Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,20
as a guy hears I’m from Trinidad, it’s all over. Bam. Falls in love. I mean, not with me. With the idea that I can shake my ass better than a Jamaican and, as much as Trinis want to believe this, who can shake their ass better than a Jamaican? As good, yes. Better? This is a matter of serious debate. If he’s looking for a dancehall queen, he better look somewhere else.
I slip my mouthguard in and grunt something in response. Let him only think I’m shaking my ass for him. I kiss my teeth. It doesn’t have the desired effect because of the mouthguard. “Come on,” I say, around the plastic. “Let’s go another round.”
We spar until he lands a swing kick good and proper into my ribs and I go down. Kru calls it then, looking at me all peculiar like. He says he’s closing for the night and, true enough, when I look around we’re the only people left in the gym.
I try not to smell him. Jason. But I still do. He still smells too good to be true.
“You look nice today,” he tells me.
In my ripped tank top and third best pair of Thai shorts? The ones I have to roll down at the waist to get them to fit properly? Wow. Some people have no taste.
As we leave for the night, Jason turns to me and says, all casual, “I don’t know why you lose so much when you fight. You’re really good.” Then he shrugs. “Must be a curse or something, Miss Trini.”
I need this Mexican superstitious bullshit like I needed Mr. Abdi racially profiling me.
A curse.
Yeah, right.
thirteen
The day before Christmas holidays, Ma tells me that I’m going to work with Aunty K in New York for the break.
She barely looks at me when she breaks the news. She doesn’t want to hear any backtalk from me, big surprise. The violence of a couple of nights ago is gone from her eyes, and so am I. In her mind, I’m not there right now. Not pleading to stay or anything. After the last day of class, I don’t even have time to say bye to my lunchtime Desis, or my crew at the gym.
She’s punishing me.
For the disobedience. For the fact that I’ve been nothing but a burden to her for all these years. For the questions that I wasn’t supposed to ask Pammy about what she saw the night Dad died.
She drives me straight to the airport with some kind of Bollywood soundtrack blasting. She looks like something from out of a Bollywood film herself. She’s flat-ironed her hair and put makeup on, dark streaks of eyeliner that should look garish but stop just short of that with a little upward tick, like a checkmark or the Nike logo. She’s tried to teach me how to do this a few times but gives up when I inevitably look like a buff raccoon.
Sitting there beside her, I think about the last time we were in the car together. Even though she’s doing her best to drown it all out with these Hindi songs, the sounds of a language she doesn’t even speak.
Beyond the windshield, on the other side of the hood, is the front bumper and memories of a godawful sickening crunch that I can’t ignore.
But she can.
Inside my suitcase is a packed lunch and snacks for the plane. It’s a short flight and I don’t need to be lugging all this food with me. I can feel her residual anger, but nothing will ever stop her from feeding me until I burst. When she leaves me at a security checkpoint, at the lineup before the gate, I hold her gaze and dump the food in the garbage. Tupperware included.
She doesn’t blink.
Just stares at me until I go through the line and out of her sight. I can feel her eyes on me the whole way. That’s okay with me. Let her look at Ravi like that. I spend the whole plane ride trying to not picture them together in the house while I’m away.
Aunty K starts chatting from the minute she meets me at JFK. It’s like she’s stored up conversations for weeks or something, just for me. “Why are you so quiet?” she keeps asking. On the train to her tiny apartment from the airport. At the apartment. When I’m on the sofa bed in the living room. The next morning when I start work at her cramped roti shop