the three-legged race

There is one race on sports day that you cannot win by yourself.

Every other race, it is just you and your own two legs and how fast you want it. But in the three-legged race they tie one of your legs to one of somebody else's, and then the two of you have to become, very quickly, one person with three legs.

Most people think this makes it harder.

I had decided it made it easier, because now there were two of us to want it, and I want things very hard.

I just needed the right second leg.

"Hana," I said. "I need your leg."

Hana looked down at her leg. "Which one?"

"The inside one. We are going to be tied together. We are going to be one runner. We are going to win."

Hana stood up so straight she looked like a broom that had just been promoted. "Yes, thiae."

That is why I picked Hana, if you want to know. She is my cousin and she is always at our house and she does exactly what you tell her, and only what you tell her, and she cannot tell a lie if her life depends on it. If I said left, Hana went left. If I said hold, Hana held until somebody remembered to say stop. You cannot buy a second leg like that. I asked Aiman the price and even Aiman did not have a number for it.

So we started a training camp.

A training camp needs equipment. The equipment was a rope. The rope was Aiman's.

"Rope is fifty sen," said Aiman.

"It is your brother's rope. I have seen it tying up the goat."

"Rental of my brother's rope," said Aiman, "is fifty sen. The goat pays too. The goat is just slow to pay."

We trained behind the house every evening. I tied my leg to Hana's leg and called out the steps, like a drum in a boat. Inside leg. Outside leg. Inside leg. Outside leg. At first we fell down a lot. We fell down so much that the ground behind the house got a smooth patch shaped exactly like two girls landing.

Kavi appointed himself the coach. A coach, Kavi had decided, is a person who runs next to you shouting the thing you are already doing.

"YOU ARE WALKING!" Kavi coached. "NOW YOU ARE WALKING FASTER! NOW YOU HAVE FALLEN OVER!"

Divya came and sat on the fence with her homework. Divya is my best friend and she is right about things, which I have learned to live with.

"You are training her to follow you," Divya said, not looking up. "What happens when you need her to think?"

"She does not need to think. I will think. She is the leg."

"Legs do not think," Divya agreed, and went back to her fractions. She had said the thing. With Divya, saying the thing once is the whole job, and then she lets you go and find out.

But we got good.

By the end of that week, Hana and I could cross the whole yard tied together without a single fall. We could turn. We could go round the chicken. Inside, outside, inside, outside, two girls and three legs and one drumbeat. We were not two people any more. We were a machine.

Which is exactly when Pei Pei turned up with a machine.

She had heard the words tied together somewhere, and gone off without a word, and now she was back with a thing. It was two loops of bicycle inner tube, joined by a flat bit of wood, with a buckle she had got from somewhere I did not ask about.

She knelt down. She put my leg in one loop and Hana's leg in the other. She did the buckle.

It was perfect.

It held our legs at exactly the right distance. It did not slip. It did not rub. When we walked, we walked as one, smooth, like the machine had been waiting its whole life for two kids to put inside it. We did one lap of the yard and it was the best lap of my life. Even Kavi went quiet, which is the loudest thing Kavi ever does.

"Pei Pei," I said. "You are a genius."

Pei Pei did not say anything. Pei Pei never does.

Sports day came.

The field was full. The whole school was there, and the makciks were at the fence, because the makciks grow on fences. Mak was at the fence too with a flask of something. Somewhere a teacher had a starting gun that was really a man clapping two pieces of wood, but it felt like a gun.

Hana and I knelt down at the start line. Pei Pei buckled us into the machine. I felt the wood snug against my leg. I felt ready. I felt unbeatable.

"Remember," I told Hana. "Wait for my call. Inside leg first. Do not move until I say."

"Until you say," said Hana. "Yes, thiae."

The man clapped the two pieces of wood.

Everybody ran.

And the machine did not let go.

I do not know what Pei Pei's buckle decided that morning. Maybe it got stage fright. The buckle locked. It locked our legs together so tight and so straight that I could not bend my knee to take the first step. I pulled. Hana pulled. The wood between us turned us into one stiff thing standing very still while the whole race ran away from us.

"Hana, go!" I said.

But here is the part Divya had been trying to tell me on the fence.

I had drilled Hana to wait for my call. Inside leg. I always said inside leg first. I had never, not once, drilled the call for "the machine has betrayed us and we must escape it." There was no command for that. So Hana, who does exactly what you tell her, and only what you tell her, did the most correct thing she had ever done in her life.

She waited.

She stood there welded to me, balanced and ready, listening for a command that did not exist, while every other pair of legs on that field crossed the line.

A teacher blew a whistle at us. I do not know what the whistle was supposed to do. We could not have gone faster if the whistle had been on fire. Kavi ran up alongside the empty space where we should have been and coached it loudly, in case the empty space needed encouragement. At the fence a makcik called out that we should try using our legs, which was the one piece of advice in Johor that did not help.

So we did the only thing the machine would allow.

We fell over.

Together. Sideways. In one piece, like a door coming off its frame. We hit the grass tied at the leg and we lay there in a tangle, dead last, so last that the next race was already lining up over the top of us.

And Hana laughed.

Hana laughed in a way I had never heard her laugh. Not a small one. A big one, from the bottom of her, the kind that uses your whole self, lying on the grass with her leg still buckled to mine and the buckle still refusing to let go. She laughed so hard she could not get a single word out.

Hana did not care that we had lost. Hana had never cared about winning. She had only ever wanted to be tied on, in the one race where they fix you to somebody and nobody can be left behind at home. She had said yes before she even worried, the way she always does.

You do not say a thing like that to a person who is laughing that hard. You would only stop the laugh, and the laugh was the best thing on the whole field.

So I laughed too.

When we finally tried to get up, the machine still would not let go. Pei Pei had to come and undo the buckle, and even Pei Pei had to think about it, frowning at her own machine the way you frown at a friend who has done something you did not believe they had in them.

But before she got there, Hana and I stood up the only way the machine would let us. As one. Inside leg, outside leg, the old drumbeat, slow and tied together. And we walked off that field three-legged, last of everybody, going nowhere fast, completely joined at the leg.