Hurricane Child: Chapters 1–2

My dad’s blue boat is flipped upside down in the backyard, which isn’t really a yard but a grove of dead trees, and frogs that won’t shut up at night, and the mangrove is just close enough to the water so that when it’s time to go, I can get out of here with a quickness that will surely inspire the speed of light.

I get to the clearing, to the white road covered with dust and gravel and designs of tire marks, to my dad’s house that’s right there on the edge of the sea, waiting patiently for the day a wave will come and wash it away.

There was a ferry on the other side of Water Island that could take us to Saint Thomas for ten dollars, but Mister Lochana only charged us five.

There’re the restaurants that smell like the salted stew beef and boiled plantain my mom liked so much.

Stalls under blue tarp sell fruit and summer dresses and ice-cold rum, and trucks and buses and chickens busily stream by in the granite streets.

People on the sidewalk look at me as I run right into the middle of the road, cars blaring their horns, chickens squawking at my feet, and up the church steps, my bag smacking my back.

I can’t hear her too well after that, since she pinches my ear and wrings it good.

“Smarter than you,” I say, and Missus Wilhelmina chases me out the classroom and into the courtyard, where she gives me a walloping right there, right in front of everyone to see, until the school bell rings and another teacher yells at her to stop before she kills me dead.

She would just sit me down on the floor in front of the couch so that my shoulders pressed into her hard, round knees, and she would take a thin comb and undo my plaits while she sang a song so low under her breath that I could never tell what she was singing, not at first, and even though a cartoon would be on I’d strain my ears to listen to my mother’s voice instead.

A half circle is waiting for me like a mob that’s ready to burn me at the stake.

Both are speckled red, and points of blood start to rise and dry.

I’m sitting on my hands in her cramped, sweltering office that has shelves covering every wall, each stuffed with piles of books and loose papers looking ready to whip around the room in a windstorm.

“I believe that you are an angry little girl, and that you’re angry because you’ve been hurt, and that you need help to overcome this pain, and so I could not force you to leave this school with a good conscience. However,” she says, “you now have two strikes against you. If you do something like this again, I’m afraid I will have no choice.”

Miss Joe stands from her seat with difficulty, since the books are everywhere, teetering on the edge of her desk and their shelves and threatening to fall to the floor.

The book has a purple leather cover with a gold hibiscus flower embossed on the front.

One day before the stone throwing, I sat by myself in the classrooms of precise desks and chalk dust, and I sat alone during lunch too, just like I always have, in the small, hot cafeteria of sticky tiles and plastic tables stained with spilled fruit juice and wood slave salamanders, translucent skin letting anyone see their guts as they skittered across window screens.

I think she might be deaf, or mute, or chooses not to say a single word, the same way the Chief refuses to speak in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I only know about because it’s one of the books my mom read aloud for me at night, me curled up next to her in her soft bed, always begging for her to keep reading even after her voice was scratchy and hoarse, and hating my dad whenever he opened the door and told me to go to my own room because he wanted to sleep.

And even then, though Marie smiles with the rest of them, I see her looking down the hall at me, over her shoulder, like she’s trying to telepathically send me a message, but I’m just not tuned into the right station to hear it.

I pick it up, thinking that maybe I will write a letter to my mom after all—but then I throw it as hard as I can, so hard that it knocks into a lamp that my mother said was exquisitely beautiful the second she saw it, and bought it immediately, and surprised me when she took it to my room instead of placing it on display in the living room for everyone to see.

I take a deep breath and heave and yank and tug until my arms feel like water and my legs buckle beneath me, and I’m sweating in the evening heat, and mosquitoes get tangled in my hair, but I don’t stop until that boat is sitting right side up again.