Fight Like a Girl Read online

  PENGUIN TEEN

  an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  Published in hardcover by Penguin Teen, 2020

  Text copyright © 2020 by Sheena Kamal

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Lauren Tamaki

  Cover design by John Martz

  Excerpt from THE BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN by Marlon James, copyright © 2004 by Marlon James. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from WHITE IS FOR WITCHING by Helen Oyeyemi, copyright © 2010 Helen Oyeyemi. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from SOUCOUYANT by David Chariandy, copyright © 2007 by David Chariandy. Used by permission of Arsenal Pulp Press. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Fight like a girl / Sheena Kamal.

  Names: Kamal, Sheena, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190145420 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190145439 | ISBN 9780735265554 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735265561 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8621.A477 F54 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  One Month Earlier

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Present Day

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Six Months Later

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  The cave tremble. The womens all stand and they don’t look like womens no more.

  —MARLON JAMES, The Book of Night Women

  “I dreamt you were the soucouyant,” she said, finally, then giggled. “Silly.” A dream, she said.

  —HELEN OYEYEMI, White Is for Witching

  What comes back to you:

  It was a dark, rainy night.

  There was no moon out.

  A story that ends with a thud.

  Your father’s face.

  A shadow in the woods.

  A slide into a nightmare.

  one

  I know that people don’t like going to funerals, but this is something else. There’s almost nobody here for Dad’s cremation service. Some distant relatives, a few of Ma’s colleagues and a handful of acquaintances. Whose acquaintances, I have no idea. I’ve never seen these people before in my life.

  Dad’s rum shop friends couldn’t even peel themselves off their barstools long enough to show up in the afternoon?

  What the what.

  Somehow, in the middle of the service, Ma senses my mind wandering and sends me a glare that could cut a lesser person with its sharpness. But I’m used to her stabby looks, so it just comes as a warning to sit there and behave, and fold my hands in my lap, and pretend that I like to wear a dress for some reason.

  I tried to get away with my black jeans that show off the thick muscles in my legs, but I got a good old Caribbean slap upside the head for that. Ma wasn’t having any of it today, of all days. When she was about to say goodbye to the love of her life (gag).

  As the service drags on, I should one hundred percent be thinking about my dad and how he died, but I can’t bring myself to do it. What I do instead is replay the disastrous events of my last fight. I guess I look dazed because Ma pinches my arm and mutters, “Trisha, don’t make me break something over your head, girl. Have some respect!”

  Now I have to pay attention because her nails are sharper than her looks and if she threatens to break something over my head, you know she will throw down in front of all these people without a care in the world.

  Alright, fine.

  I focus on the pundit singing religious songs that nobody understands. Finally, after he does the bare minimum to collect his fee, a few people get up to say nice things about Dad and, whoo boy, is it slim pickings up in here! Until Ma gets fed up and makes her way up to give a heartfelt speech about how they met blah blah, how much she loved him et cetera, how long until this is over?

  I glance around the room and see “diversity” because this is Toronto, after all, and “diversity” is what it’s all about. I mean look at all the assorted Degrassi kids, and that was even before Drake came along. We have everybody in Toronto. But in this room, let’s be honest, we mostly have Trinidadians and Pammy. And, except for one nice old man who looks like he got lost on the way to the grocery store, the majority are women.

  The curse of my life. Trinidadian women. One in particular.

  Ma is watching me again and I can tell she’s thinking about a slap. I can’t really blame her. I’m very trying on her nerves and she’s had it rough, my ma. Not that you would know by looking at her.

  Rule number one of being a woman from Trinidad: be hella fierce.

  I’m not kidding, people. This is the rule. Not only will people expect you to be educated, have a job and provide, you must also have it in you to be an all-round queen. Look after whatever stray children happen to wander your way. Drop everything and whip up some roti on a whim. Plus, you will be fetishized like crazy and you need to be prepared for the sexual energy random assholes will want you to expend whenever a bass line pulses through your prodigious hips. Courtesy of the grand bacchanalia that is Trinidad Carnival, people will look at you and imagine you in barely-there sparkling costumes with your tits out and your ass exposed to the warm sunshine, shaking and backing back on whatever sweaty crotch just so happens to be around for a well-timed jook.

  Well, what about the men? (Some p
eople might ask this. Idiots, mostly.)

