Golden Boy (16 page)

“Great-Uncle?” I hear again. Definitely a girl. I shift my weight onto my heels to ease the burning in my calves. The mat underneath me makes a soft shushing noise as it moves under my feet.

There is a pause where we both listen with all our attention, and then: “If anyone's here, I want you to know that I have a knife.” There is a quaver in her voice now. I think she's getting scared, too. She goes on: “And if you don't come out, I'm going to call the police and have them search the house. Then you'll be sorry.”

I consider. That would be a bad thing. The police would definitely make me sorry. They would tell Kweli what I was for sure in their report. This person—Kweli's great-niece, whoever she is—maybe I could reason with her, bargain with her. I haven't been here very long, but already I don't want to leave. But if this girl gets too scared and goes to the police, then I'll have to grab my things and run away before they can get here. I'll have to disappear. Without saying good-bye to Kweli. Without coming back.

I'm so wrapped up in weighing my options that I stop paying very good attention to what's going on around me. I'm startled out of my thoughts by a gasp. My head snaps up, and there, framed against the bright square of the doorway, is the figure of a girl.

A girl with a knife.

With the light
behind her, I can't make out her features with any clarity other than to see, from the way the folds of her
khanga
fall over her hips, that she is indeed a girl. In her right fist, she's carrying my knife. In her other hand is a blocky shape that might be my dog.

Great. I've given her two weapons.
I'm disgusted with myself. But she's a little bit shorter than me. If I had to, I could wrestle the knife away from her. I might get cut up a little in the process, but I'd win in the long run.

“Who are you?” she asks, holding the knife out in front of her a little. “What are you doing here? Where's my great-uncle?”

Though not as terrified as I was a moment ago, I still feel shaky and empty. I can't quite pull my mind together to answer her questions with anything except simple truths.

“My name is Habo,” I say, standing up slowly. She keeps the point of the knife level with my chest, but she doesn't move any closer. Of course, she doesn't move farther away, either. “I'm here helping Kweli around the house. We met a few days ago, and he invited me to stay on with him until I make other plans.” I decide to leave out the fact that I was trying to take his dinner at the time and he beat me handily with a stick. “He's in town right now, at the market, setting up and running errands.”

I wait for more questions and hold my palms out toward her to show her that I'm not dangerous.

“You look strange. Why do you look like that? Are you an albino?”

I sigh. I hate meeting people for the first time.

“If I tell you, will you put the knife down?” It's uncomfortable to talk to someone when you've never seen their face, but they've seen yours.

She considers this, her head cocked to the side. The gesture looks just like her uncle, or great-uncle, or whatever Kweli is to her.

“No,” she says finally. “I don't know who, or what, you are, and even if you looked normal, you would still be someone I don't know, who I'm alone with, inside high walls. So no, I'm not going to put the knife down.” She pauses, forehead creased, considering. “But if you want to come out into the front yard, we can sit down facing each other. And if you promise not to come any closer while we talk, I promise not to use it against you.”

I consider her offer. I wish I could see her face as she says these things so I could see her intentions. Is she someone like Chui, enjoying holding power over me? Someone like Alasiri, lying to me and waiting for the right moment to pounce? Whatever her motivations, I decide this is probably the best offer I'm going to get.

“Sawa,”
I say. “Let's go.”

The girl moves one careful step at a time so that she doesn't have to look away from me to keep from tripping. I follow, pace for pace, a reverse dance to freedom. Finally, we're out. For a moment I blink in the brightness, getting my weak eyes used to daylight again. Then I look at her. She isn't like Chui or Alasiri. In her face I see a calculation, but no evil intent. In her crinkled brow I see intelligence. In the jut of her chin, stubbornness.

And she's pretty.

In fact, if only she wasn't scowling—which pushes a deep line between her eyebrows—she would be very pretty. Her cheeks and forehead are round, her hair is pulled off her face in little braids, her eyes are big and wide-set. And suspicious.

“Well?” she demands.

I take a deep breath to start answering her question and realize that I don't remember what it was.
Punguani!
I thought it was hard to talk to an invisible girl, but I'm finding it even harder to talk to a pretty one.

“What did you want to know?” I hedge for time.

