Free Belinda's Rings by Corinna Chong Page B

mother’s house, they had a lopsided houseplant. Her mother kept it banished to a dark corner of the living room and it grew sideways, sprouting long, gangly arms that reached out in search of scant sunbeams. Her mother insisted it stay there because she bought it specifically to decorate that corner. To move it would defeat its purpose. The plant grew teardrops for leaves, and they gathered on the ends of the pale, limp stems. Every week when the time came for Belinda to water it, she thought of her sister.
    Prim had left when she was fifteen years old and never returned. Belinda was only a baby at the time. In her mother’s embittered way, she made the subject of Prim taboo. She isn’t anything special, her mother insisted. Only a bad girl.
    Of course, this only made Belinda more enamoured with her. She knew that Prim looked like her, with the same green eyes and dense blondish-brown hair. Their neighbour, Mrs. Fields, had given that away when she patted her on the head and remarked that Belinda was a spitting image of her sister, but that she hoped she was better behaved. Belinda had also deduced that Prim had the same wide ankles and square, boyish feet. Her mother had once told her, when none of the boots in the local store would fit her feet, that stocky ankles and feet were the Harris family inheritance, and not one of the ladies on the Harris side had escaped them.
    But as a teenager, when Belinda thought of her sister, her stockiness was not a burden but a symbol of strength. Prim’s green eyes were luminous, not mossy, and her hair thick and luxuriant rather than unruly. She smoked cigarettes, the long curl of smoke wisping from her lips like a question mark. She dated boys, which, Belinda had intuited, was part of the reason for her fallout with their mother. Belinda had imagined Prim as a more confident, more beautiful, and seductively mysterious version of herself. Perhaps even a future self. Prim was the Snow White that Belinda aspired to be, banished from the house by her evil mother and noble in her bold independence. In Belinda’s mind, wherever Prim had gone she had undoubtedly married the man of her dreams, and this was all she needed to be sublimely happy. Belinda was content to believe this, and didn’t want any evidence that proved otherwise. It was naïve, but it allowed her to believe that you didn’t need a good mother to turn out all right.
    The lopsided plant had been Belinda’s bridge. It had been there all along, since before Belinda’s birth, a living witness to Prim’s existence. Years later, when she moved out of her mother’s house, Belinda took the plant with her. She placed it on the kitchen windowsill in her apartment and watched the stems rise up from the soil after only a few days. She kept the soil moist and rotated the pot every so often, allowing the sun to pour over each leaf with equal attention. Within two months, a tiny flower bud had pushed its way out of the soil. And eventually, the bud unfurled into a lush, fuchsia-pink bloom. An azalea. Her mother had never known, had always assumed it was just a plain green plant. She had never given it the chance to be an azalea.
    Belinda liked to believe that the plant had disguised itself for all that time. It became what it needed to be according to the circumstance. When she married Dazhong and moved to Canada, she’d had to leave the azalea with her neighbours. She had often wondered what forms it had taken since then, how many transformations it had undergone. In the twenty-one years that had passed, she had never once allowed herself to believe that perhaps the azalea had died.

6 The Other Grace
    THERE’S THIS OTHER GIRL named Grace who was in my math class last year. She’s gone to the same school as me since elementary. Everyone mixes us up, even teachers. My math teacher would sometimes accidentally hand her homework back to me, so I got to see her marks. She always got 90s,