Free The Girl With Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti Page A

display our cultures? What about people like me, who came from everywhere and nowhere? And what had the administration ever done for us? But it was a chance to get out of lessons, and anyway the food was always good. I think it was the food, mainly, that made us go along with it.
    “How many countries this year?” I said distractedly, hitching my bag higher. We stepped out of the building and, following the flow of students, went across the sand, out the main gates into the gaspingly hot parking lot. An airless, twisted haze of evaporation permanently swam over the rows of parked cars. Our faces were screwed up in the heat.
    “Fifty-six,” Anju said.
    There were only two hundred students in secondary school.
    “We won’t have enough rooms.”
    “We never do. A lot of countries will be outside.”
    “I don’t envy them,” I said, squinting across the parking lot in search of my father’s car. The rows of flashing car windows stabbed pain right through my eyes.
    I spotted the hard rectangular white car in a sea of other hard rectangular white cars.
    “There’s my dad,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
    “Wait. Can I call you tonight?” Anju said. We always had to do it by appointment. “Remember, I want to come over to your house this week? To study for the math test. My parents need to talk to your parents.”
    I sighed. “Right. Did they give you their permission yet?”
    “They’re thinking about it. How about your parents?”
    “They’re thinking too.” I shrugged to indicate my helplessness. “Call tonight.”
    We said good-bye and then I had to thread my way through the cars, heat steaming off them, to get to my father. Cautiously I pulled my bag off my back, steadied my face, and entered.
    It was freezing.
    When I shut the door behind me, the sounds of the parking lot stopped, and the calm drone of the air-conditioning was the only noise. The filtered air made the car smell of petrified sand and sour metal.
    My father looked at me from behind a pair of sunglasses.
    I pretended to be very absorbed in my task of putting my bag into the back. I didn’t know why he was studying me like that. I’d made sure to move calmly, normally.
There’s no way he could guess,
I promised myself, but my stomach felt jittery. Finally I said, “Anju wants to call again tonight. To discuss travel arrangements.”
    “What for?” He turned his eyes back to the traffic and we squeezed out onto the main road.
    “She’d like to come over to our house this Saturday.”
    “I’ll think about it,” he said, just as I’d known he would. He always said that.
    We continued the ride in silence. My fingers ached to slide a book out of my bag. But my father might get annoyed. And there were only ten minutes left before we’d reach the house. Surely I could wait ten minutes.
    But I remembered hills and purple heather. And the heart-lifting flutter of speed as I flew, out of school, straight over the roads . . .
    Just wait ten minutes.
    I lasted five before I found myself twisting around to grab my bag. As soon as the reassuringly solid pages of a new book were between my fingers, a wonderful feeling of relief flooded me. I had already read this one twice, and I hadn’t liked it much either time. But it would suffice. I rubbed the cover lovingly and kept my eyes away from my father.
    Even so, behind the black painted squares of his sunglasses, I could sense that his gaze slid to my hands.
    Turning my body a little to conceal what I was doing, I opened to the front page.
    “That’s a romance, isn’t it,” he said.
    I stopped at the first sentence. No, it wasn’t a romance, but the main character did have a boyfriend, and how was I supposed to read the book now, in front of my father, while he was imagining the worst? Silence and coldness seeped from his seat.
    I tried to get through the first page anyway. But it was like force-feeding myself something that made me choke.
    I shoved the book back into my bag.
    “It