Page 81 - The Mending Season

when Marianne dropped the ball, or whisper something to Marianne when someone passed the ball so that Marianne would be too busy laughing to focus. On the court, the players were as tense as soldiers on a battlefield. Only Marianne and Veronica were having a good time.I heard it, I know I heard it, but I didn’t want to. Dirusha, tall and lean, working hard and ready to walk off the court because ofthe tension, passed the ball to Marianne. Marianne barely caught the ball and made a double-step, and then almost dropped it again as she passed it to me. I caught it halfway to the ground, and then turned around too quickly and bumped into Beth, who was playing in the opposite team. Our foreheads slammed against one another. The ball fell from my hands and bounced away, but not before it hit her feet.“Watch it!” she screamed and glared at me, her eyes the windows to the rage in her body. As my mother would say, she was burning from her own heat. I felt dizzy for two seconds and then composed myself.“Sorry,” I said, but she was already walking away.Two, maybe three steps away from me, she said it. “Kaffir.”Softly enough that I thought only I would have heard it,but apparently loud enough for Veronica, on my right, to hear as well. Heat travelled from the centre of my head down my cheeks, arms and back until it settled in my feet. The ground seemed to shift and I felt I was losing my balance. I shook my hands out to stop them from trembling, crossed my legs to stop the wobbling. I had stopped breathing, come undone.The next thing seemed to happen in slow motion, it felt so surreal. Veronica, who now had the ball in her hands, slammed it to the ground so that it bounced higher than the net pole. Then she leapt towards Beth, pushed her, and when Beth turned to face her, slapped her - no, whacked her -81