Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,43
filling my ears with a drum beat that falls in tune with my heart.
My baby
Forgive me
You’re mine
Jamette
You’re mine
There’s a spot of blood on my cheek. I must have scraped it when I fell. She’s staring at it, then she licks her dry lips. She lets me go, turns nurse-like. “You smell like salt.”
From our tears? From the Epsom salt in my bath?
I watch her as she goes about examining my arm, running her hands along my body to check for other injuries. All business, all work now. “Let’s get you to the ER.”
She helps me to my feet and keeps her hand on my back to guide me to the door. There’s a cold efficiency to it, a separation of what came before. I remember this is what it was like with my dad, after. After the bruising, the hitting, comes this practicality. Let’s mend now. Let’s take care of you. Wipe away your blood, your tears, and tell you how beautiful you are, how you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, to us, to these shitty lives of ours that we live in this country that is freezing for most of the year and sunk in unbearable heat when the snow melts.
But what she’s really saying, what he was, is that you’re mine.
You’re mine.
twenty-five
We were told that there’s no operative treatment for an acromioclavicular joint separation and all I can do is wear a sling and take it easy. But my whole arm is useless, itchy under the sling, and I’m completely and totally fucked for the gym now. As soon as I can take pressure on it again, I have to be training to make weight for Florida, which is in less than two months. No reprieve on the school end, either. Because of the injury Ma wouldn’t let me go to New York for March Break, so I was stuck in the house with her and Ravi the whole time, which is what I’d been trying to avoid.
You have no idea how glad I was when school started up again.
The one benefit of this whole thing is that I can text just fine with my left hand, something Jason and I discovered when someone from the gym told him about my accident and he blew up my phone asking me what happened. Obviously I couldn’t tell him, because snitches get acromioclavicular joint separations, but it was sweet.
He’s sweet.
Jason meets me at Kennedy station after class almost every day for a week. He’s a freshman at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. Doing political science? Something like that.
“Girl, he’s in love with you,” says Noor, when Jason leaves on his train going west. It’s one of the rare days when The Fiancé isn’t around to pick her up, so she and Amanda have decided to meet up to harass me. Because they’re here, Jason didn’t kiss me goodbye like he usually does, so I’m a little pissed at them right now for existing. We’re really getting the hang of it now, Jason and me. Every time feels even better than the last, and I try not to wonder if he’s practising with the college girls he’s probably swimming in. Ones who don’t know his abs are just for show. I don’t even mind anymore that his muscles are mostly decorative, so why would they?
Speaking of muscles. Today I tried to do some weights but Kru wouldn’t let me. He said it was important to “heal” or something. He saw how disappointed I was and tried to pat my shoulder in commiseration, but I wasn’t really having any of it today. I sat in the corner playing chess with a twelve-year-old who was better than me until everyone was done.
“You fell down the stairs? What an old-lady way to hurt your arm,” says Amanda. She’s training hard for Florida, harder than the rest of us. I’m pretty jealous and, I think, so is Noor. Amanda’s been killing it and she’s even got her videos on the gym social media almost every day. You either want to be her or fight her, and in my current shape, I wouldn’t want to fight her. In my best shape I wouldn’t want to fight her. Or Noor, or Imelda. There’s too much respect. I want nothing more than to spar with them again but I can’t right now and my arm hurts too much for me to even remember why I got hurt in the first place.
The how I remember,