Liar's Dice

Chapter One

September 1972

Outside the window, Christ on Corcovado stares at me with his peaceful soapstone eyes. My classroom is on the third floor, so I see him on the mountain, looking down. Everywhere in Rio is in front of or behind or beside Christ, so the statue is a way to remember. The favelas are under his armpits, so he can’t see them. His sleeves hide the tiny shacks, the poverty, and the dirt. The statue of Christ is like a moon, guiding me in case I want to run away.

I am a watchful girl. I watched my parents for clues, and I always watched Mita for fits, but I didn’t watch close enough, because one day they took her away when I wasn’t looking, and suddenly she was gone, and it was too late. That’s what I would say in my essay if I knew how to write: I’d say they didn’t ask me, and if they had I would have said no. Everyone knows you shouldn’t separate identical twins. They packed Mita away neat and tidy with her best helmet and her wheelchair and all her clothes, so there’s nothing left of her in our new flat. They packed her up so well that sometimes I wonder if there’s a locked drawer somewhere, where she still exists, only I can’t find it.

Mr. P. checks his watch: “Ten more minutes.” He rubs his hands down the front of his pants to get rid of the chalk. “No one should be nervous; this is not a test. Some of you come from different countries and school systems; I want to get a sense of where you are.”

I am nowhere. It’s already the second week of school, and I am still nowhere. I pick up my pen and pretend to write in my blue book. When Mr. P. comes near, I lean over so my hair covers the page and draw pictures: a flower, a swan. I’m good at swans and horses. I draw circles and waves and make them travel along the lines, little blocks of markings, so they might look like writing. I connect some of the shapes and not others, and I leave spaces in between. I draw writing.

Daddy said I’d pick it up in no time, but I’m not picking anything up. I must be slow, like Mita. Slow to read, slow to get my period, slow to make English friends. The normal things that happen to twelve-­year-­old girls aren’t happening to me. Lines of zigzags form black worms on the page that curl around one another or stretch into lines. They are not pictures of anything I know. I look at the other heads bent over notebooks and wonder how it is that writing came to them and not to me. Did they wake up one day and it was there, fully formed, like a black bean sprouting? Or did it start slowly, line by line?

At least I’m good with numbers. I learned watching Daddy play Liar’s Dice at the club in Santanésia. I have his old cup, the faded one where the leather is almost white from the sun and the dice are turning yellow. The numbers are still there: tidy black spots that declare your luck. I love the rattle of dice, full of hope and energy like a samba. Every morning, I pray for a Bidu: a two and a one. If I get a Bidu, writing will come. If I get two Bidus in a row, Mita will live with us again.

Mr. P. claps the blackboard erasers against each other, the way he always does at the end of class. My stomach folds. Write, stupid. Write. I used to talk to Mita’s hand, tell it to open. Sometimes it worked: Mita would uncurl her fingers and show me the white palm of her hand.

“Time is up.” Mr. P. stands by the doorway as students file out. Each person hands him their blue book as they leave.

I sit at my desk, frozen. All I have are drawings and blank pages. I look out the window, at the asphalt below. Three floors. If I break my leg, I’ll be stuck lying on the playground, with all the prissy English girls staring.

I decide to join the line and try to slip by, hoping Mr. P. won’t notice.

His arm stretches in front of me like a gate. “Dolores, are you forgetting something?”

Priscilla, behind me, giggles. I give him my blue book and run to the playground. I run to a place I know behind the hydrangeas and sit on the ground, my heart slapping against my chest, and try to lose myself in the sweet smell and the pink of the flowers. I put my head down on my knees and cry a silent crying where my body shakes against itself like one of Mita’s fits.

The first bell rings, then the second. We’re supposed to be in line. I hug my knees, not wanting to move. I make myself stand up and straighten out my silly school uniform with the fake tie and join the queue, behind Marcos. He’s always in detention, so he won’t report me. There’s a code among the last ones: We know we’re in enough trouble as it is, so there’s a kindness that doesn’t exist for the middle kids, and certainly not for the clever ones.

