The Weight of the Chalk Outline

continue with the following story "The lecture hall at Meru University held heat the way a clay pot held water. By ten in the morning, the air had thickened with bodies, paper, and chalk. Mulingi sat halfway back, where he could see the whiteboard without being seen too clearly himself. His notebook lay open. His pen rested in the fold between his thumb and forefinger, unmoving. At the front, Dr. Kaimenyi drew a neat diagram of a primate troop—arrows, circles, hierarchies. Chalk tapped and slid. The professor’s voice carried the practiced calm of someone who could speak about human bodies without embarrassment. “Human sexual strategies,” Dr. Kaimenyi said, “are not fundamentally different from other primates. Yet—” he underlined the word, the chalk squeaking, “—for all our brain size and culture, we often show less reproductive discipline.” A few students chuckled. Someone coughed. A phone buzzed and was quickly silenced. Mulingi’s mind raced. He no longer heard what his anthropology professor said. The sentence lodged in him the way a stone lodged in a shoe: small, but impossible to ignore. Despite the primates having a small brain, they exhibited more reproductive discipline than humans. He stared at the professor’s chalk-dusted fingers and thought, without intending to, of the way adults in his home area had lowered their voices when they spoke of certain children, as though the children carried an odor. They used words that were sharp enough to cut, words that settled on a person and stayed there longer than childhood did. He had learned early to listen for them and to pretend he hadn’t. He had never known who his father was, and no one ever spoke about him within his nuclear and extended families. His mother, when she was alive, had treated the subject like a pot too hot to touch. His grandmother had treated it like a pot that might..."