Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,35

until I see stars.

Somewhere after the stars, there’s a face.

At first, I think it’s the girl, whoever it is, that I’m going to fight in Florida my first round. Her hair is cut short to her scalp…then I realize it isn’t a girl at all.

The face that comes into focus is male, tired, drawn. Shocked. It’s Dad, split lip visible as he turns. Lit up by a dim streetlight in the middle of a rainy night, his body half toward us, stumbling back, like he’d been propelled forward somehow, pushed even, and was just realizing that we were almost upon him.

His eyes that won’t close, until they do.

For the last time.

My scream.

Pammy throwing her arms around me, sobbing that he’s with the angels now, that it’s not my fault. Not my fault. A shadow sliding along the parking lot, and into the trees.

Ma wrapping her arm around me, sobbing now too: “She didn’t murder him. He came out at us. He was drunk! It was raining!”

Is raining, I remember thinking. It is raining, still.

But she’d already made the story up in her head and that’s how she was going to tell it. The night was dark, he was drunk and it was raining. Ma couldn’t have known he was drunk at the time, except she knew that he drank a lot and that he probably was. And she was right, in the end. That’s why they didn’t take away my learner’s permit. There’d been so much booze in his system and I didn’t mean to murder my own father. Why would I?

But I can’t stop thinking about the lock that Ravi said he broke, and the fact that Dad had a bloody lip even before the accident. Was Ravi there that night? Did something happen between him and Dad?

I’m hoping a hot shower will help me forget, and as I stand under the stream of water, I stop thinking. After the water turns cold, I go downstairs for a drink and see that, within an hour and a half of leaving the table, Ravi is asleep on the couch.

In the middle of the afternoon.

Ma’s purse is on the table. There’s money in it—there’s always money in it these days, but I reach for her car keys. The glove compartment in the car was the last place I saw the key to the safe deposit box. Nobody notices as I slip downstairs to her car. It’s freezing outside, so I don’t linger. They don’t notice, either, when I come in again.

twenty

At the bank, Columbus is impatient. “What are we doing here?”

“Just wait.” I leave him in the car, and I show the key to the woman at reception. She leads me down the hall to the room with all the safe deposit boxes. I’m sweating in my giant yellow parka, even though it’s cold in here and cold outside.

The woman notices. “You alright, honey?”

“I’m eighteen,” I say, again. I wipe my hands on my jeans, but she doesn’t notice.

“I know. You showed me your passport.”

“Right. Yeah.”

We both put our keys into the double lock of Box 4242, and she slides the box out for me. It’s smaller than I expected. She puts it on a desk in the corner and turns away to give me some privacy. But she doesn’t leave the room. Everything from the lockbox is in there, plus some papers I’ve never seen before. I slip the papers into my bag. The woman leads me back out, all calm like, and I’m acting so wrong, so suspicious, that I figure she must be bored with her job or something to let all this slide. My eyes are darting everywhere and I can’t even get a sentence out. I think she’s going to give a signal to the security guard to snatch me when I’m about to leave, but I walk out the door just fine. Like nothing ever happened. When I do look back, though, she’s watching me. In no time at all I’m back in the car.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say to Columbus.

We go to the beaches by Woodbine Avenue. He’s not happy because I said we’d go for KFC, and I flat out lied about that. We park, but don’t get out of the car. The grass, the sand, the walkways are covered in snow and ice. The wind by the lake is something fierce, kicking up the water. It’s too cold to go outside so we sit in the car with the engine