Do you feel real when he touches you or do you still feel dead?
I wasn’t born when Ada met Ewan, but I can tell the story anyway. And I’m even glad I wasn’t there. It’s good that Ada had that for herself, before the rest of us got to her.
Like me and Soren, Ewan happened in Virginia. It was winter and there was a party at the tennis house, bodies pressing in a crush downstairs and music thudding against the plaster of the walls. Ada had gone upstairs to one of the bedrooms, where the noise faded away into strains of reggae and blue light filtering through a computer screen. Ewan was sitting on the bed with his back to the wall, but she had no idea who he was; she’d never seen or noticed him before that night. A friend introduced them and Ewan was easy, charming, comfortable. Soon Ada was sitting next to him, both of them chatting as people came in and out of the room, smoke softening the air around them. Ewan was Irish, green-eyed, the star of the tennis team. When they tentatively held hands, Ada smiled nervously. She was only eighteen and she was still sweet.
“My mother thinks my palms are rough,” she said. Ada didn’t feel delicate—she never had. At fourteen, she couldn’t fit into dresses Saachi wore when she was twenty-five.
Ewan ran his thumb over her life line. “No,” he said, looking at her as if she was wedding crystal. “They’re very soft.”
Ada blushed. She stayed with him until the friends she came with were ready to leave. The next day was a Saturday and, as usual, everyone ended up at Gilligan’s. Ada kept looking around for Ewan as the night wore in and around, but he didn’t show up and her heart sank. It began to climb again, cautiously, when she ran into one of his roommates as the club was closing out, and, giddy with luck, caught a ride back to the tennis house. She hung out with them upstairs, trying to seem casual when she was really waiting and hoping. Finally, Ewan wandered into the room and smiled to see her.
“I had a feeling it was you,” he said, and took her down to his room, where she taught him to play cards with Maxwell playing in the background. It was four in the morning, but Ada had gotten what she wanted, to see him. She always got what she wanted, even before I showed up. There was a framed photograph of a girl in a graduation gown on his dresser, but Ada didn’t ask any questions. She knew enough to avoid certain answers, and the moment with Ewan was too significant to disturb with whatever his actual life held. All that mattered was that he made her laugh and that there was so much peace with him, she could almost see it in the air. When he leaned in to kiss her, she tasted sharp smoke in his flesh and she could see the starkness of his skin against hers. It was her first time kissing a white person, and briefly, she wondered why he didn’t have any lips. He didn’t seem real, from the thick richness of his voice and the weight of his rolled consonants to the things about his life that sounded as if they were pulled from the Frank McCourt memoirs she’d read as a child. He felt like an escape, so Ada spent the night wrapped up and tucked in his arms while he played Al Green to her. We’re dying today, she thought. I could do this for almost forever.
She went back to her dorm room in the morning. It was finals week, so she continued studying, and in the afternoon, she ran into Ewan in the library. He leaned out of his carrel to share his earphones with her.
“Listen to this,” he said, and played her some Amos Lee. Ada wrote down the name of the song and then Ewan kissed her cheek and left.
In the evening, she went to a final exhibit for a photography class because she’d modeled for one of her friends in the class and she knew Juan, another of the photography students. He was from Mexico, slim and brown and beautiful. He used to live in the house down the hill with Luka, and he burned packs and packs of India Temple incense. One evening, he and Ada had sat together and talked about how amazing it would be if either of them could play the violin. Juan had laughed and tilted his head back. “I’d just sit on my porch with a bowl of weed and play it all day, man.” He’d held an imaginary bow and moved it against imaginary strings, and Ada had wished that all of it was real, that she was on that porch with him and the music and nothing else.
At the exhibit, when they lifted up the first of Juan’s prints, Ada nearly choked. Every photograph was of Ewan.
The air around her thickened. As they placed each print on the lighted ledge, a weight began to press on her, crushing her with colors and reflections and textures. She remembered everything she thought she’d forgotten from the previous nights: the scarf around Ewan’s neck with the forest-green clover in the corner, smoke wreathing up from his mouth, the taste of it from his lips and tongue. She glanced around the room, wondering if anyone could tell how affected she was by the photographs. Ewan had left for the winter break already. He was gone, and now she was left behind, asphyxiating on his image.
