Secret

How was the test?” Mom asks cheerfully as she walks in with Lemlem.

I look up from my homework. I haven’t really done any of it. I can’t concentrate. It’s as if my brain doesn’t come to life without Bini there to irritate me.

“It was mostly easy. Just one question I wasn’t sure about.”

“I’m sure you will get top marks,” she says, kissing me on top of my head.

“Maybe this time I will,” I answer.

She looks at me quizzically. She doesn’t like it when I’m not open with her, I realize, even though she’s keeping things from me.

I eat dinner mechanically, not thinking about the food in front of me. I am able to think only of Bini’s mother’s words: Bini won’t be coming to school anymore. This is a massive deal, yet she seemed unmoved, normal. As if Mom said, Dinner is ready. Please step over the meteorite that landed in the house—I haven’t had a chance to sweep it up.

We only have to complete this year, then go to military school for two years, then we’ll be free to apply to a university, to study whatever we want. Everyone spends two years at military school, but Bini and I have moved up through school so quickly that we’ll go early. Going early was exciting when it was Bini and me. I don’t want to go on my own. On my own I won’t be special; I will be the little kid whose friends are still at regular school.

Anger swells slowly inside me. I can always line my thoughts up like chess pieces waiting for moves. But now all I can think about is how soon Lemlem will go to bed. How soon I can confront my mother. This time I will not let her turn me away with promises of “later.”

Eventually, after we have cleaned up by candlelight because there has been another power cut, I hear Lemlem gently snoring on the bed she shares with my mother. Now that the time has come to speak, I can’t think of how to frame my questions. As my thoughts sprawl, I look over at my mother sewing a colorful strip of fabric to the edge of a white gabi. Finishing her day’s work.

She looks up at me and smiles. “When will they tell you your results?” she asks.

“Next week. Mom, Bini has quit school.”

She looks down at her sewing, concentrating, even though I know she could sew with her eyes shut.

“He’s top of the class.”

She is silent.

I feel the anger grow once more. This time it is sudden, like a flame on paper.

“Why would Saba take him out of school? I mean, is school dangerous now, too?” I think of what Kidane said to us during lunch break yesterday. “Someone at school, one of the other kids, said Bini’s dad was dangerous. I think he was talking about Dad, too. Why would he say that? Is there something else I have to be careful about?”

More silence. I can’t bear it any longer. “If Dad hadn’t died, then perhaps I could have asked him. Perhaps he would have talked to me instead of ignoring me.”

I’m almost shouting now and Mom leaps out of her chair and puts her hand over my mouth. Her hand smells of new fabric.

“Don’t wake Lemlem,” she says softly.

But I know it’s not Lemlem she’s worried about disturbing. It’s our neighbors. Anyone on the street who isn’t Bini or his mother, the only people we can trust.

My mother sits back down. I can tell she is organizing her thoughts. Her response will be calm and orderly. The exact opposite of my questions. She will start by telling me that it’s part of living in a big city, that she grew up in a village but in big cities you cannot trust people in the same way.

But she doesn’t say that.

She says, “Shif, your father isn’t dead.”