The Girl with the Silver Eyes

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Adam Cooper had an easy way of speaking, relaxed and friendly. “Must be quite a change in your life, to have a ten-year-old after not having a child around in such a long time.”

  How did he know she was ten, or almost ten? She was small, and most people took her for younger than she was. Had Monica told him her age?

  Katie stood still, a few yards behind them, and once more the uneasiness rose within her.

  “I guess you had trouble with sitters for her? Didn’t get along with her or something?”

  The chill crept through Katie, although it was still hot. Why was he asking questions about her?

  She remembered a time, last year, when a substitute teacher had sent her to the office for creating a disturbance. It hadn’t been Katie’s fault, at all; at least, she didn’t think so. The boy behind her had been poking her in the back with something hard and rather sharp, and saying nasty things to her, trying to get her to turn around. The substitute, whose name was Miss Cottrell, had spoken very sharply to the class about the need for absolute silence while they did their spelling test. “I will not tolerate any talking at all,” she had said in a voice that promised severe retaliation if they disobeyed.

  Of course, that only made the kids outrageous. They always tried to take advantage of substitutes, doing things they would never have tried with Mrs. Anderson. Two boys tossed erasers across the room the second Miss Cottrell turned to write on the board, and one of them hit her in the back of the head and left white chalk dust on her dark hair. And Jimmy Polchek stuck out his foot and tripped Charlie Foster so that instead of walking up to sharpen a pencil, Charlie fell into the waste-basket.

  And then Derward English started poking Katie in the back even harder. She was good at spelling and was trying to listen to the words and get them all spelled correctly and written in her best penmanship. She was good at that, too.

  Only it was hard with Derward pestering her. He was always pestering someone. Once he’d locked some girls in an outhouse when they were on a class picnic at a park, and it had been over an hour before anyone heard them yelling and let them out. Derward had been suspended for three days because of that. Not that Derward minded; he had returned to school boasting that his father had taken him fishing for three days.

  When Katie talked about it at home, Grandma Welker said scornfully that people as stupid as Derward’s father contributed to the delinquency of minors.

  “Anybody in this house who misbehaves in school won’t get a three-day fishing trip,” Grandma said with a cross glance at Katie. “She’ll get three days locked up in her room on bread and water.”

  Katie didn’t think Grandma would really have kept her on bread and water, but she wasn’t sure enough of it to take any chances.

  She’d tried to ignore Derward, but after a few minutes of feeling the point of his pocketknife jabbing more and more painfully between her shoulder blades, Katie had used all the force she could muster and turned the thing back away from herself.

  The next thing she knew, Derward was yelling, and there was blood all over his hand and his desk, and when Miss Cottrell came to the back of the room, she was very angry.

  “What happened?” she wanted to know.

  And Derward, rat that he was, had blamed it all on her.

  “Katie did it, she made me get stabbed, she practically rammed the knife into my hand! She did it on purpose!”

  So Derward had been sent to the nurse, who decided that since he’d had a recent tetanus shot, it wasn’t serious enough for more than a Band-Aid, and Katie was sent to the office.

  Katie remembered standing in front of the principal’s desk, her legs quivering, and being asked for her version of the story.

  What could she say? That she’d used some mental force that nobody else seemed to have to twist the knife against the boy who was jabbing her with it?

  “It was his knife,” Katie said. “He was fooling around with it, poking me.”

  “And so you twisted around and cut him with it?” the principal asked.

  “I jerked away,” Katie said, “and somehow he cut himself. I can still feel where he poked me.”

  The principal looked at the back of her blouse, but he said there was no cut in it. “Do you want the nurse to look at your back and see if there is a mark on your skin?”

  “No,” Katie said. If there was no tear in her shirt, it was unlikely that there’d be a mark on her skin. “But it was his own fault.”

  In the end, nothing happened to either of them, Katie or Derward. They were sent back to class, where spelling was all over and the kids were doing arithmetic. But all the kids looked at Katie out of the corners of their eyes.

