13

AFRICA

Just when you want the days to zoom by like a go-kart or roller coaster, they slow down like those kiddie pony rides at the state fair.

Athena was going to be gone all day with her mom for the new baby’s doctor’s appointments and stuff, and I wasn’t in the mood to ice-skate with Yaz, so I pulled out the atlas and my notebook of Places Violet Diamond Will Travel to Someday. I opened the atlas and flipped to the Africa pages. Africa is a humungous continent and we’d studied it a little in geography class, but I didn’t really know much about it and I’d never, ever thought about going there.

From the atlas, I learned that Africa has more countries than the United States has states, fifty-four in all. It also said it has a little more than 20 percent of the Earth’s land and the longest river, the Nile. I looked at the countries and wrote down some that had names I liked the sound of. Later, I’d look them up online. In my notebook, I scribbled Cameroon, Kenya, Botswana, and Mozambique. That seemed like a pretty good start. If Roxanne Diamond was Afrocentric, I figured it would be good if I knew at least a little bit about Africa. That way, we’d have something to talk about—I mean, if she would even talk to me.

The insides of me, where my heart beats, hoped she would.

• • •

Studying Africa ate up the whole day, and by dinnertime my body was hungry and my brain was full of interesting facts.

While helping Gam make lasagna, I began filling her up with information about the African continent. “Did you know Africa has, like, fifty-four countries?”

“Yes, V. Parts of Africa are so beautiful,” Gam said with a starry-eyed look.

“You’ve been there?” I asked.

“Yes, Poppy and I went on a safari in Kenya. It was an amazing experience,” she replied.

“For real? How come you never talked about it before?” I asked.

“You never asked before.”

As I’d learned online, not everything about Africa was good. “But a lot of kids are starving and sick and don’t have doctors,” I told her. “And that’s pretty sad, huh?”

“No, it’s very sad.”

As Gam drained the lasagna noodles, the steam fogged her glasses and for a minute she was blind. We both laughed. I thought about Roxanne Diamond and wondered if she made lasagna and wore glasses. Part of me started to think maybe it was a mistake to go to Seattle. Maybe I was chasing someone who really didn’t want to be caught.

But I have to meet her. I just have to.