When I’m sure I have only dreamed everything, I am grabbed. My body held tight. A lurching against me. Hands fumbling on my chest, rubbing against my nipples. Fingers across my mouth. A throat against my nape. He rubs against my skin, and there down below I can feel it smashing up against my flesh, grinding against my buttocks. His fingers under my uniform, on the bare skin of my buttocks, moving to the cloth of my underwear; pressure against that part of me that has become bad, the source of all corruption. Fingers groping and entering sacred space. He takes my hand and forces the fingers open, puts it there around him, his large fingers wrapped around mine, moving. I can feel his rage. Something transferring from him to me. I know that I will never again be alone in my body. A grunt, and my hand is sticky. He sags against me and I think of grabbing the hand that rests on my shoulder and putting it in my mouth and crushing my teeth down until I taste red. I don’t do it. I am always too afraid of what will happen after that.
He holds me against him as his breath calms. He whispers against my hair, “Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Your Amma will leave.” His voice is almost weeping. I stagger away. I go into the bathroom, bend my head. I vomit every single time.
*
I stop going down to the river. Thatha tries to persuade me to go, but I say I have too much homework. I miss the glide of the river over my skin. But it is so much better to give up these things than to think of Samson hidden and watching. I stop wearing my American shorts. I put them in a bottom drawer until Puime says, “What happened to your shorts? You never wear them anymore.”
“Do you want them?”
Her eyes narrow in surprise. “What? Really? You don’t want them?”
“No, I’m sick of them. You take them.”
Glee in her voice. “Really? But your aunt sent them from America.”
I brush away the words, as if shorts from America are an everyday occurrence. “No, I don’t want them. They barely fit anyway. You take them.”
“Okay!”
I pull them out of the bottom drawer; with them, the memory of his hand, huge and tight around my bare thigh. I swallow hard and throw them at her head. She catches them, laughing. “I can’t wait to wear these! Amma will have a fit.”
*
I go from his clutch to sitting at my desk at school, and it is like being in another world where what happens to me at home is impossible. Someone says, “What is that? What happened to you?” She points at the bruise on my arm, just above the elbow and therefore not hidden like the others by my uniform. I rub it and shrug. “Nothing. Just bumped it somewhere.”
In the bathroom I undress fast, bathe quickly, never pausing to look. My body doesn’t belong to me anymore. There is a fog around it, that white cloud settling. So I never see the bruised flesh, the imprint of his fingers.
*
I push my table against my door every night. He has never come inside at night. But he could come. At any time he could come. Something has started happening inside my skin. Sprouting from my shamed heart, a dark, fibrous waterweed grows and spreads along the nerves of my body. It reaches to every far capillary and vein, turning them green, the green of algae or stagnant water. I am covered, choked up, clogged on the inside. I know that if I am cut, I would not bleed red, but instead, a rotted putrid green.
One thing helps. I keep a small fruit knife under my pillow, stolen from under Sita’s watchful eye. When I feel too filled up, I press its point against the skin on my wrist. I press until a single point of red rises. It’s always a relief, that glowing ruby bead when I had expected a necrotic green gush. It brings a rush of safety, a hum of quiet. I can sit back, fall asleep even. I know this: I have magic skin. When I pierce it, it quivers like a million metal filings rearranged by a magnet. Always this to calm me, to take me away.
*
When I bring my school report home, Amma looks at it, then at me with enraged eyes. “What is this nonsense? You were always so good at math! And reading. What are these ridiculous scores? What the hell has happened?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, Amma.” One foot rubbing against the top of the other. Can’t she see what I’ve become? I can’t concentrate in school. There is a hum in my head, a sort of heaviness and buzz that makes it impossible to pay attention. My body is always awake, wide stark awake and waiting for danger, but my head is clouded. It’s hard to pay attention to the teachers. It’s hard to pay attention to the other girls. Everything they do seems stupid now. As if they live some other life very far away from mine.
“Is it some boy? Is that it? My god, if you’ve taken up with some boy, if you’re going to bring shame to us, I swear I will wring your neck myself.”
Her words pound into my skull. I look down at my feet and say, “No, Amma, no boy.”
Her eyes cut through me. “Then what is it? What is distracting you so badly?” She gets up, moves toward my room; already I can tell what she is thinking. “No, Amma, please, no,” I gasp.