“Astrid, are you listening to me?” asks Mom.
I nod, but I’m not, because she tells me exactly the same things every morning. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know, don’t eat anything unless it’s made in our kitchen, don’t drink anything unless it’s from a sealed bottle, don’t touch anything and, most of all, don’t go anywhere without asking. Those are the rules.
“I know, Mom,” I say as I pull my school uniform on over my head and check myself in the mirror. “I’m twelve. I can remember the rules.”
She stands behind me and smooths the neck of my uniform until I twist away and say, “Mom, you’d better get Piper up or we’ll be late for school.”
She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and says, “Go have some breakfast. We’ll be right down.”
I pull the hair out from behind my ear and adjust the neck of my uniform, then slip my feet into my sandals. I take one last look at myself in the mirror, inhale deeply and then exhale.
It’s not easy living with my mom these days. She’s getting so overprotective.
I’m not hungry, so I go outside to wait for Mom to drive us to school. My little brother, Gordo, and Thomas, the gardener, are already there, peering at something dangling from one of the hibiscus bushes. It’s some kind of spider, possibly deadly.
“What is it?” I ask Thomas, since there’s no point talking to Gordo when he’s watching any kind of creature. Gordo’s only ten, but he knows more about nature than most adults, and when he’s focused on something he finds interesting, it’s like he forgets anyone else is even there.
“It’s a weaver,” says Thomas.
“Is it poisonous?” I ask.
Thomas leans on his shovel and says, “Now Asteroid, do you think I’d let Gordo get that close to a poisonous spider?” Thomas smiles when he calls me Asteroid, which is a play on my name. I like that we share a private joke.
Thomas knows everything there is to know about our garden and the plants and animals in it. Most of them he points out to Gordo, but I did catch him once placing some cobra eggs in a bucket to take away before Gordo found them.
I shouldn’t have worried about the spider being poisonous.
The wind rattles the hibiscus bushes, and sand blows into my eyes. Thomas calls this wind the Harmattan and says it comes all the way across West Africa from the Sahara. When he first told us that, I didn’t know whether to believe him, since Accra’s on the ocean and nowhere near the desert, but I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and he was right. Ever since we got here, three months ago in the middle of January, sand’s been making our food crunchy and getting into our eyes. The rains are supposed to start soon, though, which will be a relief.
Thomas points to the spider and says, “Make sure to keep Piper away. It’s not poisonous, but it still hurts if it bites.”
“I will,” I say.
Piper is two and has hair like a chick’s down. In Accra, having white skin and blond hair is like wearing a sign that says stare at me. Even my own sandy-blond hair makes people gape. Strangers cluck at Piper when we walk down the street. Kids skip across lanes of traffic and try to stroke her cheek. I give them an ice-queen stare because Mom says we shouldn’t let people we don’t know touch her. But Piper smiles right at them, and they smile back.
When Mom comes out to take us to school, Gordo looks up and starts to tell her what he’s found, but I interrupt him. “Thomas says the mangoes will be ripe soon.” I nudge Gordo as I speak, and he sighs but steps away from the bush. Thomas nods and smiles at Mom.
We’re all getting good at hiding things from her.
Mom thinks there’s danger lurking everywhere. At home in Canada, she’s not like this. At home, she even let Gordo have an insect collection in his room. She’s changed. There’s something going on with her, and I don’t know what it is. She makes us brush our teeth with boiled water and won’t let us go outside in bare feet. In the evenings we have to wear long sleeves because of the mosquitoes, even though it’s still ninety degrees outside. She thinks the soldiers standing at the roadblocks are pointing their guns at us. She’s convinced that insects will burrow into our toes and our guts and our bloodstreams, and we’ll all get sleeping sickness or malaria or dengue fever, or the soldiers will shoot us.
Any kind of spider would be just another danger to her.
Honestly, I think Mom’s in way over her head, and she figures the sooner Dad’s done his work helping with the elections, the sooner she’ll be able to get us all out of here.
There’s no freedom for me and Gordo here at all. At home, we walked to school and biked around the neighborhood with our friends. If it was warm, we went to Dairy Queen. In winter, we hung out in each other’s rec rooms and listened to Bee Gees records. On weekends we rode the bus across town to see the latest movies, like Star Wars. I bet when The Empire Strikes Back comes out, the whole gang will go.
Here, Mom insists we’re picked up and dropped off everywhere we go. Honestly, sometimes I feel like I’m a five-year-old on an endless play date. There’s no way I’m giving Mom any more reasons to be paranoid by telling her about the spider.
I glare at Gordo as we settle into the car. “Don’t say anything,” I mouth. He nods and leans back into the seat.