“Why do you look like that?”

Oh, right, that was her question. Of course.

“Oh . . . um . . . well, yes,” I stammer. “I'm an albino.”

“Really? I thought so!” The girl squints at me, taking me in. “I've heard about that,” she informs me. “You're all the wrong color, right?”

“Ndiyo.”

She stares at my face, interested. I look back at her, trying to seem honest and friendly. She looks to be about my age. I wonder where she lives.

“Why are you the wrong color?”

“I don't know. I was just born this way.”

She continues to study me for a minute. I'm pleased to notice that the longer our conversation goes on, the lower the knifepoint has dropped. She now holds it loosely by her side.

“Really?” she says. “You don't know?”

I shrug.

“My brothers are black, and my sister, too.” I see the question in her eyes before she has a chance to say it. “And both of my parents are black. And I've seen white people before. I don't look like them, either.”

“You're right, you don't.”

“Well, that's all. I'm the only one out of my family, the only one out of my village, like this.”

She considers this a moment. Her fingers are now hardly gripping the hilt of the knife at all. I begin to hope I can get her to put it down entirely.

“But it's not just me, you know,” I go on. “I've heard that there are plenty of albino people. In the Lake District, they kill them. That's why I'm here. I had to run away because a man there tried to kill me. With a knife.” She jerks her hand tight around it again, but I think this time the look in her eyes might be guilt. Her gaze flicks back and forth between the knife and me. She switches it to her other hand and wipes her palm on her
khanga.
I press my advantage. “Are you sure you wouldn't be willing to put down that knife now? I promise not to hurt you. Why would I hurt someone who's related to Kweli when he's letting me live here and he's the only person I know in the whole city?”

She tips her head to the side, chewing on her bottom lip. Finally she says, “I'll put it in my pocket.” Then she glares at me again. “That way you won't be nervous, but if you try to come at me, I can still get it.”

“That's fair.”
You're friendly and trustworthy,
I remind myself. I smile at her.

She carefully slips the knife into the loop of fabric in her
khanga
that serves as a pouch and then holds out her open palm to me as proof of her good faith.

“What about my dog?” I point at her other hand.

“Oh. This is your dog?”

“
Ndiyo.
Kweli asked me to show him that I could carve a dog. I worked on it all day yesterday, and I'd rather you not take it.”

She turns the dog over in her hands, considering it.

“I knew it wasn't one of Great-Uncle's,” she finally says. “I mean, you can tell it's a dog, but it just doesn't look like his carvings.”

That makes me mad. I know it looks nothing like Kweli's beautiful statues, but I worked for hours on that! Who is she anyway to talk about my carving? Just because she's related to a master carver doesn't make her one.

“Since it's mine, not his, I'd like it back.”

“I didn't mean that in a bad way,” she says. “No need to get huffy. Here, catch.”

I'm not being huffy!
I think, but I'm too busy trying to catch the statue to snap at her.

I'm terrible at catching things. It was one of the reasons the other boys never let me play with them, even after they all got over their fear that I was a ghost. I've always been useless at games that require you to judge the distance and speed of something and get in the right place for it. Which is pretty much every sport ever created. Even the boys who were willing to be a little nice to me wouldn't risk losing every day by having me on their team. So I went and sat under my wild mango tree and let them win without me.

As usual, my bad eyesight takes over. I fumble with the dog for a split second, thinking I might have, for once, judged distances correctly, but I lose control and it lands in a small puff of dust by my feet. I bend down to pick it up, furious for no good reason. It's not like this girl was testing me out to join her sports team. After today I'll probably never see her again. Then I remember: She's related to Kweli. The odds are I
will
see her again. It's almost
guaranteed
that she'll come see Kweli again.

I need to make sure she doesn't tell anyone about me.
But how?
I realize I have to keep this girl around for a while, get her to trust me, get her to like me. Get her to keep my secret. How do normal people make friends? I squint at her, considering.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

I start. “Oh, um . . . I was just . . . thinking.”

“Thinking? Looks like it was a strain. Maybe you should stop.”

I scowl at her, ready to say something ugly, but I see the sparkle in her eyes just in time and realize that she's joking. I quickly swallow my anger. I should joke, too. Maybe I can make her like me that way. I hold up my dog.