Much later, I would discover that Ewan always tasted like a drug, even in his absences. But that night, it was Ada who lay on her bed in her dorm room and let the rush of him stretch out her veins. Ewan felt like a better madness to her than anything else had before. She rolled over on her stomach and pulled out her diary to write to him, since he was not there.
“I’m returning to sanity,” she wrote, “to the real world. But I will never forget how it felt to be overwhelmed by your beauty. You made me feel so alive and so right, and I know that in the real world, I will feel nothing for you and I will move on, and we’ll follow these rules because when it comes down to survival, we have to. I envy your girl, the one who holds your heart. If you ever need to take a break from this world, call me. I will come to you in a heartbeat and we will steal time.”
*
Ewan didn’t come back the next semester.
Ada e-mailed him through his school e-mail and, after weeks, gave up on him replying. Classes began without him, the parties thudded through the houses and he wasn’t there, and quickly enough, everything she’d felt with him stopped feeling even faintly real. You can’t really sustain a madness like that without its object’s presence. Ada soon had other problems to deal with anyway. There was Soren, and then there was me, my loud birth, the summer in Georgia, and then we all came back to Virginia. The August heat was beating through the glass windows of the school gym when Ada saw Ewan again. I was inside the marble room when I felt her heart shake and I turned my head sharply to look at him.
“Wait,” I said. “Who’s that?”
“Nobody,” she said, smiling as she said hello and walked past. “A ghost. Don’t mind him.”
I looked back at him as we walked away. “You know you can’t lie to me. Is he important?”
Ada took a deep breath. “We’ll see.”
I was curious. I went to her memories and looked up everything I needed to know. She didn’t think much of his return, that part was true. Too much had happened, too much hurt.
But that Saturday, Ada was at Gilligan’s and Ewan stopped her on the dance floor, drunk, his accent tumbling out with force.
“You’re the classiest person I’ve met at this school,” he said. “Come by the house. We’ll listen to music again.”
Ada watched the back of his head as he left. She was thoughtful. By then, she was more used to me, since we had just spent our first few months together. I liked that because with me there, it meant that she was less alone. “What do you think?” she asked me.
I didn’t even need to consider it. “Oh, I think we should go,” I said, a bit selfishly, since I just wanted to see for myself if that chemistry in her memory was the real thing, if the two of them could make it happen again. Anyone who felt like a drug was a person I was interested in. Ever since I dropped the one with the thin penis, I had been so bored. I missed having toys to play with.
A few days later, we walked down the hill to the house Ewan had moved to, up the street from Luka. Ada was nervous because she wasn’t exactly sure if she would be welcome there. Ewan had been drunk when he invited her—maybe he hadn’t meant it. At the house, the boys had just come back from practice, rackets and sweat everywhere.
“Oh god,” Ada whispered to me as we stepped through the doorway. “What am I doing here?”
“Hold on,” I said, pressing against her eyes. “There he is.”
Ewan looked up from the couch he was on and sprang to his feet, welcoming Ada with a surprised smile. He hadn’t expected her to show up but was clearly glad that she did. I watched, fascinated, as they left the house and walked to Main Street, down to the coffee shop, where he and Ada sat as she played him Nina Simone through a shared set of earphones. The mountains were tall and green around them. I sat in Ada and didn’t interfere, minding my own business for once.
She never gave him the number to her dorm room and they never e-mailed or planned anything. Ada would just walk down that hill with the grass brushing her ankles, cool sunshine on her head, his room at the end of her journey. They would listen to music, talk, and then she started spending the night once in a while, lying in his arms under three comforters when the weather turned cold. His bed was a mattress lodged behind a dresser and braced against the wall. They didn’t even kiss. I don’t know why I left them alone—maybe I felt she had more of a right to him because she met him before I was born. But he was different, you know; he was not someone I needed to hunt. He meant her no harm. He didn’t even try to touch her. So I could, for a while at least, allow it to continue.
On Wednesdays they danced against the bar at the Irish pub, and on Saturdays, on the dance floor at Gilligan’s. Ewan loved Ada’s short hair and she compared that with Itohan’s younger brother, who had told her with disgust that she would look like a boy. With Ewan, they just listened to music and talked about their childhoods, and it was all nice and innocent if you forget that they were humans who had hearts. Eventually, they started to wonder what exactly they were doing, and that’s how they ended up on the couch in Ewan’s room, both nervous and unsure.
