Forward Me Back to You Read online

  It’s going to take a while to come up with a good Kolkata Plan A, so Kat’s glad she has more free time here than in Oakland. The butt-in-chair classwork takes only about three hours instead of six like it does at Sanger. And Saundra was right; Grandma Vee is a brilliant teacher, telling down-to-earth stories to illuminate abstract concepts, unlocking the mysteries of honors biology and chemistry with a sparkle of joy in her eyes. Kat might actually have a shot at finishing her junior year with all As.

  After “school,” Grandma Vee puts on a bright orange apron and hands Kat a blue-and-white one. “I’d like to show you how to make a few of my grandmother’s recipes. Let’s cook a big pot of groundnut stew and some jollof rice, shall we?”

  As they chop the onions, tomatoes, and hot peppers for the stew, Grandma Vee reminisces about harvesting nuts in her village and making the red palm oil from scratch. “Now I have to go to a West African grocery store in Waltham to get my supply,” she says. “I can’t seem to break my childhood addiction.”

  Kat takes a big whiff of the savory smells rising from the skillet. Not the worst addiction in the world, she thinks.

  Turns out what Grandma Vee’s really addicted to is Boston sports. The Bruins are playing, so she listens to the hockey game while they cook.

  Kat’s not sure why they prepare such big portions, since it’s just the two of them, but it doesn’t take long to figure it out. The doorbell starts ringing in the afternoon, and some lady named Joann who works at the pharmacy down the street and Min-Seo, the medical resident from next door, both join them for supper. It rings two more times, but to Kat’s relief, the dudes who show up don’t get invited to stay. They get Ibis-embraced at the threshold instead, and leave with takeaway plastic tubs of stew.

  “You don’t let men inside, Grandma Vee?” Kat asks, once everyone’s gone.

  “Until you’re okay with it, I don’t.”

  This worries Kat almost as much as it eases her mind. She isn’t “okay with” not feeling comfortable around strange men. Or any dudes at all, if they try and touch her. Last year, she hung out a bit with another jiu-jitsu student they’d nicknamed Pinguim—“penguin” in Portuguese. She even held hands with him and they kissed a couple of times. But the attack changed all that. She stopped returning Pinguim’s texts and avoided him at the academy. Now she isn’t sure she’ll ever be able to let him, or any guy for that matter, touch her again.

  When the dishes are washed and Grandma Vee turns on the Celtics game, Kat disappears into her room. She picks up her phone and texts her mother. Did you send my passport?

  Mom’s reply arrives in what feels like a nanosecond. Yes. Remember that “beach resort” I booked for us in Tijuana? She adds a laugh-till-you-cry emoji.

  How could Kat forget? Driving the Mazda across the border to a cheap motel was the only family vacation they could afford last year. It was miles from the ocean, but they made their way to the beach every day. The two of them took salsa-making lessons and faked their way through salsa-dancing lessons. But she doesn’t answer Mom’s text.

  As if she can read Kat’s mind, though, Mom sends a GIF of a salsa dancer tripping and falling. Kat feels a sharp twinge of homesickness, but she’s not about to let Mom know that.

  She switches over to her social media. Brittany and Amber aren’t posting much—probably focused on the ACT practice exam this weekend that Kat’s not taking—but the school accounts are raving about yet another championship for the Sanger Hawks varsity basketball team. With you-know-who as the lead scorer. Her thumb punches the app to shut it down.

  “Sound of Music is on!” Grandma Vee yells from the living room.

  “Coming!” Kat calls.

  Just as she’s about to power down, Saundra texts a photo. She and Mom are out dancing at some club in the city. In that slinky dress and those stilettoes, you’d never guess Saundra’s a kick-ass cop and the top jiu-jitsu fighter in her age bracket in California. Mom’s hair is dyed red to match her miniskirt, and she’s got both hands in the air.

  Without a teenager around to worry about, they’re having the time of their lives.

  Meanwhile, the teenager’s about to watch The Sound of Music with an old woman who’s out there singing “the hills are alive” at the top of her lungs.

  The crazy thing is that once she joins Grandma Vee on the couch, Kat ends up having fun herself.

