chapter 13

Girl

IT WAS SURAYA who found her in the end, at the bottom of the stairs

farthest from the hall, whimpering, blood trailing from her nose. Her

right arm stuck out from her body at an angle so unnatural that

Suraya had to look away. By her knee were the shards of her black-

rimmed glasses. Someone had stomped on them hard, grinding the

lenses into powder.

She knelt down quickly, bending over Jing, her eyes wide with

concern. "Jing. You okay?" It was a stupid question, she knew it

even as the words were spilling out of her mouth. But what else

could you say in the face of such obvious pain?

"I can't move my arm, Sooz," Jing whispered. "Everything hurts."

Suraya touched her friend's face gently, pushing back the hair

that fell into her eyes. "Don't worry," she whispered back. "I'll go get

help, okay? I'll be back as quickly as I can."

Then she ran off down the corridor, yelling for a teacher with a

strength and volume she never knew she was capable of.

They took Jing Wei away in an ambulance, the sirens blaring, the

red and blue lights casting weird shadows on the beige school walls.

The official story was that she fell down the stairs.

But as Suraya was ushered away by the school nurse, who gave

her a cold, sweet chocolate drink to sip and made her lie down in the

sick room "for the shock," she saw serious-faced officials take Divya

and Kamelia into the principal's office across the way and shut the

door, both girls pale and frightened and curiously deflated. Just as

they passed, Divya had grabbed Suraya's hand. "We didn't mean to

do it," she'd whispered hoarsely, her palm sweaty, her voice laced

with anxiety and regret. "It just happened. It was an accident." Later,

peeking out of the sick room window, she saw their parents.

Kamelia's mother was dainty and fair, and wore high heels and a

haughty expression; Divya's mother was plump and worried-looking,

her hair streaked with gray and making its way out of the loose bun

she wore low on her head.

Suraya lay there for what seemed like hours on the lumpy

mattress in the sick room's single bed and thought about faces:

Jing's sweaty face, contorted in pain; Kamelia's face and Divya's too,

looking more scared than she'd ever seen them; Pink's face and its

wicked grin upon seeing hordes of mosquitoes descend on playing

children. Each face came with a different emotion: first worry, then

anger, then frustration, then fear. With every passing minute each

emotion grew bigger and more tangled up with another, until she

thought she might burst from trying to contain so many feelings.

When the school day was finally over, just before they boarded

the bus, Suraya took Pink out of her pocket and brought him up

close to her face, so that he got a good look at her hard eyes, her

flared nostrils, her gritted teeth. Her grip was suffocating.

"We will talk when we get home," she told him, dropping each

word like a stone.

Then she put him back in her pocket and they rode the bus in

silence, all the way back to the little wooden house by the paddy

fields.