* * *
There’s no training today.
Kru is teaching at the downtown gym and I don’t want to take two buses and a train all the way over there in hopes of a short pad session, so I decide to skip it. Plus, I’ve got at least three hours of homework ahead of me.
I walk home from the bus stop and see Pammy watching me from her window. It’s cold, the moment before winter clenches the whole city in its grip. As I take my gloved hands out of my jacket to fish around for my keys, I can feel her intensity. Pammy sends me these looks sometimes, like, I’m so sorry, boo, that your Ma still has a man in her life. Because Pammy sent her ex packing three years ago after what Columbus calls the Worst Fucking Day of His Whole Fucking Life.
It started at Canada’s Wonderland, an amusement park they had to drive for what seemed like hours just to get to. The whole thing was set off by Columbus back-talking his father in one way or another. Maybe he didn’t say anything at all—Columbus doesn’t always remember it the same way—maybe it was just a look. But what he doesn’t forget is when his dad went off the rails and whaled on him like you wouldn’t believe, right in front of everybody. He’d just lost his construction job and was maybe looking for some energy to expend, or maybe he hated Columbus just as much as we all suspected—whatever the reason, Pammy wasn’t having it.
She booted him out, pressed charges, bought herself a box of wine and a giant-ass container of bubble bath, and deliriously soaked him away. Columbus said she read Wild and Eat Pray Love back-to-back in the cramped, standard-issue co-op tub that we’ve all tried to fold ourselves into, and that was it.
Blonde Lady Epiphany.
After a few days, she changed the locks and started acting like a lesbian, according to Columbus. She even cut her hair and everything. I saw her on a date once, at a sushi restaurant near my gym. Her short hair was spiked up with gel and looked as if it could cut you if you came too close. She had her hand on a be-dreaded man’s arm and he was smiling like all his birthdays had come at once. I don’t know what happened with the man. I never saw him again and never mentioned it to Columbus, because she seemed to not be fully committed to the whole lesbian thing. Plus, guys can’t handle truths about their mothers, no matter how woke they seem. I mean, I can barely manage it with my own. And that was before I started reading the soucouyant book.
After, it was impossible to look her in the eye.
Soucouyants are like this: During the day, they’re fusty old ladies who somehow smell both like feet and lemon disinfectant. At night, they shed their old-lady skin and turn into balls of fire that go flying about in the sky and slip under people’s doorways and then, I dunno, become vampires that suck the blood right out of you.
Ridiculous, right?
Except.
Except I heard this lady talking in Aunty K’s roti shop once and she swore the soucouyant who was biting her father-in-law was the hot chick from the next village over. Her friend agreed that this was possible, you done know, and they got another round of peanut punch to last them through a discussion of how, in some of these stories, the soucouyants are beautiful young women. They’re fluid like that.
Young, beautiful, old, hideous…it doesn’t matter.
The monster is female and she comes for you at night.
The thing about the soucouyant book is that it gave me nothing but the knowledge that monsters live in our heads. Which I already knew, yeah? I skimmed through the rest of the novel looking for…what? Advice? Clues?
But it wasn’t what I needed. It scared me because there’s so much about monsters that we don’t know, that we can never understand.
I would have ignored the book and the roti shop talk, except the funeral happens that same week and everything changes. I see that look Ma shares with Pammy and Aunty K. I remember Ma’s face when she asked why Dad wanted to know about her comings and goings. I remember being in the car the night Dad died, and I start to wonder about Ma.
present day
THE MASTER PLAN:
Get degree in Business Management
Work at a bank
Start saving for retirement
Marry a banker
Use some retirement savings for a mortgage
Pay mortgage for the rest of our lives
Die
IN THE MEANTIME:
Don’t talk about the accident
Work on Muay Thai technique
Win next fight
Win fight after that
Keep my mouth shut
Win more fights
Maybe die
nine
A week after the funeral I turn in my essay on The Great Gatsby, like everybody else. Mr. Abdi can’t hide his disappointment. His hangdog mouth hangs even further and he looks at me with those big blue eyes that look so out of place in his dark face. I mean, geez. What’s with the guilt fest? It’s just an essay.
I hand him back the soucouyant book.
“You didn’t like it?” he asks, trying hard to sound all casual. Failing, because it’s hard to fake casual when you’re almost in tears over an essay. “You could have written about that, how it didn’t resonate.”
“I didn’t finish it,” I say.
This, I think, is even worse. If I let my feelings show on my face like Mr. Abdi does, I’d be even more shit in the ring than I already am.
“I see. I’d hoped it would spark something…well, don’t let this discourage you, Trisha. You write well and I know you enjoy the assigned readings, so I hope you consider pursuing your love for literature in the future. Even as a reader. We need more of those in the world.” He gives me a sad kind of smile and busies himself with the papers on his desk.
I get the feeling I’m not the first immigrant kid he’s tried to beat over the head with a book on their “culture” and, knowing what little I do know of him, I’m probably not going to be the last. Everybody has dreams, even bizarre ones, like Mr. Abdi’s.
When I leave, I try not to look back at him or the book that ruined my life and put ideas in my head. Teaching me about the evil that comes from my homeland. I try not to think of Dad. I used to think he was evil on account of him and Ma but now I don’t really know what evil is. Anyway, the book is out of my hands now.
Sayonara, Advanced English.
Business Management, here I come.
But his reaction to my essay bothers me all the way to the gym because Mr. Abdi is one of the decent ones. He actually cares. Once, he’d noticed a bruise on my arm and notified Mrs. Nunez. She obviously didn’t care and was visibly relieved when I explained it happened during training and, yes, I’m a fighter and, yes, my mother knows all about it. But at least he noticed. More than anyone else.