Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  “You didn’t do anything, Sasha. I’d just like to check in with your foster mother. I haven’t met her yet.”

  “If this is about the rope . . . ,” I venture. I figure he must have heard by now that I got in trouble in gym class for scaling a rope and refusing to come down.

  Mr. Powell’s mustache moves back and forth slightly. “Yes, I did hear about that.”

  “Miss Jacks says to write, you have to think about perspective. The top of the rope was a different perspective from the bottom. Also, Anthony was at the bottom, and sometimes Anthony . . .”

  “Mr. Tucker pushes your buttons.”

  “Only in the halls. Not . . .” I wonder whether telling Mr. Powell that Anthony goes to poetry club is the same as telling classmates. I decide to be safe and not say anything, which makes two of us; Mr. Powell seems to be waiting for me, and I have no idea what he wants.

  “You didn’t tell me about poetry club,” he prompts at last.

  “We learn new forms. There’s this contest I might enter. You can win a scholarship.”

  “That’s a great opportunity.”

  “I wouldn’t win. But I might enter.”

  “Why couldn’t you win? Miss Jacks says you’re quite talented.”

  I think about the counselor poem I wrote for Mikey. I giggle. But this makes me think about Mikey, and I stop smiling. Something about Mikey makes me uneasy lately. Something that feels like worry.

  “Sasha?”

  I don’t care for the way Mr. Powell makes me talk. He asks questions and then he waits and waits to see what spills out. I don’t remember what I tell him. Something about cinquains, I guess.

  • • •

  By the time the conference rolls around, I’ve made myself so nervous about it that I can’t even write poetry. This is a problem, since I have a contest to prepare for.

  Mr. Powell is always telling me to set goals. Michael always said the same thing. Well, my goal has become winning a poetry scholarship. Since I know now I won’t be able to save enough in the suitcase for college—look how long it’s taken me just to save half enough for a GUI-tar—I’m going to have to come up with a different plan for leaving.

  At the conference, Phyllis smiles and nods and looks serious and is polite. She asks good questions. She doesn’t make me feel like I’m in trouble.

  At the end of the meeting, Mr. Powell asks me if I’ll run an errand for him. I know he can’t possibly need twenty-five copies of a leaflet about the PSAT at five in the evening and that he’s just trying to get me out of the room, but I like using the copy machine, so I agree. After I stack the warm copies on top of the machine, I wander around the office. I’m never here after hours, and it’s strange to look at the fish swimming in their tank and think about how they live here all the time. One hundred percent of the day, this is where the fish are. They swim in circles. They bump into the little plastic trees and road signs and volcanoes. They eat flakes that you probably don’t have to grease the pan to cook. They peek out at kids coming and going, in trouble.

  When Phyllis comes out of Mr. Powell’s office, she doesn’t let me go back in. She tells me we have to hurry if we want to be home in time to fix something hot for dinner. “What did he tell you?” I ask in the car.

  “He used a lot of big words,” Phyllis says. A few miles later, she adds, “Nothing, Sasha. He didn’t tell me nothing.”

  We roll on for a minute, quiet. Phyllis’s car makes soft little rumbles, comfortable like only older engines sound.

  “I wish it was me that broke the window,” I say.

  “Mr. Powell mentioned that,” she tells me. I’m surprised. I don’t remember intending to tell Mr. Powell about that. It must have slipped loose when I was thinking about Mikey.

  “Why do you wish that?” Phyllis asks. She doesn’t sound like she’s judging, only curious.

  “Because Mikey’s only little,” I say. “He should get to be normal and grow up normal and go to college.”

  Phyllis laughs. “I don’t know if you’ve been to a college, girlie, but it ain’t exactly teeming with normal people.” She laughs again. “Never mind. Mikey’ll be fine, Sash. He’ll get to go to college, and so will you, if that’s what you want.”

