Inside pocket
There's something about backpacks that says a lot about who carries them. Mansa's real one — the one she lugs to the Boseja public primary school every morning at seven ten — always holds the same things: a notebook with folded corners, a fabric pencil case Keitumetse made from cooperative scraps, an extra sorghum bread sandwich wrapped in paper (because Mansa needs to know the food is there, always, even if she isn't hungry), a handful of peanuts, and sometimes a book on African wildlife borrowed from Mma Kgosidintsi, the science teacher. She returns the book read within three days. The sandwich she sometimes silently splits with whoever didn't bring lunch.
And then there's the inside pocket. The one you can't see. The one with a zipper. That's where the gray stone goes on hard days. Mansa wraps it in a piece of fabric — the same way she keeps Koko's glasses in the bedside drawer, wrapped in a handkerchief that smells of nothing but which she'd recognize among a hundred. The glasses don't leave the house. They're an old lady's prescription, useless for a child, but she keeps them the way you keep things that belonged to someone who's no longer here: without touching them too much, without ever forgetting them.
Koko died when Mansa was six years old. A Wednesday in July, at a hospital in Serowe, from pneumonia that started as a cough. Mansa didn't travel to the funeral. She stayed three days at Mma Tsheko's, the neighbor's house. She didn't cry in front of anyone. What she did was move the stones from the living-room shelf to her bedroom windowsill, where they've been ever since — gray, red, black, always in that order. And she started putting the gray one in her uniform pocket when the day was going to be long.
