When we get home, I find Mom in her room with the lights out. I open the door slowly, and she waves me over.
“Mom,” I begin carefully. “We went to the library today. Grandma let us get some books.”
“Bring them here,” she says with a sigh, turning on the lamp. “I need to check them to make sure they won’t have any bad influence.”
I hand her the stack of books. “I got horse books. I’m sure these won’t have any bad influence.”
Squinting, Mom takes a book and reads the back in detail. She nods, recognizing the title. She passes it back to me and opens her hand for the next. When she’s finished with the stack, she leans back on her pillow.
“Okay, these look fine. Just make sure you’re doing your schoolwork and reading your Bible before you read any of these.”
“Yes, Mom!” I sing back to her, my heart thumping with excitement.
I hurry through my homework, trying to ignore the stack of stories calling to me only a few feet away. As soon as I finish the last long-division problem, I pick up Black Beauty. The spine cracks as I open it. I’m careful not to bend it back. I know that can hurt the book. The spicy smell of musty paper held by a hundred other readers tickles my nose. I suck it in deep. “The first place I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. . . .”
I don’t stop reading.
A gray light seeps through the windows; birds twitter in the bushes. It’s morning. My heart jerks painfully in my chest. How could I have stayed up all night?! School begins in an hour. But even that worry cannot spoil the deep satisfaction I feel as I close my eyes for a few minutes before Mom bangs on my door: “Wakey, wakey!”
Despite my bleary eyes, I say not one word about being tired. I know I’ll pay for it at school, but I can’t care.
This nighttime reading becomes my pattern. I fall in love with the Dune series, which I keep hidden under my bed. Mom may let me read horse books, but sci-fi is too far outside her Family comfort zone. The stories of monsters and heroes give me the strength to withstand the alien landscape of my school. As I walk between classes, I silently repeat the mantra against fear: Fear is the mind-killer. . . . I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. That day, I doze off in my Georgia History class again.
I’m startled awake when the teacher knocks on my desk and hands me a sheet of paper with a big red D scrawled on the front. My very first exam. I don’t know much about school, but I know a D is very, very bad. I can hardly swallow. How did this happen? I read the chapter. How was I supposed to know to memorize the colony’s major sharecrops? It seemed so unimportant.
Determined to figure out what went wrong, I compare the textbook chapters with the questions on the test to understand the types of things the teacher will expect me to memorize. I pay attention to what the teacher emphasizes in class and ask questions. I stop reading all night.
By the next exam, I’m prepared; when I get the test back, I see a big red A. So, this is school? A system in which they give you the answers and reward you for how well you spit them back out? It’s the same thing I did in the Family, just different topics. I can do this.
Now that I know how to play the game, I excel.
At lunch, Katie, a petite brunette with bangs and glasses, invites me to sit with her and her friends. She’s eager to hear about my life as a missionary overseas. I tell her bits and pieces, trying to analyze in real time what’s “safe” and what’s Selah. I stick with stories of our animals and Chinese customs. But when she and her friends talk about their Girl Scout troop and soccer team, I have nothing to add.
After five months in Marietta, I finally have the hang of things. I’m getting straight A’s and speeding through as many library books as possible. My teachers love me, and finally, I feel seen. But things begin to feel tense in the house. Grandma said we could stay six months so she could claim us on her taxes and Mom could get on her feet, but now she is ready for us to leave. We have no plan, and Mom is scared.
I trudge home from school one day in early November, not wanting to return to a house where I know I’m unwelcome. But to my shock, Mom greets me with a sunny energy she hasn’t had since we moved into Grandma’s. She hurries me into the living room, where Nina and Jondy are waiting, and tells us we have a surprise. We sit on the couch, not sure what to expect. The last time Mom surprised us, she’d bought a camper.
But here, in walks our father with a big grin. When he wraps his arms around me, my heart feels like it’s about to pop out of my chest. Nina launches herself at him, and he pulls her to the floor of Grandma’s living room, tickling her under her arms. Three-year-old Jondy stares in awe. “Is that my daddy?” he asks. Our father left when he was a month old, and he has no memory of him except for the photos Mom showed him.
Behind closed doors, my parents have long conversations. I piece together that something important happened to him in Japan. He only left to bring his niece, Mene, from Macau to Mother Eve’s house in Houston, Texas. After he dropped her off, he took a Greyhound bus to Atlanta to see if he and my mom can work things out and get back together.
Two days into my father’s visit, my parents tell me that we will return to Macau after the school semester finishes. Dad promises that things will go back to the way they were.
Mom, who has been weepy for months, has got her pep back, but my heart doesn’t know which way to break. Mostly, I’m happy for my mother because she’s just so pleased and relieved my father is back. And while I’m glad to see him, he has been gone for three years and still seems like a distant, somewhat scary figure. But with him back, perhaps I won’t have to try so hard to hold things together as the other “adult” in our little family.
I have rosy memories of our life on the Farm, filled with our animals, my friends and brothers, and lots of new people and activities. Things have been pretty terrible since we left the Farm—the tortures in Thailand, being kicked out of the Family and losing the only security and community we know, the struggle to raise enough money to survive, our uncertain living situation, even the huge cultural adjustment to life in America. I want security, our own home where no one will kick us out. We know how to survive in Macau. We have friends and supporters. And I won’t have to go back to begging in parking lots. But I also won’t have school, which I’ve started to enjoy, or access to a public library to bring home stacks of novels. And I will miss the dishwasher, dryer, oven, and television.