Chapter Seven
What are you hiding from?” It was a strange question coming from someone you didn’t know. Too intimate for a first conversation, especially if you were huddled under bleachers. So intimate, in fact, that a person couldn’t be blamed for losing her heart to it.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t those words that stole Ashna’s heart. Maybe it was the strangely shaped eyes, one slightly smaller than the other, and the utter lack of feeling in them as he said those words. A question so personal with not a flicker of anything.
Nothing.
Ashna watched eyes. Studied them. As Green Brook High’s star goalkeeper, scanning eyes and body language across the pitch was what she did. A goal took seed long before the ball hit the net, stretching it back against its knots. Or in her case, before her gloved hands slapped around the ball before it got near that sacred net. This season alone she had prevented forty goals.
His eyes held nothing.
Whose eyes held nothing?
Whose clear—what color were his eyes? She couldn’t tell in the shadows—held nothing? At first she thought they looked almost black, like her own. Then she scooted out from her crouch under the bleachers and he straightened up, and the beam of stadium lights fell across his face. Emeralds glinted in the shadows.
There was this stained-glass window in the Sagar Mahal, the Sripore palace that had been Ashna’s home until she was ten, all in shades of green. Glass chips from the palest jade to the deepest moss and everything in between. Gold filigree edged each piece. At night the glass pieces seemed lifeless. In the day, the sun infused them with light, turning them into gemstones so luminous Ashna could stare at them for hours, mesmerized.
“Hello?” He waved his hand in front of her face. “Did you have a seizure or something? Are you OD-ing?”
“OD-ing?” Yes, that was the first word she ever said to him. In the two and a half years that followed—the best years of her life—he would insist it’s what swept him off his feet. That absurd word, said with enough incredulousness to cover all the questions she’d had at the sight of the first person who had found her in a hiding place she’d counted on for a year and a half without being found.
The real miracle was that she had never doubted that she really had done that. Swept the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen off his feet. How could she have doubted it, when the air became saturated with sensation every time they got near each other? The earth softened beneath her feet when he laughed. Eyes that had seemed lifeless until that laugh filled them with light, Fourth of July fireworks over the bay.
“I’m not hiding,” she said with all the indignation of a liar. Then, just to prove it, she stepped out from under the bleachers, dusting off her soccer shorts and jersey.
It was safe now anyway. Her teammates were gone. She usually hid until they left, so she didn’t have to go through the entire song and dance of why she couldn’t go out with them on a Friday night after practice.
She had to get back to Baba. Fridays were hard on him. Curried Dreams stayed open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, so she went to Palo Alto to help.
It’s not like she couldn’t tell her teammates this, but she didn’t want to. No one needed to know anything about her family. She liked having her life divided neatly into airtight compartments, nice and tidy. No one in her family knew that she had gone back to playing soccer either. It wasn’t a small thing to hide, playing a varsity sport, but Trisha had graduated early, and Vansh was at boarding school, so Ashna was the only Raje at the high school, which had worked out perfectly when, as a freshman, she had rediscovered the sport by accident.
When she’d lived in Sripore, it hadn’t been a choice. Mamma’s life revolved around getting girls to play sports, so naturally her daughter had to play. Ashna didn’t let the pop of sadness drag her down. The days of her mother caring about what Ashna did were long gone. When Baba moved her here, he and everyone else in the family seemed to forget that she’d had a life before that. It was as though that twenty-hour flight erased her life in Sripore.
In freshman year, Ashna had found herself at the tryouts. She had no idea why she’d gone, because she hadn’t allowed herself to miss it. When she made the team, the idea of telling anyone didn’t even enter her mind. Baba wouldn’t have come to her games anyway. He’d gotten so big in the past few years that he was having a harder and harder time getting in the car. Driving out to the Anchorage once every few months to see his mother was the only time he left home and the restaurant. She didn’t want Mina Kaki and HRH coming to games and making a big deal out of it. As for Shobi, it was out of the question. Ashna did not need to give her parents another reason to fight.
Exactly when the secret started to feel good, Ashna had no idea, but having something all her own had felt great. One less thing in which her success or failure was naked in front of everyone. Her cousins were her best friends, but she couldn’t even tell them. The lie had become comforting in a way she couldn’t explain.
“Are you sure?” the beautiful boy said, meeting Ashna’s eyes more directly than anyone at school ever looked at one another. There was something adult, unafraid, something deeply confident about the way he met her eyes, as though he didn’t know how not to see her.
“Yes, I’m sure I’m not OD-ing on anything, but thanks for asking.”
His mouth twisted. He had a mouth like the models in the perfume ads from Nisha’s glossy magazines. A wide, lush mouth made for hinting at a smile by the slightest pulling up at the edges. He said nothing more, just waited for her to answer the question he’d really been asking, the one she had deflected so clumsily.
“I’m hiding from the girls on my team.” Hearing the words pop out of her mouth surprised her so much she blinked up at him.
A frown folded between brows that were thick and arched. “Your teammates are not nice to you?” He had an accent of some sort. Something South American or European, she couldn’t decipher what kind exactly, but it explained how he looked. Boys in Woodside didn’t look like this, sun-kissed in the way of glossy magazine models.
“No, they’re very nice to me.”
“You hide from people who are nice to you, then?” He even cocked his head with an accent. Something about that made her want to laugh out loud.
“Every single thing you’ve said to me has been a question,” she said needlessly.
She wasn’t sure if he meant to answer, but before he could, his gaze flew to the right of her head and before she could respond to the warning shout he gave, his hand shot out and caught the ball before it smashed her in the head.
One-handed, his palm splatted against the leather, fully in control.
Shouts rose behind her. With the kind of skill she’d only seen pros display, he spun the ball up in the air, bounced it with his knee, and then letting it drop to his feet he juggled it a few times before bending it in a perfect arc to the exact spot on the pitch where some boys from the soccer team were waiting for it.
At first there was complete stunned silence, then cheers rose from the pitch.
His face shuttered. His entire body went into lockdown. Ashna had never seen anyone pull on armor, but this had to be how it looked. He turned, eager to make an escape, but then he threw a glance at her and paused. Possibly because her mouth was hanging open.