  Katie still remembered the way the principal and the teacher had looked at her. Not at Derward, but at her.

  And Monica was now telling Adam Cooper all about the trouble with the sitters. Katie stood quite still and listened to what a blabbermouth her mother was, saying how Mrs. H. had found Katie “too difficult” to deal with, although she’d been unwilling to say specifically why, and Mrs. G. had been unsatisfactory, too.

  “The first one, what was her name? Hornecker? She was all right, except that she didn’t get along with Katie? I wonder if you still have her phone number,” Mr. C. said. “I have some friends who are looking for a sitter, and their little boy is only two. Maybe she’d do better with a young child.”

  “Why, yes, I guess I still have it. Or it’s probably in the paper; that’s where I got both their numbers, in the newspaper,” Monica said. She turned her head then, and saw Katie. “Well, hi, we thought you’d changed your mind about swimming.”

  She almost had, Katie thought. She looked at Mr. C. and he was grinning, friendly, but she didn’t believe for a minute that he wanted to ask Mrs. H. about sitting for his friends’ little boy. He’d been asking questions of Mrs. M. about her, and now he was pumping Monica. Katie didn’t know why, but it made her afraid.

  “I’ll race you to the other end of the pool,” Adam Cooper offered, but Katie shook her head.

  “I don’t feel like racing,” she said. “I don’t feel like swimming, even. I think I’ll go see Mrs. M.”

  She turned and went back up the wooden steps and along the deck to Mrs. M.’s patio doors, which were open to catch a little breeze. She looked back down and saw that Mr. C. was watching her, and Monica was leaning toward him, saying something.

  “Come on in,” Mrs. M. called out. She was sitting with her feet in a dishpan of water. “Excuse me, but my feet swell up in this weather. There’s a pitcher of iced tea in the icebox; why don’t you get us each a glass of it?”

  Katie did so, adding sugar to both of them; it was the only way she could stand the taste of the tea.

  “My grandma used to call it an icebox, too, just like you do,” she observed, settling onto the sofa beside Lobo, who opened one eye briefly and then went back to sleep.

  “Oh, I guess all us old-timers got used to saying icebox,” Mrs. M. told her. “They didn’t have refrigerators when I was a girl. A man came around twice a week with blocks of ice, and we had a sign we put in the window to show how many pounds we wanted. You don’t look like you got wet.”

  “I didn’t.” Katie sipped at the tea. “They’re talking about me, Mr. C. and my mother.”

  “Oh? Well, we all talk about the people we like,” Mrs. M. said, wriggling her toes in the water.

  “I don’t think it’s because they like me,” Katie said. “He’s asking more questions about me.”

  “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you, does it?”

  “Did you tell him how old I am?” Katie asked.

  “No. I don’t think you ever said how old you are. Nine? Eight and a half?” Mrs. M. guessed.

  “I’ll be ten in September.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t mean to be insulting. I should have known; anyone who reads adult books the way you do would have to be close to ten. Come to think of it, maybe you did tell me you were ten. I forget thing
s these days.”

  “Everybody guesses me younger, because I’m not very big,” Katie said.

  After a while, when she went home, she asked Monica if she’d told Mr. C. how old she was.

  “What?” Monica said. She was somewhat distracted; it sounded as if she and Nathan had been quarreling on their way up from the pool.

  “My age,” Katie said patiently. “Did you tell him I was ten?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Nathan, aren’t you going to stay and watch the news?”

  “No,” Nathan said. “I’m surprised you even noticed whether I was here or not, the way you spent all evening talking to that jerk.”

  “He isn’t a jerk. He’s just a nice man who doesn’t know anyone here,” Monica said.

  “So why doesn’t he go meet someone else? Why you?”

  Katie could see they were building up to a real fight. She dimly remembered that her mother and her father had sometimes argued, when she was little; she didn’t want to listen, and she went into her own room.

