Aunt Maame's cruelty had a reason that made sense to her: survival. She had spent years learning to make do. The nephews had learned their power in the narrow world of boys who could be cruel and then hide it under bravado. They practiced humiliation like a sport: tripping Ariel when she carried water, hiding her notebooks, mimicking the way she hesitated at pronouncing difficult words. Sometimes one of them would steal her only colored pencil and break it, as if to test the edge of her composure. Once, they tied a string around her ankle and watched her waddle around the verandah like a puppet until she cried. Aunt Maame's reprimands were for infractions of rules, messy rooms, miscounted soap, but rarely for meanness.

Ariel learned to live under the weight of small torments. She would hold onto her breathing until a cousin went inside, then check the corner where her notebook lay and gather it to her like gold. She would rehearse replies before speaking and invent excuses to avoid conversations that might end in mockery. Her body learned the posture of waiting, of being ready for trouble.

But the worst cruelty was not always obvious. It was when Aunt Maame would say, quietly and with the casual cruelty of someone who believes their truth is obvious, "You were always a difficult child." Those statements had the precision of knives. They shaped how she thought about herself because language can become the cage you live in. The house was crowded with other people's verdicts.

Despite this, Ariel's inner life did not die. She found secret pockets of joy: early mornings when the air was clear and she could walk to the little library and lose herself in pages, afternoons when Efua would slip her a bright mango, the sensation of a problem solved on paper. In a wooden chair, with dusk falling, she would draw equations and poems and then fold them away. She would sleep with dreams of walking into a room where someone would say, simply and clear-eyed, "You are enough."

One afternoon when the nephews were at school, Ariel sat on the floor with a book about the stars. The book was old and dog-eared, its pages full of diagrams and names that felt almost lyrical. She read about constellations and the mapping of distance and felt for a moment that constellations were like people: patterns of meaning connecting tiny, dim points into something that looked like a plan. She imagined her life as a line on a star map, one that might someday bend upward.

Often, she would strike bargains in her head. If she could survive this year, maybe next year there would be a scholarship. Maybe if she kept quiet and brilliant, someone would see the light inside her. These bargains were dangerous because they made hope conditional and weakness a tactic. She had learned to barter herself for scraps of peace.

As seasons shifted and the house grew hotter, the cruelty increased. The nephews began to bring friends and then, crueler still, girls who laughed at something Ariel could not understand. Once, a cousin smashed a glass and blamed Ariel; she was forced to pay in the only currency she had: dignity. Aunt Maame struck a new tone, one of irritation, whenever Ariel came home with an extra coin in her pocket, obtained by washing someone's clothes or proofreading a neighbor's letter. "Steal from your time," the aunt would say, and the words rang like a bell in Ariel's chest.

Yet when night fell and the house closed its shutters, Ariel's secret life crowded back in the ledger where she stored kindnesses and dreams, the poems that smelled faintly of orange peel. She would whisper to the mattress, make compacts with the moon, and then sleep like a shell cradling a pearl.