When the Ground Is Hard Read online

  “Leon. Go get Mrs. Vincent.” I take charge of the situation when I realize that Lottie can’t speak, let alone give orders. “Tell her to bring water. Quick sticks, now.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Leon hobbles away, happy to be of use in an emergency. He disappears, and soon, his sister and her threats move in the direction of the dining hall.

  I pull my legs to my chest and wrap my arms around my knees. Maybe the smoke made Lottie cry, but even I’m not ignorant enough to believe that. If the fire had destroyed the school shop and then ripped through the classrooms, there’d be no Keziah Christian Academy for this term and for the rest of the year. School is the best part of Lottie’s life. She has three meals a day and bread with apricot jam for morning and afternoon tea. She has shelter and, most importantly, she has books.

  Lottie wipes her nose on her sleeve, and I want to tell her to cheer up. We did it. We saved the school shop, and now’s not the time for tears. Be happy. Be grateful. Smile. Mother’s voice inside my head tells me how to behave and what to say. This time, I ignore it and lay my cheek against my knee. My throat tightens, and my eyes water. I cry in small, hard sobs that rack my body. I cry for more than the fire. I cry for Mother and Rian and Father so far away, and how close Lottie and I came to dying.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mrs. Vincent backs the pickup truck around the corner from the school shop, and students of both sexes jump from the tray with brimming buckets of water. They extinguish the remaining embers, and thick smoke billows from the burned woods. Lottie and I make a half-hearted attempt to get up and help, but Mrs. Vincent shoos us away.

  “Find clean air and have a rest,” she says. “You’ve both had enough fire for today.”

  She’s right. We are dazed and hollow, and I want to lie down and sleep for a week. Maybe two. We rescue our abandoned pangas from the edge of the woods and drag our way toward the senior-girls’ dorm. Images of the fire churn through my mind, but I’m too tired to make a sound or leak another tear. Lottie walks beside me, pale and listless. I doubt she cries very often, and maybe she’s embarrassed by her tears now that we’re out of danger.

  I want to know what she’s feeling: Does the cut on her bottom lip hurt? How long will it take to rebuild the wall inside her? A day, a week, or a month? I keep my mouth shut and hold the silence. There’s a strange comfort in our shared exhaustion, and fighting the fire has moved us beyond words. Together, we experienced what it was to stand before the towering flames. And beat them.

  The school grounds are empty, and lantern light from Mrs. Thomas’s house guides us through the darkness. Behind us, students help put out what’s left of the fires behind the school shop and near the sports field, so we are alone. When we reach the storage shed, I crouch by the door and roll down my sock to find the key while Lottie holds the pangas.

  It’s heat-sealed to my skin, and I wince as I peel it away to reveal a key-shaped imprint seared onto my ankle. The fire has marked me inside and out. I unlock the shed door and move aside to let the light from Mrs. Thomas’s living room shine into the interior. Lottie stops and tilts her head. She listens.

  “What?” I whisper, and she hands me my panga. My heart nudges my ribs, and I hold still. I listen. Soft sounds come from the Christ-thorns, and Lottie lifts her panga, ready to strike down whatever’s hiding in the shadows. I do the same, except my hand shakes and the panga blade twitches from side to side like it’s dancing.

  A brown rabbit shoots from the aloes and runs between us with its ears pinned back. The rabbit’s white tail flashes bright in the darkness. Another victim of the fire. I jump back with a squeal, and Lottie laughs at the sound I make.

  “You were scared too,” I say when my heart rate calms.

  “Ja, but not like . . .” She imitates my shaking hand and fearful yelp, and it’s so funny to see myself so perfectly mimicked that I laugh, too, instead of hitting her a good one, which is the rule when being made fun of by another student.

  A twig snaps in the direction of the little-girls’ dorm, and our laughter stops. The fire might have flushed a bigger, meaner animal out of the bush. A wild dog, for example, can tear a chunk out of your leg and give you rabies. Lottie lifts her panga again, and we listen to the night. Small sounds find us: the wind in the trees, crickets, an owl hoot in the distance.

