This wonderful story set in South Africa tells how Jamela gets carried away by the gorgeous material her mother buys to make a dress to wear at Thelma’ s wedding. Wrapping it around herself, she shows it off to all her friends. How beautiful it is and how beautiful she is in it. But parading the material around in front of her friends gets it damaged and Jamela feels terrible when she realises what she’ s done.
“Our grounding in the soul means that regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage.”
“This truth reverberated around the room, and I knew my admission irrevocably changed something between us. The simple things I was no longer: his new neighbor, a girl, potentially interesting, also potentially uninteresting. Now I was a girl who had been permanently damaged by life. I was someone to be handled carefully.”