THE LUCKY ONES by Hananah Zaheer

Ever since Abba died, a girl has been living in my mouth. Mostly, she sits on my tongue and watches me do my homework or make houses with old cereal boxes. When Amma makes me write receipts for the laundry business she runs out of our living room, the girl helps me count. 

“I want to have fun,” she says some days. “Don’t you want to have fun?”

I tell her this is all the fun we can have right now. If Abba was still alive, we would go to the park and sit on the carousel and go around and around till the sky tilts. With Amma, I only get to watch as she walks from sofa to sofa, making foul-smelling hills out of other people’s clothes.

“Imagine if she was the one who died,” the girl says. “Do you think your father would come back to life?

Sometimes the girl doesn’t like being made to eat daal four days in a row or doesn’t want us to go to school or doesn’t want Amma to try to suffocate us with her hug and then she gets angry. She slides down my throat and sits on my heart, her legs wrapped around it. When she squeezes, I have to breathe deeply to keep from crying. 

“What’s gotten into you,” Amma keeps saying and stares at me hard like she can tell I am hiding something. I squeeze my lips together tightly so she can’t see inside my mouth. She would send the girl away and I can’t have that: the girl is my only friend. 

One morning when Amma says we are going to Billy’s house because his mother has died, the girl jumps into my stomach and pinches my lungs.

“Let’s go,” she says. “I have an idea.” 

Billy is the luckiest boy in my grade, maybe in the world. Everyone at school likes him. He comes to school in a white Corolla with his father, who smells like oranges and wears sunglasses and looks like the man on the movie poster at the theater across the street from my house. Sometimes, Billy’s father stops by our house with a bag full of dirty clothes and while Amma and he discuss business in the bedroom, I sit with Billy on the balcony and pretend he likes me. He tells me he loves scary movies. Once he told me he watched a movie where one man hooked up a tube to another man’s arm and drank all his blood. 

“Took all his power,” said Billy and snapped his fingers. “All his luck, too. I have two copies of the DVD at home.”

“Can I come over to watch?” I asked, and he looked at me like he ate something rotten.

“What if he was right?” the girl in my mouth says now. “What if you could change your luck by tasting the blood of someone lucky?” She crawls along the sides of my teeth. 

Amma points at the plastic bag someone dropped off only the night before. “Wear the black dress,” she says. “I’ll clean it later.”

The wool still smells like its owner’s sweat. I hold my breath when I squeeze in. Then I slide Amma’s pearl hairpin into my hair. 

“Please,” I say when she frowns. When she turns, I slip it into my pocket.

The whole taxi ride from the other side of I-40, the girl leaps from my stomach to throat to heart. She plans.

I imagine Billy’s blood will taste like thick honey. I imagine this of all the kids at Julius West Elementary. They are loud and happy and play only with each other. 

“It’s because they’re different,” the girl tells me. “You can’t do anything about that.”

Most days, at recess, I hide behind a bench and poke my own palm with the pearl hairpin until red dots ooze out. I lick the dots and wish for something spectacular to happen to me: to break my leg or to become so sick I have to spend weeks in the hospital, to get electrocuted and wake up in a world where Abba isn’t gone; he is just visiting some place he had always wanted to see—New York, Arizona, Los Angeles. Then, the girl would have never come to live in my chest. 

At the end of the gravel driveway to Billy’s house, Amma fixes her makeup. I feel the hairpin in my pocket.

“Behave like we belong,” Amma says. She dabs perfume onto her wrists and behind her ears. Her breath smells of onions and toothpaste. I hold my arm out. 

“Not for little girls.” Amma pulls her hand away, tucks the perfume deep inside her bag. Then she knocks at the door.

“Stupid bitch,” says the girl.

Billy is in the living room, his bony legs look like an unsteady colt’s. The grownups can’t keep their hands to themselves. He is getting hugged and kissed and offered tiny sandwiches. When we walk to him, he crosses his arms and kicks the leg of the coffee table. His mouth puckers. My face gets five-slaps hot. At home, Amma made me practice saying, “I’m sorry about your mom.” 

“Don’t say it,” says the girl. I listen. Instead, I gather my hair under my chin and bite the ends.

“Don’t you want the kids in school to make you a big card, to crowd around you at lunch?” asks the girl.

Amma stands close to Billy and his father, their three pairs of feet nearly touching. I peer at the bottom of Amma’s chin. The skin near the bone is thin, like the veiny bubble of a frog’s throat. Bruises appear on it easily: mosquito bites or finger marks or a blood spatter like a tiny man had fallen off a balcony onto a tiny sidewalk inside her neck, cracking his head open.

I could pierce it easily when she sleeps quietly on the couch, I’ve told the girl. But she tells me I don’t need Amma’s blood. 

“She’s just as unlucky as you,” says the girl.

Billy’s eyes are wet. His hair falls onto his pumpkin forehead. He pulls at the end of his too-big, too-long shirt. The girl starts climbing up to my throat.

“Why are you here?” Billy’s neck is red and splotchy. His seems sad and small, nothing like the boy from last week when he had led a half-circle around me in a chant. Daughter of a bitch is a bitch, bitch, bitch. 

“No one likes her,” he says and points at me.

My knee is still a thick scab from fighting him to the ground.

“Last warning,” Principal Miller had frowned when Amma came to pick me up after the fight. “One more incident like this and you’re gone.”

