Melba goes home and excitedly tells Grandma India how she tried “some of the things Gandhi talks about,” such as keeping calm in one’s own mind no matter what is going on outside. Conrad yells from the hallway that someone is on the phone for Melba. She hopes it is Vince so that she can tell him about her victory, but it is Link. Melba is furious with Link because she saw him laughing with the segregationists and talking about plans to attack her. He explains that they were planning on doing “something big” to her in the cafeteria. He was there among them to try to help her. He goes on to explain that his father takes him to meetings where segregationists devise methods to get the Little Rock Nine kicked out of school.
Coupled with Melba’s newly found strategies of nonviolence is a focus on understanding whom she can and cannot trust. Though she and Vince now have little in common, she still knows that he is a friend with whom she can share her difficulties and her victories. She does not know how to position Link, by contrast, who seems to be on the side of her tormenters. Even his family is involved in helping to get Melba and the others kicked out of Central. He seems to embody the white supremacy against which she is fighting.
Grandma India and Mother Lois still wonder about Link’s motives. Melba’s grandmother suggests that he could be trying to lure her into a trap for the Klan. Melba decides that she will trust Link because no one else could help to protect her inside of Central. He warns her not to go to her locker in the afternoon and she listens to him. Later, she finds that someone broke into her locker and “shredded the contents.” Link also tells her that, in the beginning of April, the segregationists plan “to speed up their efforts” so that the remaining students in the Little Rock Nine cannot complete a full school year. Mother Lois and Grandma India still disapprove of Melba’s relationship with Link, but they accept that he is helping her in a way that they cannot.
Link’s position as a “double-agent” allows him to help Melba without compromising his social position in the community or at school. Melba allows him to help her because he is undoubtedly privy to information that no one else will share with her. With Danny no longer present, she cannot rely on a physical presence to protect her from violence; instead, she requires intelligence so that she can remain a step ahead of her attackers.
