“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.”

Her words cut through me. Her father loved her. She’s certain of it. She knows it from the roots of her cropped hair to the tips of her toes.

Of all the reasons to hate Lottie Diamond, that father, with his stories and his kisses, is perhaps the best one of all.

6

Surely Mercy and Goodness Will Follow Me

We line up for Monday morning inspection, little soldiers on parade. The junior girls stand in the front rows, and the senior girls in the back. Down the road, where we can’t see them, the boys do the same.