  “Darnell?” Lottie suddenly calls. “It’s Lo-Lo and Adi. Come out. We won’t hurt you.”

  We wait and wait and get nothing back from the darkness. If Darnell is out there, he’s happy to stay quiet. Lottie’s shoulders slump in defeat. Like her, I’m sad no one answered.

  Female voices, high-pitched with excitement, reach us from the dirt road. Lottie hangs the pangas on their hooks, and I lock the shed door and slip the key back into my sock for safekeeping. Mrs. Thomas leads a gaggle of girls into the yard, and everyone has a story to tell, a close call to report, and a good reason to chatter loudly as they make their way back to their beds. Lottie and I have the best story of all, but neither of us says a word about the troop of monkeys or the flames eating away the trees behind the school shop. We know what we did. And if there’s a God and he turned his head to our dead corner of Swaziland for even five seconds, he knows it too.

  “Inside, ladies.” Mrs. Thomas herds us into the hall. “The generator goes off in twenty-five minutes, so there’s enough time for the older girls to take a shower. The rest of you will have to wait till tomorrow.”

  The younger girls groan. We collectively stink of sweat and smoke, and now our sheets and our pillows will stink too. It’s no use complaining. Graduating students get first go at everything, and the rest of us have to wait till morning to get clean. Lottie and I perch on the edge of our cots, exhausted.

  Normal sounds come from outside Dead Lorraine’s room. Showers turn on in the washroom, and girls get ready for bed. Our room is exactly as we left it, with my hairbrush on top of the chest of drawers and Jane Eyre still flipped open on my pillow. Lottie sighs and throws herself back onto her mattress to enjoy the bustle of the dormitory settling down for the night. My body softens, and I relax. I miss Mother and Rian and the comforts of home, but tonight the distance between Keziah Christian Academy and Manzini seems to matter less than usual. Lottie and I survived, and that is a good enough reason to enjoy a quiet moment of happiness.

  17

  New Rules

  We climb into our beds with ash under our fingernails and the smell of smoke in our hair. The generator is down for the night, and the dormitory is pitch-black. Mrs. Thomas has banned candles for tonight, because open flames inside the buildings will tempt fate, and how could she sleep knowing that we’re still in danger of being burned alive?

  “You can manage without light for one night, my dears,” she says. “Better safe than sorry.”

  I close my eyes and wait for sleep to take me. My blistered arm aches, and the two aspirin that Mrs. Thomas gave me from her personal medicine supply have done little to blunt the pain. I’m exhausted, but my mind is wide-awake, and when I close my eyes, all I see are flames roaring in the trees and embers sparking the grass.

  Mrs. Thomas shines her torch into the room for her nightly head count, and Lottie and I simultaneously turn so that our faces are visible in the spotlight. Stuffed pillows under the blankets don’t fool Mrs. Thomas or the Elephant.

  “You two can have a candle for an hour,” Mrs. Thomas whispers. “You’ve earned it, hey?”

  Lottie strikes a match and lights the wick. We’ve been granted a special privilege by an adult, and to refuse it would be rude. Mrs. Thomas lingers. We wait, made nervous by her attention.

  “A little bird tells me that Mr. Vincent wants to give two special girls a Golden Sun Award for bravery,” she says. “There’ll be a presentation night, and Mrs. Vincent is sure to take pictures for the Missionary Foundation newsletter. People in America will know your names and your faces. Imagi
ne that. You’ll be famous.”

  “A Golden Sun?” I’m in awe. “For certain?”

  “For absolute certain.” Mrs. Thomas edges farther into the room, the bringer of good news. “Plus, your parents will be notified, and they’ll get a special letter to frame and hang on the wall so everyone knows how clever you are.”

  Mother will be pleased. Golden Sun Awards are rare, and she’ll be sure to tell Father how many have been given out and how few are chosen for the honor.

  “Tell me your favorite food and I’ll make sure the kitchen girls cook it for the celebration dinner,” Mrs. Thomas says. And to look at her, you’d think she was the one about to receive an award.

  Lottie throws me a frown, surprised to be asked for her personal menu suggestions. We eat what we’re given, and we’re grateful for it.