“I have a girlfriend,” he said.
“I know,” said Ada. They looked at each other.
“I’ve cheated on her before, with other girls.”
They had avoided either of these truths because that was the real world, the one that wasn’t supposed to infringe on their bubble. Bringing it up scared the shit out of Ada. She didn’t want to be out there alone, so she reached for me. I came in, but I entered gently because it wasn’t time to fight yet. She just needed a little coldness, a pinch of ruthlessness. I looked back at Ewan with her eyes. “Okay?” I said.
“I can’t do it with you,” he explained. “It would be different, I already know. I would care too much, get emotionally attached.” His words were floating up toward the old ceiling.
Inside the marble room, I looked at Ada and she shook her head. She wasn’t looking for anything. She didn’t believe in that anymore.
“Are you sure?” I asked her.
She shrugged, wrapping her arms around herself. “I found him and he makes me happy. That’s enough for me. Who needs a forever?”
I nodded. “No wahala. Whatever you want.”
I turned back to him. “I don’t want a relationship from you,” I said, as if none of it was a big deal. I was cool, languid, casual. “I like you. You like me. It’s that simple.”
Ewan laughed and Ada smiled back at him and the bubble stayed safe. In his bed that night, Ewan held her face and kissed her for all the time they had waited. When Ada kissed him back, it was very different from their first kiss, the one that happened before I was born. She hadn’t known desire then. This time, she had me, and he had come back, and so she drank smoke from his mouth like it was air. I barely even had to be there.
His girlfriend remained a pale face in a picture frame on his dresser. Ada continued to flow through Ewan’s life: nothing holding her, nothing keeping her, nothing pushing her away. One night at the Irish pub, she danced to a Shakira song with a Brazilian friend, their hips intimate, moving in a way a white boy’s couldn’t. Ewan smiled at her from the bar where he was standing with his friends.
“I wasn’t in the least bit jealous, you know,” he told her afterward, when she was back in his arms.
“Why not?” she asked.
Ewan smiled again, assured. “I know it’s me you like.”
He was right. Still, for a while all they did after these nights out was curl up in his bed, make out, and then sleep. Everyone knew about them. His best friend couldn’t believe they hadn’t fucked yet. Even me, sef—sometimes I couldn’t believe we hadn’t fucked yet. Luka had pulled back from Ada because he and Ewan were good friends and it was clear who she’d chosen. I knew it was the right choice. Everything with Ewan was moving at a different pace, one I wasn’t interfering with, one that no one had given Ada before. I wasn’t going to fuck that up for her. My job was just to be there if she needed me. Besides, I liked Ewan. He was a typical bad boy, after all—older, popular, a writer who drank all the time and smoked weed and cigarettes and blacked out regularly. Ada was the model student—she was both president of her graduating class and, at nineteen, the youngest person in it. Everyone at the school, like in Georgia, only saw her and couldn’t see me. It was fine. No wahala. They didn’t need to see me for me to be who I was.
One night, Ewan turned to Ada at the pub. “We have unfinished business,” he said, his eyes wrinkling as he smiled. If she didn’t know what he meant, I did. I know how to recognize my cues. But Ada didn’t mind. She liked him and I liked him, so it all worked out. Except that Ada was still Ada and I was still me, and this was where we overlapped. She didn’t have a capacity for desire that ran deep enough for fucking, she never did. Ada has been consistent. When it came to things like that, she came to me. We are the same person, you get? So that night, when Ewan took off her clothes, me, I took my place under her skin. I had made her a promise. I do not make exceptions.
*
She fell in love with him weeks later. I get annoyed just remembering it. I had been having a fantastic time with Ewan before that because, as it turned out, he had a dark side too, one that looked like me, a cruel and ruthless thing. I saw it one night when his eyes were cold and his voice was flat, when he covered Ada’s mouth with a rough hand as he fucked me. When he was done, he got off the bed and tossed a towel at Ada, lighting a cigarette. Ada didn’t say anything and Ewan turned away from her on the bed, closing his eyes. “Come on,” I told her, and I had her put on her shoes in the heavy dark and leave quietly.