  “It is.” I feel like my brother is sitting right next to me. I can almost smell him, a mix of sweat and smoke and cologne. “I want me and Mikey both to get to leave.” For reasons I don’t completely understand, it’s becoming important to me that if I get out, Mikey does, too.

  “Hmm.”

  We drive on in silence for a minute before I think to ask, “Why did you never leave?”

  She glances at me. “Caboose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What makes you think I never left?”

  My head whips around. “You did?”

  “On my nineteenth birthday. Me and Heath Christian drove for days. We took turns sleeping in the passenger seat. We got lost probably half a dozen times and kept ending up in weird parts of Ohio, but we finally got going. When we were both awake, we couldn’t stop pointing out all the things was different over that way.”

  “Which way was that?”

  “We drove west. We were hell-bent on California, but long about western Missouri, the weather started looking a lot nicer outside the car than in it. He found a job doing truck maintenance for a big rig outfit, and I found out I was expecting Miles.”

  I watch the headlights reflect off the white line that disappears and reappears along the crumbling edge of the road. “Why’d you come back?”

  “Heath Christian didn’t turn out to be quite the man I thought he was,” she said, “and I found out I was expecting Sam. I needed help, and my family was here.”

  “Do you still have family here?”

  “Sure I do,” she says. “An aunt and a cousin. Mostly the others are with your brother, but they’re still here. I can visit them up on the mountain. I can feel their presence.” She readjusts her grip on the steering wheel and makes a couple of small noises before she finds any more words. “This is where I choose to be, Sasha. My people are here.”

  I try to imagine how it feels to choose Caboose. As long as I can remember, I’ve never considered that it was a choice. Michael wanted to escape so badly that his plan always felt like my own. Even now, as comfortable as I’ve started to feel with Phyllis, something in me still burns to escape. Sometimes, when I get frustrated at school or scared about things, I imagine running away again. I could take the money in the suitcase and use it to buy nice clothes that make me look older. I could get a job—maybe not something official, maybe just odd jobs like I’m doing now, but it would be enough to buy food, enough to survive until I’m grown and can get one of those scholarships or college loans that Michael was always shoving me toward.

  My plan isn’t that simple anymore. I still want to follow Michael’s wishes and leave the state. But now I’d want to take Mikey with me. He’s a Michael Harless, too, even if he has another name before it. He’s like another chance for Michael to get away. He should grow up someplace without secret papers in boxes. He should grow up someplace safe.

  “If I left, I’d miss your songs,” I blurt out. I glance sideways at Phyllis. “And egg salad.”

  “I’d like it if you didn’t leave again,” Phyllis says. “I’ve chased you down enough, sweet girl.”

  “I know it. I didn’t mean now. I mean later. When I’m grown.” It’s only a partway lie.

  “Later, when you’re grown,” she tells me, “you can choose a place to live that feels right to you. But it has to feel right to you, Sasha. Not to me or Mr. Powell or your brother, or to anybody else.”

  I am all full up with choices. I lay my head on the window, overwhelmed, and fall asleep before we reach Caboose.

  15

  It’s Thursday, which means poetry club, and I’ve been lookin
g forward to it all day long. The buses pull away past the windows while kids bang locker doors closed out in the hallway. Poetry club kids come in one or two at a time, snagging popcorn or pushing chairs together to sprawl out on, until there are nine of us in the room, plus Miss Jacks.

  I love how different the classroom is now from how it was twenty minutes ago in English class. It doesn’t feel formal anymore. Kids make themselves at home, getting comfortable. I’m surprised how quick they’ve accepted me as one of the group. They’ve accepted Jaina, too, even quicker than me. She acts like she was born here. The two of us sit on the floor side by side. Jaina’s tossing a beanbag back and forth with Angie, who suddenly wings it at Anthony’s head. He catches it almost without looking, and Jaina applauds.

