Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,56

warm, only shame and this feeling like I betrayed her. I can’t stand the thought. Who’ll take care of her if Jason calls the cops and they split us apart? I don’t even know who they are, but the thought of her alone is enough to make me feel sick to my stomach.

Ma comes in from work just after I reach home. I don’t know where Ravi is.

“Went to the bank today.” She takes out a few bills from her purse and puts them on the kitchen table for me. My arm is better, but it’s like she still sees me falling down the stairs every time she looks at me. I take the money, though. Slip it into my pocket and she nods, almost like she’s grateful. “You hungry?”

“Yeah,” I say. I am. I realize I’m starving.

She fries up some bake and cuts a block of cheddar into thin slices to go with it. As I watch her clatter about the kitchen, her movements slow but precise, my appetite vanishes—

This is the last thing I made for him. Dad.

—and I can’t swallow because he’s still here, hasn’t gone away, is in everything she does even with Ravi around. I look up from the bake to see her watching me, a strange sort of knowing look in her eyes. The money burns my pocket, sears through the lining to get at my bruised skin.

“Do you remember your dreams?” I ask her, desperate for an answer, any answer.

She looks at me for a long time, under the dent in the wall, now immortalized by the rolling pin she hurled at my head, just looks and looks and doesn’t end up finding what she’s searching so hard for. “You’re too weak for this country, girl.”

Weak? Excuse her. Has she seen me train?

She watches me eat every bite of the bake she put on my plate and is only satisfied when I press the crumbs to my lips and thank her. I hate the meekness in my voice, but it’s what she wants to hear. How dutiful I am, how grateful. How glad for all the sacrifices she makes for me, even the ones I don’t ask for.

That releases her to bed.

When she’s gone, I go to the cupboard and fill my pocket with salt. Later, in the bathroom, I put some of the salt in a glass of water and retch up everything I ate. Feel my strength return with every bite of food I bring back up. Like it’s poison, the food made by her hand turning to bile in my throat.

I see my face in the mirror and, maybe it’s because a bulb or two have blown in here, but whatever it is, I have lost most of my colour. I look bloodless, pale, like my stores of melanin somehow deserted me. I look like her a little bit even. This is the face I wanted to tear off. Not Jason’s.

* * *

I’m sad about Jason. I text him to tell him I’m sorry leaving the way I did. He doesn’t respond after an hour, so I tell myself that he’s not my type. I mean, I don’t exactly know what my type is, but it’s definitely not a guy who doesn’t text back.

Back in my room, I close the curtains. With my stomach empty I feel free, light. If the Brazilian girl was in the ring with me now, she wouldn’t stand a chance. I’d be so fast now. I put away the money, adding it to the stack of bills already in there. It’s more than I ever earned in my two years at Foot Locker, that’s for sure.

For a moment, I stand in front of my closet. Just looking. The pink graduation dress hangs toward the back, looking more and more like a cake every day that goes by. When I slide my wiry body into it, it’s a sad cake that sags in the middle, like the baker dolloped extra icing on to hide how bad it is.

I take a pair of scissors to it.

In minutes, it becomes a pile of ragged pink strips shoved under my bed.

Now I can turn back to the money I stashed. I put it all in my bag, every cent. It’s enough, I think. I already have the plane ticket in my name. This could get me through Florida. The insurance papers I photocopied from the ones Ma has in the bank are hidden in the deep sleeve pocket in