Mr. P. stands outside French class. “Dolores, I need to speak to you.”

“I have French now, sir.”

“I’ll talk to Monsieur Armand. Don’t you worry. Come with me.”

Instead of walking toward the detention office, Mr. P. heads to the front entrance and crosses the playground, to my hideaway. He pulls aside the hydrangea bush and sits in my secret place.

“Take a seat.” He pats the ground.

I’m in huge trouble. I imagine Daddy getting a letter saying I’ve been expelled. He’s so happy that I go to the British School of Rio, so happy because he wants to make me En­glish, just like him. It’s never going to happen.

“Lovely smell.” Mr. P. picks up a handful of earth and lets it slide between his fingers. “You have good taste.”

I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me.

“So why didn’t you write the essay?” His voice is kind, and my throat locks up. I want to answer, but I feel ashamed.

“Can you tell me?”

I shake my head no.

“If you don’t know how to write, I can help.”

“I do know how to write.” My body tightens. I stand up. “I do know.”

Mr. P. takes hold of my arm. It’s not a hard hold that hurts like Daddy’s, but it’s firm. He knows I’m broken, and I hate that he knows. Maybe other teachers know too, and Priscilla. Maybe the whole school knows.

“I can help you write,” Mr. P. says. “Let’s start tomorrow. I’ll be here, in your spot, after school. How does that sound?”

My hand doesn’t seem like a hand; it’s more like an odd flower. He lets go of my arm. There are more words, but I hear them like echoes, like the whisper of leaves. The playground is enormous. I run across it into French class and sit at the back and watch Monsieur Armand pick his nose behind the flashcards.

•

During break, I search for Andrea; I noticed her on the first day of school, but she disappears the minute the bell rings. She’s Brazilian like me, and funny. As far as I can tell, there are only three of us Brazilians in my class. There’s a whole sea of people with pale skin who wear socks with sandals and speak English. Back in Santanésia, it was just Daddy. I stand in the shade of a palm tree and watch the English girls play elastics. Two of the girls loop the elastic around their ankles and stand facing each other, as far apart as the elastic will allow, creating a double fence. The other girls jump in and out and over the band, twisting the elastic with their legs, then leaping their way out. If you trip or get tangled, you’re out. I could play that game, but no one asks me.

Priscilla sees me watching and whispers something to ­Olivia.

I walk over to the iron gate. Soldiers march by in their uniforms and green berets. Rio is full of soldiers. One of them looks at me as he marches. Except for his short hair, he could be one of the boys in class six, he’s not old. He half smiles as he gets closer. I wave at him, but he doesn’t wave back. Maybe he isn’t allowed. Mita loved to wave. She’d sit in the back of the car and wave at everyone who passed by. There was something frantic about her wave, as if she were trying to move every part of her body with her one good hand, as if all the words in her mouth that couldn’t speak, all the jumps and twists and dances she couldn’t do, were channeled into that wave.

The soldiers pass, then a businessman with shiny black shoes, and a woman in a tight yellow dress, carrying laundry on her head. A thin bearded man with two guitars. There is a hurriedness to Rio, a noisy rush of cars, radios, drills, bars, clubs, a rhythm that doesn’t stop to take a breath. Every day: Catch the bus, school, the bell, French class, English class, break, every day there is a coming and going, as if all of life is a race you might lose.

Mita was slow. That’s the word people used, but it didn’t matter in Santanésia, because there was no hurry. Our life there was slow. We’d watch the hummingbirds hover above the hibiscus flowers. We’d swing in the hammock and listen to the cigarras, or help Mummy bake a coconut cake. The only timetable was the sun coming up and going down, and Daddy arriving home from the paper mill.

Olivia and Priscilla head toward me, with their ponytails and their leather sandals and white socks. I wish they’d leave me alone.

Rory swings across the playground like Tarzan. The rope is reserved for the older boys. It hangs from a huge tree, taller than any of the buildings.