  “Who wants to start?” Anthony asks, tossing the beanbag into the air and catching it a few times. “Oh, wait, wait, that’d be me. I need everybody to write down their email addresses if I don’t already have them. That means you”—he points at Jaina—“and you.” He points at me. “I’m going to email you the contest rules, and I want everybody to email me back a poem. Everybody! Email me back a poem by this time next week! The deadline’s at the end of the month, and the next one’s not till August! I need your entries so I have time to let Miss Jacks tear them to pieces!”

  “Give constructive feedback,” Miss Jacks corrects.

  Anthony rips a sheet of paper from his notebook, tears it in half, and paper-airplanes each half to me and Jaina. “Writing down your email address means I have express permission to email you the summer newsletter.”

  “Is there poetry club in the summer?” Jaina asks.

  “No, but like I said, there’s a newsletter. And that newsletter, penned by author, poet, and world-class journalist Anthony Tucker”—he takes a bow—“will suggest various poetry forms you can be practicing so that when we come back at the end of August, you’ll have something written for the competition. Because, so help me, people, somebody who is sitting in this room right now had better win one of those scholarships—or else!”

  I’m not wild about the idea of Anthony Tucker having my email address. I write it down, but I don’t hand it back yet.

  “Now. Who wants to start?”

  “I wrote an acrostic,” Lisa volunteers, puffed up with importance.

  Anthony chucks the beanbag at her and she jumps, startled, and misses it. Angie kicks it back over to her, and she picks it up by a corner. “What do I do with this?”

  “It means you have the floor,” Anthony says. “Take it quick, before I change my mind.”

  “Like you can stop me from talking.”

  “Go on, go on. An acrostic?”

  “I remembered it from elementary school, and I looked it up online. It’s where you use the letters of a word, like your name, as the first letter in each line. Like—okay, I’m Lisa. So I wrote L–I–S–A down the page, and each of those letters is the first letter in that line.”

  She reads:

  “Little girl

  Is growing up

  So fast.

  Almost adult.”

  I actually like this, but I can’t bring myself to tell Lisa. Something about her polo shirt and her thin, straight, neatly cut red hair. If I think it’s hard talking to Jaina, I’d probably never manage to pull together any words to say to Lisa. I can’t imagine we have much in common.

  “Can we do other people’s names?” Anthony asks, super casual. His eyes also stray to Lisa. I work to hide a giggle.

  I see Miss Jacks fight a smile before she says, “Let’s stick to our own names for the moment. It’s much safer.”

  We take a few minutes to write. But I don’t like this form. It sticks to my pencil.

  Still, it’s kind of cool how many directions the members of poetry club take with each letter. In different kids’ poems, the letter C might stand for Cheetos, Camping, or Courageous.

  When Anthony tosses me the beanbag, I read:

  “So

  Annalisa

  Suggested we all use our

  Heads and write

  Acrostic poems. Ugh.”

  Lisa shrieks with displeasure. “My name isn’t Annalisa. It’s just Lisa!”

  “Well, that would make my name S-llll-sha! And you don’t have the beanbag!” Turns out she’s not so hard to talk to after all, once she’s got me mad.

  “Girls,” Miss Jacks interrupts before me and Lisa can come to blows over who gets to keep her given name. “Consider it artistic license,” she tells Lisa. Then to me: “Consider putting your shoulder into the assignment.”

  So I write:

  Someday I will

  Answer when

  Somebody asks me a question I wish they

  Hadn’t

  Asked.

  I look up to find that Lisa has been reading over my shoulder. Rage burns.

  “You don’t read over a person’s shoulder; that’s . . . that’s rude!” The words will hardly spit out. I see the other kids look up.

  “You don’t have the beanbag!” Lisa mimics. “Anyway, that doesn’t make any sense! That’s not a poem about you, just because it has your name in it.”

  “How about we keep the tempers in check?” Miss Jacks suggests.

  “It says Sasha, doesn’t it?” I snap. “So shut up. What did you write?”

  “I already did mine!”

  “Girls.” Miss Jacks is standing now.

  “Okay,” me and Lisa both mutter. I scoot even farther away.

