Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,62

my cheek for the crowd. She’s holding me up, some kind of angel. I feel ashamed that I had nasty thoughts about her when the match started. “It’s okay, hon, we’ll get you to the doctor,” she says. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

She helps me down from the ring. I see Rashida the floor manager beckoning me, the doctor right beside her. I turn away from them, away from the chaos of the match. I can’t see her, Ma, but I can feel her, and that’s even worse.

thirty-two

Upstairs in the room, I shower quickly and throw everything into my bags. There’s a knock on the door. I pad toward it, bare feet making no sound at all on the carpeted floors. I press my palms against the door and listen. Someone is breathing on the other side. A harsh, ragged breath, uneven.

This is what I’m thinking: nobody with good intentions breathes like that at a hotel door.

Myself, I breathe through my mouth because my nose is too smashed to suck any air in and I think that a fragment of bone must have slid up into my brain because I call out “Who’s there?” in a voice that’s too tiny to be my own. I don’t want to know who’s there; I mean, I already know it. This whole thing starts to feel like something out of a horror film. I try to force myself to look through the peephole in the door, but the fear is too much for me and whatever bit of courage I had a moment ago—

Calling out who’s there like an idiot

—disappears. If I put my eye to that little round window, glass will fly out at me, I know it. It will lodge in my brain, along with the shard of bone from my broken nose. I shut my eyes tight and slip into the corner behind the door, waiting with my hands clenched into proper fists.

I wait.

She waits.

The breathing stops or she moves away. I hear someone else coming down the hallway toward my door. Two sets of footsteps, actually, and now I’m thinking this is like a real movie, where the villain gets chased away by some bumbling passerby or something. Except it’s not some bumbling passerby at all. It’s the people I thought had my back.

Amanda: “…I don’t know.”

Imelda: “She keeps hitting her head. She’s not right. I saw her punch a wall. She almost fucked up her hand.”

Amanda: “Something’s not right.”

(Sound of some rifling. Things being pulled out of bags. Some choice curse words.)

Amanda: “Her dad just died. I mean, I think we can cut her a break.”

Imelda: “She probably has a concussion.”

Amanda: “She probably has five.”

Imelda: “I thought she hated her dad.”

Amanda: “Yeah. Always thought she hated her mom, too.”

Imelda: “Hey, I heard that she actually killed her dad. Like, she was behind the wheel of the car. Ran him right over.”

(A third set of footsteps joins them.)

Noor: “Will both of you please shut the hell up?”

There’s a beep, the slide of a lock releasing and the door opens toward me. I’m already across the room with my headphones on, packing up my stuff. The three of them crowd the doorway.

“There you are,” says Noor.

I don’t like the way she’s looking at me, not one bit. With pity, even though there’s no reason to pity me. Out of all of them, I’m the winner. Me.

“Why did you disappear?” she asks. “There’s a little press thing downstairs. They wanna talk to you.”

I pull the headphones off my ears. “What?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

I can’t look at any of them as they stand there, awkward and stupid around me for the first time ever. The fear in me hardens and turns into something mean, but I don’t dare let them see it. Jason implied that I’m brain-dead or something, and much as I want to say everyone’s crazy, what if they’re not?

“Nah,” I say. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

* * *

At the press thing, there are cameras. I ask Amanda what I should say but she just sighs.

“What?”

“You know I lost my fight, right?” she says, with an unexpected burst of anger. “I’m not undefeated anymore, Trisha. For the first time in my life I lost, and now you’re here asking me about press? You think I’m invincible or something?”

She’s taken her braids out and her hair is a dark halo around her head. She looks thinner, tired, less like a legend with every second that passes. I’ve never seen