Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

BONUS CHAPTER I.i If Inyanga Gets In

One last year. Only one. Last chance. All day every day was spent studying. Every day Inyanga and Amafu would take their schoolbooks and the lunches their omama had made for them and eat in the playground outside their school, Ato Praimari.

Or technically, both girls ate Amafu's lunch together, because every day Amafu's lunches were a magic cast feast, grilled sandwiches with melted cheese and braai burned meat, oily fried potatoes, sausages with chilies, and steaming hot egg tarts or soft flaky pastries for dessert. Then they would swing by the grayscale homeless who begged on the corner to give away the mundane lunch umama Inyanga insisted on packing — sweet corn bread that went stale within hours, with burned grilled sausage that got stone cold and rock hard — even though Auntie Star always sent enough magic cast deliciousness for two growing girls.

At times their books took on oil stains. If Amafu brought them home, the Lizulu family's cleaner would magic the food smudges and crumbs clean again. Half their class went to eat lunch on Frons street most days, buying more magic goodies with their allowance; the other half would hang out in the playground, studying at the tables in the pristine weather, and beg Amafu to trade.

"Hey Lizzard, I got plantain chips today!" Iwu would call from another table in the shade. "Still warm, how many do you want for a slice of salsciccia?"

"A big slice or a thin slice?" Amafu would call back. "Gimme seven chips."

"A big slice."

"Oh, that'll be eleven chips then."

Several days a week, Yanyu would come back from the pizzeria on Frons and make an offer, always the same one: "Hey Ama, want a slice of pizza?"

"A whole slice? How do you have extra?" Amafu would ask as if she didn't already know.

"Auntie Amber owns the pizza place." Even though she had said it a hundred times. "She always gives me extra." As if they had never had this conversation before.

"So spoiled," Amafu would say, and then she would accept the trade.

"Hey Ama, want some taco? Wanna go bite for bite of your grilled cheese?" Sahan might say.

"What's in it?"

"Calabaza squash and peppers."

Sometimes Venus would stay for lunch and say, "Hey Ama, want some grapes?"

"The red ones? Yuck, nope, I don't like red grapes. They make my mouth taste dry."

Lunch talk always sounded the same. First negotiations over food, then silent munching, then reading textbooks and studying and scribbling answers to homework questions, which got progressively louder as the students began discussing important discoveries and answers to problems.

Today, lunch-time study was interrupted, and not for the first time, by the instantaneously sudden appearance of their teacher, Maestra Alma. One second the students discussed astrophysics from the seats of a cluster of round tables, and the next, Maestra Alma stood in the middle of the space between the tables, inches from knocking into Sahan as she tried to give Iwu her Introduction to Mundane Astronomy textbook back.

Alma did this all the time, coming mere inches from pushing her students and sending them flying as the matter of her body displaced the air around her.

"I have exciting news! Last minute, marvelous news! You're going to love this. I booked our class for a magic scavenge! Hold on, I'm going to call the rest of the class so you can all hear at once."

While she caught her breath, the maestra sat down at the slide, at the bottom, so the little primary children going down it couldn't do so without giving her the boot. A round portal appeared in midair, floating like a compact mirror, and she spoke into it, projecting loudly enough for the thirteen students present in the yard to hear too. "Good afternoon! An exciting announcement for all final year students!"