Read Online How to Escape From a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique - Free Book Online Page A

it creak and break. She hears an engine sputter and knows it must be Violet de Flaubert’s car graveling up behind her. Deirdre does not turn to greet her. Now that Violet has arrived she wonders about her own inaction. Wonders about her own ability to simply watch the church crack, and crumble into ashes.
    Violet de Flaubert sees the smoke and thinks it must be a campfire. This makes no sense. There are no campgrounds. Then she thinks maybe it’s a barbecue, but people don’t barbecue much on the island. She thinks on anything but a burning church. She is fighting not to think of a burning church.
    Violet has five daughters who are each named after flowers, and with all those girls she somehow still feels virginal. When she teaches middle school religious classes on Sunday, she tells them, truthfully, that she was a virgin when she met Mr. de Flaubert. She makes them turn to passages on the mother of Jesus. She makes them act out the Christmas story. The girl students look at her with respect and adoration, for they are at the age for such things. The boy students look away from her with shame, because they are wishing they were Mister de Flaubert. The students don’t think Violet is white from America. They assume she is Frenchy and native to the islands because she talks with native inflections and because she’s been on the island since before they were born.
    Mr. de Flaubert works for the government in the tax system. He is a cog, but he tells his daughters and his wife that he is an accountant. He makes decent money, but with all those girls the money does not last. He, too, wishes he were a preacher. He knows he could give good sermons. He longs to reach out and put his hands on people and speak in tongues and see flames of Jesus spark on their heads.
    Violet de Flaubert is a teacher in the school where her daughters and Deidre’s son are enrolled. She teaches high school because her daughters are in high school. Before that she taught middle school. And before that she was a teacher’s aide in the elementary school. She is a teacher because she is a mother. To her they are the same thing.
    Two of her daughters are students in her Sunday school class. All five of her girls are strangely beautiful and brilliant. And they all have a saving flaw. One is overly shy, another is overly bookish, another cares only for her violin and practices incessantly, one is prone to fits, and the last is a bit of a tart. But even this last one reads science fiction and is friends with the oily-faced girls.
    Jasmine is the eldest. She is the shy one. She has a debilitating crush on a boy named Moby. Moby is the shortstop of the baseball team and during football season he is the quarterback and during basketball he is the tall center. Many girls are fond of Moby, and quiet Jasmine does not stand a chance. Though Moby has every now and then complimented her on her outfit during free clothes day or asked her about calculus, Jasmine hasn’t said more than a few sentences to him during their entire middle and high school years together.
    Jasmine is unaware of Thomas Thompson’s adoration for her. She thinks of him as the brother she never had, and in high school she went to watch his soccer games. But this island is American and soccer isn’t yet popular. No one thinks that the soccer players are valiant. Jasmine doesn’t understand the game at all and thinks the players look like overgrown squirrels fighting for a nut.
    Despite the friendship of their children, Deirdre Thompson and Violet de Flaubert hate each other. They act, of course, as though they are very good friends.
    2.
    Violet is already crying as she eases out of her rotten station wagon and feels the heat of the fire. She knows what a burning church means. She was a child in the America of the sixties. She doesn’t understand how this hate has followed her. How her father’s Klannishness has found her on this island of black people. She wonders if somehow her father