Laugh with the Moon (13 page)

I grab my heart pendant and grind my teeth into the dent.

And suddenly, here’s my mother. All of her. She’s wrapped in her green bathrobe, pointing to her face. “Freckles, Clare,” she says, as if I’ve gone thick in the head. “You know, these things. My beauty marks. And yours.” She dots her finger across her own face
.

I stare in disbelief
.

“Teach the children freckles,” she says. “It’s simple, really.” Then she laughs a fluttery laugh, like an elm leaf spiraling to
the ground in a breeze. There’s no doubt about it. It’s really my mother speaking to me, teaching me
.

“Frrreckles!” I shout, and point to the little dots on my face.

“Frrreckles!” the students call back.

I sigh. “That was pretty good,” I say.

“Yes, it was,” Mom says. “That’s my girl!” She beams proudly
.

I step away from the doorway to the middle of the room. My finger trembles while I point. “Nnnnose,” I say.

“Nnnnose,” they repeat.

I take off my sandal and wiggle my foot. “Ttttoes,” I say.

“Ttttoes.”

“You’ve got it! You’ve got it!” Mom says. She leans against the classroom wall to watch
.

After five minutes, I’ve burned through everything from
fingernail
to
eyelash
to
tooth
. By the time Mr. Special Kingsley returns with the chair from his office, my mother’s gone. “I shall sit on the side here and complete my work while you teach,” he says. “If you require help, please do ask.”

If
I require help? I pace back and forth, trying to figure out what else I can possibly do with the students. I teach the words
knuckle, nostril
, and
armpit
before Mr. Special Kingsley finally looks up. His cracked glasses are halfway down his nose. “Perhaps you might teach the children a game. An American game,” he suggests.

I swallow and glance at my backpack on the floor. I’ve got nothing against common sense, but right now, it
doesn’t help. My mind is blank. Game. Game. I can’t think of one, so I wiggle my nose and chant in my mind:

Hocus-pocus full of fear
,

Make forty more Bingo cards instantly appear
.

No luck.

“What do the children in your country do for fun?” Mr. Special Kingsley asks.

“Fun?” I say, as if it’s a word in a foreign language.

The truth is it’s been a really long time since I had fun back home. Last May, the day after Mom’s heart attack, instead of meeting Marcella and Sydni at Jamaica Pond, I lay in my bed, stared at the ceiling, and thought about how incredibly far it was from the floor. In July, for my thirteenth birthday, Dad took Marcella and me to a fancy restaurant at the top of the Prudential Center, but instead of admiring the sunset while eating cake, I sat in the restaurant bathroom and cried as Marcella pounded on the door. When October came, I should have been painting a picture of fiery leaves that littered our front lawn. But instead, I sat on the front steps without my jacket and felt the windy chill burn my cheeks raw. And when the holidays finally crashed into our lives in December, I didn’t trudge through Coolidge Corner with Dad to get hot chocolate as the snow fell. Instead, I walked on the icy sidewalks by myself and thought about how my father and I hadn’t watched a single vintage superhero episode together since our lives had turned upside down.

“I mean, the children in the United States of America. What do they do to enjoy themselves?” Mr. Special Kingsley asks.

Think. Think!
I order myself.
Fun. Fun. Fun
. I grab on to my pendant and stick my teeth into the groove.

“What about Simon Says?” Mom suggests. “You always liked that when you were in kindergarten, Clare.”

“Zikomo,”
I whisper
.

Mom looks puzzled
.

“It means
‘thanks’,”
I say
.

I tell Mr. Special Kingsley that Simon Says is a fun game lots of kids in my country like to play.

“Very well, Clare,” Mr. Special Kingsley says. “But I must ask you, who is Simon and what does he say?”

“I’m not really sure exactly who he is, but he tells you what to do. It’s the name of the game—Simon Says.”

“Ahh,” Mr. Special Kingsley says. “A game called Simon.
Chonde!
Teach the children Simon.”

I explain the directions: “Do what I say, not what I do. And only if Simon says it first.” Mr. Special Kingsley translates into Chichewa.

But when a boy in the middle of the room tries to touch his toes, he sends half of the class tumbling over like dominoes. And everyone is copying what I’m doing instead of doing what I’m saying. Plus, there are so many kids in the room that it’s impossible to see when someone is out. And I’m really sweating.

Mental note: Teachers need double deodorant.

The game is a disaster, but half an hour later, with Mr. Special Kingsley’s help, we’re singing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in a four-part round. And honestly, it sounds amazing!

The students sing it twice through before Mr. Special
Kingsley tells me he will now teach the standard one math lesson. “A fine beginning, Clare,” he says. “You have planted a hundred seventy-six flowers this morning.”

“A hundred seventy-six!” I exclaim. I’m shocked. My hand will fall off if I even try to make enough Bingo cards for the students to work in pairs.

“That is the number enrolled in this classroom. Of course, they are not all here every day. Students come from many villages throughout Machinga district. Attendance depends on the rains, the sickness, the harvest. I shall see you back tomorrow,” he says. “I do give thanks for your tremendous and most illuminating service.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” I say, and turn to head back to the standard eight classroom. But I’m not even through the doorway when I spin back around.

“Here,” I say to Mr. Special Kingsley. I hand him the stack of Bingo cards. “You might need this paper to write some important letters.”

Mr. Special Kingsley turns the cards over and looks through my designs while the standard one students stare at us both with great curiosity.

