The following day, Mel’s arm started changing. The skin went from bright pink to bluish purple. As fencers, we were used to deep and painful bruises. At Drake Rosemont we’d worn them proudly—they were the badges of an honorable battle. But Mel’s bruises were different. Worrisomely dark. Some as black as frostbite.
“Internal bleeding,” Mel said. “My arm is killing me, but I actually take that as a good sign. At least I still have feeling. My muscles and nerves weren’t severed.”
“But the bone is broken.”
She nodded grimly. “We have to assume it’s going to get infected, too. If I keep drinking the tea, I think I’ll be all right. The pennywort will help—it’s antibacterial and anti-inflammatory.”
I nodded, glad to hear she was thinking more positively.
Attending to Mel soon turned into a full-time job. When I wasn’t helping her drink, eat, or pee, or collecting more plants for her tea, I was updating the others on her condition. Her status was simple. She was the same. Her arm remained swollen, discolored, and extremely painful. The whiskey helped to dull the ache, but it wasn’t a palliative, only a mask. And anyway, there were only three bottles of booze. She couldn’t numb herself forever. It soon became clear something had to be done. Something drastic.
Betty took me aside.
“You remember what we talked about? The bone-setting?”
“You can’t be serious.”
She locked eyes with me and I saw that she was.
“Like I said before, I read about it in a novel. It was fiction.”
“Yeah,” she replied, “but the rest of us didn’t read that novel. So in a way, you’re the most qualified for the job.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Can you suggest someone else?”
“What about you?”
She shook her head. “I can do a lot of things, but I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged sheepishly. “I’m not tough enough. I faint just getting the flu shot.”
I sighed. “What about Chester?”
“He could do it. But would you really want him to? Mel’s your best friend.”
I looked at her face, so plaintive and sincere, and felt myself giving in.
“Will you help me?” I asked.
“I’ll try. But don’t get mad if I pass out.”
Later on, I went to broach the idea with Mel. I brought it up gingerly. To my surprise, she didn’t balk.
“I knew it was coming,” she said.
“You did?”
“Yeah, if you hadn’t brought it up, I was going to.”
I felt a rush of relief. “So you know how to set a bone! Of course you do. Why didn’t I ask you before?”
“I don’t know how to set a bone, Rockwell.”
I stared at her, and just as quickly as it had come, my relief faded.
“You must,” I insisted. “Try to remember what your father might have told you.”
“He never said anything.”
“Mel …”
“I wish I could help, but I can’t. And listen—I can’t direct you on this, not when it’s my bone you’re messing with.”
“Mel, you’ve gotta help me.”
“Nope. It has to be done. I get that. But I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even wanna think about it.”
“Don’t you have any advice?”
“A little.”
I was encouraged. “Tell me!”
“Give me whatever whiskey’s left—and make sure someone’s holding me down.”
It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but it was the best I was going to get. After speaking with the others, I decided to attempt the bone-setting that very day, before Mel or I lost our nerve. Betty helped me gather the necessary supplies. When we had everything, Mel lay flat on the ground. Chester knelt over her head, his hands pressed firmly against her shoulders. Avery and Ming each held down a foot. Rish braced Mel’s uninjured arm. Rittika watched from the outskirts. And Anne Marie? As usual, she was nowhere to be seen.
I plied Mel with a big slug of alcohol, and snuck a swig myself. It didn’t extinguish my worry. But at least my hands stopped shaking.
“Splints?” I asked Betty as I crouched beside Mel’s broken arm.
“Check.”
“Splint padding?”
“Check.”
“Bindings?”
“Check.”
“Sling?”
“Check.”
“I guess that’s everything. You ready, Mel?”
She gritted her teeth and nodded. Delicately, I felt for the severed bones with my fingertips. She let out a gasp.
“Wait a second, doc,” Betty said. She ran off and returned a moment later with a small stick, which she placed in Mel’s mouth.
“Bite on that,” she instructed.
When Mel chomped down, I fingered the two sides of the broken bone, trying to coordinate how they’d fit together again. Mel spat out the stick.
“Don’t,” she pleaded in agony.
“It has to be done.” It was the most firm I’d ever sounded.
She started to squirm, but my classmates kept her still as I applied force to the bones, coaxing them straight. I was surprised by how much strength this required. I used the muscles in my hands, my wrists, even my back to pull and bend her forearm into some semblance of what it had been. It wasn’t just the effort that required strength, but the need to counter Mel’s resistance. Despite all the hands on her body, she thrashed like a wild animal. Her wailing reached a piercing crescendo. I kept my eyes fixed on her arm, at the job at hand. If I looked at her face, I knew I’d break down.