It was Halloween a few days later and Ada showed up to the party at Ewan’s house dressed as me, wearing a black corset, a tiny black skirt, knee-high boots, and shining skin. Her friends leaned in, laughing.
“And what are you supposed to be?” they asked.
I grinned back at them with her teeth. “Whatever you want,” I said.
I had Ada walk straight to Ewan’s room, depositing her body on his lap. He wrapped a freckled arm around her as people flowed in and out of his doorway.
“I’ve been feeling bad about what I’m doing to my girlfriend,” he confessed.
Oh fuck, I thought, feelings. I wonder how the conversation would have gone if he could have reached Ada in that moment. She probably would have reciprocated; she always responded to honesty and vulnerability, she was sweet like that. But I had her body that night, and so he had to deal with me and I really hate when people talk about feelings.
“Is that why you were all fucking weird the other night?” I asked. He made a face and I shoved my finger into his ribs. “I don’t need that nonsense. Next time you’re in a mood like that, just don’t fuck me at all.”
Ewan stayed serious and looked into Ada’s eyes, his voice matter-of-fact. “What you and I have, it’s more than fucking,” he said. “I’m basically in a relationship with you.”
I swore to myself when he said that—I could already feel Ada’s heart pounding. Stupid, stupid girl.
I turned inward for a moment, just to deal with her. She was twisting her hands together in the marble room, his words still ringing against the walls. “No,” I said, before she could get a word out. “Don’t even fucking think about it.”
“But, Asụghara, he just said—”
“No!” I glared at her and she fell silent. I could see I was crushing her, but there was no other option. I couldn’t allow her hope any room to breathe; I had to choke it out. I was protecting her.
“Allow me to handle this,” I told her. “Stay here.”
I turned back out and gave Ewan a sharp look, keeping my voice loose but cutting. “That’s too bad for you,” I said. “Because I’m not in a relationship with anyone.”
Ewan laughed and shook his head. He looked tired. It was not the last time he would look for Ada only to be met with me.
“So, what do you want to do?” I asked him. “You want to stop?”
He looked up at me and shifted his face, locking away his emotions, returning to the way I liked him. “It’s Halloween and I’ve got a horny nineteen-year-old in a slutty black costume sitting in my lap,” he said. He was twenty-seven then. “What do you think?”
“Good,” I answered, and kissed him with Ada’s mouth. I wasn’t done playing with him. It was ideal—Ada didn’t have time to think about Soren or what he’d done, even though she was back on the same campus where it happened. I had barely thought about my own birth myself. I was busy trying out new toys, like getting Ada drunk for the first time. Had I known earlier how useful alcohol would be in lubricating my relationship with Ada and bringing us together, I would have stocked her life with bottles. But that first time happened completely by accident—she drank too many Smirnoff Ices on an empty stomach, because I was still having her starve herself, and she was already halfway drunk by the time she agreed to try some margaritas at the club.
Ewan wasn’t out with her that night, so Ada’s friends dropped her off at his house after the club. It was winter, but she was wearing a flared miniskirt and black boxer boots. It was three in the morning and Ewan’s door was bolted shut from inside his room. His housemates were still awake, but Ada didn’t want to talk to any of them; she just wanted to sleep. It was too cold to walk up the hill to her dorm, and their living room was filthy, so she couldn’t crash on a couch. She banged on his door and called his name, but Ewan didn’t answer.
“You know he’s drunk and passed out,” I told her. “Biko, just kick the fucking door down.”
I liked drunk Ada because instead of arguing, she actually agreed with me. She needed to sleep, his room was the solution, and the door was an obstacle that needed to be removed. Simple. She’d also taken karate lessons all semester, so it was perfect. The alcohol made her more like me, cold and steady, and Ada timed her roundhouse kicks to land with precision on the painted wood of his door.
The noise brought Ewan’s best friend downstairs. “What the fuck’s going on?”
Ada waved her hand at the door. “Ewan’s passed out and I need to sleep, so I’m kicking it down,” she explained. I giggled inside her.
The best friend looked from Ada to the door, then nodded. “Okay.” He held out one of the McDonald’s sandwiches he was holding. “Want one?”
