I’m expecting the hyenas to laugh, but this is a very serious accusation. They look at Kalinda expectantly, waiting for her to answer.
“I don’t know what’s in the journal,” she finally says. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her voice quiver in my life.
“Then come and take a look,” Anise says with a smile. I try to pull on Kalinda’s arm, to shake my head, plead with her by squeezing her hand, but I stop when I see the way the hyenas look at me, and when I see the way Kalinda looks at me too. Reprovingly. She might as well tell me in her adult voice to stop it, stop it now, stop acting like a child. She steps away from me and to the circle of hyenas, and she’s enveloped by them as Anise walks to her, holding the journal like it’s a sacrifice in her hands.
There’s silence, and salt stinging my eyes, though I won’t let the salt fall, and I think my heart must’ve stopped because I don’t hear it anymore now.
’Cause you’ll never love again.
Kalinda looks up from the journal, and I know she’s read everything on that page. She shuts the journal herself and steps out of the circle without looking at me and walks out of the room. There’s a moment of silence. And then the hyenas jump to circle me instead, all of them attacking at once, saying I’m going to hell and they should light me on fire now to get a head start, and Anise starts a game where they shove me like a ball, bouncing from girl to girl, until I trip and fall and bust my knee on the floor. Then Anise drags me up by my hair and the game starts all over again. And I let them play it, because I’m not sure anything else at all matters anymore.
Kalinda won’t look at me for the whole of the day, and when Missus Wilhelmina tells us to go home, she leaps out of her seat and walks so fast she might as well have run right out the classroom door. Anise stays behind, waiting for me in the courtyard. She and the hyenas march behind me all the way to waterfront, telling me to get ready to burn in hell, and that I’m disgusting, and that I shouldn’t even be alive. I’m starting to think that they might be right. When the woman in black wavers in the corner of my eye, I don’t even look her way.
The next morning, I don’t get out of bed. Mister Lochana will wonder why I didn’t come to him, and my father will get a phone call from Miss Joe tonight, hearing that this was my third strike and that I unfortunately have been expelled, but I don’t care. I sleep like the little white girl slept in that fairy tale for what feels like a hundred years.
When I wake up, the sun has already set and is beginning to rise again. I leave my house and walk out into the yellow sun, walk and walk and walk down the road. Like she’s waiting for me, Bernadette is sitting right there in a guava tree. She looks like she’s a little girl ghost. She swings her legs back and forth, and while they swing I could swear both her hands are on backward, as are her feet.
“Why you can’t just stay away from here?” I ask. She just keeps swinging her legs. I pick up the biggest stone I can find and throw it. It misses her head by a good foot. I wish I could say I meant to miss, but I don’t think I did.
“I came here to meet my father, but now I have to go home again.”
“Why would I care about something like that?” I ask.
“Because your father is my father.” And when I don’t say anything, she adds, “We’re sisters.”
“What?”
“You’re my big sister,” she says. “I’m your little sister. That’s what my mom tells me.”
“Your mom’s a liar.”
She jumps down from the tree and opens her mouth and lets out such a scream that I’m sure the gates of hell are ripping open. I slap my hands over my ears, and she keeps screaming and screaming.
“Shut up!” I yell, but she pays me no mind. She takes a big breath and starts her screaming all over again, tracks of tears and snot running all down her face. Anyone would swear I’d tried to kill her mother dead instead of called her a liar. I can’t take it anymore, so I turn on my heel and race up the white road to my house.
My dad comes back just when the frogs start to make their noise. He steps inside the house and stumbles a bit when he catches me sitting alone in the dark. He doesn’t say anything as he walks inside and turns on the light and drops his keys on the countertop with a clatter. He comes back inside and sniffs as he kicks off his shoes and leans back in his chair and unfolds a three-day-old newspaper.
“Your principal called me at work,” he says. “She wanted to know why you haven’t been at school. I told her you were sick.”
I know I should thank him. He’s probably expecting me to thank him, apologize, and explain what happened. Or maybe he’s expecting his little rebellious Caroline tonight. Maybe he thinks I’ll start to yell and scream and cuss him out. Instead, I say something he isn’t expecting at all.
“That