  “Roast beef,” I say off the top of my head. “And corn bread with butter.”

  Simple food, easy to make. Anything more complicated might seem that I’m taking advantage of Mrs. Thomas’s goodwill, and that might, in turn, bring out her spiteful side.

  “Sponge cake with apricot jam and fresh cream.” Lottie knows what she wants, and grabs it. Mrs. Thomas smiles at her request, and I have to admit that her boldness yields better results than my “be humble” strategy.

  “I’ll pass on your requests to the kitchen staff.” Mrs. Thomas reluctantly moves to the door to finish her head count. “Sleep well, and good work, girls. Be proud.”

  Lottie and I lie awake in the semidarkness as Mrs. Thomas’s voice echoes in our minds. Sleep well. Good work. Be proud. At school, it seems that the job of adults is to magnify our faults so that, burdened by shame, we learn to be better. Mrs. Thomas, in particular, has a history of putting girls in their place. Something has changed in our world.

  “Well.” I blink at the ceiling, disoriented. “That was . . .”

  “Abnormal.” Lottie finds the correct Oxford Dictionary word to fit Mrs. Thomas’s unusual behavior. “But it was nice, hey?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It was.” And I mean it. Our parents send us to Keziah to get an education and to toughen us up for life’s challenges, except school itself is a challenge that many of us will never conquer. School is a battlefield. The teachers and the other students are our enemies, and we learn to endure the slings and arrows alone.

  Lottie turns to face me. “Tonight she’ll switch from listening to ‘This Bitter Earth,’ to ‘At Last.’ Wait and see.”

  “For how long?” I ask. “A night or two if we’re lucky?”

  “I don’t know, Adele. That’s why we have to enjoy it while it lasts. Tomorrow will take care of itself, but tonight . . . tonight we are heroes.”

  The way that Lottie says “heroes” fills me with a sensation of strength and power. I stretch out and, when my eyes close, a wall of flames roars to life in my mind again. A burning branch twists and falls, and showers me in sparks.

  “All I can see is the fire,” I say to Lottie, who lies on her cot and stares at the ceiling, wide-awake.

  “That’s normal,” she says. “When a bad thing happens, your mind goes over and over it, till one day, it stops.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “A week, maybe more. Some things never go away. With the fire, at least, we won. We beat it. We made a difference. The other hurts will fade or not, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  The seriousness of Lottie’s voice tells me that she speaks from experience. I hate to think of an older version of me with a key mark still visible on my wrinkled skin, still visited by dreams of fire and ash, decades from now.

  “I wonder what’s in that letter that Jane Eyre picked up from the post office?” Lottie says, and she’s a genius for asking. England is far, far away from our small piece of Africa, and Jane’s problems will help to push our own worries away.

  I slide Miss Eyre from under my pillow, wrap my blanket around my shoulders, and sit in the circle of candlelight that pools in front of our shared chest of drawers. Lottie sits next to me, also wrapped in her blanket, and I flip to the place where she left off when the fire bell rang. The words are hard to read in the flickering light, but I know how to make the situation right.

  “Hold the book, Lottie.” I dive under my cot and drag out a suitcase. The weight of it makes my shoulders bow, and heat flares in my cheeks. Lottie is poor, but she’s no thief, while I am a first-class skinflint, a word that Lottie read aloud from The Oxford Dictionary on Friday night.

  Skinflint: a person who spends as little money as possible. A miser.

  Replace the word money with food and you have me right there. Lottie’s choice of word wasn’t personal, though. She also read out saber and then salacious, the definition of which had us both rolling with laughter.

  I scoop an extra candle from the open suitcase, and Lottie’s eyes bug out at the sheer amount of bounty that I’ve kept hidden. It looks bad, I know, but there are rules to follow when it comes to using food. Food buys favors and pays bribes. Food keeps your pets sweet. Food gives you power, and you don’t give it away without getting something in return.

  I light the second candle and keep my mouth shut about the rules. The rules are stupid. Food, I decide, is for eating.

  “Choose something,” I tell Lottie, and sit down next to her.