They ate and talked, and Ada excused herself to smash her heel into the door every few minutes. I am still not sure how much of her was me that night, to be honest, but I can tell you it was a lot more than usual. We were synched and it was beautiful.
The bolt to Ewan’s room went into the wall, so when the door finally broke, it did so at its hinges, the doorframe cracking and shuddering as it gave way. Ada squeezed through the small space and climbed into bed with Ewan. He cracked open sleepy blue eyes to smile at her.
“Unbelievable,” I muttered at him. “Breaking down the door doesn’t wake you up, but me climbing into bed does.”
In the morning, Ada woke up sober and with her first hangover. When she realized what had happened, she was so horrified that she couldn’t stop apologizing to Ewan. He thought it was hilarious. So did all his friends, but for different reasons. They spread the story that Ada had been so desperate to fuck Ewan that she broke his door down. Ada found it humiliating, but I took some of that feeling away for her. The rumors didn’t matter. Those people didn’t matter—shit, barely anyone mattered. The broken door stayed propped up until Ewan moved out of that house. No one ever fixed it.
Everything wore down into a cycle. Ewan drank and smoked like he was dying. Ada drank tequila, now that I’d discovered that it made her sink deeper into me. She and Ewan fucked and partied and rinsed and repeated. I started to come out more and more. On the porch of Luka’s house, sitting with Malena, I discovered that I could put out a cigar on Ada’s palm and a blister would rise. Malena just shook her head at me. She was the witness—she was the only person who saw me through Ada’s skin—and I loved her for that. I had Ada switch from Malena’s cigars to thin chocolate cigarillos, and she would smoke them as she walked down the hill to Ewan’s house, leaving a faint taste of cocoa on her lips. He woke up one night to find me standing in his room in the darkness, watching him in Ada’s body, a dark silhouette with a glowing red light at my mouth.
He called me the devil. I didn’t mind. I’d heard that before. I wondered if he noticed when he lost her and got me instead.
“It’s scary when I make all your fantasies come true, isn’t it?” I told him.
He should never have touched her if he wanted to keep her, but how could he know? Humans. Still, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Ada fell in love with him. She read the stories he wrote, he kissed her hand on their nights out and told her how lucky he was to have her, how lucky he was that she chose him. I didn’t disagree—he was right, he was lucky to have us. Ada cooked dinners for him and his housemates, and they sat around the dining table, loud and lovely, eating dhal and Malaysian parathas. It felt like, between me and her, we knew both sides of him—the bright and the dark, the kind and the cruel, one for each of us. We knew what he was capable of, something his faraway girlfriend didn’t. Anyway, Ada went and fell in love and decided to tell him, and I didn’t stop her because she would have quarreled with me about it. Love does people like that. It was easier to just let her go ahead—I could shield her from whatever the outcome was.
They were lying in his bed as she stammered it out, her sentences breaking as she tried to remember what he’d told her recently, that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought, that they were the only ones who mattered. Ewan was patient, his face close to hers, breathing in her exhalations, holding her against him as she looked for the courage to break her own heart.
“If you ever make me feel stupid for saying this, I will kill you,” Ada said, her eyes stinging. Ewan smiled a little and she squeezed her eyes shut, taking a deep breath. “I love you,” she whispered, and then the sadness rushed in. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not what we agreed, I know I only asked you to never lie to me and never make me feel cheap, and you’ve kept your side of the bargain and I haven’t and I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t want anyone who’s not you.”
“Hey, hey. It’s okay.” Ewan brushed his fingers over the side of her face. “I already knew you were going to say that, and I know it took a lot of courage. When you feel strongly about something, it’s a good thing to let it out.”
He didn’t say it back. Of course he didn’t say it back. This isn’t that kind of story. But he held Ada for a long time, lying on his back with her head on his shoulder. The night grew deeper. I sat alone in the marble and let her have this with him.
“You can turn to your side,” Ada whispered. “I know that’s how you need to sleep.”
Ewan kissed her forehead. “Shut up,” he said. “Stop trying to take care of everyone else.”
*
Everyone left for Christmas break soon after. Ada went to Saachi and Añuli and said nothing about Ewan because there was nothing to say. When she came back to Virginia, she ran into him at Gilligan’s and his eyes lit up. They stood by the bar and caught up, leaning toward each other to shut out the rest of the noise.