Thank god Betty remained calm and level-headed. Steadily, she handed me what I needed, item by item. I tried to feed off her energy. When the bones felt aligned again, I pressed padded splints against the inside and outside of Mel’s arm. I wrapped the bindings tightly from wrist to elbow and back again. The result was secure and poker straight. Her arm looked like a mummy’s.
I wasn’t sure if I’d done it right, but I’d done it.
“Finished?” Betty asked.
“Finished.”
Ever so carefully, Rish and Chester sat Mel up while Betty helped her put on the sling.
Sweaty, my own muscles strained, I finally looked Mel in the eye. “I did my best.”
Her face was wet from sweat and tears. I expected her to yell at me, or ignore me altogether, but she didn’t.
“Thanks, Rockwell. I’m proud of you.”
It was a moment I was sure I’d never forget, but something tainted it: the sight of Rittika. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her watch Mel. Her expression was not relieved and thankful, but sly and hungry. The look of a cat who had just cornered a mouse.
After the procedure, Mel took another sip of whiskey, went back to the tent, and collapsed. I crawled in, too, and lay next to her. More than anything, I wanted to sleep, but I was too wired. I didn’t know when I’d come down from the high of the procedure. Resting there beside my friend, I found myself wondering how we’d gotten into this mess. How it had all started in the first place. The journey for me, I realized, had begun years before the crash. It had started when I couldn’t stand being home any longer, and taken matters into my own hands.
Alexa had been a junior in high school then. While I still collected stuffed animals and read old copies of Ranger Rick and Highlights, she talked about boys with her friends and knew how to draw perfect cat eyes with black eyeliner. She wasn’t dressing in all black yet, but she had already headed partway into darkness. She was mopey and ill-tempered much of the time. She barely spoke to my parents and was outwardly hostile when my dad told her to study harder for the SATs or to add another AP class to her schedule. He wanted Alexa to apply to Yale but was openly skeptical about her chances.
“If only you were better at maths.”
“Math,” she snapped. “Singular.”
“If you spent half as much time studying as you do texting, you would be a star pupil.”
“Dad, no one uses the word ‘pupil’ anymore.”
“You better watch your mouth.”
“I will when you watch your mouth!”
My father’s eyes burned; I could practically see the fire flaring inside them.
“Do you want to be grounded again?” he demanded.
“Yeah … that would be great. That way I can keep track of when you visit your girlfriend.”
My father struck her, hard, across the mouth. Her bottom lip split open. For a week, there was a crimson zigzag where her teeth had gnashed against softness. Grounded indefinitely, Alexa sat at her desk, an SAT prep app open on her laptop, but all she did was peer out the window, long after nightfall. She looked and listened for telltale signs: the mechanical rumble of the garage door opening, headlights coming to life. Sometimes she came into my room and shook me awake.
“He’s gone,” she would mumble, half-asleep herself, dark shadows under her eyes, a combination of smudged eyeliner, fatigue, and stress.
“So what?”
“Maybe for good this time.”
“I wish.”
“We could change the locks.”
“What good would that do?” I asked.
“It would send a message.”
“He’s always going to find a way back in.”
“You’re right,” she said, giving me a kiss on the forehead. I felt the lumpy, zigzagged scab. “Sometimes I forget you’re the younger sister.”
I might have been young, but I was used to my father having girlfriends. He’d had them for as long as I could remember. When I was little, I didn’t understand that there was anything weird or scandalous about my father squiring an ever-rotating group of young women. Their existence was addressed in vague terms, if it was addressed at all. This one was the daughter of a guy who worked at the same plant as my dad. That one was the friend of a friend. What they all had in common was youth, and a particular kind of dusky beauty that Alexa referred to as “Indianness.” The girls might have been, outside of our imaginations, Jewish, Italian, Greek, or Persian, but from a distance, they could all pass for desi.
As for my mother, she pretended these girls didn’t exist. But I wondered if she secretly compared herself to them. If she did, she probably found herself lacking. Blond and introverted—my mother was the opposite of what Alexa and I imagined to be budding Bollywood starlets.
Yet years before, her non-Indianness had been a source of pride. Once, she’d told me the story of how my father had left a girl in India in order to marry her. My mother had seen the turn of events as fateful and romantic, a young man deciding against an arranged marriage to find true love. But as the years passed, the truth came out. And it wasn’t romantic at all. The young Indian girl he’d left behind was reincarnated in my hometown. She appeared again and again, with different faces but the same hair. My mother must have realized that my father hadn’t abandoned his Indian bride after all but simply found a steady stream of replacements.
My father’s girlfriends weren’t much older than Alexa was. She knew this because she followed them sometimes. Once, she drove with a friend to the local ShopSmart and trailed my father and his then-date from behind. The girlfriend pushed a shopping cart in high heels and tight jeans, my dad at her side, pointing and advising. Alexa mimicked her wiggly-jiggly walk in my bedroom. I laughed till my stomach hurt.
