This is where I live now: in a haunted room that no one will come near. A shadow falls across the doorway. Lottie Diamond steps inside and throws her sack onto the cot opposite mine like she doesn’t care about Lorraine’s ghost or the dust on the window ledges. Of course. This room is probably a palace compared to the tin shack where she lives, and it’s definitely a step up from the long room that she shared with nine other small-fee and no-fee students last year. Lottie is poor and prone to fighting, but she gets good marks and, with the help of the money that the Vincents raise overseas, she’s on track to pass her final exams. That must be why Mrs. Thomas chose her to share a two-cot room.

This is the worst day of my life.

Lottie sighs like she’s the one with the problem . . . like she’s the one whose whole life has been turned upside down in one day.

“Are you going to help me clean the room, or are you going to sit there and sulk?” she asks.

“I’m not sulking,” I snap. “My shoulder is sore. That’s all.”

“All right. You do the dusting, and I’ll scrub the floors. We’ll choke in our sleep otherwise.”

“Fine.” I shove my suitcase and my impago box deep under my cot, where she can’t get them. I’ll have to eat the food later, when she’s not around. Lottie steps outside, and I follow her into the hallway. From behind closed doors, I hear excited chatter and the sound of drawers opening and closing. The girls in the other rooms are catching up on what happened during the Christmas holidays just passed. Their rooms were cleaned by an army of black women this morning. I bet the black women refused to come anywhere near our room. They know about the evil spirits the missionaries tell us are rubbish.

We walk across the dirt yard to the lavender hedge and the house where Mrs. Thomas lives. I knock. Or rather, Lottie steps back so I’m forced to knock. A yellow cat with white paws, called Socks, weaves between our legs and purrs while we wait.

“Yes?” Mrs. Thomas’s brown eyes flick from Lottie to me and then back again. She expects that we’ve already had a fight, that we can’t possibly share a room for a whole term, and she’s too deep in her own sad mood to solve the problem. “How can I help you girls?”

We all know that Mrs. Thomas has mood swings. One day she’s sad and soft, and the next day she’s mean as a mamba snake. Delia says that’s because she went from being a blushing bride to a farm widow in twelve weeks. Twelve weeks! No wonder her mind is cracked.