“Ahhh!” he says, and pushes his glasses up his nose to get a better look. “Magnificent! I … I … I do not have words for this marvelous gift you make for your headmaster.
Zikomo kwambiri!
”

I gasp. My headmaster just broke his own rule! Only the smallest children in the school are allowed to speak Chichewa. Everyone knows that.

“I do apologize,” he says. “It is just that the beauty of your gift sent me back to the native tongue. Please do not tell my secret to the older students,” he says, and smiles.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “I mean, no, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I won’t tell, sir.” I’m all mixed up and I’ve taught my class and now I really need to go.

As I hike across the field to the standard eight classroom, I remind myself that Mr. Special Kingsley said I was tremendous and illuminating, but I’m still trembling like I survived an encounter with a wild beast.

That doesn’t really happen, though, until an hour later.

M
rs. Tomasi is wrapped in green and purple cloths, looking very much like an eggplant while she talks to everyone under the blue gum tree. I flop onto the ground beside Memory, feeling soggy and listless from my first day on the job. Mrs. Tomasi’s explaining that we’re going to build things called anemometers.

“What?” I whisper.

“Anemometers,” Memory whispers back. “To measure wind.”

After Mrs. Tomasi finishes giving the instructions, we all traipse toward the bush in search of our materials: bamboo, sticks, and calabash. “What about the leopard?” I ask, pausing at the edge of the thicket.

“That was long time ago,” Memory says. “Leopards move quick. No new reports. It is certainly gone.” She
pushes aside a tangle of vines and steps into the forest. A second later, I hear a noise.

I jump. “What is it?” I ask.

“What is what?” Memory says.

“That noise.”

“There is no noise,” she says. “Only noise in the mind. Now do tell me”—she grabs a bamboo stalk—“how is the teacher?” She tries to snap the stalk in half, but it’s too thick to break. “Saidi! Saidi!” she calls.

A second later he thrashes through the bramble. Memory points to the bamboo, and Saidi fishes a small knife out of his pants pocket while she tells him, “This girl teach school today.”

It hits me: I actually did. I taught school. I really am a teacher!

“We must take the teacher to the lake.”

“Awesome!” I say. “I mean,
yaboo!
”

Agnes pops through the branches of the bush behind us.
“Yaboo?”
she asks. “What is
yaboo?
”

Saidi saws the bamboo stalk with his knife. “What is awesome,” he tells Agnes, “is that Memory, Innocent, and myself—the one, the only Saidi Tembo—shall take our new American friend to Lake Malombe this weekend.”

“I do love the lake!” Agnes says. She jumps over the plant leaves into the clearing, looks up at Saidi, and bats her eyelashes. “Should you desire my company, I shall be obliged to attend.”

Memory answers for him. For us. “No!” she says. On that note, the bamboo stalk cracks and we all jump out of the way.

Saidi picks up one end of the pole and drags it toward the blue gum tree. Agnes follows close behind.

Memory and I venture deeper into the bush to search for calabash. We walk for more than ten minutes through dappled green leaves and scarlet wildflowers. We arrive at a river, and Memory points to a patch of swollen green squash that hangs from a vine by the bank. I push through the thicket and place both my hands on a gourd. It feels hot, like a chunk of sun has fallen right inside of it.

But how can a calabash measure the wind? I’m about to ask Memory this when I hear someone trumpet. I glance down the river and gasp: It shimmers, silver in the sunlight. It dunks under the water. When it comes up, its huge ears slap drops of elephant water onto the river. The sun catches its eye and turns it ruby red.

“Tibwerere,”
Memory says quietly. “Let us return.”

But I don’t move. Can’t move. The incredible creature bends its leathery trunk in a loop. An instant later, a smell more foul than dead fish fills the air. The elephant, still luxuriating in her bath, doesn’t seem to notice.

Memory pinches her nostrils with one hand. With the other, she grabs my wrist and pulls me into the bush. “Gas of the elephant,” she says.

“Ewww!” I shriek.

Once we can’t see the river anymore, Memory stops to rest. We’re both huffing and puffing. “Never get this close to elephant,” she says. She waves her hand in front of her face. Clutching my side and giggling, I follow her back to the blue gum tree.

“It is a serious thing,” she says, gasping.

“The gas of the elephant?” I ask.

“No,” Memory says. “Elephant …” She lifts her flip-flop and stomps it onto the ground like she’s killing a bug. “Mother elephant do that … on person who go close to the baby. We do not see baby elephant, so we do not know if we are close or far.”

“Oh,” I say. It’s not funny, but I can’t stop laughing until Mrs. Tomasi orders us to begin building our anemometers. First, we cut our calabashes in half with the knives Saidi and Norman keep in their pockets. Next, we scoop the warm, squishy pulp out with our bare hands. The pulp sticks in our fingernails, turning them an orangey, burnt sienna color. After that, we take two sticks and attach one empty half to each of the four ends. Then, finally, we hammer our bamboo pole into the ground with a large rock so it’s standing straight up.

“Now I shall demonstrate,” Mrs. Tomasi says. She picks up our sticks and crosses them at the center. Norman gives her one of the nails he’s carved out of bamboo with his pocketknife. Mrs. Tomasi holds the crossed sticks at the top of the bamboo pole. “Clare, please do hammer the nail into place,” she says. But I can’t reach the top of the pole, so Norman goes into the classroom and carries a bench outside for me to stand on.

No sooner do I pound in the nail with a rock than the wind blows, our anemometer spins, and an incredible feeling pinwheels through my chest.