  She recites a few of the lines in the movie from memory—“When the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window,” and “I am not finished yet, Captain!”—while Grandma Vee belts out all the songs. The two of them demolish a jumbo-sized bag of plantain chips from the West African grocery.

  ROBIN

  INT. METROWEST HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA—DAY

  Everything seems different to Robin now that he’s decided to go back to Kolkata. He feels different. Hope is revving him up, accelerating his thought processes.

  In the cafeteria, ignoring the wraps, he grabs a salad. After he pays the cashier, who looks surprised at his choice, he strides right past Brian’s table.

  “Robin! Where are you going? Come sit down!”

  At least “Little Guy” isn’t making a comeback. Maybe this is progress.

  Slowly, Robin turns, but he doesn’t head back to the place where he’s spent so many lunches. Instead, he waits until Brian stands up and walks over to him.

  “You’re really going to India?” Brian asks, keeping his voice low so the people around them can’t hear. “What about your offer to drive me to college?”

  I didn’t offer. You asked, and I said yes. As usual. “I changed my mind.”

  Brian frowns. “How am I supposed to get to Baylor if you don’t drive me? You know how amazing it would be to pull up in that red Corvette?”

  Because you’d be driving. As usual, in that car. “I’m not your only ride, Brian. Your stepdad can take you down. He has a Porsche; that should be cool enough.”

  “No way. I’m not spending all that time with him.”

  Robin shrugs. “You’ll figure it out.”

  He starts to walk away, but Brian grabs his wrist. Not roughly, but enough to stop him. “Wait. Can you at least pick me up after practice today?”

  Robin knows this is his last chance to prove nothing’s changed between them. That what happened at youth group was a weird blip.

  He twists out of Brian’s grasp. “Sorry. No.”

  Strange how much easier it is to overturn a table after you do it a first time.

  He watches Brian’s nonverbals morph fully into anger. Then, as if Robin has suddenly vanished, his longtime buddy turns, strides back to his table, and sits down. “The Celtics got robbed, man,” Robin hears him saying. “I couldn’t believe that call, could you?”

  Martin’s been watching the entire interaction from across the room. He raises a fist in the air, and Robin replies with a quick chin lift. Martin answers with a come-sit-with-us wave, but Robin shakes his head. He looks around for any of his auto shop buddies but none are in sight. And then he sees the desi table.

  People of Indian descent living outside of India, Robin thinks. Well, he deserves that label, too, doesn’t he? Clutching his salad, he makes his way over to them.

  Once again, Indian music’s playing at the table. Six or seven kids are leaning into each other, watching music videos on a shared tablet.

  “Hey,” Robin says. “Room for one more?”

  Someone presses PAUSE on the video. “Sure, Robin,” Sona Patel says, shifting over.

  She knows his name. That surprises him, but why should it? He glances around at the rest of the people sitting with her—he knows most of them. Three are seniors, like him. Vinod, Sanjay, and Chitra.

  “Hey,” says Vinod. He and Robin played Little League together back in the day.

  “What’s new, my man?” Sanjay asks. He’d sat next to Robin in second grade, and in their middle-school art class, too. “What do you have planned for after we leave this prison?”

  What’s new? Wh
at does he have planned? “I’m going back to Kolkata this summer.” Then, for some reason, he adds, “That’s where I was born.”

  “My parents are from Kolkata, too,” says Chitra. Robin crushed on her from afar in the seventh grade; this is the first time he can remember her speaking directly to him. And—wait! Is she twisting her hair?

  Sona didn’t grow up in their town. “Are both your parents Bengali? Isn’t your last name Thorning or something like that?”

  “It’s Thornton. I’m adopted.” He’s never said it this boldly before. With no hesitation.

  “Oh,” Sona says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  Robin looks her right in the eyes. “No apology needed. I’ll bet I’m the only Bengali dude named ‘Robin Thornton’ on the entire planet.”

  “Cool,” she says, smiling. “I’ll do a search on the internet to make sure.”

  Vinod puts an arm around Sona in a she’s-mine kind of way, which makes Robin feel great. He doesn’t want Sona, even though she’s gorgeous, but at least someone thinks he’s a contender.

