Little Bee Read Free

Driver’s License that was not mine, and one
water-stained business card that was not mine either. If you want to know,
these things belonged to a white man called Andrew O’Rourke. I met him on a
beach.
    This
small plastic bag is what I was holding in my hand when the detention officer
told me to go and stand in the queue for the telephone. The first girl in the
queue, she was tall and she was pretty. Her thing was beauty, not talking. I
wondered which of us had made the best choice to survive. This girl, she had
plucked her eyebrows out and then she had drawn them back on again with a
pencil. This is what she had done to save her life. She was wearing a purple
dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern. She had a nice
pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet. I was
thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our detention center.
One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will
understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an ensemble.
    On
the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and
the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you
right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the
scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy
them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because
take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar
means, I survived.
    In
a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them
the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another
beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
    The
girl with the purple A-line dress and the scars on her legs, she was already
talking into the telephone receiver. She was saying, Hello ,
taxi? Yu come pick me up, yeh? Good. Oh, where me come? Me come from Jamaica, darlin, you better believe that. Huh? What? Oh,
where me come right now ?
Okay wait please.
    She
put her hand to cover the telephone receiver. She turned around to the second
girl in the queue and she said, Listen darlin, what name is dis place, where we
at right now? But the second girl just looked up at her and shrugged her
shoulders. The second girl was thin and her skin was dark brown and her eyes
were green like a jelly sweet when you suck the outside sugar off and hold it
up against the moon. She was so pretty, I cannot even explain. She was wearing
a yellow sari dress. She was holding a see-through plastic bag like mine, but
there was nothing in it. At first I thought it was empty but then I thought, Why do you
carry that bag, girl, if there is nothing in it? I could see her sari
through it, so I decided she was holding a bag full of lemon yellow. That is
everything she owned when they let us girls out.
    I
knew that second girl a bit. I was in the same room as her for two weeks one
time, but I never talked with her. She did not speak one word of anyone’s
English. That is why she just shrugged and held on tight to her bag of lemon
yellow. So the girl on the phone, she pointed her eyes up at the ceiling, the same
way the detention officer at his desk did.
    Then
the girl on the phone turned to the third girl in the queue and she said to
her, Do yu know the name of dis place where we is
at? But the third girl did not know either. She just stood there, and she was wearing
a blue T-shirt and blue denim jeans and white Dunlop Green Flash trainers, and
she just looked down at her own see-through bag, and her bag was full of
letters and documents. There was so much paper in that bag, all crumpled and
creased, she had to hold one hand under the bag to stop it all bursting out. Now,
this third girl, I knew her a little bit too. She was not