Free Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward Page A

He could feel his palms and his armpits grow damp. “I…,” he said.
    “It’s okay, man, no worries,” said Thola. “You’re not the only one, let’s leave it at that.”
    “Oh,” said George. His food sat in front of him on his plate. He never wanted to eat again.
    “I don’t have time for boys,” said Thola. “My cousin Albert’s in the MK. I want to be in the MK, too. But I’m only nine, so I must wait. There are more important things than boys, you know?”
    “I thought,” said George. “I thought you wanted to be a ballerina.”
    “Dancing’s okay,” said Thola. “I love to dance. And I can go places. Here I am in America! It’s great, but I miss my mom. Someday I’ll go back to dancing. When my country is free, I will be a ballerina. It will happen, you know, whitey.”
    George was speechless, completely flummoxed. Was there a chance for a hug? He looked at her brown arms, and imagined them around his shoulders. Did she wear perfume? He couldn’t tell from across the table. He wanted to get one milk shake with two straws. Then they could both sip at the same time, as George had seen in movies.
    “What are you staring at, boy?” said Thola. “Don’t look so unbelieving.” She finished off her sandwich and leaned across the table. Her face was very close to George’s. Was she going to kiss him? George looked into Thola’s brown eyes. Thola opened her mouth and sang joyfully, “Free Nelson Mandela!”

    “D id you have any idea what she was talking about?” said Nadine, opening two more cans of beer.
    “Fuck no,” said George. “But she did kiss me after lunch. She tasted like Reddi-wip.”
    “Whipped cream?”
    “We’d had banana splits for dessert,” said George. He shook his head. “She ate most of mine.”
    Nadine laughed.
    “I wanted to stay in touch. She gave me Kevin’s address. I wrote her for months.”
    “Did she write back?”
    “Not for a long time. The company went to LA, New York, Boston. I started researching South Africa at the library. Can you imagine? There I was, this sheltered kid from Pacific Heights, learning about apartheid. I’d never really understood how…how big the world was, how horrible and exhilarating. It blew my mind.”
    “It was the same for me. I grew up in a tiny town on Cape Cod. When I was twelve, we went to Boston for the Saint Patrick’s Day parade and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I mean, people looked so different. I heard other languages for the first time. And people were talking about…fucking foreign policy! Well, not at the parade.” Nadine smiled, remembering a dim pub called the Black Rose, where she overheard two students arguing about bombings in Northern Ireland while her father tried to order her a Coke. “Woods Hole,” she said, “they talk about clamming and boats. They don’t want to know what’s going on off-Cape.”
    “Something to be said for that,” said George. “A simple life.”
    “I guess. But it isn’t for me.”
    “I hear you,” said George, and they tapped their cans together, a toast. George sat back and studied Nadine. Nadine touched her neck. “Back to the story,” she said.
    “Right,” said George. “Right. So I started researching South Africa. I finally found a
Newsweek
article explaining what Thola had meant by
MK.
”
    “You were ten, reading about the MK?”
    “Wild, huh? I read that they sent kids to Mozambique and Angola for military training, and I was hopeful, but I saw on my light-up globe that neither spot was near the Bay Area.”
    “No,” said Nadine, laughing.
    “I read that the MK were given guns and hand grenades, taught how to fight, and then sent back into South Africa. The idea of Thola as armed and dangerous only made her more attractive, of course.”
    “Of course,” said Nadine, thinking of Sammy again, the biker whose tattoos and bad attitude had been his best characteristics.
    “I went around singing the ANC anthem, which I’d found on a