Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,3
a five-year-old at a princess party wouldn’t look out of place in. I stare at myself in the mirror, my muscular shoulders and thighs ruining the drape of pink she’s chosen for me.
“You are so dark,” she says softly, as though this is a crime. Her expression in the mirror is one of pity, because she is fair and she thought her daughter would be, too. But I’m not. I look like my dad.
Once we get the dress, Ma’s in a better mood. She even takes me for lunch, but she can’t resist reminding me that there’s enough food at home. We eat tacos at the mall food court and I try to forget what she said about my skin. Other people sometimes comment on it, especially when they see me and Ma standing together, but she doesn’t usually. I think maybe it reminds her too much of Dad.
After the mall, I ask her to drop me off at the gym. She’s probably feeling guilty about the “you’re so dark” thing, so she does.
“Trish, you know you’re beautiful to me, right?” she says, when she pulls into the gym parking lot.
“Ma.”
She ruffles my hair. “You are. Go have fun.”
Finally, she lets me out of the car so that I can work up a decent sweat and try to forget about how pink dresses look on my dark skin. Plus, I don’t really like being at the house when Dad is around. I think Ma knows it, too.
* * *
Whoever said The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice never met me, or my sparring partner Amanda Finch. Amanda, with her hair forever pulled back in neat cornrows and her limbs so long and strong that if you let her get a lock on you, you’d be on the mat forever, being squeezed to a pulp. Sweetness never even comes into the picture. I’m having serious doubts about my own levels.
“I don’t know about you, but she’s sweet,” said Ricky, her sometimes gym boyfriend, when I shared my thoughts on the matter with him. “But only if you hit that spot, if you know what I mean.”
I don’t, so I ask Noor, my other training buddy. We’re in the locker room and she’s fussing with one of those new-fangled sports hijabs that never comes undone; when she puts it on her eyes turn into dark pools so gorgeous that every now and then you’ll get trapped in them, and that’s when she’ll unleash a combo on your ass that will leave you vowing to never look in her eyes again. But you won’t be able to help it.
“How the hell should I know?” Noor says, but she also spent an hour in her fiancé’s BMW last week after class, so you’d think she’d be a little wiser than me. “Engagement doesn’t mean marriage, Trish. What do you think I am?”
Who does she think she’s fooling? Those windows steamed themselves up? Yeah right, girl.
I am as dark as Amanda, but Indian, so it’s a bit different. Amanda is from Jamaica and I’m from Trinidad but Indian Trinis are as good as black even though we’re not, according to the Desis I play cards with during lunch at school (sometimes dominoes when somebody is feeling dangerous). The lunchtime Desis are actually from India and can spot pretenders immediately, the people who are sort-of but not-really. The in-betweens like me with Indian blood but without any of the culture steeped into me. We’re lumped together in their minds, Amanda and me. They show me pictures of saris that they wear to Indian weddings and sometimes speak in Desi-slang around me, so I won’t feel like a complete outsider, but I know I am. I’m only Indian to those who don’t know the difference.
Maybe this would all matter if I didn’t have the gym, but I do, so who cares?
When I get back home, I’m still thinking about all this plus my skin. Especially since Ma laid the dress on my bed for me to look at some more, I guess. Pammy’s son, Christopher, is also on the bed. I like to call him Columbus because of his desire to “discover” every girl he sees who puts the brown in brown sugar. He hates the name but knows it’s true. Plus, him and Pammy are the only white people on this block of co-op townhouses, so he’s surrounded by people who know what good curry tastes like. Noor’s theory is that all the spice