“Maybe he knows her from work,” I managed to say.
“Whatever. She looked like a whore.”
I still slept with my Chewbacca stuffed animal, but I was old enough to know what a whore was, and I couldn’t get the dirty sound of the word out of my head once Alexa had said it.
A few days later, I opened the door to the bathroom Alexa and I shared to find her on her knees in front of the toilet, her face moist, her hair disheveled.
“Get out!” she screamed. This wasn’t the first time I’d caught her. And I’d seen other things that weren’t normal: mashed-up pills, a stash of empty cough syrup bottles, long red scratches on the inside of her arms.
I took her words to heart. I shut the door and got on the Internet to search for boarding schools. I wasn’t going to run away from home. Hitchhiking and sleeping under bridges sounded pretty stupid; boarding school was a safer bet. Maybe it would be like Hogwarts.
I’d applied to Drake Rosemont for superficial reasons. I liked the hoity-toity name. I liked that it ran from grades seven to twelve, and that there would be kids of different ages. I liked the buildings on the website, how the library looked like a medieval castle, with turrets, spires, and gargoyles. The pictures reminded me of Yale when Dad had taken Alexa and me on a campus tour. Maybe if I got into Drake Rosemont, he would approve. Maybe he’d be proud. It was an odd thought to have when ultimately all I wanted to do was escape him.
I applied all by myself. Drake Rosemont was at the top of my list, but there were other schools, too. Online, I filled out the applications to the best of my ability. I did it in secret so nobody could tell me not to. For the hell of it, I threw in some short stories and poems. I hoped they would set my applications apart.
I got into three of the schools. When my Drake Rosemont email acceptance came, it was accompanied by a personalized note. “We love your writing, Samantha. It’s unique and inspired.” Turns out that the writing samples qualified me for a scholarship I hadn’t even known existed.
To be in the running, I had to visit Drake Rosemont for an interview. I told Alexa I needed her help. She was so impressed with my motivation and resourcefulness, she volunteered to drive. We told our parents we were off to visit colleges and they let us go.
We took to the road in Mom’s car, the old Subaru. I didn’t mind its dents and dings, its rearview mirror reinforced with duct tape. I didn’t mind when Alexa cranked up the volume of her music and pressed the gas pedal way too hard. I felt like we were in a spaceship bound for a faraway planet.
I dangled my arm out the window and looked at the smudged mehndi design on my palm. Alexa had applied it the day before. She’d squirted it out of a carrot-shaped plastic bag like frosting, then rubbed in a mixture of lemon juice and sugar to make it set. I’d left on the mehndi only two hours, though Alexa had told me it needed six. The result was too light, the color of a tea stain, only one shade darker than my normal skin.
It was Alexa who had insisted on the bindi, too. She stuck it low on my forehead, almost between my eyes. Then she pushed a pile of thin silver bracelets up my arm. “Made in India, purchased at Target,” she said.
“Why so much Indianness?” I demanded.
“You’re in costume,” she told me. “For the interview.”
“Why can’t I just be myself?”
“Because being the daughter of an abusive jerk and a pill-popping housewife is not going to get you in.”
I cringed, then said, “But being Indian is?”
“You’re not Indian,” she chided. “You’re half Indian. Biracial.”
“Why does that matter?”
“It’s a hook. Being mixed is what’s in. What’s dope.”
“I’m not sure …”
“Oh my god, Sam, will you just listen to me? All you have to do is present yourself as mixed, and you’re golden.”
“But how do I do that?”
“Easy. Talk about the stuff you like in real life, and then throw in Indian stuff. Just make it up, like how you love Indira Gandhi and how you celebrate Holi. Then talk about being pulled between two cultures, and how you’re determined to forge a new path. Colleges love that garbage. I think Drake Rosemont will, too.”
“That sounds kind of … fake.”
“Trust me, it’s exactly what they want to hear. But you have to back it up with sound bites.”
“Sound bites?”
“Yeah, like how multiracial people need to be acknowledged. How it’s good that people can check off more than one race on census forms now. How multiracial people have been invisible for too long. Blah, blah, blah.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” I repeated.
“They’ll buy it. You’ll see.”
“What if my interviewer is mixed race?”
“Please,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Drake Rosemont sounds like a factory where white bread is baked.”
I nodded, then thought better of it, and waggled my head from side to side, like our Indian relatives.
On the drive, Alexa had pulled up her sleeves to show me where she’d cut herself again. She showed me how the razor marks were horizontal, because she didn’t want to kill herself. “I just like the feel of pain. Isn’t that messed up?”
I assured her that it was. It most definitely was.
“Why do you like it?” I asked squeamishly.