  There is silence for a minute. Then Jaina raises her hand and Angie tosses her the beanbag.

  Jaina reads:

  “Joyful

  And

  Interesting.

  Never forget to be

  Awesome.”

  “That’s not about you, either,” Lisa mutters, but Miss Jacks silences her with a raised eyebrow.

  “I like it,” I say, a little louder than necessary, because I want my voice to matter more than Lisa’s. Anger has made me less shy and given me a little more volume.

  Jaina watches me long past her turn. When I catch her eye, she glances toward Lisa and then, when she is very sure Lisa isn’t looking, sticks out her tongue. Some of the tension bleeds out of me, and I smile back, glad I haven’t scared Jaina off with my temper.

  Anthony raises his hands for the beanbag, and a smile creeps onto my face before he can even start reading. I’m surprised to find how much I’m looking forward to his words.

  He reads:

  “Anthony is

  Never on

  Time for anything, Mrs. Tucker.

  He needs to turn in his homework

  Or he will flunk.

  Next week is report cards.

  Yes, that’s right. Next week.”

  Everybody laughs. But I notice Anthony doesn’t laugh much. Miss Jacks was wrong. Writing about our own names isn’t safe at all.

  I look at Anthony, but he never looks back. He’s missed a few opportunities to pick on me since last poetry club. It’s almost like we’re friends now because we share Thursdays.

  So I write:

  Anthony is

  Never as boring as

  The other kids.

  He writes

  Okay poetry and

  Never forgets to be funny.

  Yes, that’s right. Funny.

  I don’t read it out loud, because it has broken the rule about other people’s names. When we’re leaving, I want to hand it to Anthony, but I’m too shy. Maybe next time, I think. For now, I keep it in my notebook, and I hand him my email address instead.

  • • •

  Phyllis drives slowly through the rain. I gaze out the window at wet springtime leaves. Dead leaves from last fall still coat the ground. They’re grimy from passing trucks. I reach across the front seat and ta
ke Phyllis’s hand. She squeezes my fingertips with hers.

  16

  “Sasha, hold it still. Don’t move it so much.” I’ve never heard Phyllis’s voice sound quite so high-pitched. It’s still Thursday, but much later, and Phyllis is reaching across the car, holding Shirley’s dish towel against my hand.

  “You’re squeezing too hard!” My voice sounds strange. Too slow or something.

  “I have to squeeze,” Phyllis says. “I have to stop the bleeding. I know it hurts—”

  “No, it doesn’t.” It really doesn’t. I wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

  After poetry club, we’d gone home as usual. Phyllis started dinner, and afterward, we made dessert. We were going to take some to Mikey and the girls, but we only got halfway through the yard to their front porch before we heard Shirley screaming.

  I ran ahead, ignoring Phyllis’s hollering for me to stop, and I found Mikey crouched in a corner of the kitchen with his hands over his head while Shirley hit him with the dish towel.

  It was only a dish towel and it couldn’t really hurt him, but the anger pouring out of Shirley made me feel cold and hot all at the same time, and she kept hitting and hitting him, and he wasn’t doing anything besides sitting there. In another corner of the kitchen, Sara and Marla sat on the floor, both wailing. Marla’s high chair was turned over, and Sara had her sister on her lap, their arms and legs all tangled up.

  I hollered for Shirley to stop, and when she didn’t, I wrenched my sleeve from Phyllis’s grip and went in swinging. Shirley ducked, but her kitchen window didn’t. Maybe I hit it at just the right angle, or maybe it was weak from all the hot dishwater she was always running below it. Whatever the reason, it shattered before I even understood what was happening.

  Shirley followed us out of the house. She’d always been so grim and quiet, it was a shock to see her screaming and sobbing. Phyllis held a dish towel, the same one Shirley’d been swinging, around my bleeding hand. She was maneuvering me and Mikey both out of the house when Shirley grabbed a handful of Phyllis’s jacket.