“And did I ask you to hurt those girls?”
Not in so many words.
“I didn’t, Pink.”
He sighed. Fine. You did not ask.
“So you disobeyed me. Never again. Do you hear me?”
In the distance, he could hear the steady murmur of chattering girls as they clustered together, waiting for the bell to ring. I hear you, he said sullenly. But why? Why not give them the same pain they give you? Measure for measure. An eye for an eye.
“I don’t want anybody’s eye.”
You know what I mean.
Suraya was silent for a while as she thought about this. Then she sighed. “Because then, that makes me no better than them. That makes me a bully too.”
The bell rang and she quickly slid him back into her pocket. Just before she began running toward her class, she glanced down at him and smiled—a weak and watery smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Thanks,” she whispered.
Pink felt pleasantly warm all over. You’re welcome.
“But don’t ever do that again.”
Seven
Girl
THE DAYS PASSED, as they always did. Suraya survived them as best she could, working hard at her classes, avoiding K—whose name, as it turned out, was actually Kamelia—and the rest of her gang of bullies when she could, tolerating their torments when she had to.
Thankfully, their paths didn’t cross often—Kamelia was fourteen and in form two, a whole year ahead—but they were grouped into the same sports house. Twice a week, after classes, Suraya had to change into her track bottoms and bright red house T-shirt with a gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach and the miserable knowledge that Kamelia and her goons would find new and creative ways to make her life difficult when they could. Often, she would get home and catalogue the fresh bruises blooming all over her thin body, the result of spiteful pinches, well-timed pushes, and once, a hard kick to the shin when nobody was looking.
Pink watched grimly through it all. I could hurt them, you know, he told her. I could shatter each of their bones into tiny pieces. Make them sorry they ever even looked at you. Make them pay. It’s what the witch would have done.
It appalled her that his dark streak reared its ugly head so easily these days. But she just shook her head. “No, Pink,” she said. “For one thing, I am not my grandmother. And for another . . . well, they’ll get tired of it eventually. And besides, better they do it to me than some other girl who might not be able to handle it.”
She saw him peer more closely at her face and tried her best to rearrange her drooping mouth into a smile. But you cannot handle it, actually, he said.
Suraya felt her mouth pinch tight together. Pink had a way of saying things that made her feel the exact opposite of how he wanted her to feel when he said them, kind of the way her mother telling her not to sing so loudly around the house made her want to scream every line to every song she knew until the rafters shook. Pink was the extra parent she’d never asked for. She could tell he wanted her to break down, agree with him, admit that he was right, and all she wanted to do right now was cross her arms, dig in her heels, and prove him wrong. “Silly Pink. Of course I can.”
She knew that he knew she was lying.
This is when the odd things began to happen.
They weren’t happening to her, which is why at first, Suraya didn’t really notice them, in the way that you don’t really notice a single ant meandering lazily along the contours of your foot. But when one ant becomes two, and then seven, and then seventeen, and then a hundred, the pricking of their tiny feet and the stinging bites of their tiny teeth become harder and harder to ignore.
This is the way it was. It began with nothing, really: one day, there was a stone in one of Kamelia’s pristine white canvas shoes that made her limp and curse, and which wouldn’t dislodge itself no matter how many times she shook the offending shoe. On another day, her geography workbook was drenched and soaking, even though she’d fished it out of a perfectly dry backpack. On yet another, the marker exploded in her hand as she worked out a math problem on the whiteboard, covering her from head to toe in black ink.
On and on and on it went, and at first, it was easy enough to brush off as a mere run of terrible luck. Only, the bad things kept on happening, and somehow they only ever happened after Suraya had been the victim of one of Kamelia’s cruel jokes, and soon this link became impossible to ignore.
Coincidences, Suraya thought desperately to herself, trying hard to ignore the memory of Pink’s flicking antennae, the wicked grin on his little grasshopper face. But the day they played volleyball during PE and Kamelia somehow managed to get hit by the ball nine times in a row—once as a hard smack to the shoulder, which made her squeal so loudly it echoed through the courtyard—even Suraya had to admit that coincidences could only explain away so much. Kamelia’s gang didn’t know what was going on, but they did know that somehow, whenever they did something to Suraya, something happened to them in turn. And they didn’t like it.
I should talk to Pink, Suraya told herself firmly. Ask him what’s going on. Tell him to stop, if he’s the one doing all of this. But she never did. Sometimes she told herself that it was because she was certain he would stop by himself; sometimes she told herself it was because it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. What she never told herself was the truth, which is that she didn’t want to start a fight with her only friend in the entire world.
She didn’t want to go back to being alone.
Waiting for the bus home one afternoon, a shadow fell across the whirling dragon Suraya was sketching in her notebook. She tried her best to ignore it, tried to focus on the scales she was painstakingly and precisely inking on its great tail, but her trembling hands made the pen hard to control.
“What have you got there, Kampung Girl?”
Around her, the other girls waiting for the bus, sensing trouble, quickly walked away.
“It’s nothing,” Suraya said, quickly snapping her book shut and fumbling with the zipper of her backpack, trying her best to stuff it inside before they could get it.
Too late. Divya had snatched it right out of her hands and was riffling through the pages with her long fingers, nails shaped to delicate points. Divya was Kamelia’s best friend, and she took particular delight in digging those nails hard into Suraya’s arm when teachers weren’t looking, so hard that they left deep red half-moons in her flesh for days afterward, so hard that Suraya often had to bite her lip to keep from yelping.
Divya was grinning now, her eyebrows arched, her eyes wide in exaggerated mock-surprise. “Look at this, K,” she said, tossing the book to her friend. “She thinks she’s some kind of artist.”
Kamelia flipped through the little book, frowning. “Wow, Kampung Girl. Looks like you spent a lot of time on these. You must really like to draw, huh?”
Suraya stayed mute, her eyes never leaving the book in Kamelia’s hands. She had learned early on not to trust the older girl’s seemingly pleasant tone or inane conversation. Her words were like a still river; crocodiles floated just beneath the surface, ready to catch you with their sharp, sharp teeth.
“It’d be a shame if . . . whoops.” A sick ripping sound tore through the afternoon air, and Suraya stifled a gasp of horror. “Oh dear. However did I manage to do that?”