  Well, what about them? The men, they don’t matter. Not one bit. Looking around this sad excuse for a funeral, they’re not even here. They’re good for a poke in the night—two sapodilla and a nine-inch banana, as the calypso goes—but not much more than that. I’ve got hordes of useless uncles and semi-uncles (and people I’m just supposed to call uncle even though we’re not related) to prove my point. What they do best is disappear. Even when they’re right in front of you, they’re somewhere else. Forever playing cards in the rum shops of their minds.

  It’s the women that stay.

  They’re with you even when they’re not around. They give you pieces of their souls, jagged pointy things, and you can never give them back, no matter how much you want to. No matter how much these pieces cut you and make you bleed for them, over and over.

  I have to tell you something.

  The women of my family are both warriors and witches. Creatures of the night, vampires that haunt the dreams of Caribbean children, soucouyants who will suck the life right out of you and burn you with our flames.

  I first begin to suspect this about my family after Mr. Abdi gives me a book about a soucouyant living in my hood. Fiction, he says. Yeah, right. Like women who take everything you have and keep wanting more could ever be some made-up shit in the pages of a book.

  Another pinch from Ma tells me the service is finally over.

  Mourners trail out and some of them even make it to our townhouse co-op in the east end of Toronto for the food part, which is probably what lured them to the service in the first place. They walk into the front door, past the boiler room, which we call the basement, and up the stairs to where the living room, dining room and kitchen are. There’s another floor with the bedrooms, but nobody goes up there to poke around because the food is laid out on the dining room table. People practically eat and run, muttering their condolences, and we try to find something new to say every time.

  It’s an ordeal, but we do our best.

  We are the saddest people you ever saw, but after everyone leaves our house with their bellies full of dhalpuri, curry channa and sahina, all of a sudden it feels different somehow. Lighter. Like how my arms feel at the gym after Kru makes me punch with weights for what seems like hours. Like they could float away.

  I walk into the kitchen and I feel this airiness about Ma. The grief she should feel over my father’s death is suddenly somewhere in the wind, far away from here. Maybe her sadness joined him at a nearby rum shop—no doubt where his spirit flew when it exited his mutilated body. Even in her black dress, her face bare of makeup, her hair pulled tight into a bun, she’s light itself in this moment.

  Which is weird, right?

  And it’s like I’m waking up from a dream. I see the smile that my mother gives to my aunty Kavita. Pammy, our next-door neighbour, comes in and grins at them both. A pit of dread opens up inside me because it’s like I’m not even there and they’re sharing something I SHOULD NOT be seeing. Pammy’s inclusion in whatever’s happening here shocks me. We are the witchiest of warriors if we’re starting to corrupt the white people in the neighbourhood, too.

  Make them into killers, like us.

  one month earlier

  two

  In the warehouse district on the east side of the city, the Muay Thai gym I train at is tucked between two underground sweatshops that pretend in the daytime they’re legit clothing manufacturers. The ring has seen better days—

  duct tape on the floor, the ropes and the posts

  —but the mats aren’t revolting and the gear is disinfected at least once a week.

  There isn’t much more you can ask for, really. Kru does his best, but he’s pretty busy, what with his plans to expand across the city and spread the joy of connecting shinbone to ribs. Fist to chin. Knee to solar plexus. Elbow to…you get it.

  We call each other gladiators because we go out and fight for reasons beyond us. Reasons that nobody else can understand if you’re not part of it. We don’t even understand it, not really. Nobody is from here, or from Thailand, even, the birthplace of our sport, Muay Thai. Some people call us nak muay farang—foreign boxers. We’re from a couple dozen other countries at least, the knot at the centre of Canada’s cultural mosaic, where everybody is from somewhere else. Our origin stories are irrelevant here, because we all want the same thing.

  That rush.

  The Art of Eight Limbs, the Thai words that stutter off our tongues. They don’t sound right, even to us, but none of that matters. Not really. As long as we pay our respects, we get a pass to train. To fight.

  I’m in the ring right now.

  I do my Wai Kru, the pre-fight dance, and bow to my Filipino coach, who was made Kru ten years ago in Thailand, the only place where it matters. The mecca of warriors like us, in our bright shorts and with our hard bodies. Kru is there in my corner and our team is behind him, cheering. He gives me that look, the one that says You got this, Lucky, and steps back. The rest of the team melts away and it’s just me and her. My opponent. There’s this calm that comes over me, this peace. I see the fierce look in her eyes but I make my own go soft so I can see her whole body, trying to sense her weakness.