  KAT

  INT. METROWEST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH SANCTUARY—DAY

  Kat’s sitting alone in a back pew in this large, old-fashioned church. Do they make churches like this in California, with stained-glass windows, wooden pews, organ pipes, and high, high arches and pillars bearing the weight of the soaring ceiling? She’s never seen one.

  The few times they visited Saundra’s church in Oakland, it felt like being inside a warehouse. There, Mom’s was always one of the only white faces in a big crowd. Kat looks around as people take their seats. This church has only about a hundred or so people scattered here and there, but she sees black, white, and brown faces. It’s “racially ambiguous,” like some idiot at Sanger once described her, trying to sound smart.

  Grandma Vee’s smiling down at Kat from the choir. Martin’s singing up there, too. He waggles his fingers when he catches Kat’s eye just like he did last Thursday, and she lifts a hand in reply. There’s a stained-glass window behind Martin. It’s of a bearded man surrounded by children. HINDER THEM NOT, says the caption below it in big letters. That must be Jesus, Kat thinks. Doesn’t look canine at all. Looks more like a Sparrow.

  Other windows continue along the walls, each one telling another chapter in the story of the Sparrow’s life. The two in the very back show his body hanging on a cross, and then draped across his mother’s lap. Dead. Didn’t have a chance. No way a Sparrow can single-handedly fight off wild dogs.

  “You must be Viola’s grandchild from California,” an old man says, shaking her hand.

  Kat doesn’t correct him. She likes how nobody seems to question her kinship with Grandma Vee. When Mom, Saundra, and Kat are together, strangers usually assume that Saundra’s Kat’s mother. Brittany and Amber did a bad job hiding their surprise when they met Mom at a Sanger college prep night.

  “What are you, Kat?” Amber asked once, hesitantly. “Racially, I mean? I hope you don’t mind if I ask.” She’s awkward about race, like a lot of white girls at that school.

  “No idea,” Kat answered. “What are you?”

  “I’m … white, I guess.”

  If she got to be a color, so did Kat. “I’m brown, then.”

  Kat spots Gracie, sitting next to Ash in the front pew. Ash is ignoring the woman sitting on the other side of her. Must be her mother, because she reaches over to straighten Ash’s collar. Ash shifts her butt along the pew, yanking her shirt out of reach. If that was me and Mom, Kat thinks, it would be me fixing Mom’s outfit, not the other way around. Wonder what time the two party girls got home from their party night?

  She tries to push away her thoughts of home and keeps scanning the pews. No sign of the Alsatian, but she sees Bird Boy squished between two tall white people.

  Suddenly, the drama the other night around the trip to Kolkata makes sense.

  The kid’s adopted.

  Nosy strangers probably ask if they’re in the same family, just like they do with her and Mom. Kat always answers with a mind-your-own-business glare, but Mom does something silly—throwing an arm around Kat’s waist, leaning her head on her daughter’s shoulder, saying, “We’re twins, can’t you tell?” Kat’s always liked Mom’s banter. It keeps the King women in charge of classifying themselves.

  The service starts with an African-sounding hymn about “walking in the light of God” and Grandma Vee goes to town. Even from a pew in the back of the church, Kat can hear her voice rising above the others. For some reason, the off-key pitch of her new grandmother’s voice cheers Kat up.

  After the song, the Owl sitting beside Ash’s mom goes up front. Must be Ash’s father, Kat thinks. She listens to his announcements about the upcoming sermon series and Bible study options. Guess he’s a pastor, too. Along with the Goose. This congregation might be mixed, but both pastors are white. And balding. And wearing glasses.

  Ash’s father sends the kids off to their Sunday school classes. “Come up here and tell us about our youth group’s summer service trip to India, will you, PG?” He gives PG a clap on the shoulder and sits down again next to his wife.

  “Any kids left in the sanctuary?” PG asks.

  “Nope,” a voice calls. “You got a PG-13 audience in here, PG.”

  The congregation groans. To Kat, they sound like one very loud person.

