by Jane Kurtz
TWO
As they walked around the corner, Dakar grabbed Melanie’s arm. There was no way they looked as cool as these high school students. They should be planning exactly what they wanted to say when they were stopped. She winced, but her feet just kept going, and somehow they were walking up the stairs and through the door. To Dakar’s astonishment, even with a beefy high school teacher standing right there, no one even seemed to look at them. She wanted to laugh. After that hairy speech on the first day of school, it was no big deal to use the high school door.
Foo. That was almost too easy. Or … was it charmed? She knew where she needed to go next, straight over to the wall—the wall o’ jocks, as Jakarta would call it. “We saw this on the orientation tour,” Melanie said. “How come you wanted to see it again?”
Dakar stared with awe at the names and numbers. Every person up there was like a modern-day Odysseus or Gilgamesh—all those athletes pitting themselves against obstacles and only sometimes getting a tiny bit of glory, while everyone else sat around and tossed olive pits at them. Sometimes you needed to be around people like that to soak up their courage and confidence.
She suddenly knew what else had struck her the first time she saw this wall. At all her schools it bothered her that every year there were new athletes, new teams just, well, sweeping away all the old heroes and all those soaring memories. It bugged her the way someone could be so great and then disappear without a ripple.
But once your name was on this wall, you were solid. You were forever. Lois Yellowbird had the record for the fifty-yard dash. She wouldn’t stop for any golden apples thrown on the path by her enemies to distract her. No, she must have streaked across the line, hair flying. Zoe Thureen and Natalie Thureen each had a relay record. Were they sisters? Cousins? Was quickness in family genes?
Dakar took a few steps and looked at the middle section. The boys’ basketball team had won state championships in 1947 and 1974. Interesting pattern. Just coincidence? The bodies of the boys on the winning teams were drawn in basketball poses. Photos of their heads were pasted on. Girls’ basketball had no state championships, but Promise Johnson held the record for most points in a regular season.
“What’s so great about a wall?” Melanie persisted. “I’m sure you saw stuff a thousand times more interesting than this in Africa.”
It was true. She had seen incredible things. Melanie didn’t need to know that at least half the things had scared her.
“Notice, the Cottonwood Wildcats’ best sport is hockey,” Melanie said, waving at the next section. “And it is not an accident that hockey rhymes with cocky. But my cousins say the hockey team is no way even going to regionals this year. They say, even so, everyone can’t wait for hockey season because the football team is sooo lousy. I told them I can wait.”
No soccer, Dakar noticed. What would Jakarta do even if Dakar pulled off a quest that did manage to get her here? Yikes. Speaking of the quest, no ideas were coming to her. “Come on,” she said, deflated. “We’re going to be late for class.”
As she got close to the middle school hall, she began to ease one foot in front of the other. She was a tracker in the bushland. One false step, and the elephant’s ears would fan out. She imagined she could hear the muffled snort of a lion, breathing threats and slaughter. Instead, a locker slammed. She stopped, listening to the voices.
“That’s your new hair thingie, right? For cute!”
“Quit that—you almost made me drop my books. Why do you always have to be body-checking everyone?”
“Borrow me a quarter, hey?”
Dakar glanced at Melanie, and they laughed. Then she felt a splash of guilt whitewashing her heart. Jakarta had been her rock, her hiding place, and she not only had let herself be torn away from Jakarta, but was making a friend.
She tried to remember when she’d ever had a friend like Melanie. In her first school, which happened to be a boarding school in Ethiopia, all she ever wanted to do was tag along after Jakarta—Jakarta, the queen. Jakarta, the one who thought up all the games and assigned all the parts. When Dakar had to spend time with her roommates, she made herself small and unsquirmy. If Jakarta ever got impatient with having a little sister bumping along behind her, Dakar went off and pretended to be a horse, galloping through the grass that swished and grabbed at her legs. In the international schools in Egypt and Kenya, she was the type of kid who skittered at the backs of classes and never said anything out loud on purpose. Just a quiet kid hanging on the edge.
