“The problem,” Suraya said quietly, “is that I don’t want to go.”
But it is a good opportunity for you, is it not? Bigger school. Better teachers. Pink turned over so that the cold tile pressed against his back, and sighed with pleasure. Is that not what you want?
“I’m happy where I am.” Suraya’s dark hair spread around her on the floor like a halo, and her face wore a frown that had appeared the day before, when her mama had made the big announcement.
“Since you’ve done so well in your exams, I think it’s best that you go to school in the big town,” she had said, smoothing the folds of her worn baju kurung and avoiding Suraya’s eyes, which had grown wide with shock, then dawning horror. “The village school will not be challenging enough for you. I should know, I teach there. And challenges are the best way to grow and learn.”
Suraya had said nothing for a long time, appearing to be concentrating hard on moving the rice and fish curry on her plate from one side to the other. When she did speak, her voice was low and quiet. “When do I start?”
“On the first day of school, with everyone else. In two weeks.” Her mother got up and busied herself with putting away leftover curry into an airtight plastic container and wiping down the kitchen counters with a damp rag.
“And how will I get there?”
“You’ll take the bus in the morning—there’s a school bus that will pick you up from the stop just down the road.”
“By myself?” Pink heard the uncertain wobble in her voice, and he knew Mama did too, because she clicked her tongue impatiently as she reached up to massage her sore neck. “It’s only forty minutes away. That’s nothing. You’re twelve now, after all, thirteen this year. You’re almost a woman, old enough to take care of yourself.”
That was the end of the conversation, and Suraya had not stopped frowning since.
“Only forty minutes,” Suraya muttered darkly now, splayed on the kitchen floor. “It might as well be light years away. I’ll be more of an outcast there than I ever was here.”
Maybe the new school might be an opportunity for new friends, Pink suggested. On the ceiling, they were watching two cicaks warily circle each other in a complicated dance, their little lizard eyes darting from each other to a hapless bug crawling in the space between them.
“Considering my track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.” The smaller cicak darted forward, and before the other realized it, he’d made off with his spoils to a dark corner, leaving the bigger one gaping in his wake.
“I thought for sure the bigger one would get it,” Suraya said.
Fortune favors the bold.
There was a silence. “All right,” Suraya said. “All right. I get it.” She turned her head to look at him. “And you’ll be there with me, right? You’ll stay with me the whole time?”
A warm glow spread through his chest, and he smiled to himself. Their relationship had shifted the day of the mosquito incident all those years ago; he’d felt her grow wary of him, felt her choose her steps carefully around him, as though he was a bomb that might go off any minute. He’d worried that it would never go back to the way it was. Now it seemed that he was, happily, completely wrong. She still needed him after all. I am bound to you, he said softly. Until the end.
She nodded and shut her eyes.
In the shadows, the cicaks chirped.
Six
Ghost
THE BUS RIDE was long, and Suraya spent most of it sleeping, unused to having to be up before the sun in order to be on a bus by 6:20 a.m. She wasn’t the only one, either. In almost every seat, Pink watched as one by one, freshly scrubbed students nodded off, lulled by the bus’s gentle rumble. When he tired of staring at their lolling heads or glazed eyes, he looked out of the streaky windowpane instead, as the landscape changed from rolling green to brick buildings, and the world changed from the darkness of early morning to the light of day.
The school was a sprawling old building with graceful arches for windows and an overwhelming air of gentle decay. Pink knew from the fancy brochure Suraya had read aloud to him that this was a premier all-girls school, known for its stellar reputation in academics and athletics, its list of former students a constellation of familiar names and well-known stars. But as far as he could tell, the “premier” label did nothing to hide the peeling paint on the heavy wooden classroom doors; the flickering light bulb in the corridor; the bat poop that clung stubbornly to the red tile floors; the bats themselves, which often took the opportunity to swoop down from the dark recesses of the high ceilings to make the girls squeal; the wooden chairs and tables that wobbled tipsily on uneven legs.
The hall was filled with excited chatter and hordes of girls who seemed to greet each other exclusively in shrieks of joy. The noise set Pink’s teeth on edge, but Suraya didn’t seem to notice; she’d fished a battered copy of A Wrinkle in Time out of her backpack and had settled contentedly in a corner to read, her legs crossed, her back against the wall, the skirt of her turquoise blue pinafore nicely arranged to make sure she wasn’t flashing her “coffee shop,” as the boys back at her old school had called it.
When Suraya was younger, her mother had sometimes brought home back issues of an ostensibly educational children’s magazine the school subscribed to, and one of Suraya’s favorite sections had been the Spot the Difference page, her brow furrowed as she concentrated furiously on marking all the ways the two given pictures didn’t match: a missing tree branch here, an extra flower petal there. Now Pink played the same game with the scene laid out before him: the deafening squeals of the other girls versus Suraya’s silence; the bright, brand-new, freshly ironed uniforms versus the faded softness of Suraya’s pinafore and the white shirt she wore under it. Both were hand-me-downs from a neighbor whose daughter had outgrown them; they were fuzzy from use and draped over her thin frame as though it were a hanger instead of a body. He wasn’t quite sure why, but the differences made his chest tight and his stomach hollow.
Pink curled into a ball in a particularly cozy nook in the depth of Suraya’s shirt pocket and shut his eyes. The school day was long; he might as well take the time to nap.
He was just about to drift off to sleep when he felt Suraya’s body tense, like a fist ready to punch.
Suraya?
He poked his head a tiny way out of her shirt pocket to see what was going on. Suraya was still looking down, seemingly focused on her book, and he was about to shrug and slide back into his nook when he realized that her hands trembled slightly, and that they hadn’t turned a single page.
Slowly, he looked around her until he spotted them: a cluster of girls, shooting sly looks over at the corner where Suraya sat and whispering to each other.
Whispering about her.
Inside Pink’s belly, anger began to spark, warm and bright.
They nudged each other and giggled. “Look at her shoes,” one stage-whispered, loudly enough for Suraya and Pink to hear, and Suraya shuffled her feet awkwardly, trying to hide as much of them as she could under her too-long skirt. Her school shoes were so old that they were fraying at the seams; the Velcro was fuzzy and barely held together, and there was a hole right above the little toe on her left foot. She’d tried to hide the graying canvas beneath layers and layers of the milky chalk her mother had bought, slathering on more and more with the sponge applicator until the white liquid dripped down her arm and splashed onto the grass. As a result, her shoes were so white they were almost blinding, but also stiff as wood, and as she walked, the chalk cracked, leaving bits of dust in her wake.