The Yalung family were in tobacco and sardines. Mabelle’s troubles had started when she was in the fifth grade and had confidently announced to her classmates that her family owned the world. Carina Barcelona, a scrawny fourth grader with a dark ferrety face and hairy ears to match, sensibly declared that it was impossible for one family to own the world, thereby making Mabelle’s grandmother out to be a liar. Mabelle had bridled and challenged the much smaller girl to a fight. The coup de grace was when she shoved Carina’s face into the toilet. But Carina’s family, being in banking, was not without influence, and that was the start of Mabelle’s wandering from school to school. The immediate cause of her last expulsion was that she and a boyfriend had been caught sans culottes, running acro
