“Well? You must know more. What’s your plan now? I can’t help you if all you know is that she’s on this island.”
And it looks to me like Kalinda doesn’t have any patience to help me find a plan, either. If I tell her that I don’t have one, she might just walk away from me right here, right now, and never speak to me again. It isn’t lost on me that somehow all my wishes were granted: My mother is on island, and Kalinda is here too. There is still a hope, a chance, that Kalinda might someday return my feelings, and I’ll have the unending joy of being able to love her, and being able to have my mother.
If she’s still alive. If she isn’t now trapped in a graveyard.
I rummage through my mind and come up with an answer quick. “I need evidence that she’s still alive, and if she’s still alive, then I need to know where she is. My dad is hiding that from me. And now, Miss Joe is too.”
“What will you do?”
I think of my dad’s room. Even though he caught me, I managed to get through a lot of his closet, his drawers—enough to see that he didn’t really keep papers there, no letters or documents that would prove my mom was still alive, or that she was still in contact with him.
I decide it right then and there. “I want to spy on Miss Joe,” I tell her. “She’s hiding something from me. I want to know what it is.”
Kalinda is good at hiding her expressions and emotions, as adults often are. If she’s surprised or upset hearing this, she doesn’t show it. She only nods.
“Then I’ll do what I can to help,” she says.
Breaking into Miss Joe’s office isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, seeing that she always keeps her door wide open for anyone to come in, even when she isn’t there. The problem is that she is always there, or it seems like it that morning as she sits and reads her newspaper and eats her hot cereal. Kalinda and I have already missed one full class with Missus Wilhelmina, and when she asks where we are, the other children will say they never saw the two of us at all this morning, since we have been hiding in the empty classroom that’s directly beside Miss Joe’s office, staring through tiny holes in the wall, and when Missus Wilhelmina hears that, she’ll immediately call our homes, only to hear that we’ve left as we were supposed to (or hear it from Kalinda’s anyway, since no one will be at my home to answer the phone), and so the search will be on. We don’t have very much time, and I’m nervous that if I’m caught, this really will be my third strike, and Miss Joe will send me home just as she promised, away from the first friend I’ve ever made and quite possibly the love of my life, and away from the one chance I have to learn the truth about my mother.
Finally, Missus Wilhelmina comes right into the office, just as I thought she would, and my heart drops—but instead of my name coming from her mouth, she throws up her hands and complains that one of the overhead fans has broken, and she and her class of students are destined to die of heatstroke if they’re forced to sit in that classroom any longer, so Miss Joe heaves a sigh and stands from her desk to follow Missus Wilhelmina away. I look at Kalinda and she nods. This is our only chance.
We leave the empty office and run into Miss Joe’s room. The mountains of teetering books, the scraps of paper that seem to be flying in every which way, the mess itself—I remember what Miss Joe’s office is like, but I never until this moment understood how incredibly packed it is with papers, and how impossible it’ll be to find anything at all. Maybe this is why Miss Joe has no qualms about leaving her door unlocked. She knows thieves won’t be able to find anything anyway.
“I’ll begin over here,” I tell Kalinda, who nods and goes to the opposite end of the tiny office, and I begin looking through books and papers, but of course nothing about my mother is there. Miss Joe will be back any moment. Maybe this isn’t worth the risk. I stand straight and look at her desk. I go to it, and standing atop is a row of many photo frames and many smiling faces of Miss Joe throughout the years: one black-and-white picture of a girl-child version of Miss Joe standing in a somber crowd of other young girls; one brightly colored photo of an older Miss Joe holding a toddler on her hip on the sand of a beach; another of her standing tall and proud in her graduation uniform; and one yellowed photo of two young women, only slightly older than me, and one of them is undoubtedly Miss Joe, and the other is just as clearly my mother.
I hold the photo. Kalinda comes to stand beside me. “Who are they?” she asks. She’s sweating, either from the heat or the exertion of rushing through books and files.
I hold up the photo and put my finger on the glass, leaving my fingerprint in a smudge. “That’s my mom.”
Kalinda takes the photo with a smile. “She’s beautiful.” She looks at me again. “You look like her.”
My heart blooms like a flower in my chest. “I don’t.”
“You do. You have her nose and her eyes and her brows.” She hands me back the photo in its frame.
I didn’t realize Kalinda had studied my face so closely. I’m suddenly shy and can’t look at her properly.
“Why does Miss Joe have a photo of your mother?” she asks.
“They were best friends,” I tell her, and almost add, and
