She gets up and goes to her cot while I lie on mine with a lump stuck in my throat. Fights are common at Keziah. You have to fight to survive, to mark your territory, to warn others that walking over you has consequences. The rules say that I have to get up and swing at Lottie, bite her, scratch her face, and pull her hair, even if I know that she’s stronger and faster than I am.

Instead, I lie limp and confused in the moonlight. The nettle mixture burns, and all the terrible things that happened to me today keep me from moving. This term will be hell, and losing a fight on my first night back will make me a weakling. If Lottie doesn’t boast about flinging me down on my cot like an empty sack, then my reputation as a fighter is safe.

I crawl under my blankets and turn my back on her. The slime really stings now, but the pain has eased.

“Are you going to eat this boiled egg?” she asks of the last item in the impago box that she ransacked.

“Have it,” I mumble, and hear the crack of the shell and the happy sounds she makes while she eats. The river is two miles away, and the hut where she got what she calls “medicine” is farther out still. She must be starved. I stop my soft thoughts and count all the reasons I have to hate her. Lottie breaks the rules, she fights, she steals, she has one school uniform and one change of clothing for the weekend, two pairs of underwear, a comb, a nightdress, and a tiny spinning top with strange symbols painted on the sides. She’s poor. Being with her will bring me down to her level.

She slides into bed to the creak of metal springs. I stay facing away from her. I’ve run out of bad thoughts, and I watch the shadows flicker across the wall instead. A lightning strike. Moving clouds and then, clear as sunshine, a skeleton hand reaches out to grab me and pull me into the land of the dead. Lorraine. I gasp out loud.

“What?” Lottie says in a sleepy voice.

I look again, and the bony hand is gone. But I saw it. Right there. “Do you believe in spirits?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “They don’t exist.”

Nonsense. Everyone, even the missionaries who finished high school, believe in good Christian spirits. Mostly the Holy Spirit, but that counts.

“How do you know for sure?” I ask.

“If they did exist, then my father would be here every night to tell me a story and to kiss me good night, but he’s gone and gone. Just bones in the ground.”

“Your first father?”

Delia says there have been too many to count. Some white, some mixed-race, some black.

“I only had one father,” Lottie says. It’s silent for a moment. Then very quietly, she says, “And he loved me.”