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when the alarm went off, and she got up quickly. And this time, with no one to see what she did, she helped herself to three slices of toast, with jam, and prayed that her aunt hadn’t counted the number of slices left in the loaf when she put it away after dinner. She knew it was excessive, but she was always hungry.
    It was dark when she went outside and walked to the barn, and still dark when she headed down the road in the direction that her aunt had told her. She knew Carole would be up by then, but Marie-Ange didn’t stop in the kitchen to say good-bye. She was wearing a pair of pants and the ugly sweatshirt from the Goodwill store. Her hair was brushed, but for the first time in her life, as she left for school, there was no ribbon in it. There was no Sophie to wave her off, no Robert to make canards of cafe au lait for her, and no kiss or hug from her mother or father. There was only the silence of the Iowa plains, and the darkness, as she headed down the long, lonely road toward the bus stop. She had no idea what the school would be like, or the children there, and she didn’t really care. She couldn’t even begin to imagine having a friend here. Hers was the life of a convict, and her aunt was the jailer.
    There were half a dozen children at the bus stop when she arrived, most of them older than Marie-Ange, and one considerably younger, and none of them spoke to her. They just stared at her as they waited, and the sun came up slowly, and reminded her of mornings in Marmouton when she had lain in the grass or under a tree, watching the sky turn pink at dawn. She said nothing to the other kids as they took their seats and the bus took off, and an hour later, they arrived at a long, low, brick building, where other school buses had converged, and students were spilling out everywhere, of all ages. They went from kindergarten to high school, and came from farms within a hundred miles of the school. Marie-Ange’s was by no means the greatest distance. And looking lost, she wandered into the building, and was quickly spotted by a young teacher.
    “Are you the Collins girl?” she asked, as Marie-Ange shook her head, not making the connection.
    “I am Marie-Ange Hawkins.” They had been expecting a Marie Collins, and it had never dawned on her that her great-aunt would register her under her own name.
    “You’re not the Collins child?” The teacher looked perplexed. She was the only new student they were enrolling. All the others had started two weeks before, but she recognized the accent instantly, and led Marie-Ange to the principal’s office, where a balding man with a beard greeted her solemnly and told her which room to go to.
    “Sad-looking little thing,” he commented when she left, and the teacher answered him in hushed whispers.
    “She lost her whole family in France, and came to live with her great-aunt here.”
    “How good is her English?” he asked with a look of concern, and the teacher said that her homeroom teacher was going to test her.
    And as they discussed her, Marie-Ange wandered down the hall in the direction she’d been told, and found her classroom filled with children. The teacher was not yet there, and they were a lively bunch, hooting and screaming and throwing paper balls at each other. But no one said a word to her as she sat down at a desk in the back row, beside a boy with bright red hair, blue eyes like her own, and freckles. She would have preferred to sit next to a girl, but there were no empty seats beside them, and no one offered to make room for her.
    “Hi,” he said, avoiding her eyes, as she glanced at him, and then at the front of the room as the teacher entered. It took her over an hour to notice Marie-Ange, and then she handed her some papers with questions that were designed to assess her reading, writing, and comprehension in English. It was pretty basic, and Marie-Ange understood most of it, but her answers, when she wrote them, were phonetic. “Can’t you