With Melanie, everything was different. The first day of school, right after homeroom, kids had bunched around Dakar’s locker, cornering her. Of course, it didn’t take much to make her feel cornered, a water buffalo staring into golden lion eyes, knowing by instinct that she must not run. She heard them asking questions, but she was so nervous that their voices just sounded like babbling waah-waah-waah until one boy’s voice pushed over the rest. “Hey, do you speak some weird language?”
At first she thought she wouldn’t bother to answer. But he was leaning against her locker, and she wasn’t going to be able to get her books out until he moved, so she said, “Yeah, I’m a polyglot. Wakati umeketi, funga mkanda.”
Babble, babble, waah-waah-waah … “What did she say? What did she say? Say it again. What does it mean?”
Suddenly Melanie was there, flying through the crowd like an avenging angel, shoving people, hollering, “You guys are being so stupid.” She gave the boy leaning against the locker a push. “You—you speak weird languages all the time.”
“Me?” He scowled at her. “I’m not even taking Spanish.”
Melanie slammed her own locker open, shut and whirled around. “No!” Her voice could wither flowers. “Anything but Spanish. But you say things like ‘Borrow me a quarter, hey?’ What kind of language is that?”
Everyone had laughed, and their laughter made Dakar feel strong. “It means,” she said, “it means … in the jungle, the mighty lion weeps.” She had walked away grandly, listening to the sudden silence behind her.
“Fierce!” Melanie said, running to catch up. “Who taught you how to say that?”
Dakar just shrugged. The truth was that the words were printed on the back of the Kenya Airways seat in front of her, and she had whispered, “Wakati umeketi, funga mkanda,” over and over to herself when she got bored with sitting cramped in the airplane seat for eight hours. The English words were underneath: “Fasten seat belt while seated.”
“We better hurry,” Melanie said now. “See you in math.”
Dakar nodded. The halls had gotten crowded. She pulled her invisible cloak around her so no one would purposely bounce into her and knock her books out of her arms, hurried up the stairs, and slipped into English class, about a minute late. She could feel herself blushing as she sneaked to her seat. “We’ll be going over outlines today,” Ms. Olson was saying. “For your first reports.” Dakar grimaced. How could she care about outlines when Jakarta was in danger? She eased her lists and thoughts book out of her backpack and made her own outline as Ms. Olson talked.
What I miss most
1. Kenya
a. Trees—the one Jakarta and I called a frangipangi tree with its creamy yellow and white flowers … and the strange way the lavender flowers come out on the jacaranda trees.
b. The red roofs of houses. Red puddles. Red clay on the rug.
c. The sounds of the Kikuyu village when I woke up—birds and roosters and lambs and people calling to each other.
d. The ginger taste of Stoney Tangawizi peppering my mouth. Why doesn’t Coca-Cola sell Stoney Tangawizi in America?
She doodled for a moment and then kept writing.
2. Ethiopia
a. The little pods of the eucalyptus trees that Jakarta and I used for teacups.
b. Thick fog in the gray-green mountains.
c. The cozy, safe attic where Jakarta and I played paper dolls.
3. Egypt
a. Sneaking navel oranges out of the d
ining hall to eat after Jakarta’s soccer practice.
Dakar closed her eyes as the smell of sweat and oranges washed over her. The oranges were brilliantly colored and so full of juice you choked as you bit down on each piece. Then she started writing again.
b. Can’t remember anything else at the moment, but Ms. Olson just said if you have an “a” you have to have a “b.”
4. Jakarta.
5. Jakarta.
6. Jakarta.
She sighed. Had she really heard Jakarta’s voice speaking to her back at Melanie’s house? And could quests really change the course of the universe? Mrs. Yoder, the girls’ dorm mother at boarding school, might say this was heathen thinking, but even Mrs. Yoder talked about how everything you did—or even thought—mattered. And how mysterious the whole universe really was.
“… finish up tomorrow,” Ms. Olson was saying. “Don’t forget to be thinking about a topic for your report.” Dakar slid her book back in her backpack and stood up. The wall hadn’t given her any inspiration about what to do next. What she really needed was one of those wizened old Baba Yaga types who unexpectedly show up and give instructions to the hero.
