When I come to school, I sit alone in the classroom with my head bent low. The photo is still in the pocket of my skirt. No one has anything to say to me today. Anise Fowler and her friends leave me alone. I don’t even feel their stares. This is a strange and unprecedented thing, but I wonder if it’s because of the way I’ve stared blankly past them, and because of the way Kalinda asked them to help me just yesterday. We’re not friends, and never will be, but maybe now we’re not quite hated enemies, either.
Someone stops beside my desk, and I look up to see Kalinda. She doesn’t look like she knows for sure what she wants to say to me.
“Good morning,” she says.
I tell her good morning too.
She stands there, the expression on her face pained. She looks like she doesn’t know if she should stay or run away. Finally she opens her mouth. “Have you found anything?” she asks. “Anything about your mother?”
I don’t want to tell her the truth. If I do, then we’ll have to go to 5545 Mariendahl Road together, and I’ll have to see my mother opening the door and looking at me without any love in her eyes, and then once we’ve found her, Kalinda won’t have any reason to speak to me anymore. I grip my hands and shake my head.
She still stands beside me. She rocks back and forth on her heels and her toes. “I tried to imagine myself not speaking to you at all today,” she says. “I’d come here planning to ignore you.”
This hurts my heart more than I can bear, so I look away, expecting that she’ll take her leave. But she stays where she is—even continues to speak.
“But the second I arrived and saw you, I knew that I couldn’t ignore you, no matter how much I tried.” She pauses for a long while before she asks, “Would you like to take a walk with me after school?”
I’m surprised. I look to Anise, who has her back turned to us. I’m not sure I trust this. Would it be possible that Anise convinced Kalinda to play a cruel game on me? That she’s only pretending to be my friend again? “Why?”
“Because we need to talk,” she says. “I have some things to say to you.”
I’m afraid. I don’t want to know what she wants to say, or whether she even speaks the truth or not. But I nod my head anyway, unable to really look at her. I stare at the air over her shoulder instead. She turns on her heel and returns to her seat, and doesn’t say a single word to me for the rest of the day—not until I find her waiting for me on the church’s front steps.
“I thought we could walk to the beach,” she tells me as she starts the walk. “I haven’t been swimming in a very long time.”
I wring my hands together. “I don’t want to swim,” I tell her.
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid of the ocean.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” I say, and I remind her of the day I fell off Mister Lochana’s speedboat and nearly drowned before I’d even had a chance to fully learn how to walk.
“Well,” she says, “I won’t let you drown.”
She keeps walking, like that should be enough. Who knows? Maybe it is. In fact, I decide that, yes, I’m safe when I’m with Kalinda, and if it turns out that this really is nothing more than a cruel game, then I’ll have nothing else in this world at all, because right now, I think she is the only other person I can trust besides myself.
We walk and walk and walk, all down through town and past the graveyard and over the long strips of paved road where mirages shimmer in the sun. The sky has gray clouds blowing in from the west, and with them comes the smell of rain and a heaviness in the air, but Kalinda doesn’t seem to care. She just keeps on walking. She doesn’t speak to me. She only walks with such a focused look on her face that I think she’ll just leave me behind if I don’t keep up.
When we get to the beach, sand spilling onto the road, she doesn’t waste any time. She takes off her shoes and socks and places them neatly in the shade of a palm tree and runs straight for the water. I do the same, hot sand burning my feet, and follow her. She leaps into the waves and comes back up again, her locks flying with salt water everywhere. I stop where the water crashes onto the sand, foaming up around my toes, trying to suck me back out again.
She stands in the water. Stands like she’s a queen of the spirit world. Kalinda doesn’t belong here. I know that for sure.
“Come,” she says. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
I wade into the waves after her, the cold winter water lapping up against my thighs and my sides, making my school uniform stick to my skin. Kalinda takes my hand.
“I’m sorry for the way I treated you,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I say automatically, even if it isn’t true.
“I’ve thought long and hard about our friendship, Caroline, and I realized that I miss you too much to lose you. I still want to be your friend, if you’ll let me—even if what you feel is a sin.”
There’s pain mixed with joy that strings around my heart, caging it in so it can only beat a low thump—pain that she does not love me as I love her, pain that she thinks my love for her is a sin … but joy that she considers me her friend once again. It begins to rain, lashing water against our skin and making the sea splash into our
