anytime soon. Maybe when she was twenty-five. Kamal had told her that some women in Phnom Penh didn’t get married until they were twenty-five or thirty and earned four hundred dollars a month all by themselves. Nita ran behind the dangling sheet where she and her little sister slept, and she put her schoolbooks inside her mother’s old trunk where nobody would find them.
Early the next morning, before her father and brother got up to load the oxcart, Nita crept down the ladder and went to hide at Lina’s house. It was still dark outside, so she took a kerosene lamp, but she knew the way. Lina and Nita had made many trips on the rutted road between their two houses, chatting and pretending not to notice the boys lolling under the acacia trees, doing nothing except sucking palm sugar juice out of plastic bags. “What’s up, little srey chhlat,” the boys would say to Nita. Smart cookie. Which was sweet, but maybe it wasn’t really so sweet. Nita figured they just wanted her to do their math homework for them. The boys paid the teacher to get the answers to the tests, but Nita got the answers on her own. Lina, they called sa’at. Beautiful. They never called Nita that. Lina could have had her pick of any boy in the village, but her parents wanted her to marry her cousin Hin Nhean, so that’s what she did. Then her husband left to get seasonal work in Malaysia, and the boys began looking at her again. Sometimes she looked back.
Afternoons, after their household chores, Lina and Nita walked along the river to watch the wooden fishing boats dragging their white nets behind them. Lina usually wore her knockoff Diesel T-shirt and matching flip-flops. She once offered Nita her tight-fitting Diesel—one of the boys had given it to her, and she could get many more, she said—but Nita thought it provocative. Lina had plenty of friends, but she said she liked Nita the most because Nita didn’t judge her and didn’t jabber all the time.
That morning, Nita hid in Lina’s storage shed. She had to share the space with Lina’s two cats, both strays that Lina had taken in. Nita’s family had owned a cat when she was a little girl, but she had beaten it badly with a broom after she saw her father beat her mother with the broom, and the cat ran away and never came back.
All day Nita squatted in the shed, sweating in the heat. Lina brought Nita some rice and dried fish. To pass the time, they put pink polish on each other’s fingernails. “I thought you’d stay in that dumb school for the rest of your life,” whispered Lina. “I wish I could,” Nita said. “What are your plans, sister?” said Lina. She held Nita’s hand. “Why don’t you live in my house with me. It’s lonely when my parents go to Praek Khmau.”
Live in her house with her? Lina always said a lot of silly things. She said that she’d been born to marry a rich man because she’d done a lot of good deeds in her previous life, but some crazy cosmic accident had occurred and she got stuck with her cousin Nhean. She also said that her father had seventeen girlfriends. Nita calculated that if Lina’s father spent only fifty dollars on each one, it would cost more than he made in a whole year in his fish stall at the market.
Nita stayed in Lina’s shed until dark, then went back to her house. Pich had been outside drinking palm wine and could barely stand up. As soon as he staggered into the house, he picked up the broom as if he was about to beat his daughter. This time he changed his mind. He just touched Nita on the shoulder and said “Daughter” and lay down on his sleeping mat. It wasn’t late, but Ryna turned off the bulb dangling from the tin roof, and the house went dark.
For a long time, Nita couldn’t sleep. She was thinking about how much she would miss school and learning things, especially math, and how she would never go to university now, which had been her dream, and then she began wondering about her older sister, Thida, and if she would ever see her again, and then she was thinking about the boys who looked at Lina and wondered whether they would ever look at her that way.
The next afternoon, two teachers from Nita’s school came to her house, Krou Phally and Krou Sophal. Krou Sophal was her math teacher. She had hair on her chin, like a man. Krou Phally and Krou Sophal told Nita’s parents that there were only four girls left in the class, against seventeen boys, and that Nita was the best student in the entire class. In fact, the best in five years. None of the other students paid attention for one entire minute during the day. Then the teachers began complaining about how they got paid only forty dollars a month, and there was no toilet in the school. Their only satisfaction was a good student like Nita, every five years. At the least, she should be allowed to finish high school, they said. Navin “the little scientist” had finished high school three years ago and was working as a tour guide in Siem Reap and sending her parents thirty dollars a month. Two girls from the nearby town of Praek Khmau had even gone to university. Nita could be the first girl from their village to go to university. Times were changing, they said.
As the teachers were talking, Krou Sophal put her arm around Nita’s shoulder—as if bonding them in a shared vision of great things for the future. A future in which Nita would graduate from high school and then go on to university like the girls of Praek Khmau and bring honor and glory to Praek Banan, and perhaps even a toilet for the school and increased salaries for its teachers. Actually, Nita had not been aware that she was the best student in five years. That knowledge solidified her ambitions. The future was beckoning.
Pich didn’t say a word. He just sat picking at the dirt under his fingernails.
Nita hated working on the farm. She hated tossing the smelly cow dung and beating the rice seeds into the mud and sifting out the snails. It was stupid work. Did the other farmers think she was stupid, like them? Using her math brain to sift snails? This was temporary work, she told herself. Sometimes, she brought along a bag of salt and sprinkled it on the snails, a little at a time, and watched them slowly dissolve and turn into mush. Let them suffer a little, she thought. Suffering was part of life. At night, after she and Sreypov went behind the dangling sheet and undressed, she studied her schoolbooks with a kerosene lamp. When she was studying, she forgot who she was and where she was, and she just floated in the Land of Learning. But she knew that she would probably never be in school again.
It was a few months later that Nita’s father began dropping hints about this man he knew in Battambang. Noth Bun was his name. Actually, Pich had never met this man, but his cousin in Battambang knew him. “Cousin Narith knows a rich bachelor,” Pich said one night. One minute before, he’d been talking about how many kilos of rice he’d reap in the next harvest, and suddenly he was talking about Mr. Noth. A week later Pich said to Ryna, as if he was talking only to her, but loudly, “I heard that Mr. Noth is very handsome.” That’s all he said. Who was this Mr. Noth? Nita wondered. But she never interrupted when her parents were talking.
One afternoon, Pich said, “Mr. Noth is pretty young for somebody so rich.” “How old is he?” asked Ryna. “Cousin Narith says he’s thirty-eight,” said Pich. “That’s a good age.” “How did he become rich?” asked Nita’s brother, Kamal, who was allowed to interrupt. “I heard he sells rubber from the rubber trees,” said Pich. “He’s a businessman.”
After a few weeks of this kind of talk, it was like Noth Bun was a member of the household. Nita had never heard his name before a month ago, and now he was practically eating at their table. Of course, she knew what her father was doing. But she didn’t want any of it. Look at Lina. What good did a husband do her? Nita had another friend, Chenda, who worked day and night making food for her husband and his friends and washing his clothes and his uncle’s clothes and taking care of their two babies. Chenda used to be so pretty. By the time she was eighteen, her face looked like a stone. Nita’s friend Sreyden had been married only six months when her husband walked out on her, leaving her with five hundred dollars of debt.
Long ago, when Nita was still a little girl, her mother had told her while they were washing clothes in the river that she didn’t have to get married if she didn’t want to.
Pich kept talking about this Noth Bun, and one day he announced that the man was coming all the way