“I wanted to get you this CD I saw, but I thought it was too cliché to give the African girl a CD with African music on it,” Ewan told her, and she laughed. They stayed in the club until they’d both missed their rides.
“Let’s just walk,” he suggested. It was three miles back to his house and he held Ada’s hand the whole way as he told her about his girlfriend, how much he adored her, that they’d talked about breaking up.
“You told me once that you’re more honest with me than you ever were with her,” Ada said.
Ewan nodded. “Probably true,” he said.
They kept walking and Ada looked up at the largeness of the sky. It was strange, she thought, to be here in Virginia, with this man, inside this bubble they’d built.
“What kind of parents do you think we’d be?” she asked.
Ewan thought for a moment. “I think if a guy came up and said outright, ‘I’m fucking your daughter,’ we’d probably just look at each other—”
“—and shrug—” added Ada.
“—and say, ‘You know what? Fair enough.’” They laughed as they crossed a road and cut through a parking lot. “Can you imagine what our kid would look like?”
“What, brown skinned with freckles?” said Ada, giggling.
“And a ginger afro.” Ewan bent over laughing, and I watched them both from inside her head, amused. It was cute. They talked about how their families would receive them—they talked as if things weren’t impossible, as if choices hadn’t already been made. I didn’t interfere, not yet. When they got to his room and got into bed, Ada hesitated.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Things have changed, you know, we can step back and just be friends. Nothing would get broken.”
Ewan smiled. “You’re beautiful and you’re lying next to me.”
He reached out to her and I entered his arms. I can only be what I was born to be.
Trust me, I wanted things to go back to the way they were, free and easy, but Ada couldn’t do it. It was too late, now that she loved him. She started feeling guilty all the time, imagining how it would feel for his girlfriend if she knew about their affair. It was easy to imagine the pain of betrayal—after all, Ada loved him too now. She and the girl were basically on the same side. He and I were, for all purposes, the villains in this.
Also, Ada had gotten the Depo-Provera shot, a load of hormones that made her bleed for eight weeks nonstop. It threw off the fragile balance she and I kept in her mind, and there were terrible mood swings, a gutting depression. Ada owned a bokken, a wooden Japanese sword, and one night she used it to smash the mirror in her dorm room, screaming tears as glass flew across the hardwood floor. The shards glinted in her fingers as she drew them down the inside of her arm, watching the bright red bubble through brown skin. I moaned inside her, greedy for the mother color she was feeding me. We were pulling apart. Ada sat on the floor surrounded by a hundred mirror pieces and cried.
Her friend Catia, a military brat who hung out with her and Malena, came by to get Ada for lunch. She saw the mess and the blood and sighed.
“Oh, Ada,” she said. “Let’s clean this up.”
I liked her for that, for how she never made Ada feel damaged. Ada loved her. Catia was quiet but forceful, a pastor’s daughter. On a night run to Taco Bell once, when Catia was driving and Malena was sitting in the back with Ada, they stopped at a liquor store and Malena bought her usual bottle of Johnnie Walker, tipping some of it to the ground before getting back in the car. She offered some to Ada, but Ada refused. Now that she drank, I preferred her to stick to tequila. Malena looked at Ada and knew she was thinking about Ewan.
“He loves you, Ada. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Ada made a face. “Yeah, whatever,” she said.
Malena shrugged with half-lidded eyes. “You’ll see, mi hermana. You’ll see.”
Catia smiled slightly at us through the rearview mirror, and Ada looked out the window, her heart hurting. Ewan had started cleaning up his life after a bad Salvia trip he had one night, when he said Ada came to him in a vision, sent by the devil. He said it was her, but if there was anyone a devil would send, we all know by now—it would be me. Ewan just couldn’t tell the difference.
“Clearly, we’re both way too Catholic,” I joked, but he was serious. He stopped smoking weed; he cut back on the drinking and focused on his classes. Ada was so proud of him. I was alarmed.
“I’ve given up all my vices,” he said. “Except you.”
“You’re going to give me up?” Ada whispered. I could taste the grief in the back of her throat. She didn’t want to be just another drug polluting his life, and she wasn’t, she really wasn’t. It was me, but we were one, so I didn’t know what to tell her.
