Behind Platinum I see a couple of lonely monkey bread trees in the distance, looking like dumbfounded giants with sticklike upraised arms. A gray cloud casts a shadow over one of them, making the tree look like it is disappearing into a big black hole.
“My daddy says those Nazis should have got rid of you folks too, Jew-girl,” Platinum says. She is sitting on top of my stomach, holding me down, and digging her fingernails into each of my arms.
I scream, “Ow! Stop it right this instant!” I try to wriggle out from under her, but she is bigger than me and holds my thin arms down with her bony hands. She digs deeper with her nails, throws back her head, and cackles. I keep myself from crying by keeping my eyes on the trees. Their trunks are waxy-barked. Each tree is something like twenty-five times the height of the tallest man I have ever seen. Some of them are two thousand years old. I know that as a fact that Miss Jenkins taught us last week. It’s hard to really understand what it could mean to have lived that long. Bessie says those monkey breads keep her going. Some of their trunks hollow out inside, so that you can crawl in and lay down.
“Get her, Mary, hold her!”
Mary, she’s the one always with Platinum. Mary was standing guard in front of the break in the school yard fence, near the hedge of pink proteas, which look like alien flowers. Now she crushes a delicate orange crocosmia underfoot and galumphs behind the fence to where no one can see the three of us,...
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