  “These?” Lottie points to a box of strawberry-cream biscuits, nervous. Strawberry creams buy a lot of favors.

  “Fine,” I say. “Eat as many as you like.”

  We settle against the chest of drawers and scoff down a strawberry-cream biscuit each before I start to read.

  “‘If J.E., who advertised in the —shire Herald of last Thursday, possesses the acquirements mentioned, and if she is in a position to give satisfactory references as to character and competency, a situation can be offered her where there is but one pupil, a little girl, under ten years of age; and where the salary is thirty pounds per annum. J.E. is requested to send references, name, address, and all particulars to the direction:—

  “‘Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield, near Millcote, —shire.’”

  “She’ll get the job,” Lottie says with confidence. “Then she can leave Lowood. Is thirty pounds a lot of money?”

  “I don’t know, but Thornfield sounds big. Unfriendly.”

  “And isolated. Look here, it says ‘near Millcote, —shire,’ which means Thornfield is out in the boonies.”

  “Like Keziah . . .”

  “Keep reading,” Lottie says. “It’s the only way we’ll find out where Jane ends up.”

  I find our spot and read on. The scratched-out name at the front of the book doesn’t bother me anymore. Father’s other children and Mother’s anxious cleaning have no power inside Dead Lorraine’s room. Inside these pea-green walls, only Lottie, Jane, and I exist.

  18

  Liars and Thieves

  The morning bell rings for the second Monday of the school term, and I wake up on the floor with a pillow under my head and a blanket over my body. Lottie lies beside me, with Jane Eyre, the empty box of strawberry creams, and the Jewish spinning top tucked between us. Last night’s hour of grace turned into two hours, and then Mr. Rochester turned up on his horse and almost killed Jane, and although he’s a proper white man with money and Jane is only a servant, it’s obvious that he’s attracted to her and that she’s falling for him. But that house, Thornfield Hall . . . Something’s wrong there, that’s for sure. We kept reading until the candles burned down and we fell asleep to the sound of “At Last,” played over and over again. Mrs. Thomas will be in a soft, don’t-much-care-who’s-wrong-or-right mood this morning.

  “What?” Lottie says when I shake her from sleep.

  “Move it. We have to get one of the showers or we’ll stink for a week.”

  We grab our towels and washcloths, and rush to join the bathroom line, which is alread
y long. I snag a spot behind Claire Naidoo, and Lottie falls in behind me. The fire is the main talking point, and the atmosphere is festive. We’re alive, and standing in line is better than being consumed by fire, which would mean we’d have to have closed caskets at our funerals, and wouldn’t that be a shame?

  A door slams, and Delia, Peaches, Natalie, and Sandi Cardoza come out of their room with flushed faces. Sandi’s hair sticks up like porcupine quills, and something disastrous must have happened for her to show her natural kink in public. Delia walks straight toward us like she’s on a mission, and I can’t imagine what she wants from Lottie or me.

  “Here. Take it.” Delia throws a wad of material in my face. “Now give it back!”

  “Give what back?” I’m in shock. Delia just threw Lottie’s stolen undies in my face. In front of everyone!

  “Don’t play dumb,” Delia snarls. “Give it back.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, exasperated. “Give back what?”

  “My silver necklace.” Sandi Cardoza’s eyes are red from crying. “The one my father gave me for Christmas. That one. It was in my top drawer, and now it’s gone.”

  Lottie grabs her undies from the floor and crushes them in her fist. “Who says we took the necklace?”

  “It couldn’t have been anyone else,” Delia says. “The two of you came inside and stole the necklace while the rest of us were at the fire.”

  “We were also at the fire!” Lottie says.

  “You stole the necklace when Mrs. Thomas sent you back with the pangas.”

  My stomach clenches. Stealing is a serious accusation, and if just one adult believes Delia’s lie, we’ll be expelled for sure.

  “Are you calling me a thief to my face?” Lottie stands nose-to-nose with Delia and bristles with impending violence. The bathroom line breaks to form a semicircle around us. There might be a fight, and nobody wants to miss that. “Are you calling Adele a thief too?”