Ewan looked at her sadly. “I don’t know if I can,” he admitted.
The whole thing became a loop, as these things often do. Ada stopped sleeping with Ewan, so I stopped fucking him, and instead they cooked together at his new place, making nasi goreng in a smooth dance across the kitchen floor, with knife and cutting board, onions and meat, oil and spices. He tossed the wok and washed the dishes, and Ada was so happy. I left her alone that night—it had been so long since she could be this happy. She made him watch Sarafina! and they ate Cadbury chocolates and fell asleep and nothing happened. But then, eventually, I fell back into bed with him and the cycle started again and the guilt was everywhere, greasy and thick, and Ada couldn’t get away.
Eventually, Ewan was the one who ended it.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I can’t be with you anymore. She makes me happy.”
For the first time, I let Ada cry in front of him. I watched her sob into his shoulder, into the soft cotton of his T-shirt. She didn’t beg him; she didn’t ask for anything. Ewan held her and touched her face gently.
“Why do you have to be so beautiful?” he whispered.
Ada cried herself to sleep, her face pressed into his chest. She woke up briefly to see Ewan watching her sleep, his hand playing in the curls of her hair, his eyes soft.
*
Ada graduated college a few weeks later with Catia and Malena and Luka and most of her friends. Saachi flew up for it with Añuli and Chima, and the whole time, Ada was unsettled and shaking. I had to keep her face smooth so that her human family wouldn’t see any of the storm within. Saachi was demanding her time, too much of it, considering that Ada was about to lose all her friends and there was barely any time to say good-bye.
“We came all the way here,” Saachi told her. “The least you can do is spend time with us.”
None of it fucking mattered, honestly. Ada and I had lost Ewan. Since the night he’d rejected us, I’d slept with him once, a final time before Ada’s graduation. He and I were in her room, on the raised bed, moonlight spitting through the glass of her window. Ewan was drunk and high, back from a night of bad decisions that ended, as usual, with him looking for Ada and fucking me. He wrenched her hair until her neck and spine cracked loudly, and when we were face to face, I found myself opening Ada’s mouth and saying the same words Soren once told her.
“I fucking love you,” I said.
Ewan kept thrusting, pounding in the dark, and when he spoke, his voice was a stranger’s, slurred and hard.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said.
I swear, I never felt more stupid and useless than I did in that moment; like I was some whore he was just dumping into. Ada knew how Ewan was when he was drunk and high, when he pissed on coffee tables, when he couldn’t remember a thing that he’d done or said—which was the case this time. He went back to himself in the days afterward, but it didn’t matter. He had already insulted me, and wallahi, I was unforgiving and petty and vindictive. Don’t expect anything else from an ọgbanje.
I targeted one of Ewan’s friends on the tennis team, a boy who had always seemed to hate Ada, but I could see him and I could smell the truth. Ada was a beautiful girl and this friend had to watch her, knowing that Ewan got to fuck her and he didn’t. He was human. There was bound to be desire lying under his hatred—there always is. So it was easy to take him home at the end of one night, and of course he agreed. He kissed me and sank his fingers into Ada’s body before coming with my hand wrapped around him. I kicked him out of Ada’s room as soon as we were done and turned inward.
“Really?” said Ada. She was folding her arms and leaning against the marble, her eyes red from crying over Ewan. “His friend?”
“And so?” I answered. “Ewan won’t care. He let us go, remember? He doesn’t love us. He made that fucking clear.”
Ada winced and looked away. I came close to her and ran my hand along her cheek.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “Fine girl. There are others who will want us, who I can make want us. It’s easy.”
I had her put her pain with me because I could use it as fuel, I could do things with it that she couldn’t. Like fucking one of the track runners, a boy with a silken Southern drawl and hooded eyes that dripped sex from the lashes. Trust me, I didn’t need Ewan, and if Ada thought she did, I would make her forget. There were many, many other things we could be doing.
