Zahrah the Windseeker (6 page)

I was tired of thinking about it. Doing so wasn't yielding any answers.

Dari smiled. I think he knew his patience had finally paid off.

"Yeah?"

I hesitated, picking a bit of tree bark from my orange dress and looking at myself through one of the small mirrors sewn into the sleeves. Then I chewed on my pencil. Dari continued trying to memorize the cellular patterns of the four subphyla of CPU seeds and magnetic diatoms as he waited for me to continue speaking.

"What is it, Zahrah?" he said closing his book.

I paused again, the words stuck in my throat.
What if
Dari thinks I'm weird after I tell him?
I wondered. The thought of losing his friendship made me feel sick.

"Just tell me. Goodness." He looked down and then back at me. "Your parents won't hear."

"You promise you won't think I'm weird?"

"I already think you're weird."

I frowned.

"Just tell me. How long have we known each other? Have you no faith in me? I'm insulted!" Dari said with a laugh. "You think me monstrous, like ... like an elgort!? Vicious and simple-minded? Shallow? Unthinking? Ignorant? Insensitive?"

I laughed.

And then carefully, hesitantly, slowly, I told Dan about the breeze, the coming of my menses, and that night.

"Show me," he whispered.

And right there in the tree, hidden among the leaves, I showed him. Dari gasped as I quietly lifted a few inches off the tree branch. When I finished, I looked at him, waiting to hear the words he'd speak. It was a rare moment. Dari was at a complete loss for words.

When he finally found some, all he could say was "Do it again! Do it again!"

Dari liked me for several reasons.

"I like how you always think before you speak," he'd said once. He probably admired this because it was something he had a hard time doing. He usually ran his mouth, rarely considering before he spoke. Of course, Dari was very clever, so this wasn't much of a problem.

When he was in a good mood, which was most of the time, he couldn't help but spread the joy by telling jokes, overblown stories, and just talking. At school even his teachers let him ramble on and on during class for longer than they should. People just loved to listen to him.

These same people said I was creepy with my "strange" hair and quietness. But Dari didn't care either way, and that day, when we were seven years old, I had caught his interest.

"You were frowning and staring at the jungle," he said. "I've seen you on the playground before. I just thought it was odd that no one was saying a word to you and you weren't saying a word to anyone either. I was curious."

Dari said his father once asked him why he'd befriended "that dada girl." Dari shrugged and said, "She's thoughtful and nice." His father nodded and said, "That's true. And she's sharp too." Both of his parents thought I was nice, bright, very polite, and dressed civilized, even if I was born with that strange hair. When Dari told me this, I was very pleased.

Dari loved me in the way only a best friend could love a best friend. It was as if I were his other half. We completed each other. But Dari had a lot of friends and knew girls who wanted to date him.

I sought him only before and after school and once in a while during midday break. But most of the time, I preferred to keep to myself, finding a nice spot under a palm tree to be alone with whatever it was I was thinking about. Our classmates didn't even know that Dari and I were so close.

I liked the silence and didn't really care to bask in Dari's sunshine at school. I didn't need him to vindicate me. And anyway, there was often a crooning, purple-beaked dove in that palm tree I sat under that would sing the loveliest songs, but only when it was quiet. If Dari were around, he'd make too much noise with all his talk and chatter. Dari and I understood each other.

That Friday, Ciwanke and one of her friends slowly walked past me as I waited for Dari at our usual spot a little ways down the road from school. I rolled my eyes at the sound of her voice and looked away.

"Whoo, look at that ugly monster on her head. Who knows what's growing in it," Ciwanke said, stopping. With my peripheral vision I could see the wooden pick she always wore in her large Afro. A wooden pick that would break if I tried to comb my hair with it.

Her friend, Amber, dramatically grabbed Ciwanke's arm with a grin and said, "Don't get too close to her. Who knows what bad luck will rub off on you."

I only looked at my hands. The thought of looking up and speaking to them made me nervous. To speak to them would keep them there longer. Plus my mother always said that silence was the best answer to a fool.

"Ugh, pathetic and disgusting. I don't know why you're allowed to attend this school," Ciwanke said, walking away and patting her soft halo of black hair.

Some steps away, I could see Dari saying goodbye to a few people. Ciwanke glanced back as he began to walk over.

When he got to me, he dropped his backpack on the ground, put his hands on his hips, and looked at me.

"Was she—"

I shook my head, a signal that I didn't want to talk about it.

"Doesn't matter," I said. "Nothing unusual."

"Hmm," he said frowning. But he left it at that, knowing that I didn't like talking about Ciwanke and her harassment. The less I talked about it, the less of a role she played in my life, which was fine with me.

"I don't have much homework today, do you?" I asked.

"Nah."

"So you want to come over or something?"

"How about ... we go to the library?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I don't have anything I need from there. Do you?"

"Well," he said slowly, "we could go to look up stuff about, you know, your ability, if you want."

I paused, biting my lip.

"I don't think there's anything in the library about ... it," I said. But I wasn't sure. Actually, my instincts were telling me that we might find something, but I was not one to follow my instincts. I didn't trust them, plus the idea was so sudden.

"Well, we'll never know unless we look."

***

The Kirki Public Library was a huge five-story building with a cluster of impersonally grown computers on each floor. The traceboard leaves, monitors, and technological sophistication were all cultivated to suit the "average user." Dari and I both hated using them because the trace-boards—large, moist, sensitive leaves that you traced commands on—were not made for our long, skinny fingers, the monitors were too big, and they functioned way too slowly. But at least the computers did what they had to do.

