The gym is closed for a couple days while the mats are being replaced. I think Kru is mad at us, maybe the comment even got back to him, so he’s punishing everyone for the idiot (who’d also said some unflattering things about the Punjabi contingent of middle-schoolers that come to train Saturday afternoons). Flags from all the countries represented at the gym hang from the ceiling and if there’s anything that bothers Kru it’s the kind of talk that makes anyone feel unwelcome. He doesn’t stand for it. We leave personal shit at the door and only the dumbest of fucks mess with that. But now someone did and I’ve got nowhere to go after school.
Racism, damn. It affects everyone’s training schedules, I mean, lives.
Ma has forgotten all about the back door, but I can’t open my wallet without looking at all the extra money in there. After getting a new lock from the hardware store, Columbus and I watch videos online on how to install locks. We smoke some weed while we mess around with the door. Finally, we get the new lock in.
Columbus wants to smoke more, but I’m looking at my fingernails and imagining them growing longer, sharp enough to do as much damage as my razor-like teeth. There’s a cut on my thigh, probably from the glass at the gym, and I can’t stop staring at it.
I tell Columbus to go home.
“You have no chill,” he says, rolling his eyes. But I’m plenty chill right now. That night I dream about nails that lengthen into claws, pointed and sharp, and wake up with my fingers on the cut on my thigh. There’s no more sleep for me tonight, so I go downstairs and find Ma at the kitchen table.
“How was work?” I ask her.
“Same thing every day,” she says. She’s still in her nurse’s uniform. “Did you eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Still hungry? Want me to make you something?”
“No, Ma.”
“You can speak in full sentences, you know.” But there’s a tired smile on her face when she says this. “I’m going to bed.”
She hugs me when she gets up, so quick that I’m unprepared. Before I can fight her off, the hug is over and she presses a kiss to my temple. It goes straight to the hurt there, that I hadn’t even remembered until this moment. She never does stuff like this and I think she must be upset over Dad so I tell myself I should watch her more. I’m not gonna ask about him—we don’t talk about him now any more than we used to—but I’m gonna pay more attention.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m home after school these days, watching for Ma, so I don’t miss the next big imposition in my life. Maybe even bigger than Imelda Isaacs and this BJJ nonsense, because who shows up next is the man who will bust more than just a wall of glass. It will be my life. In a thousand sharp little pieces.
ten
I come home after training and voila. A whole new problem in my life in the form of a stranger inside the house with Ma. Without any kind of explanation, nothing. He’s just there, eating a mushroom pizza from the freezer that I’ve been saving for one of my carb-overloading days. Ma isn’t eating. She looks a bit tense, to be honest, as she introduces him to me. His name is Ravi. I’ve always hated that name. I’ve never met a good Ravi in my life, or even a useful one.
“Did you know my dad?” I ask Ravi. I mean, I’m so confused. Ma doesn’t let people into our house easily. Sometimes I was surprised Dad got past the front door.
The look that passes between them is charged. Ravi reaches for Ma’s hand and I’m so shocked that I can’t even speak.
“No,” he says.
I sense Ma is furious at me, for some reason, so I shut the hell up and lock myself into my bedroom for the rest of the night. They go upstairs together later, and I can’t even believe it.
I hope she’s washed Dad off her sheets.
* * *
I remember something from a while back.
Two months of hard training for a fight in Buffalo left me exhausted and near-starving. But cutting weight is no joke. I fight at 115 but I’m naturally 125. I heard my opponent came in at 130 when she’s off weight, so I was at a disadvantage anyway, but what the hell. I had three pounds to go and I’d been running in saran wrap every day. I was nothing but muscle, sinew and bones—and a lot of hair, which I pulled ruthlessly into a braid every day, or waxed off, if it was on the wrong part of my body, if you know what I mean. (You know what I mean, right?) But I couldn’t stop cutting because Amanda and Noor had already made weight with a week left and were looking fierce as fuck. They were keeping up with the guys on chin-ups, too, an ability I lose when I get too skinny. It’s the light-headedness that unbalances me.
So I went downstairs after midnight for something quick to eat. I’d heard Ma in the shower earlier so I knew she was home from the hospital.
She should have been asleep in bed, but she wasn’t. I ate peanut butter with a spoon, straight from the jar, and caught a glimpse of two shadows in the parking lot right outside of our corner unit, the last unit on our block. The shadows parted and a man walked to a car at the far end of the lot. That would have been the end of the story right there if he didn’t pause before getting in. Paused right under the streetlight so that he could get one last look at her. I could feel his smile even from a distance. I crept back up the stairs and was in bed by the time Ma came back into the house and creaked open my door to check that I was asleep. I wasn’t but my back was to her so she couldn’t possibly have known that.
My back turned, eyes open, mouth gummy with peanut butter and confusion. Dad wasn’t up from Trinidad. Who was that man? And what was Ma doing with him so late at night?
* * *
I want to see if there’s any mushroom pizza left, but I don’t want to run into Ma or Ravi. So I just do homework until there’s no more homework to do, then I lie in my bed and think about the soucouyant book. It’s not like I can think about Gatsby, because what I wrote in my essay was true: it was kind of boring and about people who make no sense to me. The soucouyant book, though, it makes a lot of sense. Mr. Abdi was on to something when he gave it to me. Maybe he knew I would find some uncomfortable stuff in there, but it’s not like I can actually admit that.
The thing about soucouyants is that once one of them gets her hands on you, she doesn’t let go. She can bleed you for years. When you wake up there are little scratches on your body, on your neck. You feel like your life is draining away right before your eyes. Over the years you become weaker and weaker. You stop fighting. You let her take everything you have and don’t say boo. She’s not in it for the fast bleed; she plays the long game and lives off your life force until she’s through with you and moves on to the next sucker.