Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,16

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.

When I got a look at Ravi sitting there eating my pizza like it was his all along, I saw something in him that I’ve only ever seen in myself.

A sucker.

How could she even get a new man so quick, you ask? Yeah, I was wondering the same thing as I stared at him in a kinda shocked haze, until I realized where I’d seen him before.

He’s the guy she was with in the shadows of the parking lot.

I know it’s him, know it from the salt-and-pepper of his hair, from the bend in his nose, from the smile he flashed to her under the streetlight. Illuminated for a split second, caught in the camera flash of my memory.

Snap.

There you are, new man. In our lives, outside of our house, in the months before my father died under the wheels of our car.

eleven

It’s just a week away from Christmas holidays. Dad’s urn is side-eyeing us from the living room and I’m sitting at the table with Ravi, who turns out to be another Trini guy, because Ma’s man-barometer apparently is broken and has just one setting. He’s not tall like Dad was, but he’s a solid bulk in our dining room. His hair is slicked back off his forehead and I can’t tell his age.

He’s looking at me and I know exactly what he’s thinking.

He’s wondering what kind of problem I’ll be.

I silently send the signal that I’m gonna be the biggest problem he could possibly imagine, but the main issue with that is that he doesn’t seem to have much of an imagination.

We stare at each