Folio Two, Page Seventeen (svegra mos itzkron tal-pyes)
I left them and took the second-story balcony to the toilets. The entire house sounded and looked like a carnival. Colorful banners and strings seemed to fly out of nowhere. Men and women in uniforms that read KOBSARKA EVENTS INC. stood on ladders, and more leaned over the balcony handing out enormous expanses of red fabric. Sunlight streamed through the translucent courtyard ceiling, tinting everything below their hung fabric red.
Kobeis waited for me just inside the toilets. “Are you okay? What did Nikis do?”
When I finished recounting what had happened, she looked down and said, “I saw my mom put something in your drink last night, but she wouldn’t let me say anything.” Quickly, she reached up to brush tears from her eyes.
I hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks like the sisters in Catching Air, the children’s cartoon series everyone watched back then. She pulled herself away from me and ran towards her room. I didn’t follow her. My bladder was about to burst.
Back in the room I once shared with Salus, I took off the red jacket Adviser Kimajoa had given to me and laid it neatly on the bed. If he came tonight, I would run up the stairs and give it to him; otherwise, surely someone could take it back to Galasu for him.
At seven, my budding interest in costuming manifested itself as a passion for formal clothing. I wore the dresses my mother bought me whenever I could, especially on school days. The press would notice this years later. Almost every interviewer printed a photograph of that pale, slight girl who looked like an ornamental doll — a girl who ceased to be me when my body’s figure opened up like a river changing course.
The components of my elaborate wardrobe had expanded by two hundred percent since my mother’s death. Her dresses did not fit a seven-year-old girl, and over half of the headdresses were designed for dreadlocks. She had owned boxes of ornamental dreadlock cuffs and ordinary hairpins.
Other than the red and gold outfit I had worn for the memorial service at school, I had nothing worthy of a funeral reception. I would not wear it today because people had already seen it. Instead, I wanted to wear the blue silk gown she had given me. Even though I wore contacts to disguise my eye color, the formal outfit matched almost perfectly. “You are shameful,” Anumë told me when I paraded in front of her once. “Go ahead and ruin your chances with every boy in the school.”
She wouldn’t tell me why, but I will explain it to you: people with any shade of blue or green eyes, excluding hazel, have an increased chance of catching the muakanua — at least, according to the 1877 study. Since then, almost everyone in the upper classes had decided not to allow their children to marry anyone with the exotic eye colors. Unless my family did extensive genetic screening, most men wouldn’t marry me.
To prepare, I scrubbed off all of the mud and grime I had accumulated since that morning. The bruises from that morning had already begun to darken; the pumice scrubber opened series of razor-fine cuts on my arms and thighs from the stream bed nettles. The white towel came away pink. We had no antibacterial ointment.
For the first time since my mother had died, I cupped her special hair perfume into my hands and massaged it into my scalp. It smelled bitter and sweet like the ending of a tragedy or beginning of a comedy. She told me that a woman she had known wore it but never mentioned a name.
I found gauze in one of the storage room cabinets and began to wrap my arms. It reminded me of photos from Malzū — they wrap their corpses in gauze and mica dust—and I thought that appropriate for a reception celebrating my mother, albeit morbid.
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