  “Good one, Ed, but we may need an R rating for what I’m about to share,” says PG. “We’ll be going to India this summer to work with the Bengali Emancipation Society. Slavery still exists, both for labor and for sex. And they work to free trafficked children. But guess what? India’s not the worst country in the world when it comes to selling humans for profit. It’s got a Tier 2 rating, which means it’s ‘making significant efforts to come into compliance with Tier 1 standards.’ Tier 3 countries are places where trafficking is on the rise, with Russia, China, Iran, Belarus, and Venezuela often ranked as the worst five.”

  Ignoring the congregation’s surprised murmurs, PG keeps going. “And don’t think we’re off the hook here. Human trafficking is big money in our own country. I read somewhere that it’s the fastest-growing part of organized crime. The average age for a girl who is sold for sex in our country is thirteen.”

  “THIRTEEN’s the AVERAGE?” a woman calls out. Was that Bird Boy’s mom? Kat thinks it might have been.

  “That’s right,” says PG. “And when it comes to children as victims of online sexual abuse, many live in Colombia, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, and—guess where?—right here. The United States of America.”

  How did Kat not know this? Saundra probably did; why hadn’t she educated Kat more? There’s not a sound in the sanctuary. Even the Sparrow on the stained-glass window—the one with children surrounding him—seems to be listening.

  “I want to share a short film with you,” says PG. “My friend Arjun sent me the link; it’s password-protected but he gave me permission to show it to you.”

  PG asks for the lights to be dimmed, a screen comes down in front of the stained glass window, and the film starts playing.

  At first, all Kat sees is a green, lush meadow. Indian-sounding music is playing in the background. Then a title appears. RESCUE: IN HER OWN WORDS.

  More words scroll up the screen, almost like they do at the beginning of a Star Wars movie. The Bengali Emancipation Society’s mission is to fight people who sell and abuse children for profit. Please listen to one such child’s story.

  The music fades and the meadow disappears. Kat sees some kind of balcony or veranda behind low-growing bushes that are dotted with small white flowers. Birds are singing. The camera pans in. A girl dressed in yellow is sitting on the veranda, rocking back and forth in a white chair. Her face is blurred out and so is the building behind her, but Kat can see a yellow ribbon woven into her long black braid. Canary, Kat thinks.

  The girl starts speaking in a language Kat can’t understand, but an English translation is appearing across the bottom of the sc
reen. As Kat reads what the calm, sweet voice is telling them, her heart begins to pound.

  I was twelve years old when my mother sent me from our village. I don’t blame her. She needed money to buy rice for my sisters and brothers. I was the oldest. It was my duty. I went with a madam, thinking I would earn money working in a factory sewing clothes. I am very good at sewing. But when we arrived in Kolkata, the madam sold me to the brothel.

  Kat’s mouth feels like she’s swallowed a fistful of flour.

  The Canary in the film keeps talking.

  They locked me in a room and bound me to the bed. A man came in. And then another.

  Someone in the congregation calls out: “Oh!”

  That first sour taste of vomit is rising in Kat’s throat. It’s been a few days since she’s had to swallow it down.

  The brothel owner’s men beat me. Sometimes they gave me drugs, and I would wake up bleeding and bruised. After many days and weeks, I stopped fighting. I started wondering if I might have deserved this terrible treatment. Maybe I was being punished for some evil I had done in a life before this one.

  Kat swallows and swallows, managing to keep her stomach in place. But every muscle in her body is tensed, as if she’s about to battle an opponent twice her size. The girl keeps talking.

  For months and months, I suffered like this. They didn’t let me out of that room, except to go to the bathroom. Soon, I lost count of time. But one day a man came who didn’t touch me. He quietly told me he was working for the police. He asked my age; I said I thought I could be fourteen by now. He said they would try to rescue me and told me to trust the police who would come, they would get me out of this prison and take me to a safe place. She pauses, as if she’s remembering a girl waiting in the darkness. And they did.

  She escaped. Somehow, they got her out of there.

  But where did she go?

  It’s almost like the girl on the veranda, far away on the other side of the planet, can hear Kat’s unspoken question here in Boston.

  The police took me back to my village … but my mother would not allow me inside our house. She was afraid. I could hear my brothers and sisters crying. The madam had warned them that if I came home, they had to send me straight back to the brothel. If they didn’t, the brothel owner would have me killed and take my two little sisters as payment.