Ignored by everyone, I sit in my assigned desk and listen to the whispers around me.
“Have you seen her?”
“She looks wild.”
“I hear she’s from Barbados.”
It’s barely enough information, but I piece it together: Someone new is joining the class. Our school is so small that the last new student we ever had was about four years ago, and it was a girl who only came for a day, before she began to cry and sob and wail, snot dripping down her front and all, and she had to be picked up by her mother before recess even began, and we never saw her face again.
Missus Wilhelmina steps inside then, and everyone falls into a church-like silence—they’ve all seen my bum smackings enough to fear her. Her expression is pinched today, like she’s walked into a room to discover a forgotten ham covered with maggots, which is just what happened over Thanksgiving vacation just one year before. She folds her hands in front of her stomach.
“Class,” she says in her nasally voice, as though she’s smelling that rotten ham too, “we have a new student joining us. Please welcome Kalinda Francis.”
A girl walks in. The heads swerve. I lean out of my desk to get a better look. I can barely see her between the first few rows. Even with Missus Wilhelmina standing there, the excited whispers break out again, and Anise says something that makes her group of hyenas howl. Missus Wilhelmina stands taller and straighter until the room quiets down once again.
“Say hello, Kalinda,” Missus Wilhelmina whispers, tone dripping with disgust.
All I can see are scarred brown knees and white socks and shining black loafers, but the voice that comes out nearly sounds like a grown woman’s—it’s deep and grave. “My name is Kalinda Francis, and I am twelve years old.” Kalinda might as well be speaking at a funeral, she sounds so serious.
Missus Wilhelmina tells Kalinda to take a seat in the front row beside Marie Antoinette. It’s only then that I see her hair: thick locks, twisted and braided together and piled on top of her head so high it’s a wonder they don’t snap her neck! My mouth falls open at the sight of her, and I’m not the only one staring. If Kalinda notices, she doesn’t seem to pay us any mind. She takes her seat as she’s told and holds her head so high and proud that she reminds me of the paintings of African queens my mother left hanging on our living room wall.
When Missus Wilhelmina turns her back to start her lesson, Anise begins to whisper from her second row. “I heard that Rastas don’t wash their hair, so they have caterpillars living in their locks. Did you hear that one story about that Rastafarian from Tutu? He had a horrible headache one morning, and so he went to the doctor, but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him, so he went home again, but his headache just kept getting worse and worse, until finally one day he fell down dead! When the doctor looked at him again, he saw that a spider living in the man’s hair had laid a nest, and that it had burrowed into the Rasta’s skull to do it.”
There are squeals and laughs all around. Missus Wilhelmina would usually whip around and clap her hands together and demand that the perpetrator stand outside in the hot courtyard for the rest of the lesson (unless it was me—if it was me, then I would get a walloping right then and there), but today she only continues to scratch her chalk against the chalkboard. Everyone looks to Kalinda, to see if she has heard Anise’s story about this Rastafarian, and what she will do about it if she has.
Kalinda does not pretend she didn’t hear. She looks at Anise with interest. “I knew that man,” she says. “He was my uncle.”
Anise’s eyes become big, and there’s a collective intake of breath around the room—but then Kalinda smiles and looks at the chalkboard again, and it’s clear that she was only joking, and the room erupts with giggles that Missus Wilhelmina finally can’t ignore. She turns around and hushes us all and stamps her foot until we’re quiet again.
I decide then and there that Kalinda would make a great candidate for the first friend I’ve ever had. Anyone brave enough to stand up to Anise like that—well, maybe she’d be brave enough to stand up to the rest of my class too, and would realize that they were silly and mean, and the two of us would sit together for lunch every afternoon and walk to waterfront after school, and everyone would realize what a good a friend I am—so good that they’ll want me to like them too, and suddenly I’d find everyone talking to me and asking me and Kalinda Francis to join them at their lunch tables.
A new student. It’s like a dream, almost, to be seen by someone who has never looked at you before, someone who is not the same thirteen classmates you’ve had all your life, someone who is not your teacher or a parent, someone who does not know who you have been and has not already decided who you are, or what you will become. It’s more than a chance to create a new identity. It’s a chance to really become someone else—or, perhaps, to really become myself.
And for me, it’s the only chance I’ll ever have.
But halfway through class, I see Anise write a note and slip it to Kalinda. Kalinda turns, surprised, and reads the note, then smiles and nods. An invitation to eat lunch with Anise, Marie Antoinette, and the other hyenas, no doubt. I shouldn’t be surprised. There’s no way they would ever let Kalinda sit anywhere else after that scene. Even if Anise doesn’t like Kalinda or any other Rastafarian, it’s