  Then one of us moves, and it begins. A dance. Brutal, but beautiful, too.

  When it’s all over, after a left hook catches me at the precise spot that my headgear shifted, plowing through my temple and leaving me face down on the bloody mat, I sit alone on a bench in the locker room of my gym, smelling of sweat and tangy Thai liniment. After all the consolation hugs and smacks on the back, my team has left me alone. Which is how I like it best.

  A fallen gladiator. Beaten but not defeated.

  Undoing my wrist wraps. Pulling off my compression sleeves. Taking the braid out of my hair. I step into the shower and feel the heat of the water sear the pain away and I feel fresh. I forget that my dad is arriving from Trinidad tomorrow, for about a month (as usual), bringing with him a suitcase full of frozen food, made by the hands of women I’ve never met, blood connections who will never stop cooking for other people until the day they die. Food parcelled out in little baggies just so and wrapped up tight for the trip. Frozen coconut water in plastic Coke litre bottles, sealed with duct tape. There will also be tamarind balls for me, because he knows how much I love them.

  That’s the only thing he knows about me.

  He brings nothing for Ma, nothing but his fists.

  three

  I don’t go with Ma to pick Dad up from the airport because she usually does that alone. Dad never talks about anything interesting anyway, and he definitely doesn’t talk about his life back in Trinidad. So what I know about Trinidad isn’t much. To tell you the truth, my knowledge about the island my parents were born on could probably fit in an A-cup sparkly Carnival bra with tassels.

  This is the whole of it: When Columbus discovered Trinidad, he saw three big hills and thought of a trinity, an inverted triangle that his fellow Europeans could fuck until the Amerindians were gone and they were free to populate their sugar cane plantations with slaves. When slavery was abolished, the need for sugar was still there, so they took indentured labourers from India who lived and worked like slaves for years, though you’ll never get a coolie today who’ll admit that their people were actual coolies.

  Like there’s something wrong with being poor and without better options.

  So you have to get on a boat and lose your identity, your culture? So you were led astray by false promises? That shit happens. Get over it. Everything I learned about Trinidad I learned from Ma, and she’s never had any time for history lessons, what with her long shifts at the hospital and all the effort she spends trying to make my father happy.

  Now that Dad’s here, I can’t wait to get out of the house. Ma, too, it seems. We’re at the mall, getting a dress for my graduation ceremony, which will happen in the fall.
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  “Stand up straight,” Ma says, smacking me upside the head with her open palm. The usual. “What are you, a child? Sometimes I think you’re seventeen going on twelve.”

  “Ow,” I say, even though I don’t mind. The insult or the smack. This is what Amanda from the gym calls a love tap. Her family is from Jamaica, so she’s well familiar with the Caribbean style of love.

  The store is filled with dresses, not someplace I usually go, but Ma has the money now, so we’re buying the dress now. Not off the sale rack, because this is a special occasion. My first full-price dress. A milestone as important to her as my graduation, which is waaay off in the future—

  So why are we here exactly, Ma?

  —but I can’t think about that now because I’m trying to find my balance in something a five-year-old at a princess party wouldn’t look out of place in. I stare at myself in the mirror, my muscular shoulders and thighs ruining the drape of pink she’s chosen for me.

  “You are so dark,” she says softly, as though this is a crime. Her expression in the mirror is one of pity, because she is fair and she thought her daughter would be, too. But I’m not. I look like my dad.

  Once we get the dress, Ma’s in a better mood. She even takes me for lunch, but she can’t resist reminding me that there’s enough food at home. We eat tacos at the mall food court and I try to forget what she said about my skin. Other people sometimes comment on it, especially when they see me and Ma standing together, but she doesn’t usually. I think maybe it reminds her too much of Dad.

  After the mall, I ask her to drop me off at the gym. She’s probably feeling guilty about the “you’re so dark” thing, so she does.

  “Trish, you know you’re beautiful to me, right?” she says, when she pulls into the gym parking lot.

  “Ma.”

  She ruffles my hair. “You are. Go have fun.”