She thought for several moments. “It’s like I’ve grown this hard shell. It’s probably because of Dad—you know I need to be tough around him. So I cut myself to break that shell. To feel things.”
“I don’t understand.”
“So … if I cut myself, or get high, or don’t eat, then I get emotional. But otherwise, I’m kind of numb.”
“It hurts to hear you say that.”
“I know. But I’m the first pancake, right? Bound to turn out bad.”
“You’re not bad, Alexa.”
“Listen, enough about me. It’s your interview, and I want you to kill it.” She glanced at me and smiled. “If you get into Drake Rosemont, you’ll be free.”
At that moment, I understood that one day my sister’s shell might grow too hard, and if that happened, I might no longer be able to get through to her. Already, she saw herself as broken. Even worse, she was addicted to pain. I think my sister loved the perfection of it. Simple and pure, that kind of hurt, while so much at home was complicated, twisted, and ugly.
We drove like there was no tomorrow, listening to a playlist Alexa had made. All of the songs were depressing, and all of them made her strangely happy. When we arrived on campus, she reoriented my bindi—it had migrated to my eyebrow—and gave me a high five.
“You’ll do great,” she promised.
At first, I didn’t say much. I was too nervous about Alexa’s instructions. I didn’t know if I could pull off her plan. The interviewer, Mrs. Duval, asked me about my extracurriculars, my favorite classes, my writing samples. I struggled to introduce the topic of being mixed; there never seemed to be a good segue.
“Being Indian, do you relate to any Indian authors?” she asked. “Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai? I myself love reading about India. What a diverse country. So vivid, so vibrant, so colorful!”
“I’m not sure I relate to any of them,” I told her, seeing an in. “Since I’m mixed-race, I don’t totally identify as Indian. I’m different—part of a population that needs to be acknowledged. Did you know mixed people didn’t used to be counted on census forms? We were invisible for a long time. I’d like to change that.”
Mrs. Duval scrutinized me. I could tell from her expression that she was thinking something, but I didn’t know if it was good or bad. “What you say is interesting,” she replied finally. “If you are selected to be a student here, perhaps you’ll consider starting a club for other mixed-race students? I think Drake Rosemont would benefit from that.”
I nodded. “Sure, I’ll think about that. And for the record,” I added, “sometimes I do like to read Indian writers.”
When she smiled broadly, I could tell she’d already made up her mind. Alexa had been right.
“You know,” she said, “we have some rather high-profile Indian families affiliated with Drake Rosemont. Have you ever heard of a businessman by the name of H. Vijay Singh?
I shook my head.
“Mr. Singh is very supportive of Drake Rosemont. I think it’s fair to say he is one of our most generous donors. His daughter and son are students here. They’re your age, I believe.”
“I’d love to meet them.”
She continued to smile and I saw myself reflected in her eyes. I’d become a symbol of multiracialism, the wave of the future. When Alexa asked me how the interview went, I told her I’d nailed it.
Just for kicks, we stopped at an Indian restaurant on the drive home. We ordered mango lassis. Alexa drank hers and half of mine and for once didn’t go to the bathroom afterward. I peeled off the bindi and stuck it on the underside of the table, next to an old wad of chewing gum.
The road trip had been one of the best times I’d ever had with my sister. Later, I would come to see it as a turning point. I was off to Drake Rosemont only a few months later, and she was admitted to the hospital for the first time. Apparently, her shell wasn’t hard enough to withstand a razor blade plunged too deep.
At the hospital, I told her I didn’t have to go away to school. I could stay home and be with her. But she wagged her finger in the air defiantly, despite the IV line and stitches in her arm. “You have to go,” she said. “I need you to go.”
As it turned out, I had no trouble convincing my parents that I should go away. Their attention was on my older sister; they didn’t need another distraction. When I showed my dad the pictures of Drake Rosemont’s campus, he liked them. He liked my scholarship even more. There was no way we could have paid for even one semester on our own.
“You’re the one I don’t need to worry about,” he told me as he drove me to campus, suitcases and boxes loaded in the trunk and stacked in the backseat. It was my second trip to Drake Rosemont in the Subaru. My mother had stayed home in an Ambien daze. It was just as well. I went crazy when both of my parents were together in close quarters.
I watched my hand trail out the open window, my palm long ago scrubbed of mehndi. There was no music this time. We were crawling in traffic, nowhere near space.
“You’ve got it together, Sam,” my father continued. “Alexa could learn a thing or two from you.”
I thought about how my father had one voice for me and another for my sister. He was always gentler with me. He never had that nasty glint in his eye that he had when Alexa was around. I don’t know why Alexa was his only target. Maybe they were too much alike, both stubborn and strong-willed. Or maybe she resembled his forgotten Indian bride in a way that made him resentful. Whatever the reason, I hated my father most when he was kindest to me. Right then in the car, I wished he were dead.