Hurricane Child by Kheryn Callender

Author:Kheryn Callender
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

I wait for Kalinda in the shade of a barren mango tree in the courtyard, away from everyone else. No one has touched me or laughed at me or thrown rocks at me since Kalinda and I became Carolinda, and I know I should be grateful, but for some reason, that just makes me even angrier. They won’t throw rocks at Carolinda, but they will throw rocks at Caroline? That doesn’t feel very fair at all.

Kalinda comes walking, like she promised. She walks up the stairs and straight for me, and coming up on the steps behind her is the white woman in her dressing gown.

I grab Kalinda’s hand. “You can see her too,” I say.

“Yes,” Kalinda says.

“Who is she?” I ask.

“I don’t know, but she must have me mistaken for someone else. Someone she knew when she was alive. Or maybe she knows my ancestors. Or maybe I will meet her in the future.”

I frown in confusion. “In the future? But she’s dead—she can only be a ghost from the past.”

“No,” Kalinda says, “not necessarily. Time is something we’ve made up in our heads. Time isn’t real at all. The time before I was born, and all the days that I’m alive, and the time after I will die is all one in the same, Caroline. The spirits could be friends from the future or people from our past. Who knows? Maybe a spirit I see could even be me.”

I look back to the steps, and the woman has disappeared. “I’m not sure what to think about any of that,” I tell Kalinda. “I don’t want to think about spirits or ghosts at all. I just want to know where my mother is.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve thought about it,” she tells me, “and I will speak about them openly, but only because you need help finding your mother.”

I tell her that I’m most grateful. She asks me what it is that I want to know.

I ask Kalinda, “What do you know about ghosts?”

And she says, “More than I should.”

She tells me the house she lived in on Barbados, where her mother and seven other siblings currently live, was haunted, as most houses in the islands are, and she said her house had a dead little boy who liked to play too many games. He’d turn on the radio or turn up the dial on the oven so your dinner would be burned and he’d pinch your arm if you weren’t paying him enough attention. And then there was the ghost that haunted the library next to her school, a ghost that took no shape at all, wasn’t a man or a woman or a child, but was the overwhelming emotion of rage and fury and betrayal, and anyone who happened to walk through that emotion would come out ready to fight anyone and anything. She told me she walked through that spot one day, and she’d never been so angry before in her life.

“You’re surrounded by spirits,” I tell her.

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