Saachi and Chima were angry because Ada insisted on flying to Georgia to spend a month with her friend Itohan, instead of coming straight to Saachi’s house with them. I didn’t give a shit about their anger—mine was much larger and stronger. Except for Añuli, they’d soured the graduation for Ada, keeping her from her friends, the people who really knew what was going on in her life. She didn’t know when she’d see Malena or Catia again. Luka was going back to Serbia. Axel and Denis were going to Iceland to coach volleyball, Juan was going back to Mexico. The house at the bottom of the hill was going to be empty.
We had lost Ewan. Ada was devastated, but I had work to do, so we went to Georgia.
*
It felt strange to be back there. Things there were the same, but everything for Ada and I was completely different because we’d just spent a whole year with Ewan. I was done with him. I wanted him out of Ada’s head and I wanted her to stop loving him. I was furious. I wanted a new toy and I already knew I was going to play rough. It’s not as if there was gentleness in me to start with. I was hungry and I was hunting. I couldn’t stop myself and I didn’t want to—the whole point of my existence was to run wild and tear whoever fell into my mouth into pieces. I picked Itohan’s other brother, the older one. I started grooming him, which was easy because he and Ada were close, and after about a week or two of this, Itohan pulled Ada aside, saying they needed to talk.
“What’s up?” Ada asked, her face open and friendly. I lurked behind it, as usual.
“I know you don’t know how it looks,” Itohan said, her long hair roughly pushed behind an ear, her lipstick matte and red. “When you and him are hanging out upstairs and the rest of us are downstairs.”
“He was just showing me his books,” Ada said, and I fought to keep from laughing out of her mouth.
“I know.” Itohan kept her voice friendly. “But it’s just somehow when you and him are alone in his room together.”
She smiled, trying to be kind. Inside the marble room, I let out a shriek of laughter and Ada kicked me in the shin, hissing at me to shut up. On her face, she was maintaining a worried and slightly scared frown for Itohan’s benefit.
“I know it’s not intentional,” Itohan was saying, “but just think about how it looks, okay? You two can’t date, not after you dated my younger brother.”
The marble suddenly felt cold around me. “Wow,” I said, my laughter fading. “She really thinks we don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Good,” muttered Ada. “Lucky for me.”
I couldn’t fucking believe it. They still saw only Ada; they still gave her the benefit of the doubt even when you’d have to be an idiot not to realize how it looked, as Itohan put it. It was amazing. I had planned every touch of skin, every coy glance that wove the older brother in, yet everyone stayed blind. It was as if they were all stuck in that nice, innocent Christian world Ada used to be a part of, before she was ripped out by my birth. And now, after everything that had happened with Ewan, there was absolutely no way Ada could return. She was an imposter; she was now me. I’d contaminated her too much—we had done too much together.
So she and I nodded obediently at Itohan, but I had no intention of stopping. What for? I wasn’t finished with the older brother, not yet. I had spent weeks trying to crack him open the way I wanted. I played soft and sweet, I pretended to be Ada since she was the one he loved. I brushed her fingertips over the back of his hand as he drove and gave him shy smiles till we were alone, and then I slid my palms over his jeans, but he stopped me. Maybe he could smell the difference between her and me, between the grassy lemon of her and my coppered scent. I don’t know what it was—maybe he just knew her well enough to know who I wasn’t. But he wouldn’t surrender and it made me angry. I told him I loved him and he still wouldn’t surrender, he wouldn’t let me touch him. I had arrived in Georgia wrapped in a red rage, and after Ewan, this second refusal blinded me with fury. He denied me at his own risk.
So the night before Ada was leaving, I slid her out of the guest room and into the younger brother’s room. He was the type I knew, easy and predictable. I fucked him with Ada’s body, with his older brother in the next room, asleep and still in love with Ada, with their mother down the hall next to her Bible. The next morning, I sat the older brother down and pretended to be Ada and told him that she had never loved him, a trick I learned from Soren. I watched his heart crack and fall into shimmering pieces of dust, and it was good, it felt correct. This was the lesson: I can fuck you or I can fuck you up—simple.
After I hurt him, he still got up and drove Ada to the airport. You see, what I realized later was that he wasn’t like the others I targeted. He was gentle; he didn’t deserve to be punished. But we had lost Ewan and I was there and I was born into what I was born into. I have always been a weapon and I am not obliged to be fair. My only mistake was that I forgot one small detail: Ada did love the older brother. Very much, in fact.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had gone too far.