Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

“Ready?” she asks.

“Off we go,” I say, butterflies in my stomach.

I fall into step beside Belén. As we walk, kids bubble out of the other houses and join us. Belén is soon surrounded by a small pack of friends, the older ones towing or carrying their younger siblings. It must be nice for Belén to always have a group of kids her own age around. Daniel and I always lived so far away that we walked to school by ourselves. I imagine Daniel, lying against the white, white sheets of the hospital, and remember the thing I overheard Mami and César whispering about last night when I was supposed to be asleep. It sours my joy, and I walk a little faster to outpace the feeling.

I’m the tallest by far and I feel like the one grumpy old llama in a herd of happy sheep. It’ll be better when you get to school, I tell myself. Then the little kids will go do their thing and you’ll be with your friends too.

When we finally arrive, Belén picks up a stone and bangs on the door for us to be let in. When Doña Inés cracks the door open, the kids surge through in a chattering tide.

I’m carried in with them and find myself standing in the courtyard. We’re barely in time for the morning scramble to get into lines for the anthem. I watch Belén and her friends find their places, then search for mine.

But my line, Daniel’s line, is gone.

My eyebrows pull together as I scan and re-scan the courtyard. But no matter how hard I look, I don’t find anyone older than eleven.

“Where are all the older kids?” I ask Doña Inés, who’s latching the door behind me.

“Oh,” she says sadly, “after the disaster at El Rosario, a bunch of work slots opened up. The older boys took them. I’m not sure what happened to the girls. They tend not to say. They just don’t come back.”

I thank her absently, and glance over the schoolyard again.

There is no one here older than me anymore. There isn’t even anyone here my age.

The little kids jostle in their lines. It seems like a big game to me all of a sudden, and I see the school through old eyes. It seems like babysitting, not like an important step toward a better life. The teachers with their wide smiles that tarnish over time, every false comfort that slips past their lips corroding them further. The classrooms with their brightly colored posters that are fading day by day in the harsh light of the Cerro Rico. The kids, row after row of them, slowly getting older, slowly vanishing.

I swallow hard. How had I ever believed that school was really a good way to get off the mountain? I always knew I was just buying time, that I’d never make it to secondary school in Potosí. I always knew that girls like me don’t really have choices. But it took seeing my line disappear to realize that I truly don’t have a place here.

Don Marcelino sees me from across the courtyard. He breaks into a big, beaming smile and hurries over to me.

“Ana!” he says. “It’s so good to see you. I visited your mami at the hospital when I heard you had disappeared and your brother was hurt. Everyone thought you must be dead. Yet, here you are, safe and sound. It’s wonderful!”

I try to smile for him, but I’m not sure I manage it.

“And welcome back,” he adds, but his tone goes up at the end, betraying it for the question it really is.

My eyes rove once more over the lines of little kids.

“Thank you, Don Marcelino,” I hear myself say softly, “but I’m just dropping off my sister. I have some errands to run. I’m not here to stay.”

And before I can second-guess myself, or decide whether I mean that answer to be for today or for forever, I turn away from the disappointment on his face and let myself out the big blue metal gate.

16

I lean against the peeling blue paint and let the cold of the metal seep into my shoulder blades. I have no idea why being the oldest kid in the school unsettled me so much. No idea why I felt like I had to run. But here I am. I can’t go inside now. Better if I just take the day off, figure out what’s wrong with me, and come back when I’ve sorted things through.

A clatter to my right makes me turn. At the small mine entrance a few hundred meters from the school, ore carts roll in and out of the mouth, pushed by sweating boys not much older than I am. How did we ever think—Victor, Daniel, me, any of us—that we could escape this?

I let my gaze rove up the drab cliffs in front of me. My future looks as bleak as the rocks. When I was younger, I thought about that future all the time: what I would do, where I would live. But in the past few weeks I’ve grown up: I’ve buried my father and survived the hellish mines of El Rosario only to crawl out and find that my world has changed in ways I can’t control. I feel out of place in my new family; without a place at my old school.

Behind me, I hear the opening bars of the national anthem sung by an off-key chorus of high-pitched voices, led by Don Marcelino’s booming bass. The impossible weight of all the days stacked between my childhood and death feels heavier than a fully loaded ore bin pushed uphill.

For a few minutes I let myself stand there and wallow in sadness and aloneness. Then, as the scratchy blare of the anthem winds down, I push myself away from the gate and start walking.

I pause as I reach a fork in the road. One