The Girl With Borrowed Wings by Rossetti Rinsai

Author:Rossetti, Rinsai [Rossetti, Rinsai]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2012-07-19T05:00:00+00:00

The nights were magical, the days remained tight. But who cared what happened in real life? Day was only a murky moment of sunlight, soon over; then I could escape through my window again.

Back in the classroom, going through the motions of Heritage preparations with the taste of the chilly sky air still in my mouth, exhausted and giddy, my distraction must have showed. Anju continued to regard me with suspicion, as if she thought I might have caught some rare tropical disease. “You’re smiling!” she kept saying, jumping out of nowhere and surprising me at random moments, when I was doodling in the classroom, or eating my lunch, or talking to the stray cat that was Sangris. “You’re smiling!”

I said, “Well, sorry, but you don’t have to look so disgusted.”

She stared at me in shock.

My other friends, the beautifully plump ones, told me, “You shouldn’t go around smiling like that. It’s as if you’re trying to get attention.”

“You should learn how to hold it in,” one of them said. “A boy back there thought you were smiling at him. You weren’t, were you? You don’t want to be a . . .” Delicately, she didn’t finish the sentence.

“I’m not,” I said, my eyes widening.

They looked at each other. “Hmm,” was all they said, and then they left, in a cloud of heavy perfume.

It should have been a reality check. But it was easy to disregard them, because Sangris was very much on my side.

“‘Plump and curly-haired’?” he spat at me afterward, quoting something I’d once told him. “Fat and frizzy, more like! Who are they to lecture at you?”

I was sitting cross-legged on top of a table at the back of the school, its surface all dust and peeling paint. I’d gone there to hide from my friends. Sangris sat beside me with his tail curled around himself, the light almost blue where it hit his fur. “What do they know?” He paused, his venom momentarily distracted. “Ah . . . you weren’t actually smiling at that boy, were you?”

“No idea,” I said truthfully.

There was a pause at that. After a moment I looked up from my lunchbox to find Sangris studying me. He didn’t seem angry anymore. A new expression was there, incongruous on his cat-face.

No, actually, I realized, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was a cat. It was incongruous on his face because he was Sangris. Sangris the Free person, who could fly, who shrugged as he talked about being constantly lost—this same Sangris was studying my face with eyes as canary yellow as ever, but different in one way: For the first time since I’d known him, he looked tense.

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