Mother of Hope

Ambition Masemole had a name no one in America would want. I thought this when she told me she was pregnant. She was only fifteen, big and slack, with a fat, sleepy face. She didn’t actually look pregnant, but her heft, dense more than soft, made it hard to tell; she was flesh without curve. She had hard, black eyes and heavy eyelids creased with fat. “Yikes,” I thought, and remembered that her African name was Lesego, meaning “luck”—another piss-poor choice, after all.