River Meets the Sea by Rachael Moorthy

Author:Rachael Moorthy [Moorthy, Rachael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2023-04-24T18:04:44+00:00

A charcoal sea of storm clouds blanketed the sky, but the air was warm. The biting lurk of winter had dissipated, and a sudden heat sent spiderwebs of lightning across the horizon. Skating to school against everyone’s advice, I nodded along to my new Run-DMC cassette. The collar of my denim jacket was popped and Rocky’s Black Fist Afro pick was wedged artfully in my hair. I did a clean backside flip to impress the freshmen girls, who’d gotten hot, and the older, blonder bunnies behind them. Tony and Stu leaned against the red bike racks, windbreaker-clad backs exposed.

I fought the urge to pull the band of Stu’s tighty-whities over his thick head and pounced, shrieking karate kiais while pretending to choke him out with my skateboard. “Black lightning strike! Hundred-dollar indecency fine, all because of your slow ass! Hi-ya!”

Tony bit his lip, tucked a gold curl behind his ear. “C’mon, let it go man, s’been weeks.”

“Tony, I’m about to break his knees.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Stu pried my hands off his ostrich neck.

“I don’t know, not rat out your homie?”

“Be cool, Chan, be cool.” Tony placed his hands on my shoulders.

I hated that Tony was defending Stu. Had it been the other way around, Stu would have already been ass-up in a Dumpster.

“Fag.” I glared at Stu, hoping he’d get a fleeting gust of courage and look me in the eyes, just so I could see him flinch and look away again. A vein of white lightning bolted across the horizon, and we took that as a signal to get indoors.

Stu just kept looking at his feet. “Peace. I said I was sorry, all right?”

“Your mother.” I left him hanging and strolled off, grinding my teeth.

I was still seething when I got to class. I took my seat by the window and slammed my binder on my desk. Everything seemed louder and more irritating than usual — the hardness of the chair, the height of the desks, the sound of Bertrand clearing his throat every two seconds. I was ready to jump on top of the desk and go totally feral.

I spent the rest of class hungry and lethargic, longing for a power outage. The weather outside thickened and intensified. Rain pelted down and I immediately regretted skateboarding to school, angrier still that it was my own dumb defiance that drove me to ignore the forecast. With the rainfall came a hollow pit in my chest, and something felt wrong in my body, like a loose screw or fraying wire. The world had a monochrome filter over it, so I used the small magic I had available to me and teleported: Turquoise waters of secret beaches, Olympic-sized saltwater infinity pools that overflowed into the sea. I surfed Big Sur, Supertubos, the North Shore of Oahu, Fiji, Tahiti . . . met golden surfer girls. In my daydreams, I had light eyes and skin, a perfect body: chiselled as stone.

I slipped out of my daydream, rain splattering against the portable’s tin roof.

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