Baba Yaga! Of course. She almost laughed. She swerved in the opposite direction from her second-period class and hurried down the hall, imagining herself as a princess, sweeping the corridor with her silver-and-red cloak. Lucky thing she’d been given the gift of invisibility at birth.
Quickly now. Down two sets of stairs. She was running by the time she got to the place where soap and taco meat and sour washcloth smells were strong and where she could hear the shhhick, shiiick of a knife being rubbed against something. She stopped, panting, put her backpack on the counter, and looked into the kitchen, her elbows on her book. “Hey,” she said, softly.
“Mercy.” The cook’s voice was loud and had a kind of roll to it, but she didn’t look up from her knives. “Lord have mercy on all your children, and especially on those who have to put up with the pestilence that stalks in darkness, the destruction that wastes at noonday, and students who creep around buildings on quiet feet.”
“Don’t you remember me?” Dakar asked.
“Should I remember? Should I remember?” The cook began chopping onions, rocking the knife back and forth.
Dakar leaned into the familiar smell. “I’m the one who liked your chili last week when everyone complained it was too hot. I showed you my ring from Ethiopia. You said you’d never forget me.”
“Ah.” The cook chopped deftly, the way women in Ethiopia and Kenya knew how to chop onions. “Ah, yes. The Africa child. Don’t you hear that bell ringing? Grab hold of your education, I tell you. Grab hold and hang on, and don’t ever let anything shake you off. Go on, now. You can still make it.”
“I have to ask you something first.” Dakar felt her breath coming quickly, the way it did when she was a centaur, feeling the grass against her leg muscles as she ran, somehow both horse and human at the same time.
“Ask then.” The cook muttered something that Dakar couldn’t hear. “Ask, ask.”
Dakar tried to pull that moment at Melanie’s table back into focus. “If you heard someone’s voice. Heard it very distinctly, I mean. Someone that isn’t even in the same country as you. Do you think it’s true that …” A fly was buzzing in the kitchen somewhere. She’d hardly seen any flies here. How had one managed to get inside and also stay hidden from the cook and her sharp knives?
Melanie was scared of the cook because of those knives. But the knives made Dakar remember the teenage boys who worked in the Maji kitchen to make money for school. They would wave the kitchen knives at her and say, “We’ll cut off your ears.” They laughed if she shrieked or squealed, as she quickly learned not to do. Of course, they would never really and truly hurt her, but they did use the knives to cut the heads off chickens. Dakar shuddered. Not the time to think of that—the chickens squawking and flapping their blood around the yard.
“Africa child? Are you gone to class?”
Dakar wrapped her arms around her backpack and hugged it. “Okay, it’s this. My mom says that when her mother died, she heard her mother speak to her plainly. You know. After it turned out her mother was already dead. Maybe my grandma’s spirit was still hovering for a few hours, or something. Well, I know it can happen because it happened to my mom, but do you think that’s the only time you would hear a person’s voice so clearly? If the person was dead?”
The cook began to hum. Dakar listened. After a few minutes she thought she would have to just go to class after all. But then the woman pointed the long knife at Dakar and said, “The earth and the firmament are full of the glory of God, I do know. I also know glory has such mysterious ways. Such mysterious ways. You never know where a bit of glory is going to pop up or why. I do know that.”
“‘The heavens are telling the glory of God,’” Dakar said. “‘And the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.’ Psalms nineteen, one and two. I learned it in school in Ethiopia.”
The cook chuckled. “You must have gone to some school there. Life’s a miry bog, Africa child. A dry and weary land. You’re going to need knowledge to get through this life. Go to class.”
Dakar put her book on her head and balanced it there. “A lot of Ethiopians get insulted if you call them African,” she said. “I don’t know why, but they do. I was actually born in West Africa, though, where the sand was soft and fine as flour and where the rooms of our house were sometimes so steamy and hot that my father’s glasses would slide from his nose in a river of sweat. That’s what my mother says, anyway. And I just now lived in Kenya. So you can call me Africa child.” She turned, her books still on her head, and moved off with those gliding steps she and Jakarta used to practice. Jakarta! She jerked her head, and the book tumbled off.