“I think almost as well as I carve,” I say, and, to my great relief, she laughs. Then she looks around.

“So, you said Great-Uncle is at the market?”

“Ndiyo.”

“Well, I don't feel like walking all the way into Mwenge to find him. So instead, maybe you can show me how good you are at making tea.”

I smile and wave her inside like we're already friends and it's my house, instead of her having a knife in her pocket and me being a squatter.

“Just you wait,” I say. “I'm even better at making tea than I am at thinking.”

“I can't wait,” she says. “And oh, by the way.” I look up in time to see the twinkle is back in her eyes. “I'm Davu.”

We walk through the house and head out into the backyard together, but as I rekindle the breakfast fire and pour the water into the pot to make tea, a silence begins to stretch and I'm not sure what to do about it. Davu is tracing patterns in the dust with the toe of her sandal. It's pink leather and looks expensive.

“So . . .”

“Yes?” she says, looking up from her feet.

I have no idea where I was going with that. I force myself to make conversation. Something,
anything,
is better than this stretching silence. I pick up the wooden spoon and start to stir the tea leaves around, just to have something to do.

“So you're Kweli's great-niece.”

“Ndiyo . . .”
Davu looks at me like maybe I'm a little slow.

“Uh, how old are you?” I ask.

“I'll be thirteen next month.”

I was right. We're nearly the same age.

“How old are you?” Davu asks back, spreading her fingers in her lap and studying her fingernails. They're painted the same pink as her sandals. The ones on her right hand are chipped.

“Thirteen,” I say, happy to be older.

The silence starts to stretch again. Thankfully, Davu says something.

“How long have you been living with Great-Uncle Kweli?”

“Three?” I think for a second. “No, today is my fourth day here, if you count the night I arrived.”

“That would explain why I didn't see you when I came by last week,” she muses.

“Oh? Do you live nearby?”

“Just a few streets over.” She stops playing with her fingers and looks up at me with sudden interest. “Where are
you
from?”

This stumps me for a minute, but then I think of a way to pull the pieces together.

“I grew up in a little village outside of Arusha, but recently my family moved to Mwanza. I took the train from Mwanza to get to Dar es Salaam.”

“Why did someone try to kill you in Mwanza? And why did you have to leave Arusha?” Davu leans forward.

I don't correct her when she says we lived in Arusha. I also don't tell her that we had to leave because we didn't have the money to stay on our farm. Anyone wearing those sandals wouldn't understand that sort of thing. I skip ahead to her other questions.

“We went to Mwanza to be with my auntie.” I take a deep breath. This is hard to tell, but if I want her help keeping my skin color from Kweli, she has to know why it's important. “I left Mwanza because a man tried to kill me in order to sell my body to a
mganga
to make luck medicine.”

“Oh no! I had heard that they do that up in Mwanza, but I didn't really believe it.” Davu looks down, frowning. “How did you get away?” she asks.

“Well, I was hiding in my auntie's house, but this poacher found me anyway. He came after me with a hunting knife about this long”—I hold my hands up to show the length of the blade—“but he only managed to cut me once when I pushed into him to get out the door. See?” I roll up my sleeve and show her the long, puckered scab on my forearm. She looks at it with round eyes, then back up at me. I like that all this makes me sound brave, but I still feel kind of queasy when I think about it. I take a deep breath and go on. “I ran out the door and spent the day running and hiding. When it was night and I was sure he was gone, I went back to the house, got train fare from my family, and came here to Dar es Salaam because my auntie said there haven't been any albino killings here.”

“That's so awful.” Davu shudders and the little beads at the ends of her braids click together. Then her face turns quizzical. “Why didn't your family come with you?”

“We only had enough money for one ticket, and I had to get away.” It's not entirely a lie. I rub the palms of my hands against the sides of my pants. Talking about this has made me break into a cold sweat. I want to change the topic.

“You must miss them,” she says. Her dark eyes are wide and sad. “I can't imagine traveling all alone to a place I'd never been before.”

I shrug, not wanting to talk about my family, either. I finish my story. “Well, once I was here, I found Kweli. He's paying me in food to stay and help him around the house while I figure out what to do next.”