chapter 16

Girl

THE FIRST DAY without Pink, Suraya woke up feeling as light as a

cloud. She floated through her usual morning routine: brush your

teeth, make sure to get that little gap between those two front ones,

good job Suraya, now shower, oops, that water's cold, dry yourself

carefully everywhere, every little bit, that's it. It was strange to think

that the only voice occupying her head was hers. She felt giddy and

effervescent, her thoughts fizzing like bubbles floating to the top of a

glass of ice-cold cola. And she carried that feeling with her all day

long, and into the next day, and the next. Pink was a good friend,

she could admit this to herself unreservedly, but being friends with

him was like walking a tightrope. You had to be careful where you

stepped, what your next move would be. You had to be watchful and

wary and alert always. You could never relax.

And so even though Jing was in the hospital, even though Suraya

worried about her friend, even though she spent most of her time

alone, even though she felt a tiny pang of guilt about feeling the way

she did . . . she was also, in a way, happy. She sat with Jing for

hours, playing card games, trading her stories of teachers and fellow

students and school-day woes with Jing's stories of doctors and

nurses and patients and their visitors. She filled page after page of

her sketchbook, pictures leaping from her pen as if a dam had been removed from its tip. She read for hours, sitting in a pool of sun on

the rocks by the river and trying not to think about the last time she

was there, with Pink, and the harsh words they'd exchanged then. In

fact, she tried not to think about Pink at all.

Of course, like it or not, she was going to have to start thinking

about him again very soon.

The problem with parting ways with a friend, particularly when that

friend happens to be a supernatural being, is that they often take out

their displeasure at your decision in ways that go far beyond the

realm of human possibility.

The first sign of Pink's rage was the smell.

It appeared a few days after the breakup. Suraya woke up from

strange, disturbing dreams that she couldn't quite remember, only to

be greeted by a horrible stench, a stench like bad eggs and rotting

corpses, a stench so bad she thought she might actually throw up.

She jumped out of bed and flew out of the door to find her

mother. "Mama," she called, holding her nose. "What is that terrible

smell?"

But her mother just looked at her strangely from where she stood,

slicing carrots for soup. "What smell?"

Suraya stared, open-mouthed. "What do you mean, what smell?

This smell, the one like . . . like . . . like the garbage truck on a hot

day!"

Still Mama just looked at her, and Suraya soon realized that

nobody else smelled the smell but her—not Mama, not any of her

classmates or teachers, not Jing or Jing's mother when she visited

them at the hospital, not a single person but Suraya herself.

It was Pink, she knew, Pink punishing her for what he thought of

as her disloyalty, Pink expecting her to call on him, apologize, beg to

be saved.

But if that's what Pink expected, he didn't know her at all. Suraya

gritted her teeth and endured the smell. Days went by, and still she

endured. She endured it as it coated her tongue and rendered food

inedible; she endured it as it made water turn sour in her mouth; she

endured it as it blanketed her in a layer of filth that made showers futile. At night, when she finally fell asleep, it crept into her dreams

and tinged them with darkness.

The nightmares were the second sign.

She came home from school one day to find her mother in the

kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove. "Set the table," Mama said,

ladling steaming curry into a big white bowl, and so she did, pulling

glasses out of the cupboard above the sink where they were kept,

setting the big blue plates carefully in the center of the yellow

placemats. Mama put rice on her plate, a big helping of thick curry

lumpy with contents that Suraya couldn't quite make out. Together

they read the pre-meal duaa, and then Suraya tucked in, making a

neat parcel out of the rice and curry and fresh greens and sambal

with her fingers and shoveling it into her mouth. It was delicious,

though she couldn't quite make out what it was, and with every

mouthful she tried to figure it out. Was it fish? Chicken? Beef,

perhaps? Each time, the answer eluded her.

Finally, she turned to her mother. "What is this in the curry,

Mama?"

"Ladies' fingers," her mother replied, chewing placidly.

Suraya frowned. "But that can't be it," she said, poking the

morsels on her plate, which looked nothing like the long green pods

her mother often added to curries or fried in sambal. "This tastes like

meat. Not vegetables."

Mama stared at her as though she'd said the stupidest thing in

the world. "No," she said again. "They're ladies' fingers." And she

picked up the bowl and shoved it into Suraya's face so that the curry

was inches away from her nose, so that she could see for herself the

fingers swimming in the thick brown gravy, some long and thin, some

short and squat, some still wearing their nails, others with bare spots

where nails ought to be. "It was quite challenging harvesting

enough," Mama said nonchalantly as Suraya choked and spluttered.

"But I managed it, in the end. All you need is a good sharp knife. . . ."

Suraya never heard the rest because she started to scream, and

it was the sound of her own screams ringing in her ears that woke

her up with a start, cold sweat streaming down her face.

That was only the first. There were more, many more, sometimes

two or three on the same night. She often mused, during the daytime

when the world was flooded with light, that the dreams would have

been fine if they were merely peopled with strange creatures and

horrific monsters. Those she could handle. The problem was that the

nightmares were twisted versions of reality, vivid scenarios that

started out perfectly normal and quickly spiraled out of control, and

so real that she sometimes had trouble figuring out what had really

happened, and what hadn't.

By the time Jing Wei came back to school, it had been two weeks

since the red paint incident and the rainy season was in full swing,

each day an endless gray blur of drizzle and dreariness. Suraya saw

her as she stepped out of her mother's red Mercedes, carefully

shielding her cast from the rain as she made her way into the hall,

and her heart lifted crazily. "Jing!" she called, waving wildly. "Over

here!"

In the distance, she could see Jing's face light up as she ran

over. But the closer she got, Suraya thought she saw her face

change. And when they hugged, it was Jing who held her gently, as

if it were Suraya who was broken and not the other way around.

"What's the matter?" Jing said, the first words out of her mouth.

"Matter?" Suraya frowned, confused. "Nothing's the matter. I

missed you so much!"

"I missed you too." Jing's grin was wide, but there was a hint of

worry playing on the edges. "But are you sure you're all right? You

don't look like yourself."

Suraya shrugged. "Just been having some trouble sleeping," she

said. It was, of course, a bold-faced lie. Between the smell and the

nightmares, she'd barely eaten or slept in the past two weeks, and

she knew that it showed—more than once, teachers had pulled her

up sharply in class for not paying attention, and the world was

starting to take on a hazy, unreal quality, as if she were wandering

through a fog all the time.

Still, Jing was back, and with her friend beside her, Suraya felt

like she could handle anything Pink threw her way.

So she linked her arm through Jing's and smiled. "I have so much

to tell you," she said. "Wait till you hear—Mrs. Sumathi has a

boyfriend!"

"No way!" Jing's eyes were wide, and she drew closer to hear this

tantalizing gossip about their English teacher, who wore ornate

sarees and a perpetual frown. "But she's ancient, though!"

"Way! And her boyfriend's, like, ten years younger than she is!

Jane's mother saw them together at the cinema . . ."

And as they walked arm in arm through the sea of girls waiting for

the bell to ring, you might have heard a low growl in the shadows,

felt it ripple through the air. Or you might have thought it was thunder

ripping through the rain. Who knows? Suraya was just happy to have

her friend back, and she didn't hear a thing.