A loud sniff makes me look up. Lael has tears running down her cheeks.

“Dude,” I say. “Don’t tell me you’re crying.” “I’m not crying. You’re crying.”

I touch my face and realise she’s right. I’ve been crying for ages and I didn’t even realise it. I take a pack of tissues out my bag and we both wipe our eyes and blow our noses.

“That is the saddest thing I’ve ever read,” Lael says after a while.

“Right? That part where she sees her baby for just a second before it gets taken out of sight.”

“And the part where her arms are still aching to hold her baby!”

“I know!” I hiccup. “It’s sooooo sad…”
We both start crying again and have to wipe our eyes and blow our noses all over again.

“The worst part for me,” says Lael, “is picturing Nosipho in that same situation. Imagine if she had just given birth and someone took her baby away from her forever, and there was nothing she could do.”

“Stop! I’m going to cry again.”

“Her parents must have been monsters. How could they have watched her go through all that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They probably thought they were doing the right thing for Amelia and for the baby. In those days, I don’t think they realised how this could cause lifelong trauma.”

“Exactly. I mean, look at Ms Waise. She’s a grown wom-an of fifty, and she still made a career decision to take a job at Brentwood just to find out more about her birth parents. And it sounds as though her adoptive parents were perfectly nice. She just needed to know more about her origins. It’s obviously a feeling that never goes away.”

“Like Nosipho too. What was the first thing she did when she found out about her biological father? She tried to contact him, even after the family warned her not to, and told her to leave it up to them.”

I look up and see the Bio teacher glaring at me. She holds a finger up to her lips.

We pretend to work for a while. Then I whisper as quietly as I can. “What about Ms Waise? Are you going to send this to her now?”

“I’d better, hey? I just hope it doesn’t upset her too much. If it made us cry, what is it going to do to her? That’s her in the diary. She’s that baby who was snatched away from her mother.”

It is such a weird thought I can hardly get my head around it.

“I think she came here looking for answers, and this diary entry will give them to her. She has probably been wondering all this time why her biological parents put her up for adoption. If I were adopted, that is what I would wonder. Like, was it to give me a better life, or because they couldn’t cope or couldn’t look after me? And at the back of my mind I would worry that there was something wrong with me: that I wasn’t good enough. Like, maybe they just didn’t want me, you know?”

Lael nods. “I know. But I think that hardly ever hap-pens. Like, that is literally never the reason.”

“When Ms Waise sees the diary, she’ll see how much her mother loved her and wanted to keep her.”

“Exactly, yes! I’m sending it to her right now.” And she does.

“You know what else I noticed?” Lael says once the diary entry has been sent off. “We’re nearly at the end of the diary. It looks like there were only a couple of pages to go to the end of the book. One more entry about the same length as this one, and it will be finished.”

I can’t help feeling a bit panicky.

“The end?” I say. “Really? Already? But we haven’t found out how Jim died yet, and that was the whole point of our investigation.”

“I know. And we’re running out of time. It’s nearly June exams.”

I give her a strange look. June exams are still two weeks away. That is heaps of time. Heaps! That is like a century of time.

“Please tell me you’ve started studying, Trinity.” “Of course I have.” I roll my eyes. “I have totally planned to start studying any day now. I’ve drawn up a schedule for myself, which everyone knows is the hard part.”

“Um … no. I think you’ll find that the hard part is actually doing the studying.”

“Pessimist.”

“Slacker.”

“Getting back to Jim,” I say. “The only thing we have to go on is the word ‘whisky’, which might or might not be important. And one more diary entry. I don’t think it will be enough.”

“I know,” says Lael.

“I’m starting to doubt whether Amelia even knew what happened to Jim. He was still at school while she was living on her parents’ farm and going to secretarial college. They probably lost touch.”

It is starting to look as though we may never know why Jim died, and I find that really hard to accept.

“Okay, this is better.” Nosipho looks around the hall. “This is much better.”

Lael and I look around too, and we have to agree. For one thing, Nosipho and I are not the only black girls in the room. For another, we are not the youngest people by about twenty years. And for a third thing, the lady at the front of the hall looks like someone’s mom – i.e., a person who has actually given birth – not a perky twenty-something who doesn’t know one end of a baby from another. Three good things right there.

We are at the Teen Mothers’ Support Association in Bramley. We phoned Dr Patel’s rooms and explained that Kathy’s group wasn’t working for us. They were very apologetic. Apparently, they keep flyers for various baby-care classes in their rooms, and just recommend the one closest to you. They don’t necessarily know anything about the class itself.

But this is one that Dr Patel recommended herself the last time Nosipho went for a check-up. They specialise in teaching baby care to teenage moms. There is a board outside the hall that says “JUDGEMENT-FREE ZONE”. Some girls are here with their mothers, some with their boyfriends, and some – like Nosipho – are here with their friends. All the girls are still pregnant, so there aren’t any actual babies around, which makes everything less stressful.

“Wow!” Nosipho looks at some of the girls going past. “Look at that. I’m not going to get that big, am I?”

Some of the girls are months ahead of Nos in their pregnancies. Some of them look like they’re about to pop at any moment. The only thing we know for sure is that Nosipho is going to get way bigger than she is now. But right now, she needs to live in denial.

“Nah!” says Lael.
“Of course not!” I agree. “Look at you – your tummy is tiny.”

“You’re right,” says Nosipho, relieved. “Although … I read a thing on the internet the other day about how most of the baby’s growth occurs in the last trimester of the pregnancy.”

“Fake news!” says Lael.

“Absolutely,” I add.

She sighs. “Nice try, guys. I guess I’d better face it – I’m also going to look like that in a few months. Anyway, let’s go and sit down.”

Half an hour later, all I can think is that this is more like it. There are enough bath and changing stations so that each girl has a chance to practise bathing, changing, and dressing a baby. And the baby-dummies are incredibly realistic. In fact, they are almost creepily real. When I hold one in my hands, it feels like it’s alive, with its floppy neck and soft skull. I kind of expect it to sit up and start talking to me. Like Chucky.
Best of all, is that you can choose whether to bath a black, brown or white baby, and a boy or a girl baby, if you know what you’re having. Nosipho heads straight for a little black girl baby.

“You guys, I come from a family of women,” she says.

“There hasn’t been a boy born in my family for a gener-ation. The last one was my Uncle Linda, and even he has twin daughters. This kid is definitely going to be a girl. I can feel it in my bones.”

“Okay, you’re already a mom if you’re talking about feeling things in your bones,” laughs Lael.

There is a very nice lesson on breastfeeding after the bathing section. It is very non-judgey. They make it clear that breast is best for the baby, but not always for the mom, and not to feel guilty if you don’t get it right. They promise to cover bottle-feeding and nap times at next week’s class.

At the end, Lael and I are in great spirits, practicing swaddling the baby, and choosing cute outfits for her from the onesies on offer. It takes us a while to notice that Nosipho has gone a bit quiet.

“Hey, what’s up?” I say when I see her watching some of the other girls.

“Ag, nothing, I guess.”

I notice that Nosipho is looking at the ones who came to class with the fathers of their children. And I must say, it does look as if they’re having a really special time, bonding with their pretend babies.

***