“Tell Fatface Miller to shut up,” the girl had said.

“I don’t care,” I had said, instead. 

Outside the school, Amma called a taxi and we rode home silently. Before bed that night, she breathed prayers into a glass of water.

“Drink this,” she said. “Maybe it makes you nicer.”

Amma’s palm is against Billy’s cheek. “This is a sad time.” She is using her bedtime-story voice. “It’s okay to be angry.”

I’ve heard this voice before. When we were new to America and I missed the stray cats outside my grandparent’s house in Lahore, she used that voice to tell me the cats missed me too. Later, I would hear her calm Abba on the other side of my bedroom wall. When she stopped using the voice was when everything went wrong. Abba got angrier. Amma started shouting at him. I move closer to her.

Billy’s face twists and then his entire body pulls away. 

“Oh,” Amma says, and it looks like a deep sadness is pulling at her lips from the inside. She retracts her hand, holds it against her chest. 

The girls says, “She would have swung it against your cheek if that had been you.”

“Son.” Billy’s father taps his head in warning. 

“It’s okay,” Amma says. “When someone close to you is gone, you feel abandoned, angry. I understand.”

“She doesn’t understand you,” says the girl.

I pull at Amma’s sleeve, the girl in my stomach. “I’m hungry.” 

“I’m sorry,” Billy’s father says. 

“I’ve been there,” Amma says again.

The girl is unhappy. She twists inside my throat. I can feel her climbing to the back of my mouth. I imagine she’s on some sort of knotted rope.

“You’re not going to take that,” says the girl. “Say something.”

I shake my head. 

“You can’t come to my house,” Billy says to me. His father squeezes his shoulder.

Amma is looking at me. I wish she would say something nice to me, but she looks like she is ashamed, saddened that I could make someone else so upset.

“She only cares about him,” says the girl, and swings against the roof of my mouth. “Everyone cares about him. Tell him to go to hell.”

“I can go where I want,” I say to Billy. I open my mouth wide to show him the girl swinging wildly. 

“Stop it,” Amma says.

“Weirdo,” Billy says. 

“Kick him,” the girl says.

I do. The kick is loud, Billy’s cry even louder, and before I know it, he has run away somewhere and everyone is looking at me and the skin on my arms is burning in Amma’s grip.

“What is wrong with you?” Her eyes are dark. “Why can’t you be normal?” 

The room goes quiet. I can hear everyone’s breaths, in out, in out. The girl is angry. She wants to climb out of my mouth, to fly around the room and kick everything in sight. I squeeze my lips together.

“Go, apologize.” Amma’s jaw is tight again. 

“I don’t know what to do with her.” She says this to Billy’s father and they both look at me in the same, disappointed, way. 

Behind the door with a blue rocket ship, Billy is in a caterpillar curl on his bed. He is crying. 

“He’s stupid,” says the girl.

“You’re stupid,” I say, not knowing what else to do. 

“This house is stupid,” the girl says.

“Your house is stupid,” I say. 

“Go away,” Billy says.

“Stay,” says the girl.

I close the door behind me. Billy is clutching his stomach. 

“I hate you,” he says. I know he means to be angry but his chin trembles, and he sounds weak. On his bedside is a picture of his mother and him. They are standing in front of the Statue of Liberty. They are smiling.

I sit down next to him. Billy wipes the trickle from his nose on the too-big sleeve of his shirt. I trace the edge of the spaceship on his bedcover. He tucks his hands between his knees. 

“He misses his mommy,” the girl says. 

I pinch the skin on my hand and wonder what Billy’s eyes would look like if I pricked his neck. 

“Here we go,” the girl says. She is sitting on my teeth now. She is nudging my tongue with her feet. I pull the hairpin out of my pocket.

“Are you going to cry?” I ask Billy.

“What do you want?” A tear falls down his cheek, then more. 

His face is doing ugly, sad things. I can feel the end of the pin in my palm. Abba would have wiped my eyes if he saw me looking like Billy. Abba would have held my face. My chin quivers. 

“Stab him,” says the girl. “Do it.”

I want to. I want to listen to the girl and stick the pin in him. I want Abba to come back. But he looks so tiny and sad, I can’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I lean in and kiss him. I press my lips against his wet slug mouth. 

“Ew.” Billy’s head jerks back and he wipes his lips. “What are you doing?” Then he laughs, a small laugh that sounds a lot like his laugh from the playground, like he is better than me, like I could never be like him.

His face is still ugly, but he no longer looks sad. I imagine he will tell everyone at school about this. I imagine they will all whisper about me at lunch. My ears already burn. The girl is awhirl inside my head. Somehow she is in my arms and my legs and my stomach all at once.

I grab Billy’s shoulder and lean in and bite him. Then he punches me in my chest.

“You’re crazy,” he screams and scrambles off the bed. He is holding his mouth.

“You’ve done it,” the girl says. “We’ve done it.”

I can’t breathe because now the girl is dancing. She is in my chest and then in my stomach and then in my legs and back in my throat. Billy is still screaming. His blood tastes just like mine: coins and salt and water. There are footsteps thudding up the stairs. I slide the hairpin into my hair, just above my ear. I imagine Amma will slap me five times, six times. She will take me home in silence and lock me inside my room. And tomorrow, I will be lucky.