Purple Hibiscus Read Online Free PDF Page B

me beginning to drift off at the thirteenth recitation of the Plea to St. Jude, he suggested we start all over. We had to get it right. I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama needed to be forgiven for.

    The words in my textbooks kept turning into blood each time I read them. Even as my first-term exams approached, even when we started to do class reviews, the words still made no sense.
    A few days before my first exam, I was in my room studying, trying to focus on one word at a time, when the doorbell rang. It was Yewande Coker, the wife of Papa’s editor. She was crying. I could hear her because my room was directly above the living room and because I had never heard crying that loud before.
    “They have taken him! They have taken him!” she said, between throaty sobs.
    “Yewande, Yewande,” Papa said, his voice much lower than hers.
    “What will I do, sir? I have three children! One is still sucking my breast! How will I raise them alone?” I could hardlyhear her words; instead, what I heard clearly was the sound of something catching in her throat. Then Papa said, “Yewande, don’t talk that way. Ade will be fine, I promise you. Ade will be fine.”
    I heard Jaja leave his room. He would walk downstairs and pretend that he was going to the kitchen to drink water and stand close to the living room door for a while, listening. When he came back up, he told me soldiers had arrested Ade Coker as he drove out of the editorial offices of the
Standard
. His car was abandoned on the roadside, the front door left open. I imagined Ade Coker being pulled out of his car, being squashed into another car, perhaps a black station wagon filled with soldiers, their guns hanging out of the windows. I imagined his hands quivering with fear, a wet patch spreading on his trousers.
    I knew his arrest was because of the big cover story in the last
Standard
, a story about how the Head of State and his wife had paid people to transport heroin abroad, a story that questioned the recent execution of three men and who the real drug barons were.
    Jaja said that when he looked through the keyhole, Papa was holding Yewande’s hand and praying, telling her to repeat “none of those who trust in Him shall be left desolate.”
    Those were the words I said to myself as I took my exams the following week. And I repeated them, too, as Kevin drove me home on the last day of school, my report card tightly pressed to my chest. The Reverend Sisters gave us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class. It was written in figures: “2/25.” My form mistress, Sister Clara, had written, “Kambili is intelligent beyond her years, quiet and responsible.” Theprincipal, Mother Lucy, wrote, “A brilliant, obedient student and a daughter to be proud of.” But I knew Papa would not be proud. He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have us let other children come first. Nobody had spent money on his own schooling, especially not his Godless father, our Papa-Nnukwu, yet he had always come first. I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he had done. I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me that I was fulfilling God’s purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.
    Mama opened the door even before Kevin stopped the car in the driveway. She always waited by the front door on the last day of school, to sing praise songs in Igbo and hug Jaja and me and caress our report cards in her hands. It was the only time she sang aloud at home.
    “
O me mma, Chineke, o me mma
…” Mama started her song and then stopped when I greeted her.
    “Good afternoon, Mama.”
    “
Nne
, did it go well? Your face is not bright.” She stood aside to let me pass.
    “I