Mother says, “Be good, Adele.”

I force a smile and say, “Of course.”

I am always good—polite to teachers, reserved with the other students, and all “hallelujah, praise his name” in chapel. That’s why what just happened to me is so unfair. If there was a God, I’d be at the front of the bus, where I belong. Mother is right. God is too busy to notice the hurts of a bunch of mixed-race people in a little landlocked African country. The real gods, she says, are the white men in England who draw lines on maps and write the laws that say go here, but don’t go there.

Rian steps closer. He understands everything that just happened to me. He sees it in my face and hears it in Delia’s distant giggles and in the way that no one on the bus will look at me.

“Don’t worry, Adele,” he says. “She’s not worth it.”

“Thanks,” I say quietly.

Mother blows me a kiss as the Ocean Current lurches from the stand and joins a line of buses snaking their way to the main road. I crane my neck out of to the window to keep her and Rian in my sight for as long as possible. They grow small in the distance. The Ocean Current turns onto the road heading south, and Rian and Mother are swallowed by the surge of disembarking passengers and pickup trucks.

“Bet that feels nice, hey, Lottie?” Lazy-Eye Matthew snickers. “Take a mouthful while she’s there.”

I realize that I am leaned across Lottie with my breasts pressed close to her face. We’re not touching, but you know what it looks like. Lottie stares out of the window at the native women cutting grass in the fields and ignores Matthew. She doesn’t even blush at his words. It’s like there’s a wall around her that cannot be breached by bad words or rough hands.

3

The Road to Keziah

The journey is slow, and I am bored. Slow because the dirt road is eaten away by potholes and washboard gullies that make the wheels of the Ocean Current shudder and bump at twenty miles an hour. Plus, cows have the right of way, so the bus stops and starts and chugs behind lazy herds of long-horned native cattle walking from one grass patch to another.

Boring because the scenery is the same as the last trip: Mud huts sprout from fields, distant mountains loom on the horizon, and rivers scattered with stones snake through the valleys. Stray dogs and stubborn goats dot the side of the road. Barefoot black children run to a tin-shack school somewhere. Out there. We travel in heat and dust, but I can smell rain coming too.