The Weight of Our Sky(33)

My face burns icy hot; my toes curl in agony. I let him see me. How could I let him see me? For one wild moment I consider lying, thinking up some story, anything to put him off the scent. But I’m tired of lying, of hiding all the time, of pretending everything is fine. The numbers are wearing me down. I’m sick of it. The Djinn courses wildly through my body, screeching as he senses my impending betrayal.

How do I even begin?

Okay, Melati. Deep breath.

“So . . . imagine your mind is a house. You fill it with things and people and ideas and thoughts that are important to you and worth keeping, right?” He nods, not wanting to interrupt. “Well, in my house, the back door sometimes opens all by itself, and uninvited people just let themselves in and get comfortable. They talk really loudly, they do whatever they want, and they never seem to want to leave.”

So far, so good. I keep going.

“Those strangers in my house . . . they aren’t really me. But because they act like they own the place, sometimes it’s hard to tell if what I’m thinking is really . . . what I’m thinking, if that makes sense.”

“Okay . . .”

I can hear the hesitation in his voice, and it almost makes me falter. In my head, the Djinn replays the memory of my mother’s recoil when I told her my truth, over and over and over again.

“When I get stressed, when I get worried, when I find myself thinking about something that I don’t want in my head, I sort of . . . count things. To help me calm down.” I glance over at him to see how he’s taking this.

“Does it work?” he asks.

“Sure. Well. Most of the time.” Stop, the Djinn whispers. Stop. He’ll hate you for saying any more. I ignore him and forge on. “I can’t just count any which way. I have to count in threes.”

“Threes?”

I nod. “Yeah. That’s the magic number. So everything I count has to be in threes, or the total has to be a number that can be divided by three. Or if there’s a bunch of things, I can only count every third thing. Sometimes I count words in books, or things people say, or the steps that I take. Sometimes I have to touch things when I count them, or sometimes I have to tap out my count—like with my fingers, or my feet. . . .” My voice trails off. This is too weird. Even saying it, I know it sounds too weird. He’s about to call me crazy, call a doctor, call a bomoh.

Instead, he just asks: “Why three?”

I shoot him a look. He actually seems interested. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think maybe it’s because the last time I was happy, the last time my mind was quiet, it was when we were the three of us. You know. A proper family.”

There. It’s all out. Well, almost all of it—I can’t quite bring myself to tell him about the Djinn, but even then, I’m new to this being-honest-about-my-mental-and-emotional-state thing, and this is enough. I feel a strange combination of exhaustion, relief, and utter vulnerability, as though I’m naked next to him. Baby steps.

This pause is stretching on for far too long now, and I’m aching to look at him, search his face for clues, ask him flat out what he’s thinking.

Don’t look. Don’t look, Melati.

The tips of my ears burn, and I rub them self-consciously as I wait for him to respond.

“That sounds exhausting.” I strain my ears for any hint of disgust or pity, but amazingly enough, all I hear in his voice is compassion.

“It is.”

“Is there anything that makes it better?”

I think about this for a while, trying to find the right words. “Music,” I say, finally. “Music calms me down. For my last birthday before my father . . . before he . . . you know. Before he died—” The word sticks in my throat, but I forge on. “They bought me my own record player. And even though my mom can’t really afford it now that it’s the two of us, every other month she somehow scrapes together the money to buy me a new record.”

The memory of it brings up fresh tears: Mama and me at the record store, flipping through the latest releases, giggling over particularly garish album covers, shrieking with excitement when we find the perfect one.

“She sounds like an amazing woman,” Vince says softly.

“She was. I mean, is,” I quickly correct myself. Djinn got your tongue? the voice purrs, and not for the first time, I wish I could strangle him. I look down at my lap dreamily and realize that I’ve been tapping and counting the entire time. Quickly, I stuff my fingers beneath me and hope Vince didn’t notice.

“The thing about a song is that, if you break it down, it’s all chaos,” I say. “Like, there’s all these different notes, different instruments, different sounds. It’s a mess. But you add a beat and a rhythm and somehow everything can come together and make something beautiful. I think that’s what I’m trying to do. Find a rhythm for the mess in my head, so that it somehow . . . makes sense.”

I steal another glance at him; he’s looking straight ahead as he drives, frowning a little. I can tell he’s thinking about everything I’ve told him. The silence stretches on and on, and I can feel that familiar flutter. The Djinn opens his palms and releases a thousand tiny black birds, all flapping their wings frantically against the walls of my stomach. He thinks you’re crazy. He thinks you’re crazy. He thinks you’re crazy. My palms start to sweat, and before I realize it, my fingers have worked their way back onto my lap and are moving as if they have minds of their own. I close my eyes. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two . . .