Chapter 39 2007
Dylan did write back. So did Kai.
Kai emailed, then later, messaged on Facebook, and eventually, texted on his phone. We sent jokes and memes, or sometimes played phone games like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.
Dylan, on the other hand, always sent letters because he usually included something—a feather, leaf, dried flower. One time, a gold button engraved with a hummingbird, which he’d found on a sidewalk.
Like the keepsakes I kept in the box beneath my bed, I collected people, keeping them in my life in whatever way I could—Profe, Mr. Jeffries, Dylan, Kai . . . and Boodo.
Six months after I moved to Prague, she found me.
Since starting at the institute, I’d been sending whatever extra money I had from the allowance Mother sent to Somalia.
Profe had learned from Happy that Boodo had started a school for girls out of her house.
There was a website where you could donate.
Believing she hated me since I was the reason she’d gotten fired, I never let her know the money was from me.
But somehow she figured it out, and it turned out I was very wrong about her feelings.
“I told you, Dhoola,” she said the first time we spoke.
She had called me on Skype and hadn’t quite figured out how to use the camera, so the top of her head was cut off, but I could see her mouth and her great big smile.
“My love for you is great and strong as the Jubba River. It will never slow, and it will never end.”
I started sobbing, all the missing I had inside me since she’d left spilling out. She cried as well, and we had a great long cry together like we used to.
When we were all cried out, we talked for a long time.
She updated me on everyone from Blue House.
Scissor Teeth had married Yasmin, the girl he’d been dating, and they had two little boys.
Diamond and her partner had moved to Massachusetts, the only state with legalized gay marriage, and they took part in a large group wedding with hundreds of other gay couples on the state capitol’s lawn.
Tiny was doing better now that she was home and didn’t have to constantly worry about speaking English.
Astur was president of her class and on a travel soccer team.
Her mom, Happy, was dating a very nice man.
Farts Often was still working at the 7-Eleven and was surly as ever.
No Fingers was running for city council.
If he won, he would be the first Somali representative Minneapolis had ever had.
She told me how grateful she was for the money I’d sent. It paid for books and pencils and the computer she was using to talk to me.
We had a wonderful conversation, and we promised to talk once a week, a vow we kept from that day on.
It helped ease the hurt I felt each time I thought of Mother, who still had not called or written in the six months I’d been away.
She also had not yet arranged for me to come home for a visit.
Profe said it was because she was busy. Kendall Enterprises was struggling because of a financial downturn in the markets, and her divorce from the minister was a painful, complicated ordeal.
The excuses did not make her rejection hurt any less, but having Boodo back in my life definitely did.