Costello reaches our desk and drops our tests in front of us.
Lerato pulls at mine. “I knew it.”
I take the test back from her. My mark’s more or less what I expected.
“With grades like that, I don’t understand why you stopped being a monitor,” Lerato says.
“It wasn’t comfortable. Mr de Silva saw the report card I came in with from East London, and thought it was a Rorschach test and not just marks.” The two of us learned about the inkblot test in English last week. “Like it meant I’d naturally be good at following orders.”
Lerato shifts on her seat, grinning, before closing her test. “To be honest, it isn’t that bad. There’s the tuck shop thing, for one.” I know. Monitors like her get free apple pies.
“I don’t care about King Pie,” I say.
“Even apple King Pie?”
“Even apple King Pie.”
Lerato smiles, shaking her head, even though it’s true.
Toward the end of my last year of junior high—not long after I came here—I got my student monitor badge taken away from me. I got summoned to the principal’s office, where I watched our headmaster, Mr de Silva, sweating under his collar, while through the window mounds of rain clouds massed over the field the school rented for track. He was on the phone, looking down at his blotter, and I remembered how we hadn’t had any sports, that year. I looked at the mist on the windowpane behind Mr de Silva’s head.
He dropped the receiver and sighed, looking at his hands. “You fraternize too much,” he said. “You were trusted with leadership and discipline.”
I nodded, but I didn’t face him.
The world outside felt muted. Two old men pushed a wheelbarrow to a landfill across the field, thin curtains of smoke rising from a smoldering garbage fire before them, and I didn’t answer him, but walked to his desk when he told me to. He removed the pin from my school uniform and turned it over in his palm.
“You can go,” he told me, and I left.
Before class ends, an alarm goes off for a fire drill. We file out into Huberta Square. I’m surprised they’re still following regulations, even for safety; for the longest time, we’ve been told the school is just hanging on, on the verge of going broke. Joining the crowd at the back, I reach into my bag and feel for Kiran’s MD. I can’t see him anywhere.
Lerato sidles up to me. “Here’s to another waste of time.”
I nod and rub my hands together, feeling the onset of winter. The mist hangs low over the grounds, raking goosebumps from our skin. We get told to arrange ourselves in straight lines, slicing the courtyard into four perfect squares.
I never used to believe enough when Mom was still around.
I remember that.
The first time I told Part about the abduction, her hesitation didn’t surprise me.
We were in her kitchen, the first cul-de-sac off Head Drive on the other side of town; she was straining a cup of tea for her mom and telling me she’d promised herself not to spit in it. Not that I’d asked.
I sat back on the kitchen chair and watched her leaning over the basin. Part’s legs could be found in an old dentist’s waiting-room magazine, I thought, preserved from the ’80s, like the ones I’d seen in a box of Mom’s old things. Her Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt hung past her cut-offs. Her feet were slender, and if the tiles were cold, she didn’t show it.
“You mean extraterrestrials?” she asked.
“I didn’t see them, but yes.”
“I see.” Using two fingers, Part pulled the lid off the kettle, releasing steam.
I decided to try something else, before I lost my nerve. “Do you want a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know. Does that happen?”
“I learned about it in Life Orientation.”
Part laughed. “There’s also Litha.”
I sighed. Part liked to provoke me, I knew that, but I could also tell we were both scared. I dropped my head onto my forearms, reminding myself of all the ways I looked better than she did. I stopped when I reached the ones I’d made up. I breathed out.
Part stood and rinsed the strainer over the basin. Then she turned around and dried her hands down her sides. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“Do you?” I looked up from my forearms and attempted a smile. “Then say yes to me.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, “and yes, yes to you, too.”
Then I got up.
That’s how Part and I first got together, that afternoon. The second time it happened, I told Part my theory of how my mom had been abducted.
The two of us headed down to the library on Alexandra Road behind the shut-down theater. We walked around the rusting cannons that sat baking on the lawn by the dried-up water fountain, ignoring the other students. I let Part walk in in front of me, absorbing the sunlight so I could savor the gust from the air conditioning in the lobby when we went inside.
We checked our bags and passed single-file through the glass doors into the main part of the library. The air was even colder here, which I liked. Under the flicking fluorescent lights, we curved into the adult section on the right, where I pulled out a hardcover with UFO Diaries embossed on the front.
I handed it to her. “I first found a copy of it when I was 12. It was in Mom’s things. I’d snuck into the guest room, where we kept her clothes before Dad packed them up.” Since then, I’d often come back here to read about people like me and Mom.
Part squinted at the cover. “These people could be insane.”
“I don’t know. Look.”
I opened the book and she leaned over my shoulder to look, close enough for me to inhale the aroma off her skin. Thinking of my own scent, I told her to wait; I tried not to blush as I walked to the bathroom, where I tamped my armpits with damp toilet paper. I pressed it over my eyelids and between my legs. Then I washed my hands with the sweet puke-like soap from the dispenser.
I found Part sitting cross-legged in the non-fiction aisle, the book open on her lap.
“I don’t know,” I said, “one night she was around and one night she wasn’t. The window in the living room was open. I mean, who vanishes like that?”
I sat down next to her and she looked up at me, the book’s cover sticking to the insides of her thighs. I didn’t mention the other connection I had to it. That I’d found the first copy at a time when I felt foreign inside, breasts aching for the first time, and with new underarm hair. I looked taller, too. I felt like there was an exit from being a child and alone. Feeling noticed, as well, and not having a pill prescription.
“Like, aliens?” Part smiled, and I felt more stung than I’d expected. She looked down and opened the book again, creasing her brow as she read.
“Like that, huh?” she said.
“Like that.”
I only met her father, the policeman, after I met his gun—an automatic 9mm.
Part’s dad was out that afternoon, somewhere in town. She had the gun between us on her mother’s bed.
Looking at me, Part laughed and said, “Put it in your mouth. It still has my saliva on it. It’ll be like a kiss. Or even better.”
Outside, the light was golden and had stuck itself to the windows, hiding behind the synthetic curtains, and there in her mother’s room, on her bed, we were two humming spirits in a movie about desolation, where life was two people and death was everything else.
“It