Somebody laughs. Mrs. Singh appears to realize what she has said, and she flushes scarlet. My face grows hot under the pain.
Then an arm shoots into the air.
“I agree with Amarra,” says a high, clear voice, without waiting for Mrs. Singh to call on her. “There was some good in the Creature. He even loved Victor. Same with Heathcliff. Doing a bad thing doesn’t necessarily make someone evil. If you expect the worst, you’re only denying someone a chance to be better. That’s pretty much what Amarra said, and I agree. I,” Lekha reiterates, lest anybody have failed to grasp her meaning, “agree.”
Nobody knows what to say. I realize something that at once jolts and amazes me. By making my point far more eloquently than I did, Lekha has done something nobody expected. She has chosen a side.
Mine.
Mrs. Singh also seems to see that, somewhere along the way, battle lines were drawn. Her lips purse as though she has an especially sour lemon in her mouth. She sniffs and immediately sends me to the nurse to get my face looked at. But it’s too late to quell the whispers or put out the fires. I go off to the nurse, smiling for the first time in days. Someone has chosen my side, and that is more than I ever expected.
9
Sculpture
It’s weeks before I think of Lekha as anything but Amarra’s classmate. But one afternoon after school, when I find myself sitting with her in Coffee Day, at the very table where Amarra sometimes sat with Sonya and Jaya, it dawns on me she’s not just a girl in my class. She’s a friend.
She makes me laugh, often at her, but she doesn’t mind. She also tends not to listen to me. No matter how many times I tell her that “Palestines” are not what she thinks they are, she insists I must be wrong and that “Philistine” is in fact a country in the Middle East. I don’t give up. She has no talent for metaphor, either, but insists on using it.
I realize she’s also incredibly perceptive when she admits one day that she knew almost from the start that I wasn’t Amarra.
“It’s the way you move,” she says. “You’re too light on your feet. Like you’re ready to run. Or you’re about to growl and defend yourself. Like a hurt wolf cub. Lost but wolfy, you know?”
She shows me places in town I haven’t yet visited. Restaurants, rooftop cafés, cute little shops, and enormous stores. We go see movies at the multiplexes, buy peanuts off street vendors, visit shiny bars and hope no one questions our age as we order drinks with long, exotic-sounding names. We can never manage more than one or two because they’re so expensive and we’re poor teenagers. We sit under the hot sun and design costumes for famous literary characters: Lekha comes up with them and I draw them for her. We splash through puddles as we desperately try to hail rickshaws in the rain. I learn very quickly that the price a rickshaw driver will charge is directly proportional to the amount of rain rocketing down on the city at the time.
“Times like this,” I tell her one hot April evening, during the last week of school before the summer, “you remind me of one of my guardians.” She’s pirouetting on the step in front of me, striking a ridiculous pose as I try to sketch her. “She’s as dopey as you.”
“A new word! Dopey. I like it. Like the dwarf. Does it mean charming and beautiful?”
“If you know the dwarf, you’ll know it doesn’t.”
“Did you not think Dopey was adorable? Shame on you.” She stops pirouetting, moving on to a contorted imitation of a plié. “Well? What does it mean?”
“In Ophelia’s case,” I say, smiling, “it means she has her heart in the right place, but her head is definitely full of dust and feathers and has a few necessary ingredients missing.”
“Her name is Ophelia? Good grief. Has she done anything to ward off the evil eye?”
“Her father is a Weaver. I don’t think she can ward off the evil eye.”
“Creepy?”
“No,” I say, “but I saw him on telly once and there was something cold about him, like he wouldn’t let anything stop him from getting what he wanted.”
Lekha abandons her posing. She sits down next to me. “Eva,” she says, having by now coaxed my real name out of me, “I overheard someone in class talking the other day. About the