Mama and I had only been in Sangui a few months when I got it. At the time I was still getting used to the Greyhills’ palatial estate. It had unspoken rules about where I could and couldn’t go, which I was learning one smack to my backside at a time.
I was standing at the edge of the staff quarters, watching the boy of the house and his friend play football in the yard. Mama had warned me not to talk to the boy; I was not welcome up there. I was to stay out of sight. But the possibility of other kids to play with had been too much for me. I’d been alone, except for Mama, for weeks since we’d left Congo, and she barely spoke anymore. I made sure no one was watching, and then sprinted up the yard. It would be like with any other kids playing: I’d just join in, no questions asked.
Instead, the friend, a big pug-nosed boy, tripped me as I ran for the ball. I sprawled into a table a maid had set with glasses of juice and biscuits. A glass tipped and shattered.
The big kid laughed, like me flopping around on the ground was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. When I stood up, I found a chunk of glass had sliced me in the crook of my elbow, and bright blood was dribbling into the grass.
“You can’t play with us! Your mother’s a maid and a whore.” The boy cackled. “His mom told my mom. You got no dad. And your mom does it. All. The. Time.” He pumped his little hips to punctuate in a way that I didn’t understand, but somehow knew was dirty.
“Who-ore, who-ore,” the pudgy boy chanted, while the boy of the house stood wide-eyed and silent.
Twenty meters away, a guard who had come to investigate the noise hovered. A gardener lifted his head from his work, uneasy, but made no move to help. From the house I could hear footsteps coming, heels moving with swift surety toward the sound of broken glass.
And as the blood dripped from my arm it became very clear what Mama had been trying to keep me from. I understood what not welcome meant, at my core. The boy of the house and his friend were different creatures entirely. From the tips of their scrubbed fingernails to the snowy laces on their shoes, they were soft, unscarred. They were significant.
I saw what was coming. I was out of my place, and I would be put back into it. When my mother found out she would yell. Or worse, and more likely, she wouldn’t say a word, just take me back down to the cottage, then turn and walk away from me.
And as I was standing there waiting for the inevitable, a sudden blur of fists and knees came rocketing past me, and the boy of the house launched into his friend like a tiger. The bigger boy was taken by surprise, and it took him a moment to wake up. When he did, though, he slung the boy to the ground and started pounding him back. Smack went his fist, and blood squirted out of the little Greyhill’s nose.
At this point the gardener had stepped in, gently pulling the two snarling boys apart. The friend was crying and ran away to a puffy-faced woman who had come out onto the veranda. Mrs. Greyhill followed. It was the first time I had seen her up close, and her beauty was a powerful, living thing, as sharp and terrible as the shards of glass scattered on the soft grass. She was impossible to look away from. Her wide eyes lingered on me, and then she looked at the mess, her face a question.
I waited for her son to point a finger at me. But instead he just wiped his bloody nose on his shirt. “He started it,” the boy said. Then he went inside.
Later, after the friend had been taken home, the Greyhill kid came back out of the house and walked down to where I was sitting in front of the servants’ cottages. His face was clean, but his nose and eye were purpling.
I looked up at him warily.
“I’ve never been in a fight,” he said, sounding slightly in awe of himself.
“Why didn’t you tell on me?”
Instead of answering, the kid showed me his arm. “Look, I got cut too.”
I stood up to see. He lifted the bandage someone had carefully placed over it, maybe even my own mother. Mine was bare, no longer bleeding, but raw. His was a sickle, like a crescent moon. Mine was a straight line. Our cuts were different shapes, but in almost the exact same places on our arms.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Nah. Yours?”
“Not anymore.”
“You want to play?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Why?”
I thought about it. I didn’t really know.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Christina.”
“I’m Michael. Come on.”
And he had turned and raced up the yard. I looked down at the red line of separated flesh, pressed it with my finger until it hurt, to remind myself of what I was risking. My mother could still find out I’d disobeyed her. Maybe this rich boy would turn on me eventually, like his friend. Maybe I should just stay by the cottage, keep out of trouble like Mama had told me to.
But this boy had stood up for me, even though it had cost him, even though he didn’t know me.
He saw me, when everyone else wanted to pretend like I didn’t exist.
I looked back at my cottage, then up at the yard, where he stood waiting.