Seeing that I’m the littlest girl with the darkest skin and the thickest hair in the whole Catholic school, Missus Wilhelmina doesn’t like me—no, not at all. I get a smacking on my bum for everything: not looking her in the eye when spoken to, laughing too loud during playtime, thinking I’m better than everyone else because I know the answers to her questions in class, for asking too many questions in class, for not crying after those bum smackings. I always refuse to cry after a bum smacking.
One look at her, and I can tell she saw me jump off that safari taxi without paying.
“Caroline!” she says. “It’s always something with you!”
I can’t hear her too well after that, since she pinches my ear and wrings it good. She gets an early start on the bum smacking too. She doesn’t even wait until she’s dragged me into the church. Through the heavy doors, into the heat of the church, down the aisle, Missus Wilhelmina’s voice echoes off the walls and bounces into Jesus Christ, hanging from the cross like he always does. He looks down at me with those tired half-closed eyes. It has to be exhausting, hanging on a wall like that all day and all night, listening to so many people’s complaints and prayers. He’s already going through enough, hanging on a cross, crown of thorns on his head, without having to listen to us too. I’m dragged through the church’s back door, which is only ever used by the priest and the choir during service and leads out to the courtyard and classrooms.
The courtyard with its benches and cracked cobblestone ground is spattered with black-and-white bird droppings and filled with green-and-white uniforms and brown legs and shiny loafers, running and screaming and pushing and jumping. There isn’t enough room for all of us, so every morning before class we push each other to make enough room—but when Missus Wilhelmina comes, my ear in her hand, the other hand whizzing through the air and landing on my behind, that crowd stops its pushing and parts right down the middle, like how my mom used to part my hair to give me two big braids that poked out the sides of my head.
Missus Wilhelmina yanks me into our classroom of cinder blocks, with ceiling fans pushing hot air around in circles.
“Always something with you,” she says again. The doorway she comes through fills with faces and eyes and open mouths. They’re funny, pushing one another to see through the door like that, so I laugh.
“You think this is a joke?” Missus Wilhelmina asks.
“Yes,” I say.
The kids at the door gasp too loudly. Missus Wilhelmina whips around and sees them there. They scramble away. She turns back to me.
“You don’t want to go to this school anymore,” she says, “that’s what it is. You want to be kicked out of this school.”
I agree. “I do.”
“You think you’re smart,” she says, her hand raised again, but I duck.
“Smarter than you,” I say, and Missus Wilhelmina chases me out the classroom and into the courtyard, where she gives me a walloping right there, right in front of everyone to see, until the school bell rings and another teacher yells at her to stop before she kills me dead. Missus Wilhelmina is sweating from the effort. She wipes her brow and huffs and puffs.
“Go home,” she says, “and don’t come back to this school. You hear me?”
That is just fine by me.
I do nothing but wander and wander and wander while a little girl no one else can see follows me, skipping along the road, and when I get home long after the sun’s gone down, my dad sits on the sofa, looking as tired as the Jesus Christ that hangs on the church wall. He tells me he just got off the phone with my principal, who will let me come back to school tomorrow—as if this is something that should make me grateful.
“Did you hear me, Caroline?” he says. “You can go back to school tomorrow.”
I don’t speak. I don’t tell him about Missus Wilhelmina, or say he forgot to leave money on the counter again. If my mom were here, I wouldn’t have to say anything at all. She would just sit me down on the floor in front of the couch so my shoulders pressed into her hard, round knees, and she would take a thin comb and undo my plaits while she sang a song so low under her breath that I could never tell what she was singing, not at first, and even though a cartoon would be on I’d strain my ears to listen to my mother’s voice instead.
’Cause your mama’s name was lonely.
The day she left and didn’t take me with her, I decided I would find her again. Remind her that I was Caroline Murphy, her only daughter, and that she loved me too much to leave me behind. Then she would laugh and say it was her mistake, and take me into her arms, and even though most people always wanted to let go after just a few seconds, my mom would only stop hugging me when I told her to, and if it were up to me, she’d just keep holding on forever.
“Caroline—where’re you going? I’m not done speaking to you—”
I get to my room before my dad can reach me, and slam and lock the door with such a quickness I know he must wonder how his little girl got to be so fast. I sit on the edge of my