I hoped with all my heart that we would not have to venture to the fifth floor. We learned a lot about the Kirki library in history class. It was grown and nurtured forty years ago by an artist turned architect named Cana. Cana was obsessed with the beauty of glass and thus began his greatest masterpiece, a building made entirely of glassva, a transparent plant! It took Cana years to turn his idea into reality because the glassva plant was very fickle.

After years of failure, Cana threw down his hoe and watering pod and gave up. Still, he couldn't help visiting the plot of land where he'd planted the glassva plant every day and wallowing in his failure. A month later, as he was walking to his place of barren neglect, a strange blue lightning bolt struck the plot of land. The next day, when he returned, he was shocked to find that his plant had begun to grow.

From that point on, the plant flourished and Cana was able to cultivate it as he pleased. To this day, no one has been able to repeat the floral miracle. The building is one of a kind. Well-known authors from all over Ooni often give their readings at the Glass House of Knowledge, the name Cana gave his library masterpiece. Once, I even got to meet the author of the Cosmic Chukwu Crusader Series there! And tourists still travel to Kirki just to see the library. It's one of the most beautiful places rn the world during sunset.

But because the library looked as if it were made entirely of glass, it made me
very
aware of how high up I was at all times. Especially on the fifth floor. The ceilings of all the floors were very, very high. Many say that Cana made them this way so that women wearing dresses and skirts wouldn't have to worry about people looking up from the floor below. In all my years of going to the library, I had never gone past the fourth floor. It was simply too high. If I needed a book from the fifth floor, I asked one of the librarians to get it.

"Just relax," Dari said. "Don't think about it until you have to. What are the chances, anyway?"

We browsed through the catalog on the computer and found books about birds, the history of the Ooni Palace, a field guide to the flies of Ginen, but nothing about human beings who could levitate at will or even fly. Nothing even close. We sat at a study table and slouched in our seats, exhausted from typing and thinking. This was when it popped into Dari's head.

"Ah, I've got it!" he exclaimed. "Why didn't we think of this before?!"

We had been looking up
facts.
But what if what we sought wasn't believed to
be
a fact? What if people thought it was only a myth or legend?

Still, Dari's inspiration proved far less fruitful than we expected. Only one book popped up which dealt with the myth of dadalocks. It was called
Ooni Fashion Magazine's Best of the Year.
Dari frowned. "What could this have to do with the dada myth?"

I shrugged, scribbling down the call number. I froze when I saw where the book was located. Dari laughed.

"Oh come now. We are
not
calling the librarian! You're a big girl. It's about time you got over your fear of heights, anyway."

I didn't agree with him, but I didn't say so. I knew my fear was childish and embarrassing, but that didn't change the fact that I was afraid. Instead of begging Dari to just get the librarian, I followed him up the stairs.

I did anything but get over it. By the time we stepped onto the fifth floor, I was sweating rivers, my legs were shaking, and my heart felt as if it were ready to jump out of my chest. The walls, the floors, the stairs, were all transparent. Only in the bathrooms were the walls and floors opaque.

Once I started moving, I was determined to make it. The sooner I made it up there, the sooner I could pretend I was on the ground by not looking down. And I was curious about what information we could find. All Papa Grip really told me about being dada was that I would grow up wise. Because of all the mystery around my hair, I, too, was sure that my strange ability was connected to my being dada. If there was more to it, I wanted to know.

When we were between the rows of books, I wiped the sweat from my brow and relaxed a tiny bit, making sure not to look at the transparent floor. There were a couple of hours of sunlight left, and it lit up the entire library. The dusty books stacked on the bookcases, however, were not transparent, and Dari and I stood in their shadow. The cluster of computers was in the center of the floor, surrounded by several desks where people did homework, read books, or whispered softly. It was very quiet. So quiet that I could hear people's footsteps perfectly.

"You OK?" Dari asked, looking at me with a smirk.

"Why'd you make me do this?" I grumbled, wiping a tear away and sniffing.

"It's good for you. You won't die, Zahrah," said Dari.

I only "humphed."

"OK, the call number is HR2763, page fourteen," he said, turning to the bookshelves.

We walked for a while, looking at book spines.

"Here it is," he said, pulling out the slim book.

We stood close together, flipping through it. It was a book on fashion. We turned to the right page. There was a small picture of a woman with dadalocks, wearing a lot of face powder and coloring, grinning with all her teeth. I frowned. The woman's locks looked too shiny and perfect, each one the same length, not one hair out of place.

"Hers are fake, aren't they?" Dari asked. "At least they look nothing like yours."

"Yeah, hers look like they're made of pliable plant byproduct. And look at the vines! They're pink!"

"How can she have byproduct hair?" Dari asked.

I laughed. A lot of women had byproduct hair.

Dari and I read the few paragraphs next to the picture.

TUNDE OLATUNDE'S JANUARY FASHION PREDICTION:

Do you want to know what's hot? What's chic? What's most civilized? What'll make people who see you stand on their feet? Well, you don't have to go to the north to find out. I, Tunde Olatunde, am the man to ask.

For the New Year, comes an old style! Few of us have ever seen a real person born with dadalocks. Oh, they're born here and there, northeast, northwest, southwest, southeast, and north of the great city goodness knows exactly where. Most of them choose to lop off their strange locks in order to live a normal life. The ones who keep their hair are quiet people who somehow grow into wise men and women, excelling in whatever career they choose. Or so legend says. But then again, another legend says that those born with dadalocks are rebels whose only cause is to make things go wrong.