THREE
Half an hour before lunch Dakar decided she might have to lie down in the middle of the classroom and perish from hunger. But it was good to think about the gnawing in her stomach, something powerful enough to take her mind from the worry, worry, worry.
When she made it until the fourth-period bell without perishing after all, there was the cafeteria to think about. Melanie had lunch second half, so Dakar didn’t have anyone to eat with. She always navigated the cafeteria carefully, “with absolute stealth,” she whispered to herself. If she was lucky, she could get through lunch without having her tray bump any of the wild animals (“wildebeests,” Jakarta would call them). She could find a place to sit where she wouldn’t be noticed, never downwind where her fear could be scented.
She thought the afternoon classes would be the worst, but in fact she discovered that she was able to concentrate fiercely, not wanting—even though she did want—to hear Jakarta’s voice again. “Jagged,” she whispered to herself as she walked down the hall after her last class. “I’m feeling jagged, jagged, jagged.” She said the word jagged so many times in her mind that it began to sound like mush and not even like a word. And then she suddenly didn’t feel jagged at all, but more like frozen. That was it—her stomach was frozen. Soon her heart would be, too. How long did it take ice to creep from stomach to heart, and what, exactly, would happen when her heart iced over?
“Dakar!” It was Melanie. “Hang on. Hey, what did happen to your knees?”
Dakar blushed. “Um … nothing.”
“Want to go to my house?”
She could go home. They might have news. But they might not, and what would that be like? Like an elephant stepping on her heart.
“What’s wrong?” Melanie said when they were walking. “In math class you were staring at Mr. Johnson as if he was a squid. A dead squid. Was someone evil to you at lunch?”
“It’s Jakarta.” Dakar said the words quickly so she wouldn’t think about them first. “I think she’s in trouble. I wish more than anything that she hadn’t stayed in Kenya. Have I told you much about Jakarta?” She knew she hadn’t. She felt guilty eve
ry time she even thought about telling Melanie any stories about Jakarta.
“Jakarta, your sister?” Melanie chewed her thumbnail. “Wow. What kind of trouble? What are you going to do?”
“Maybe we need to light a candle for her,” Dakar said. “As the smoke drifts up and away, we’ll send our thoughts for Jakarta up with the smoke.” The idea of being able to communicate with Jakarta in some way made the frozen spots that had somehow leaped to her lungs a little easier to breathe around.
Making conversation with Melanie’s mom was going to be tough. She’d only met her once before. Besides, Dakar was never good at knowing what to say to strangers, and it would be even harder now that she was feeling so jagged and jangly. She concentrated on pretending that she had a governess, that the governess was sweeping them through the kitchen, managing her. “Time for your supremely gracious smile now,” the governess was saying to her. No, chiding her. Chiding was a great word. She gave Melanie’s mom what she hoped was a gracious smile and patted Gingerpuff, who leaped up on the counter and wound herself into Dakar’s fingers while Melanie pulled out some crackers and slathered cream cheese on them and then slipped a candle from a drawer marked “Emergencies.”
“Okay,” Melanie said as soon as they were settled on her bed. “We won’t even eat our crackers yet. Tell me all about Jakarta.” She struck a match and reached over with a flourish to light the candle. “I’ll concentrate on sending my thoughts off,” she added, closing her eyes.
Dakar settled back against Melanie’s pink pillows. What had Malika said that time when Malika and Jakarta had done a candle ceremony and let Dakar sit in? The universe is flowing goodness all around you. Open to the universe. “Well,” she started, “Jakarta was always there. By the time I was born, she was already four years old.”
“How come they named her Jakarta?”
“My mom and dad adopted her when they were living in Indonesia. Anyway, Jakarta always took care of me. At boarding school. And in Maji, when the Allalonestone—” She stopped. This was bad. The Allalonestone was something between Dakar and Jakarta. Now Melanie was staring at her with those wide, amazed eyes, waiting to her to go on. But she couldn’t talk about something so personal. “Uh …” she said, “it’s a long story that has to do with my mom. I don’t think we should think about my mom, because the candle smoke is for Jakarta.”
