Marisa followed them, kicking delightedly, her heart flooding with joy. Then she turned a corner around some rocks and her breath caught, as if someone had reached inside her chest and closed a massive fist around her lungs. Even here, she found murk and drudgery, the reef not on display so much as its dying was.
She emerged from the water and took off her mask, tears mixing with the waves. People and the trash with which they suffocated the world. She looked around, shading her eyes from the shimmering sunlight with her free hand. Maybe it was time to accept the world as it was.
As she turned to swim back to shore, she caught sight of something on the far end of the island. A construction site. Large, acres and acres of it, from what Marisa could tell, and a handful of bulldozers. She swam closer and saw the sign announcing the coming resort. Nearby, a trickle of brown-gray water weaved its way from below the makeshift wall around the site and dribbled onto the sand.
Yes, it was a travesty, an outrage that the world had been ruined before her arrival. But that trickle hadn’t reached all the way to the shore, not yet.
As soon as she and her family made it back to their eco-hotel that day, Marisa decided she had to stop that waste from reaching the ocean. Whatever she could do for the reefs, she was going to do it. If it was just shutting down that one construction site, or if it was something much bigger, she had to try. What else was there but to try?
* * *
Months of stewing later, of planning, of seeing the ruined remains of the ocean floors every time she closed her eyes, of thinking of a way to make everyone else see what she saw. It all led up to this moment, when Marisa hoisted a chain from the duffel bag she’d hidden on campus a few days ago. She weaved it through the handles on the double doors that led into the main school building, then she wrapped it three times around her own body, uncomfortably tight, so bolt cutters could not break through the metal without snagging on her skin. When she was satisfied, she grabbed three giant padlocks from the bag and locked herself in, meaning to stay.
She set the keys in the middle of her palm, rubbing them each in a pad of butter procured earlier from the cafeteria, and which had warmed nicely in her pocket throughout the afternoon. Then Marisa, rehearsing her speech in her mind one last time, looked up. She expected to see a sizable crowd already gathering. What she saw instead was a lanky blond sophomore leaving the bathroom across the open expanse of the building’s foyer. The boy was checking to see if he’d remembered to zip up. He had not.
When his eyes met Marisa’s, he could tell she had seen him checking, and he stepped quickly away from her line of sight, failing to notice the heavy metal chain wrapped around her torso.
* * *
This boy was on his way to the gymnasium, where Amira Wahid was waiting for the whistle that would signify the start of the CIS Intrasport Decathlon. The year before, arriving from a school in Colombia only weeks prior to the lock-in, Amira had won the girls’ category, which annoyingly came with the qualifier of best female athlete. This year, Amira had enrolled in the boys’ decathlon, not bothering to check if it was allowed, wanting it to be known that she was, at least in this one aspect (or rather, these ten aspects), better than all. Basketball, running, rock climbing, it didn’t matter. She could beat anyone. For once, she did not want her gender to qualify her.
There was some resistance, but in the end the parents and board members at CIS were a little more liberal than not, and the fight was dropped. Already inspired by Amira, several girls crossed the gender distinction, and some boys, in what they believed was a show of solidarity, signed up for the girls’ competition. In the end the lists were too hard to distinguish, and the gendered distinctions were dropped altogether.
Amira for her part didn’t pay much attention to the “controversies” or general conversation. She was too busy training, sweating, repeating the same motions over and over again until they became as ingrained and natural and unconscious as breathing. Some of her exercises, Amira came to believe, even took on the rhythm of her heart: the jab-hook combo against the punching bag, thunk thunk; the two dribbles she needed on a basketball court to take the ball from the top of the three-point line to the rim, thunk thunk; her feet on the track, on asphalt, on grass, thunk thunk.
She loved how the world felt while she trained, loved that it all seemed designed for her enjoyment, the air and the sun and the ground beneath her feet. She loved the strain of her body, how she could feel it getting stronger, more limber, how she could get better at controlling its movement day by day by day.
More than anything, Amira loved to surprise people, to anger them, confound them with the things she could do with her body. The look on boys’ faces when she was stronger, faster, better. The look on those boys’ dads’ faces, the look on her coaches’ faces, when she outshone them all.
Amira’s mother was not aware of any of this. Not the training, not the decathlon and certainly not the anger. Amira was a different girl in front of her mother—at home in general—than she was at CIS.
This wasn’t out of necessity—at least Amira didn’t think so. Her mother was strong-willed, sure, but Amira had never tested that will. If she pushed back against her mother’s beliefs about what Amira could not or should not do, about what girls could not or should not do, her mother might very well respect her wishes. Her dad, certainly, was less of a traditionalist than many Malaysian men of his generation.
Amira became someone else at school merely out of opportunity. At home there were expectations pressing down on her—not forcefully, but they weighed heavily just the same. Expectations of what a girl should do and be, expectations of religion, expectations of family, expectations of sexuality, expectations that she did not feel equipped to go against. And though she did not hold herself to many of these expectations, her parents did, and that wasn’t something she could ignore.
Amira did not know how her parents would react if she outwardly bucked any of these expectations, and so she tried as best as she could to fit within them. She was never forced to act a certain way; the expectations were so heavy that she didn’t dare subvert them.
At school, though, the expectations felt easily shed. They were not religious or familial, they weren’t ingrained into the history of who she was. The expectations outside of her home felt, at worst, superficial. Society and its expectations, albeit plentiful and obsequious, were not tethered to Amira’s soul. So she could leave them behind, chasing the thunk thunk of her heart instead.
* * *
Most people expected Amira to win, though a handful of others believed Omar Ng’s strength and speed were superior simply because of his masculinity. Omar, for his part, standing on the opposite side of the gymnasium from Amira, likewise awaiting the first event (a one-on-one basketball tournament), wished Amira the best, and at least partially hoped she would beat him. He wanted only to do his best, or whatever amount of athleticism might impress Peejay Singh.