Purple Hibiscus

smiled. They had hair as short as Amaka’s, wore shiny lipstick and trousers so tight I knew they would walk differently if they were wearing something more comfortable. I watched them examine themselves in the mirror, pore over an American magazine with a brown-skinned, honey-haired woman on the cover, and talk about a math teacher who didn’t know the answers to his own tests, a girl who wore a miniskirt to evening lesson even though she had fat yams on her legs, and a boy who was fine. “Fine,
sha
, not attractive,” one of them stressed. She wore a dangling earring on one ear and a shiny, false gold stud on the other.
    “Is it all your hair?” the other one asked, and I did not realize she was referring to me, until Amaka said, “Kambili!”
    I wanted to tell the girl that it was all my hair, that there were no attachments, but the words would not come. I knew they were still talking about hair, how long and thick mine looked. I wanted to talk with them, to laugh with them so much that I would start to jump up and down in one place the way they did, but my lips held stubbornly together. I did not want to stutter, so I started to cough and then ran out and into the toilet.
    That evening, as I set the table for dinner, I heard Amaka say, “Are you sure they’re not abnormal, mom? Kambili justbehaved like an
atulu
when my friends came.” Amaka had neither raised nor lowered her voice, and it drifted clearly in from the kitchen.
    “Amaka, you are free to have your opinions, but you must treat your cousin with respect. Do you understand that?” Aunty Ifeoma replied in English, her voice firm.
    “I was just asking a question.”
    “Showing respect is not calling your cousin a sheep.”
    “She behaves funny. Even Jaja is strange. Something is not right with them.”
    My hand shook as I tried to straighten a piece of the table surface that had cracked and curled tightly around itself. A line of tiny ginger-colored ants marched near it. Aunty Ifeoma had told me not to bother the ants, since they hurt no one and you could never really get rid of them anyway; they were as old as the building itself.
    I looked across at the living room to see if Jaja had heard Amaka over the sound of the television. But he was engrossed in the images on the screen, lying on the floor next to Obiora. He looked as though he had been lying there watching TV his whole life. It was the same way he looked in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden the next morning, as though it were something he had been doing for a long time rather than the few days we had been here.
    Aunty Ifeoma asked me to join them in the garden, to carefully pick out leaves that had started to wilt on the croton plants.
    “Aren’t they pretty?” Aunty Ifeoma asked. “Look at that, green and pink and yellow on the leaves. Like God playing with paint brushes.”
    “Yes,” I said. Aunty Ifeoma was looking at me, and I wonderedif she was thinking that my voice lacked the enthusiasm of Jaja’s when she talked about her garden.
    Some of the children from the flats upstairs came down and stood watching us. They were about five, all a blur of food-stained clothes and fast words. They talked to one another and to Aunty Ifeoma, and then one of them turned and asked me what school I went to in Enugu. I stuttered and gripped hard at some fresh croton leaves, pulling them off, watching the viscous liquid drip from their stalks. After that, Aunty Ifeoma said I could go inside if I wanted to. She told me about a book she had just finished reading: it was on the table in her room and she was sure I would like it. So I went in her room and took a book with a faded blue cover, called
Equiano’s Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African
.
    I sat on the verandah, with the book on my lap, watching one of the children chase a butterfly in the front yard. The butterfly dipped up and down, and its black-spotted yellow wings flapped slowly, as if teasing the little girl. The girl’s hair, held atop her head like a ball of wool, bounced as she ran. Obiora was sitting on the verandah, too, but outside the shade, so he squinted behind his thick glasses to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was watching the girl and the butterfly while repeating the name Jaja slowly, placing the stress on both syllables, then on the first, then on the second. “
Aja
means sand or oracle, but
Jaja
? What kind of name is Jaja? It is not Igbo,” he finally pronounced.
    “My name is actually Chukwuka. Jaja