  She wasn’t really thinking much about Monica and Nathan, though. She was wondering how Adam Cooper had known how old she was and wondering, too, why it seemed so important to her to know how he’d learned that she was nearly ten.

  9

  AS SOON AS MONICA HAD gone to work in the morning—with a headache, she said, and Katie wondered if it was because she and Nathan had had a real fight before he left the previous night—Katie called the number where she’d reached Dale Casey.

  A man’s voice answered, a gruff voice.

  “May I speak to Dale, please?”

  “He’s busy now,” the man said. “He’s got chores to do before he can talk to anybody. He’s got to weed the garden and mow the grass.”

  Katie thought quickly. “Couldn’t—couldn’t he call me back? Couldn’t I leave my number?”

  “Well, I guess so. What is it?”

  She told him the number, and repeated her name, hoping the man was writing it down. But though she waited in the apartment all morning, no one called.

  While she was waiting, she sat down and composed a letter to the girl, Kerri Lamont, and addressed it to the return address on the letter Monica had gotten yesterday from her friend Fern. And then, remembering, she went looking for the letter itself.

  Monica hadn’t answered it yet, so it was still lying on her desk in the bedroom. Ordinarily Katie wouldn’t have thought it very nice to read someone else’s mail, but surely this was a special case. Maybe Fern Lamont would say something about Kerri that would give her a clue to what she wanted to know.

  The letter was written in terrible handwriting. Mrs. Anderson would have given Mrs. Lamont an F in penmanship, Katie thought. And most of what she wrote wasn’t very interesting, all about Mrs. Lamont going back to work now because the kids were in school, except that now they were out for vacation, and she couldn’t find a decent sitter, and she didn’t really like the job all that much, and Charles (that was her husband) didn’t think about anything but bowling and left everything else to her.

  Mrs. Lamont sounded like a whiney sort of woman. Katie wasn’t surprised that her husband wanted to bowl rather than sit around home and listen to her. She complained about everything. But, finally, at the very end of the letter, Katie found what she’d been looking for.

  “The boys run me ragged with their noise and their dirt, but it’s still Kerri who bothers me the most. She is such a strange child,” the word strange was underlined, “and I’ve never been able to talk to her. She just looks at me with those unusual eyes and doesn’t say anything back. She doesn’t cause trouble, exactly, but she makes everyone uncomfortable, for some reason. I guess I shouldn’t say that, she is my own daughter, but it isn’t just me. Charlie is always looking and raising his eyebrows and asking what’s the matter with her. As if I know! Why do men think the kids are a woman’s responsibility? He never takes the kids anywhere, or does anything for them except pay their bills—”

  There was more, but that was the important part. Kerry had “unusual” eyes, and she was “strange,” and her mother didn’t understand her, either.

  Just like me, Katie thought.

  She composed the letter very carefully. Just in case Mrs. Lamont opened it and read it first.

  “Dear Kerri:

  You don’t know me, but I think maybe we could be friends, or at least pen pals. I was born September tenth, the same year as you, and I think maybe we have something in common.”

  Katie chewed on the end of her pen for a minute, wondering if she should specify anything, and decided not to.

  “I like to read, and I like animals,” she wrote then. “And I’d sure like to hear from you.”

  It wasn’t much of a letter, but she didn’t know what else to put in that wouldn’t be dangerous.

  Dangerous. Dangerous was walking off the curb without looking to see if there was a bus coming, or being careless with matches, or something like that, wasn’t it? Dangerous was a frightening word, and she was surprised, at first, that she’d thought it.

  And then she wasn’t surprised, because it was the way she was feeling. Afraid, as if something dangerous was happening. If people didn’t like people who were different, would they do something about it? Would they be more than just mean, in the way they treated the ones who weren’t the same as themselves?

  She remembered a boy who’d been in her third grade class, a black boy named Efram. He’d never done or said a single thing, as far as Katie knew, to make anyone dislike him. Yet some of the kids never wanted him on their team when they played games, although he was as good a player as anyone else. And some of the kids made remarks where Efram could hear them, about his color. She’d hoped, when Efram moved away after a few months, that in his new home he lived close to some other black kids, because he must have been very lonely.

