|
Daddy walloped Crystal this morning. She’d spilled the last
of the milk all over the floor, and there was nothing for
him to put on his cereal. He smacked her upside the head
and yelled, “Shit, Crystal, watch what you’re doing! That
damn milk is expensive!” Mama wasn’t home, so the milk
never did get mopped up.
I’m eleven years old and Crystal is seven. I’m in the fifth
grade at South Chesterfield Elementary, and Crystal’s in
the first. Crystal should be in the second grade, but she
had to repeat kindergarten; she’s had a hard time
remembering all of her letters. I tried to help her a
little, but she didn’t get it. Crystal’s not one for
learning. She told me that those letters swam in front of
her, like teeny tadpoles in a jar. She told me that all of
those letters looked exactly the same.
I’ve always been good at school. One day when I was in
second grade, I overheard my teacher, Mrs. Kuhn, tell the
guidance counselor that I had a “knack for language arts,”
which was apparently surprising to her, “considering the
girl’s home life.” At the time, I didn’t quite understand
what that meant, so I asked Mama about it. Mama told me
that she didn’t understand it, either. She told me that
those “damn teachers don’t know what they’re talking about
half the time, anyway.” Mama never went to another parent-teacher conference after that.
Because of Crystal spilling the milk, it took us a little
longer than usual to get ready for school. Crystal cried
after Daddy hit her. She decided that she was “very sick”
and told me that she did not feel like going to school.
Crystal likes to stay home with Daddy, but I don’t. I go to
school, even if I have a sore throat. I go to school, even
when I’ve just thrown up and my whole body aches. There are
no beds to rest in at my house, except Daddy’s. There’s no
time to rest, either. When you stay home from school, Daddy
expects you to make him lunch and keep him company.
We’d learned to write limericks in language arts last week,
and today, we were going to write haikus. I was very
excited because Mr. Clark sometimes picked the best poem
and read it to the class. He’d read Jessica’s on Friday.
None of my stuff had been read, yet, but I kept my fingers
crossed. Today could be that special day.
I got to school late. Mrs. Byron, the attendance monitor,
screamed at me in the back hallway as she wrote my late
pass, her letters like Daddy-Long Legs on the page. She
leaned toward me and whispered as I walked past her, “Take
a bath before you come to school tomorrow, Angela. Water’s
free.” When I got to Mr. Clark’s room, the class had
already started doing their morning work.
“Haikus are a very structured form of poetry,” Mr. Clark
told us, “Five syllables, seven syllables, then, five
syllables.”
5, 7, 5, I repeated to myself. 5, 7, 5.
I hunched over my desk, imagining a garden, full of color.
I imagined little creatures — frogs, crickets, and
inchworms — busying themselves. I pictured a place where the
rain splattered against leaves, where everything was rich
and green and full of life.
Bright butterflies sail
Across morning so quiet
Noisy solitude.
“Angela, is your head itchy?” I was so busy writing that I
almost didn’t realize that Mr. Clark was talking to me.
I hadn’t thought about it much, but yeah, my head was
itchy. I scratched it again as I answered him.
“Angela, I think you need to go have the nurse take a look
at your head.”
I’d been through this drill before, a million times. I
glanced at my poem one last time as I pushed my chair back
and stood up. The other kids snickered. They knew where I
was going. Jessica Jones leaned towards the coat rack, away
from me, as I walked past her desk.
Miss Tanya ran a comb through my hair. It tickled. Lice,
she pronounced immediately. Miss Tanya didn’t even ask me
for my parents’ phone number so that she could call them
and let them know that they needed to pick me up. She knew
that we didn’t have a phone. She went to the coat rack and
grabbed her jacket. “C’mon, Angela,” she sighed, “Let’s get
you home.”
Miss Tanya let me go back to the classroom to get my coat
and my book bag. I shuffled slowly down the hall. I knew
that once I arrived at the room, the kids would all laugh
about my “cooties.” I also knew that Daddy wouldn’t mess
with my hair today, and Mama would be too tired after work
to shampoo it for me. Tomorrow, I would be as welcome in
school as a cockroach on a cookie.
Mr. Clark helped me get my things together. He gave me a
geometry worksheet to complete for homework. He was holding
my poem, but he didn’t hand it to me. “Angela, your poem
is beautiful. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to read it to
the class this afternoon.”
Even though my head was so itchy, I didn’t scratch it. Even
though I felt sick about going home, I forgot about Daddy.
For one second, I got down in Mr. Clark’s words. I lived in
my poem. My poem was “beautiful.”
If my words could be beautiful, then I could be, too.
|
