It was a September day, hot and dusty, normal. Meryem Sultan was lined up in front of the school with three classes of Uyghur schoolkids waiting for the buses. Back when she was nine, Meryem hated these school trips to the country. She had to pick caterpillars off the crops because, she was told, Chinese people liked to eat them. Kind of weird. When she was ten, what bugged her was that she was the smartest kid in the class, but now the teachers said they had to pick cotton. Then they told Meryem off, right in front of everyone — “Meryem, your results at school mean nothing. If you can’t pick cotton? You’re useless.” It was humiliating, but other kids were getting regular beatings for slacking off. Anyway, it was “just part of going to school” so Meryem did it. Turned out, she could pick faster than almost anyone in the class, especially the boys. Once she got going, she was “an addict.”
Now she was 13 years old. And Meryem and her friend Hanzokre were kind of excited, standing at the front of the line, when the first bus arrived. But the other buses never came. So the teachers ordered all three classes onto the bus. Everyone jammed in, like 45 kids in all, sitting on each other’s laps, laughing and shouting. The teachers led the students in a few songs. The open windows helped a little at first, but the road was long — four hours — and as they crept along the old village roads, clouds of red dust filled the cabin. The holiday mood faded. Meryem had been separated from her friend in the crush. She knew that Hanzokre’s older brother, a 15-year-old boy named Alimjan, or “Ali,” was on the bus somewhere. He had a health problem. Actually, everyone knew it. And now, as if in a dream, she could hear Hanzokre, near the front of the bus, shouting: “My brother has a heart condition. He says he cannot breathe.”
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