What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(22)
“Joe who goes to the puppet school?” Arjun asked.
“Yeah . . .”
“Seen, seen,” Arjun said. “What you saying?”
“Girls like you, don’t they?” Joe asked.
Arjun lowered his eyelids and shrugged; if I’d been wearing sleeves I’d have laughed into one of them. Joe had a twenty-pound note, which he was willing to hand over to my brother right now if Arjun would go over to a certain girl, dance with her, talk to her, and appear to enjoy her company for a couple of hours. Once I realized what he was asking, I thought: Even Arjun will be lost for words this time. But my brother must’ve had similar requests before (can teenage boys really be so inhuman?) because he asked: “Is she really that butters? I haven’t seen any girl I’d rate below a seven tonight. A good night, I was thinking.”
The boy had the good grace to blush. “No, she’s not that ugly. Just . . . not my type.”
“Why did you even bring her then, if she’s not your type?” Arjun asked.
“It was a dare,” Joe said, miserably. “I don’t usually do things like this—you can ask Tim—just believe me when I say I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t think she’d say yes. But she did.”
“Mate . . . don’t pay people to hang out with her.”
“I don’t know what else to do. She’s got to have a good time. She’s my headmaster’s daughter. I don’t think she’d get me expelled or anything—maybe she won’t even say anything to him. But she’s his daughter.”
“Better safe than sorry,” my brother agreed. Myrna, by that point I was already looking around to see if I could spot you (what level of unattractiveness forces people to pay cash so as to be able to avoid having to look at it or speak to it?) and when Joe said that he’d been trying to talk to you but you just sat there reading your book, I searched all the harder.
“What kind of person brings a book to a party,” Arjun said expressionlessly, without looking at me, but he gave a little nod that I interpreted as a suggestion that I seek this girl out.
“What’s her name?” I asked. Joe told me. I found you half buried in a beanbag, pretending to read that dense textbook that takes all the fun out of puppeteering, the one your father swears by—Brambani’s War Between the Fingers and the Thumb. Curse stuffy old Brambani. Maybe his lessons are easier to digest when filtered through stubbornly unshed tears. You had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be comforting, the lights around your neck. Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore. Clearly I hadn’t arrived in your life a moment too soon. You looked at me, and this is how I saw you, when first I saw you: I saw your eyes like flint arrows, and your chin set against the world, and I saw the curve of your lips, which is so beautiful that it’s almost illusory—your eyes freeze a person, but then the flickering flame of your mouth beckons.
Thank God Joe was so uncharacteristically panicky and stupid that evening. I discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple: If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me . . .
—
AS FOR WHAT you saw of me—I think you saw a kid in a gray dress gawping at you like you were the meaning of life. You immediately began talking to me as if I were a child at your knee. You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need. You’d recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the clouds. “Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book—maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.’”
I got you to dance, and I got you to show me a few of the exercises you did for hand flexibility, and I got you to talk about your school and its classrooms full of students obsessed with attaining mastery of puppets. I liked the sound of it. Your eyes narrowed intently as you spoke of your final year there: The best two students were permitted to choose two new students and help them through their first year. It was in your mind to play a part in another puppeteer’s future, that much was clear. You believed in the work that puppet play can do—you’d seen it with your own eyes. Before your father began teaching, back in the days when he performed, you had seen a rod puppet of his go down on its knees before a girl who sat a little aside from his audience of schoolchildren. This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it. Man and long-bearded puppet left the stage, walked over to the girl, and knelt—the puppet’s kneeling was of course guided by your father’s hand, and every eye in the audience was on your father’s face, but his uncertain expression convinced everyone that the puppet had suddenly expressed a will of its own. “Princess, I am Merlin, your Merlin,” the puppet man said to the girl. “At your service forever.”