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

off the boulder and starts walking beside me, and I bend double, gripping the four backpack straps, fighting against the steepness of the slope and the darkness of my thoughts.

2

Just over two hours later we crest the last rise home. Even before we see them, we can hear the irregular pounding and cracking of Mami and Abuelita checking the refuse pile of rocks in the gully near our house for bits of metal missed by the miners. I dump our schoolbags near the door and pick my way over the uneven pile until I reach them.

“Puangichi.” I kiss each of them on the cheek and switch into Quechua because Abuelita never went to school and doesn’t speak Spanish.

“Allyisiami, Ana,” she replies. “How was school today?”

I don’t like questions like this. I like Three-fifths added to four-thirds is how many fifteenths? And Describe the way the Bolivian government is divided between our two capital cities. Those types of questions have one right answer and you can learn them or figure them out. How was school? is one of those questions that you have to answer differently depending on who’s asking you. If a teacher is asking, I have to say Good, no matter what I’m really feeling, so as not to be rude to a community leader. If a friend is asking, I’m supposed to complain so they have the chance to complain too if they want to. If Mami or Papi is asking, I have to tell them something impressive I’ve learned, to give them a reason to let me go again tomorrow. Papi likes to see numbers. He’ll check my math notebook and, if I’ve gotten a problem wrong, will make me copy it over ten or twenty times until I have it memorized. Mami likes to see my writing. Sometimes, when no one else is around, we’ll take out my notebook and read through what I’ve written together. She’ll trace the curves of the letters with her fingers and I’ll help her sound out the words. Mami had to start working when she was nine, so she only got two and a half years of school. I’ve already been in school more than twice as long as my mother.

With Abuelita, it’s a little different. Abuelita loves stories. She doesn’t want to see a row of neat, correct numbers, or a well-lettered sentence that someone else dictated. She wants something to think about while she works as a palliri with Mami. It’s hard, boring work sifting through rock chunks all day long, and she’s been doing it every day for longer than I’ve been alive, so I try to give her a good story. It doesn’t matter if it’s happy or sad, gossip or fact; she’ll treasure any story like a new shirt and spend the day folding and refolding it into her memory. Sometimes, months later, she’ll pull out a story I told her, but it will have all kinds of additions and changes from the original. That’s how I know she spends her days embroidering them.

Today, though, the only stories I focused on all day long are the ones about Victor leaving school, Daniel needing better air, and the tragedy of Mariángela. None of those is something I want to bring up now. I’m also not about to admit my worries about my own future. I like to believe that, if I never talk in front of my family about the fact that I’ll one day have to start working full-time, then it will never occur to them and I’ll get to stay in school forever.

I shoot Daniel a panicked glance. He rolls his eyes. Daniel thinks I’m stupid for believing this. Just because you don’t talk about the wind doesn’t mean it won’t blow you over the cliff, he says. But even so, he comes to my rescue.

“Did you hear? They found that girl’s body.”

“What girl?” asks Mami, her hands stilling. “The missing guarda? Mariángela?”

“Yeah. A group of miners found her body yesterday in a ditch on the far side of the Cerro.”

“¡Ay, Dios!” What few phrases Abuelita has in Spanish are all religious.

This tidbit is interesting enough to keep Abuelita and Mami asking Daniel questions for a while. And though I’m grateful he saved me from having to answer Abuelita, I hate that this is what he distracted them with. It was bad enough when she disappeared . . . at least then I could pretend that maybe she just decided to run away to a better life. I could imagine her, with her shy smile and ready laugh, in a green field or a sparkling city. But now, knowing she’s dead, knowing the Cerro Rico has taken another person I knew . . . it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

“. . . and she was only fifteen! Such a pity.”

I can’t stand it anymore. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

Mami and Abuelita stare at me. Daniel raises an eyebrow in my direction. It clearly says, You asked for a distraction and now you’re complaining?

“It’s . . .” I mumble. “I knew her. I . . . I don’t want to talk about her anymore like this.”

“Of course, mi hija,” Mami says gently.

Abuelita sucks on her teeth. I can tell she’s disappointed but also doesn’t want to upset me. “Girls shouldn’t be working so close to the mine anyway,” she says loftily. “La Pachamama gets jealous.”

“I thought you said Mother Earth gets jealous if women or girls go into the mountain?” I ask, scrunching up my face, trying to remember, sure that’s what she said last time. Trying to figure out if this is a real thing or another story she’s embroidered.

Abuelita snorts. “In, on, near. It makes no difference. You shouldn’t take chances with la Pachamama like that. If Mother Earth gets jealous, she will collapse the mining shafts to keep her men to herself. You remember when that whole section of the top of the mountain collapsed five years ago?” She nods