  Efram couldn’t help it if his skin was a different color, and she couldn’t help the way she was, either. She didn’t even want to be able to make things fly through the air; what good did it do her?

  She found a stamp in a little box on Monica’s desk and took the letter to Kerri downstairs for the mailman, trying to think how she’d react if she got one like it.

  Dale Casey still hadn’t called back. She’d run up and down the stairs and left the front door open so she’d hear the phone if it rang while she was doing that. She wondered if his father had given him her message. There was also the possibility that Dale wasn’t interested in talking to her, though he hadn’t sounded that way.

  Katie left the door open again and crossed the hall to knock on Mrs. M.’s door. She had Dale’s address written down.

  “Good morning,” Mrs. M. said. Her hair looked like something a bird might choose to make a nest in. “Or is it afternoon? I overslept. That’s what I get for staying up half the night to watch the Late Late Show.”

  She led the way inside and laughed at Lobo, who was stretched full-length across the flowered sofa. “I guess Lobo stayed up all night, too. I think he has a lady friend.”

  Katie brushed a hand over his head. “Have you, Lobo?” she asked.

  Lobo opened one eye. There’s a lovely white Persian who lives in the next block.

  “You’re right,” Katie told Mrs. M. “It’s a white Persian.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen her. Has good taste, old Lobo has. What’s that you’ve got?” Mrs. M. waggled her fingers at the slip of paper Katie carried.

  “An address. I don’t know my way around at all. Do you know where it is?”

  Mrs. M. had to get her reading glasses in order to see it. Then she got out a city map and her finger pointed out the place to Katie. “Should be right about there.”

  “And where are we?”

  Mrs. M. showed her.

  “It doesn’t look so far. Do you think I could walk it?”

  “You could. The bus runs right there, though, along that red line. Be easier to take the bus. You could get off here and only have two blocks left to walk.”


  “How about Millersville? Do you know where that is?”

  “About ten miles south of here, I think. Wait a minute, and I’ll get a state map.”

  Again Mrs. M. pointed out the place she wanted. Katie wondered if she had enough money in her owl bank to pay for a bus ticket to Millersville, in case Kerri didn’t answer. Or in case Kerri did answer, and that was the only way to get to see her.

  “You’re not thinking about taking any trips without telling your ma, are you?” Mrs. M. asked.

  “No,” Katie said slowly. She wondered if she could get to Millersville and back between the time Monica left in the morning and the time she came home at night. She was pretty sure Monica wouldn’t let her go alone, if she asked. “Not right now, anyway,” she added, so as to be truthful with Mrs. M.

  Across the hall, the telephone rang.

  Katie ran, but whoever it was had hung up by the time she got there. She stared in frustration at the phone. Had it been Dale Casey?

  She had his number, written on a crumpled piece of paper in her pocket. Katie’s fingers were unsteady as she dialed the number, wondering if Mr. Casey would be angry that she’d called twice instead of waiting for Dale to call her back.

  But Mr. Casey wasn’t angry. No one answered at all, although she let it ring for a long, long time.

  That afternoon Katie met Mr. C. in the corridor, carrying a box of books. She knew it was books because it was obviously heavy and there were brightly colored jackets sticking out over the top of it.

  “Hi. Open the door for me, will you, and then I won’t have to put these down.”

  Obediently, Katie opened the door to 2-C. The apartment inside was just as she’d last seen it except that there was a coffee mug sitting on the table she could see through the kitchen door. Mr. C. didn’t do anything to make his place look lived-in.

  Katie didn’t have any great amount of experience with men—her father had gone away when she was small, and her grandfather had died so long ago she didn’t remember him at all—but she thought most men had a tendency to scatter their belongings around. Nathan, who didn’t even live there, left things all over Monica’s apartment.