Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,63

her like this, and I wonder about everything it took for her to be the star at our gym.

“I guess I never thought…I’m sorry.”

“If Kru asks, I’m going for another walk,” she says. I watch her leave and it shakes me because I’ve never seen her look so sad.

The cameras flash. I manage to say a couple things to the almost bored reporters there. They’re not interesting things.

“Yeah.”

“It was hard.”

“I dunno.”

I find a couple of smiles and they make me feel better when I start, so I smile some more. I forget about the things Amanda and Imelda were saying at the door of our hotel room, forget all the ways I got hit today. I smile and smile and everything is the way I imagined it. Now I know what it feels like to be a winner. For once, I’m in control.

It’s better than any other feeling in the world.

* * *

I try to stay awake on the flight back to Toronto but I’m so tired I fall asleep on Kru’s shoulder. He’s somehow sensed the distance between me and the other girls but thinks it’s because I won a belt and they didn’t. I don’t correct him. I don’t say: It’s because they think I’m crazy and maybe they’re right because there’s a soucouyant living in my house that looks a hell of a lot like my mother.

You just can’t say stuff like that to Kru.

I wake when the plane touches down. The force of the landing sucks me back into the seat and I feel that pull in every muscle in my body. When I try to stand to get my bag from the overhead compartment, I realize that all my strength is gone.

“I’ll get that,” Kru says. He seems sad, even though I won. We won. “Go on ahead.”

“Thanks, Kru.”

I turn back in the aisle and watch him grab the belt from above. I take the bag from him, but not the gaudy belt. “That’s for the gym,” I say. On the shelves with the other belts, above the training mats where everyone can see what you’ve earned. How you’ve made Kru proud. Except he doesn’t seem all that proud right now, and I don’t know what to say to him.

He pats my shoulder and tries to smile at me. I try to smile back, but this only makes him sadder.

The others look everywhere but at me, and in the airport bathroom, I see why. Coarse strands of hair have escaped my braid and are standing almost on end, fighting their way to the ceiling, but that’s nothing compared to the damage done to my face. The bandages plastered over my nose are covered in droplets of blood. My eyes are pinpricks, shining out from dark hollows, and there’s a cut on my lip that I haven’t seen before. Now I’m aware of it, it starts to throb. I push into it with my fingertips and come away with blood under my nails. I push and push and push until there’s no more blood.

I leave the airport without saying bye to any of them. I see Kru wave Noor off as he stands in arrivals, looking around for someone. On the bus to the train station, I realize he might have been looking for me, and I feel ashamed because I don’t want to worry Kru. But not so ashamed I turn on my phone to call him.

By the time I get home, it’s dark. I slip around back, skirting the parking lot. There are too many lights on in our unit, which means that Ma is home. I stand in the dark for so long I’m almost asleep on my feet, and maybe I am, because I don’t hear Columbus calling my name until he’s right in front of me.

“Holy shit,” he says, pulling me under the streetlight. I flinch and shake him off. “What the fuck happened to your face, Trisha?”

I grin wide, little firecrackers of pain bursting across my face, sending stars shooting behind my eyes. “I won a belt.”

“Your mom is going to kill you,” he says, then frowns at the look that crosses my face, the one I can’t help, the one that says I’m so frightened I’d rather stand here in the dead of the night than go inside and face her. Columbus takes my hand and leads me to his house, through the back door and up the stairs and into his bedroom, where he sits me on his