The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [113]
“Um, this is Eeven,” he says.
“Sorry? What?”
He motions downward with his eyes. Standing in front of him, not much taller than his waist, is a small black boy, eyes now downcast with embarrassment.
Javier repeats the boy’s name and spells it for her. The boy is slight, with narrow shoulders, but his head is comparatively huge, a strange, hovering planetoid, mostly Afro, containing at its center a tiny face like a doll’s, with a negligible bump of a nose and a mouth no larger than a quarter.
“He’s ten years old,” Javier adds.
Slowly the child looks up. His eyes are strikingly like Ivy’s, not the same color but just as wide-set, so much so that when they blink in sync, it comes as a mild surprise: she was almost expecting them to operate independently of each other.
She clasps her shirt closed and clamps her arm against her side. Javier crouches down behind the child. “I told you she was beautiful,” he whispers in his ear.
She hugs herself, fighting back tears as the absurd pain throbs in her armpit.
“I’m his big brother,” Javier says. “It’s this inner-city program. I applied months ago. It was pretty grueling—orientations, background checks, interviews. They even visited my place. Lucky I still had a place at the time. Anyway, it finally came through. So you’re a big sister now, kind of.”
From waist level the two of them look up at her, Javier admiring and Eeven fearful, making her doubly conscious of her appearance. She brushes the hair from her eyes, tries to will her face into some shape that won’t necessarily give a child nightmares.
“Ursula,” Javier observes, “you cut yourself.”
Panicked, she looks down and checks her shirt. She doesn’t see any blood.
“Let me see that,” he says, standing up and taking her right hand. Her thumb, she sees, is bleeding. She must have picked up the X-acto blade the wrong way just now as she went to hide it. He licks his thumb and uses it to brush away the blood on hers, then inspects the cut, cradling her hand in both of his. The boy watches, their hands inches from his eyes.
“Just a little nick,” Javier says. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll get you a Band-Aid. You got some in the bathroom?”
She nods, hypnotized by the comfort emanating from his hands. She wishes she could curl up in those hands and sleep for a year. But when he lets go and begins to make his way past her, she remembers the bloody towel.
“No! I’ll get it!” she says.
She retreats to the bathroom, reeling with fear and joy, her every sense overcharged, confused. She doesn’t quite trust what’s happening, doesn’t quite trust her own mind. Her mind made her cut herself with an X-acto blade and then made Javier appear in her doorway like some kind of saintly apparition. But no, her mind had nothing to do with it. He’s returned. He’s really out there. And he really does look fine—better than fine: he looks like nothing bad has ever happened in human history.
She inspects her makeshift bandage. So far it seems all right. She allows herself to look in the mirror one more time and be frightened by what she sees there one more time. Keeping her left arm clamped at her side as much as possible, she washes her face, buttons her shirt, runs a brush through her hair, hides the towel in the cabinet beneath the sink, and finally, almost as an afterthought, sticks a Band-Aid on her thumb. She does all this as quickly as she can, half afraid he won’t be there when she comes out.
But he is, and so is the strange child, the two of them now seated side by side on her couch. Javier has produced a bag of jellybeans and something else, a red fruit of some kind, about the size of an orange, and is now placing the two foods on the coffee table in front of them. Ursula pauses in the bathroom doorway, watching as Javier prompts the child with a question, listens attentively to the answer, and responds. He emanates strength, stability, and calm. His face is kindly, his voice soothing, his entire attention focused on the child. Then he looks up, and his eyes brighten at the sight of her. Having just seen herself