It was his grandmother's voice, coming from the kitchen, low and even. At first he thought she was on the phone. He lay in the twin bed under the dress quilt and listened, and gradually he understood she was talking to no one he could see. The kitchen light was off; he could tell from the dark line under his door. She was sitting in there in the dark with the coffee maker gurgling, praying out loud, not loud enough to wake anyone who wasn't already awake.
She did not pray the way they did on TV. She did not shout or plead. She talked the way his mother talked to the pharmacy's insurance line, patient and specific, going down a list. She prayed for Sister Philippa Moss's hip. She prayed for the Teague grandson in Afghanistan, which Malik later learned was actually Kuwait, but she'd been praying it as Afghanistan for two years and God knew what she meant. She prayed for the man who'd cussed her out at the food pantry on Tuesday, by first name. She prayed for rain, but not on Saturday, because of the fish fry.
Then she said, "Clara."
She said it and stopped. The coffee maker finished and clicked. Malik held his breath without meaning to.
"Clara," his grandmother said again. "Malik. Josiah." And then nothing else, for a long time, and he understood that she had run out of words, and that she was going to sit there in the dark anyway.
He did not go to breakfast at seven. He went at seven-twenty, and there were grits keeping warm on the stove and a plate under a paper towel with two eggs and a piece of toast, and a note in blue capital letters: GONE TO THE CHURCH. BACK BY NINE. DON'T TOUCH THE POUND CAKE, IT'S FOR SUNDAY. Under that, smaller: (ONE SLICE.)
He texted his mother: made it. its fine here.
The reply came forty minutes later. Good.
He texted Jojo's tablet account, the one he'd set up for him in the spring so Jojo could send him pictures of dinosaurs and his own feet and the inside of his nose. hey rex. u ok? i miss u.
No reply. Not that day, or the next.
Cedar Bluff High School was smaller than his middle school had been. The principal, Mrs. Fairweather, walked him to his classes personally and said "Your grandmother says you're very bright" in a voice that suggested his grandmother had said it as an order. Nobody knew him. That was the best and worst thing about it. At lunch he sat with his tray at the end of a table of boys arguing about a phone game he had never played and nobody asked him anything, and he was so grateful and so lonely he could barely swallow.
Tariq texted him every day. Tariq had been his best friend since third grade, since a field trip to the planetarium when they'd both gotten sick on the bus. bro where u AT. mr bryce asked about u in english. ur mom said family stuff. is it family stuff? u good?
family stuff, Malik wrote back, because he did not have any other words for it.
On Wednesday, his grandmother took him to Bible study, which he did not want to attend, and which was not what he'd expected. It was eleven people in a fellowship hall with a dropped ceiling and a box fan, eating Lorna Doones, arguing about the Book of Esther like it was a group text. An old man in suspenders said Esther should have marched straight in to the king the first day instead of fasting for three. A woman in scrubs said you walk into a king's court uninvited and they kill you, and a woman who stops to eat nothing and think for three days is not a coward, she's a woman with sense. Reverend Pike let them go at it, and then said one quiet sentence about how courage and fear sometimes look identical from the outside, and the room went still, and they moved on.
After, a very small, very old woman in a purple hat came up to him with a cane and looked at him so long he started to sweat.