I see the things no one else sees. As I’m walking to the cafeteria, out the classroom and into the courtyard, there’s a white woman standing in her nightgown, standing across the yard, away from a crowd of fuzzy black hair and green-and-white uniforms, and the closer I get, the more I see that they’re all standing around one person—Kalinda. The white woman is watching Kalinda too, but the next second I blink and she’s gone and there’s nothing but a dead rosebush standing where she was.
Students are speaking around Kalinda loudly, buzzing with anticipation, and whenever there’s a break in the noise, I can tell even from where I stand, it’s because Kalinda is speaking. I want to hear what she has to say. Her voice is so serious, so grave, I’m positive that anything she has to say must be important. She’s probably the one and only person in this entire school we all need to listen to.
I hesitate by the doorway. I want to join the group, stand with them and listen to what Kalinda is saying, but Anise and Marie Antoinette and others are also gathered around, and I don’t know what they’ll do. If they’ll say something that will make me feel ashamed in front of Kalinda, if they’ll immediately let her know that I’m the most hated girl of this school, warning her to never speak to me so Kalinda Francis will start to look at me with disgust too.
The group lets out one long, hard laugh, and I decide that it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I walk to the group and stop behind them, standing on my toes to see inside of the circle. Kalinda has let down her locks out of their twists to show just how long they are. They reach the back of her bum!
I must have gasped, because the next second, Anise looks at me, and her face turns into such disgust that it’s clearer than ever that she thinks I never should’ve been born.
“Hasn’t something started to stink?” she asks Marie Antoinette, who looks around in confusion, until she sees me and then nods. She chooses to say this specifically, because just a few months before, it became apparent that a horrible smell had begun to ooze from my skin, so much so Missus Wilhelmina one day pulled me to the side and told me that I need to wear more deodorant.
Anise has already tortured me enough by reminding me of my stink whenever I get too close, and now when she says this, I’m not sure if it’s because it’s true. The others around her see me, and then pinch their noses and wave the air in front of their faces impatiently, and there’s Kalinda in the middle of all of them, looking right at me. I begin to wish that I’d never been born either. I turn on my heel and try to walk slowly, like I don’t care that they’re all staring after me and laughing, like I don’t care one bit at all.
Visitors come to Water Island. I see the things no one else can see, but I’m not sure anyone else can see the visitors too. They take a house that’s on the other side of Water Island’s brown hill. Water Island has a scarred hill, big brown scorch mark shining like a giant leech, because one day during Carnival almost seven years back, fireworks went off over the Saint Thomas waterfront and exploded right above us, even though fireworks were only ever supposed to explode over the sea. My mom was still home, and she wanted me to go to bed so if the fire came for us, I wouldn’t see death coming—but my dad took my hand and together we went out to see. I was five years old, and I thought the sun was falling down. I fancied myself brave, because I was standing my ground and looking that sun right in the eye.
Helicopters came and dumped buckets of seawater on the hill, so my mom and my dad and I stayed alive, but by then the house on the very top of the hill was burned and the man who lived there had died. My mom said that children are children because they know nothing about death, so I guess that day I stopped being a child. They left the skeleton of his blackened house behind as a gravestone. It stayed there until the hurricane took that away too.
Water Island is supposed to be a part of the United States Virgin Islands, but we were never sainted like Saint Thomas or Saint John or Saint Croix, and so everyone forgets we exist. People have forgotten about Water Island since the days when there were slaves. Since no one remembered Water Island was right there beside Saint Thomas, slaves escaped to Water Island to be free. They didn’t have to hide whenever a boat filled with white men passed by because those men never even looked their way. I guess some of the slaves started to believe that the island was magic—magic so no one could see its hills except the people who already knew it was there. No one knows who the magic belongs to, but it’s stayed all these years, so I’m invisible whenever I’m on Water Island too, and that suits me just fine. Nobody ever looks my way anyway.
The house on the other side of the brown hill has been available for rent since before I was born, but since Water Island is always forgotten, no one has ever come to stay there before. I notice those visitors on the ferry docks, down the road from
