Marama didn’t.
That day, Aminata folded the uniform and placed it under the bed. She never wore it again.
Jake noticed her absence before anyone else did.
“Why weren’t you in class?” he asked one afternoon as they sat near the docks, legs dangling over concrete stained by years of oil spills.
Aminata shrugged without looking at him. “School doesn’t help when your mother can’t stand.”
Jake frowned the way he always did when the world presented him with a problem too big for his age. He reached into his pocket and pulled out half a piece of bread. Hard at the edges, soft in the middle.
“Eat,” he said.
She hesitated. “What about you?”
“I already ate.”
He lied. He always lied about hunger, and she always pretended to believe him, because their friendship had rules made of mercy.
They weren’t in love the way adults described love. There were no dreams of weddings or houses or futures with clear shapes. What they shared was quieter: understanding.
The kind that came from knowing the same hunger, the same fear, the same invisible weight pressing on your chest when night fell and tomorrow promised nothing.
On days when Marama’s pain was unbearable, Aminata would sit outside staring at the ocean as if it held answers. Jake would join her without speaking. Sometimes they counted ships. Sometimes they imagined where the ships were going.
“Somewhere people don’t worry about food,” Jake said once.
Aminata smiled faintly. “Do you think they worry about anything?”
“Probably,” he replied. “But not this.”
That night, rain came early.
Not gentle rain. It slammed against roofs, flooded alleys, turned the port into a mirror of broken lights. Aminata’s house leaked from three places. Marama coughed until her body shook. Aminata held a bowl beneath the bed to catch water dripping from the ceiling, listening to her mother struggle like someone trying to breathe through cloth.
When Jake knocked, Aminata opened the door with surprise.
He stood there soaked, barefoot, shivering. In his hand was a small plastic bag.
“My mother sold everything today,” he said quickly, like if he spoke too slowly he might lose the courage. “She said I could keep this.”
Inside were two meat pies, still warm.
Aminata’s throat tightened. “Jake, we can’t—”
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