“Hello to you. I see you found Zak. Please join us, won’t you? Everyone, this is Karys. She’s practically Zak’s sister. Isn’t she gorgeous?” I saw Zakai pick up his glass and throw back the clear liquid from my peripheral vision as Giselle reached out and tipped my chin, turning my face, her long red nails scraping across my skin. “I dismissed you based on your height but . . . on second thought . . . maybe print work.” She turned my face in the opposite direction, toward Zakai, and I watched him watch her, his expression blank, his eyes still bleary. “A modern-day Cleopatra. These cheek bones, these lips,” Giselle went on, “are far too photogenic to go to waste. Why attend school when I could make you a millionaire in a matter of months?” She laughed, letting go of my face.
“I . . . maybe,” I said. Perhaps this was a second chance for me and Zakai, another way for us to be together. He hadn’t been welcomed at my uncle’s home, and I wasn’t allowed at the group residence he’d first inhabited, but maybe . . . maybe we’d do it together again: perform for watching eyes.
Despite his obvious inebriation, Zakai seemed to be watching my expression closely. His gaze burned and he let out a low growl that I wondered if I’d imagined in the midst of the surrounding cacophony. He stood very suddenly, rounding the table, and taking me by my arm roughly. He pulled me through the crowd and though I tried to protest, to tell him he was hurting me, it was far too loud for him to hear my quiet pleas.
He led me through a door near the elevators, up a short flight of steps, and back into the chilly night, this time onto an empty rooftop area featuring nothing but pipes and gravel.
“What are you doing here, Karys?” he gritted.
I took him in, desperation climbing higher, his own expression filled with fury. He looked like a stranger to me, and the small fire I’d kept burning slowly began to die.
“I . . . I need you. Maybe we could . . . what Giselle said . . . we could be together that way . . . I could . . .” It felt as though a bubble of air was slowly expanding in my throat, growing bigger, trapping my words. My heart pounded, echoing in my brain and dispersing my thoughts.
Zakai stepped closer and for one wild moment I thought he might take me in his arms, soothe me, tell me everything would be all right—because he’d make it so. But he brought his face close to mine, his jaw clenched tightly, the words hissing through his alcohol-saturated breath. “You were right, Karys. I did think of you as a pretty little fool. No better than Bibi.” He smiled, his lips stretching cruelly, his eyes mere slits within his face. “My very own dancing monkey,” he grated. “Lucky me.”
My soul withered like a flower deprived of water under the unforgiving midday sun.
Zakai grabbed me suddenly and walked me backward toward the low concrete wall at the edge of the roof. He tipped me backward. My heart pounded as I let out a terrified squeak, flailing my arms, grasping for him. “You liked it once,” he said, “the danger.” He brought his face close to mine once again. “But not anymore. Not anymore.” He turned me around, pushing me so I landed on my butt on the gravelly ground. Air whooshed from my lungs along with a pained cry. “That’s good, little star,” he said, moonlight and something I could not name flashing in his flinty gaze. “Go home now, Karys. Go back to your life and leave me to mine.” He turned, weaving slightly as he walked away, leaving me where I lay.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The café where my friend Carly worked was only a few blocks from school. They served sandwiches, salads, soup, coffee, and baked goods. I’d gone there a time or two for study groups she’d invited me to, and I went there the day after I’d left my uncle’s apartment and Zakai had smashed my heart into a million pieces. Carly was there, so I applied for a job, and she put in a good word for me with the manager, an older woman with a soft round shape and a hundred braids hanging down her back. Within the hour, I had my very first job.
I tried to feel the joy of the accomplishment, and the victory of such a necessity now that I was completely on my own, but the cloud of despair that had wrapped itself around me refused to dissipate. I was numb. Adrift on a sea of melancholy with no land in sight.
I stowed my suitcase in a supply closet at the restaurant, behind boxes of cleaning products, and only carried a small Ziploc bag of personal items in my backpack. After classes, I spent the days I wasn’t working in the library. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom and freshened up as best as possible, and I spent the nights huddled in doorways, my coat wrapped tightly around me, the shivering of my limbs keeping me from slumber.
I was tired at work, but grateful for the warmth, and the steady buzz of activity that kept my dismal thoughts at bay. As long as my hands were active and my body was in motion, I could quiet my mind.
After the first week at my new job, the manager, Ayana, caught me going in my suitcase before work. “Karys,” she said, standing behind me as I turned, “where exactly are you living, girl?”
Heat infused my face. “I . . . nowhere,” I squeaked, not able to meet her eyes. Would she dismiss me now? I had put my uncle’s address on the application I’d filled out, and now she knew that was a lie.
“You’ll stay with me then,” she said, her expression softening. “I won’t have an employee who doesn’t get a regular shower.” And though her words were semi-harsh, her eyes were kind, and her offer was generous. I began gratefully sleeping on her couch.
At night, the squeal of sirens—which seemed to be the constant background noise of New York City—would fade away, replaced by the distant bleating of goats, and the quiet cries of the night birds rustling in the trees. I would smell the almond oil I’d once worn, and feel the hot, dry wind waft across my skin. Then, inevitably, some sound would bring me from my trance, the real world rushing back in, and I’d become aware of the warm tears tracking down my cheeks and the emptiness next to me where Zakai had always been.
I began to bleed a week after moving into Ayana’s apartment and I sat on the edge of the bathtub crying into my hands. I hadn’t taken the birth control pills Haziq had once provided for me since leaving Sundara and in the back of my mind, I had worried about the consequences. What a terrible thing it would have been to realize I was carrying Zakai’s child. And yet the proof that I was not, felt like the last bit of hope I hadn’t admitted to myself I was clinging to, had just been torn away, leaving an even deeper chasm of desolateness in its wake.
After a time, I had risen to my feet. Whether I wanted it or not, and regardless of the desperate nature of the desire, I had no means of compelling Zakai to remain in my life. I had only myself to rely on.
I opened my first bank account and began depositing my checks and almost every penny of my tips. I ate once a day, either the free meal provided by my workplace, or on the days I had no shift, the cheapest fast food I could find—meat patties squeezed between two squishy pieces of bread, or a pie made with round disks of meat over a sweet and salty tomato topping. My stomach still wasn’t used to this new and unappetizing diet in the country I now called home. But I wolfed it down anyway. I was always hungry. The feeling made me think of Zakai. He lived in a castle now, one made of steel and glass. Now I was the one who felt like a beggar.