, that was one. And a cracked khaki sink, the cool, clean floor shining, me on my knees in the bathroom. The third was the look on my own face when I read my father’s list in the car.

But it wasn’t true. I couldn’t possibly be so stupid—I had more control over myself than that. I might still have managed to get my mind tidy and composed again, if Sangris hadn’t chosen that moment to murmur: