There’s a spider inspecting its web up in the corner of her office. Miss Joe stands from her seat with difficulty, since the books are everywhere, teetering on the edge of her desk and their shelves and threatening to fall to the floor. She carefully comes to a stop beside me and my chair.
“Every little girl needs her mother,” she says, and that’s all she says about that before she pulls out a book from her shelf. I don’t know how she knows where to find it, but her hand shoots straight for it and yanks it out of its pile. The book has a purple leather cover with a gold hibiscus flower embossed on the front. She flips through it, tears out a few pages, then hands the book to me. It has fancy paper that is thick and yellow, with golden flowers designed in the corners. I decide it’s the prettiest paper I’ve ever seen.
“You should write letters to your mother,” she says, “and one day—if you do meet her again—you can decide whether you would like to give these letters to her or not.”
I take the journal and say thank you, because my ma always taught me to say thank you if anyone ever gave me something, but I already know I won’t be writing a single word on any of this paper. It’s the first gift I’ve gotten from someone who is not my mom or my dad, and I plan on keeping it preserved on my nightstand, pretty paper untouched.
Miss Joe smiles. “Just don’t throw any more stones,” she tells me.
One day before the stone throwing, I sat by myself in the classroom of precise desks and chalk dust, and I sat alone during lunch too, just like I always have, in the small, hot cafeteria of sticky tiles and plastic tables stained with spilled fruit juice, and with wood slave salamanders with their translucent skin letting anyone see their guts as they skittered across window screens. I watched the students who would not come near me or look at me because I got so many bum smackings and because I asked too many questions in class and because I knew too many answers too. They never paid me any mind. I might as well have been invisible, because everyone else would always walk right by, laughing and teasing each other and going to sit at the tables where they always sat. No one would ever say, “Come and join us, Caroline,” so I would then spend the rest of the lunch period feeling sorry for myself and trying to remember that the lonely children like me are the ones who grow up to be someone that everyone wishes they could be.
One day after the stone throwing, nothing has really changed, except now those children watch me watching them. They lean into their friends to say something and then their friend laughs. Anise sits on the other side of the cafeteria, but I can hear her voice over the hum of talk.
“That Caroline Murphy is a female dog,” she says, except she doesn’t say female dog, but the rude word my mom would’ve slapped me silly for saying. “Look what she did to my head. I had to get stitches, and now they say there will be a scar. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re not raised the right way.” And her friends tsk and shake their heads the same way they’ve seen their mothers do over meals of lemongrass tea and salt fish and fungi.
There is one girl who watches me watching her, but she does not look at me in the angry way everyone else does. She is white, and she is Anise’s friend and sits at the table where Anise sits, but I’ve never seen her speak before in my life. I think she might be deaf, or mute, or chooses not to say a single word, the same way the Chief refuses to speak in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I only know about because it’s one of the books my mom read aloud for me at night, me curled up next to her in her soft bed, always begging for her to keep reading even after her voice was scratchy and hoarse, and hating my dad whenever he opened the door and told me to go to my own room because he wanted to sleep.
Marie is her name, but everyone calls her Marie Antoinette because she’s white. She has yellow hair and blue eyes and looks the way the rest of the world thinks everyone should always look, since people with yellow hair and blue eyes are supposed to be more beautiful than anyone else, even though no one can see that they were brainwashed into thinking only yellow hair and blue eyes are beautiful, on account of the fact that people with yellow hair and blue eyes did the brainwashing themselves, so the moment I saw Marie I decided I didn’t like her, since everyone automatically likes her for looking the way she does, and everyone automatically hates me for looking the way I do.
I still don’t like her, but while Anise is talking loud, Marie Antoinette keeps looking at me silently, and every time our eyes meet she looks back down at the table again. She looks again at me, and then again and again, until by the end of lunch, I’ve caught her looking at me nearly sixteen times. That’s a lot of times to look at someone, so I figure she must want something from me. I decide to ask her about it directly, instead of spending the rest of the day wondering.
“Hello,” I tell Marie in the hallway. My hands are shaking, so I clasp them behind my back where no one will see. Anise is close enough to spit in my face, and she
