LITMIR.BIZ

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then without warning me she stood in front of the dresser and raised the gun, pointing it at the wall.

      I could hear her mom’s voice mumbling through the wall from the living room, talking and laughing to herself.

      “Imagine how easy it would be,” Part said. “She wouldn’t know what happened. Her head should be here, somewhere.” Part aimed, made shooting noises with her mouth. Then her arms fell limp at her sides. “I’m done. We should listen to In Utero.” She opened the door to her room, still holding the gun in her hand. “We should do it loud, so she can hear.”

      I got up.

      “Now come closer.”

      I went closer and her hand fell on my shoulder; her mom laughed again.

      The next week, when I told her a third time about Mom’s abduction, Part looked up at me for a moment, then reached for my hand and told me she believed me. For the rest of the afternoon, we paged through UFO Diaries end to end, going through each sighting, taking special note of locations and dates. This was a day before Litha came back from an out-of-town trip. Part told me she suspected his fosters might be thinking of taking him back to the children’s home.

      The two of us met him after school at the alcove in the park.

      “Most of it was us driving around Hogsback,” he said. “My fosters and I were meant to meet my biological uncle, but he stopped calling when we got to town. It happened the same way with an aunt a few years ago. It’s about money.”

      Part and I watched him push his fingers through his hair, his dreadlocks trimmed into a new mushroom bob.

      “So what did you do?” asked Part.

      “Not much, except drive to Hole in the Wall and eat ham sandwiches.”

      “Did anything fun happen?”

      Litha shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t call it that.”

      Part patted him on the shoulder, half-joking and half-meaning it, like she often did. I looked across the field to the red roof of the public hospital, where they kept my dad under a plastic mask for two days one October, a dish the shape of a bean catching the yellow paste from his lungs.

      •••

      Mrs Robinson clears her throat and quiets us down. “Mr de Silva’s engaged today,” she says. “He’s had to attend an urgent funding meeting in East London, so I’ll be addressing you in his place.”

      There’s a murmur before everyone goes quiet.

      “Now, I take it most of you have seen the news. Yesterday, three local girls were abducted on their way home from netball practice. They’re local students, but the police are also investigating cases from neighboring towns. There could be more.”

      The silence deepens over the courtyard.

      “It’s devastating, of course, but we don’t want to encourage unnecessary panic. The school’s taking the required measures. Members of staff are putting together a committee to produce a memo for students. Evidence suggests the targets are girls, but there’ll be an update for everyone. For now, be discerning: avoid all strangers and don’t walk home alone. There’ll be information on how to use the buddy system in the memo.”

      Then Mrs Robinson makes us file back to class in separate grades.

      I pull my blazer over my shoulders, pushing through the cold as I climb the stairs to bio. It feels like there’s a threat hanging over the school; I imagine it covering us like a blanket, turning the world dim and silent.

       October 7, 1999

      I didn’t harp on about the machine, which is what I started calling it. Most of my family was already openly suspicious of me, appalled at stories of how, when I was 12, I’d convinced Tata, a man still grieving his wife, to move me from three schools in the space of 10 months. And how I’d continued to trouble him until he took me to a doctor in town—at which point I’d been awake for four days. I was diagnosed with dysthymia, which my family didn’t know about, and which Tata and I found foreign too.

      The doctor wrote me a prescription for a trial of SSRIs, which would change the chemical signals in my brain, he said— this was after he’d taken me alone to a separate room next to his dispensary and asked me about my period, and whether I was having sex yet, in which case I had to be warned against whoring—and which Tata pocketed but ignored. Instead, my father opted for a host of herbal remedies from friends and associates, receiving each one with what I thought was a premature sense of gratitude.

      A month later, my symptoms hadn’t abated and we had to drive down to town again for a second prescription. That’s when I decided to tell the doctor about the machine—a mistake, I could tell. He summoned Tata into his office and told him that, aside from the dysthymia, it was possible I was suffering from severe hypnagogic hallucinations, not uncommon in epileptic patients who’d suffered brain trauma from a head injury. Though in my case, he added, it was hard to diagnose me as epileptic without the visible seizures. He leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “The hallucinations will disappear over time,” he said. “The key issue is treating the dysthymia.”

      Tata was quiet for most of the drive home. At last he said, “I understand your injury, but now you’re also unhappy with your life. Even at your age. This is what all this is about.”

      He creased his brow, the way he did whenever someone mentioned Mama. I knew he wouldn’t face me for the rest of the trip.

      I took in the sky with its thick cumulus clouds; it seemed impossible that there was no permanence to the blue that spread itself outside the windows. That from the vantage point of the universe, where light didn’t refract, the only permanence we could know was darkness—or what I’d come to think of as Mama’s home. I didn’t tell Tata that, though. Instead, when we drove into our neighborhood, I turned to him and explained I’d never liked my teeth.

      “Teeth?”

      I nodded and opened my mouth at my reflection in the sunshade. My teeth were crowded and uneven. I told him that since losing my baby teeth, I’d found it difficult to talk. I was struck, most of the time, with the fear of having an audience.

      Tata shrugged, but I could sense his relief. “You want to be even more beautiful than you already are,” he said. “Your grandmother was the same.”

      Two weeks into the next month, we drove out to a maxillofacial surgeon in East London—a booming old Indian man who stooped over me and took X-rays of my skull, before presenting Tata with a sheet of paper marked with a vast sum.

      “It won’t be impossible to save,” he said on our drive back. “The doctor said we could do the braces in a year, so why don’t you give your father some time?”

      I gave it to him, and he was right. I went for surgery toward the end of that year, on his insurance. By the time I got my braces fitted, I was told that my face, always described to me as earnest and severe, had improved fivefold. The pain in my jaws changed my relationship with meat, though. It gave me a diet that trimmed my reflection to that of a stranger’s.

      “No more new schools.”

      That’s what Tata would say whenever he found me observing my reflection in the bathroom mirror; he detected vanity, where I felt curiosity. Not that he was far off. I’d smile back at him, not knowing how else to respond.

      When I started lifting banknotes from the wallet he kept in his bedroom, hoarding full-priced halter tops in a stack at the bottom of my closet, he pretended not to notice. Tata knew the prescription for my SSRIs had gone from trial to regimen, but he’d never come with me to the pharmacy, claiming to be engaged. Only when he’d been drinking, which happened on occasion, would he call me to his room and tell me he’d been reading about what was happening with me.

      “Do you still feel anything?” he’d ask, and in those moments, I would. There were times Tata dismissed me if I couldn’t tell him in terms he understood

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