One morning my mom got up and went halfway across the world, as my dad likes to say. She sent postcards from all the places she traveled to, names of cities I couldn’t even pronounce, but the postcards stopped coming after the ocean got up and killed all those people, and for a while my dad thought my mom was dead too. Then the cards started coming again, from small towns across Europe, but the handwriting was scratched quickly, and my mom had less to say with every new postcard, with every new town. When the cards stopped coming again, it wasn’t because my dad thought my mom was dead.
Opening the mail in the morning became a ritual. The two of us, my dad and me, sitting at the kitchen table like we were about to say a prayer before a feast, him taking the stack of letters and bills from the post office and cutting open each one, me swinging my feet while I waited for him to find a postcard slipped in between—but after the fifty-third morning since we got the last postcard, my pa put the letters down in a neat stack after opening them and told me, “I don’t think we’ll be hearing from your mother again for a while, Caroline.”
That’s all he said about it. He stood up from the table, chair scraping the yellow tile, while I bit my lip. He went to the stove, pots clanging. I kept swinging my feet.
And your daddy’s name was pain.
And I knew it before. Knew it then. Still know it now.
I have to find her.
I know something’s wrong when I get to school the next morning and a little girl with twists in her hair stands in the middle of the aisle of the church. When she sees me, she jumps right up into the air and turns tail and runs for the door at the back of the church, screaming, “Caroline Murphy is here! Caroline Murphy is here!” so loud that I’m afraid Jesus Christ and his cross will fall right off the wall.
I don’t know what they have planned, but I’m no coward, so I go right down that aisle out the back door and into the hot courtyard. A half circle is waiting for me like a mob that’s ready to burn me at the stake. They’re all holding stones.
“Why don’t you have a mom anymore, Caroline?” a girl asks. I know her well. Anise Fowler. Her hair is ironed straight, and some days I think I can still smell it burning. Her nails are always painted because her mom takes her to the spa. Today they’re scarlet red.
She’s waiting for me to speak. They’re all waiting for me.
“I still have a mom,” I tell them.
“Heard she ran off with another man.”
I don’t know if she actually heard that, or if she’s just making it up. “She didn’t,” I say.
“You’re gonna be just like her,” Anise says. “You’re gonna run off with some man.”
“Same way your mom did?” I ask, since this is openly spread knowledge—something that everyone whispers, because they heard it from their parents, though no one ever says it to Anise’s face.
Anise’s smile twitches. She doesn’t need to give a signal. They all know to start throwing the rocks right then and there. They’re small enough that they won’t kill me, but chunks of mud dirties my white-collared shirt, and sharp pebbles scratch my ears and my cheeks and my knees and my hands when I reach out to protect my eyes. Anise is aiming right for my eyes.
When they run out of rocks, I look at my hands. Both are speckled red, and points of blood start to rise and dry. I look at those smiling faces all around me, and I reach down for the rocks at my feet and I pick them up and throw them as hard as I can at each and every one of them, even the ones who’d only been watching. They scream and scatter except for Anise, and I pick up the biggest rock I can find and aim it right at her head. It knocks her above her eye, and she falls to the ground.
Three teachers, with Missus Wilhelmina right up front, come hurrying into the courtyard. Piles of dirt and rocks everywhere, and me in the middle, with my hair sticking out of its braids and dirt all down my front and little children pointing at me, telling those teachers I’m the one who threw the rocks.
“I will not force you to leave this school, Miss Murphy,” the principal says. I’m sitting on my hands in her cramped, sweltering office, which has shelves covering every wall, each stuffed with piles of books and loose papers looking ready to whip around the room in a windstorm. There are so many books and papers I’m afraid they’re all going to come crashing down on my head. The principal doesn’t seem to be scared at all. Miss Joe is her name, and she only ever calls students by their last names, because she says then we will know we are destined for excellence, though I’m not sure what my last name has to do with anything.
“I believe that you are an angry little girl, and that you’re angry because you’ve been hurt, and that you need help to overcome this pain, and so I could not force you to leave this school with a good conscience. However,” she says, “you now have two strikes
