Chapter Nineteen
In the morning, Lek inspected her lips. The right side was swollen and blue and the upper lip had burst open. ‘There was no way that she could cover that up’, she thought, ‘not for at least a day or two’, so she decided to stay at home and try to get word to her mother that she had the flu and wouldn’t be going in for a few days. The problem was, who was going to convey that message for her. It was highly unlikely that Tom would go to work, so her parents would become suspicious anyway.
There was no way for her to avoid her mother, so she cleaned her face up as best she could, got on her old bicycle and rode to her mother’s. She repeated several versions of the story that she would tell her, but none of them sounded any better than a simplified version of the truth.
“G
