Gabriela Speaks Out

by Teresa E. Harris

  I started to feel like I was still wearing my heavy wet clothes. I took a deep breath and texted back, Super cool!

  IKR? I still can’t believe Red and Alejandro, though!

  Neither can I. See you later at poetry group.

  The more I thought about it, the more mad I got. Red and Alejandro were usually the type of friends I could count on to be there for me when other people weren’t. The whole poetry group was like that. Whenever I was with my poetry friends—who never laughed at my stutter and always waited for me to find my words—there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

  And Red—Red definitely knew Isaiah and I were nervous about this school year. How could he do this?! I had so many words inside me that I just needed to get out. I thundered up the stairs to my room, taking the steps two at a time, and then found my journal exactly where I’d left it on my furry chair.

  Back when she first started working with me for speech therapy, Mrs. Baxter had suggested I use a journal to write down all the words I wanted to say but couldn’t because of my stutter. I did, at first, but last year after we started the poetry group, I found myself filling the notebook up with poems more and more until it became just that: my poetry journal.

  I sat down on my furry chair, opened up to a fresh page, wrote RED in all caps at the top, and began to write. By the time I was done, I’d filled up almost two whole pages. I could’ve written two more, but I heard the front door open. Red! I jumped to my feet, raced downstairs, and ran right into Mama.

  “Whoa, Gabby, where’s the fire?” she said, laughing.

  “Where’s Red?” I demanded, caught a glimpse of Mama’s raised eyebrow, and quickly changed my tone. “Is he in the car?”

  Mama shook her head. “He texted me after school and asked if he could go to Alejandro’s house.”

  Of course he did, the sneaky, water-balloon-throwing coward!

  “Mr. Gomez is going to drop the two of them off at Liberty in time for poetry group. Are you ready?”

  I was more than ready.

  When Mama and I got to Liberty, she stopped at dance studio two to prepare for her Tiny Tots class and I kept on going to studio six. The whole group—Red, Teagan, Isaiah, Alejandro, and Bria—was already there.

  Normally, before the official start of the meeting, we would be sprawled on our bellies on the floor, close enough for our elbows to touch, our poetry notebooks open in front of us as we read over our old poems or put finishing touches on anything new.

  But today, only Bria, Alejandro, and Red were talking. Isaiah only had eyes for his still-soggy book of black activist poets, and Teagan was alternating between writing in Cody and glaring at Red and Alejandro.

  I took a seat between her and Isaiah, who glanced up, gave me a weak smile, and went back to his book.

  “All right, poets, let’s get this word flowin’ goin’!” Red said, clapping his hands.

  “Did you give Red a piece of your mind?” Teagan whispered just as Red asked if any of us had any new poems to share.

  “I’m about to,” I whispered to Teagan, and thrust my hand into the air.

  “Okay, cuz!” said Red. “Liking your enthusiasm.”

  Alejandro nodded in agreement. They were both smiling. How on earth could they act like they hadn’t just soaked Isaiah and me with water balloons three hours ago?! The wave of emotions was back, and this time it broke over me with such force, I all but shouted, “I-It’s a f-first dr-draft.”

  “First draft,” Alejandro, Bria, and Red shouted back, matching what they must have still thought was enthusiasm. Isaiah and Teagan, on the other hand, were much quieter.

  I took a deep breath and began to read.

  “Let me tell you about a boy named Clifford

  Poet, comedian, so I thought he was different

  Thought he meant well, that he had my back

  Til I was walking home one day and SMACK

  Right in the face he hit us with water balloons

  Took off running, his buddy Alejandro, too

  Oh, yes indeed, that boy named Clifford

  Got to seventh grade and yes, he is different

  Not in a good way, oh no not at all

  Now he might laugh if you trip and you fall

  Let me tell you about Clifford and the way that he was

  Because after today, I hardly know you, cuz.”

  My heart pounded as I read the last word and looked up. Only Teagan and Isaiah applauded, slightly defiant looks on both of their faces. I chanced a look at Red. He stared back at me, openmouthed and wide-eyed. I waited for him to say something. He looked like he was waiting for me to do the same. In the end, it was Alejandro who said, “We didn’t mean anything by those water balloons. It’s just part of the tradition!”

  Of all the things I’d expected either of them to say, that hadn’t even made the list.

  “Tr-Tradition?” I asked.

  “Sixth-Grade Initiation,” Bria put in, her bushy ponytail bobbing. “It’s been going on for years at Kelly.”

  “You were involved, too?” Teagan asked Bria, a note of disgust in her voice.

  “Yes,” Bria replied defensively. “They’re just harmless pranks the seventh and eighth graders play on the sixth graders to welcome them to the school.”

  “If that was your idea of a welcome, I’d hate to see what you guys would do if you didn’t want us there,” Isaiah muttered, shaking his head.

  “But it’s not like that,” Alejandro cried. “It’s supposed to be funny. Other sixth graders were laughing today. It happened to Bria and me last year, too, and we laughed.”

  Red nodded in agreement.

  “Y-You weren’t even here at the be-beginning of school last year!” I said.

  Red and Aunt Tonya lived almost a half hour away. Up until he moved in with Mama, Daddy, and me that past February, he’d been going to sixth grade at a totally different school.

  “I heard the sixth graders had fun,” Red replied. “Sure, everyone said that they were surprised at first, but then it was funny. It’s just water balloons.”

  “Just water balloons to you, maybe,” I said. “But what if you’d had a pretty good day,” I added. “A b-b-better day than you were expecting, for the most part, and were thinking sixth grade might not be so scary after all, and th-th-then your own cousin and friends ruined your hair and your homework and—”

  “And what if …” Isaiah added, pausing as though gathering the strength to say what he had to say next. “What if you’d been bumped into accidentally-on-purpose by seventh and eighth graders the first day of school and they’d made fun of you for your haircut, and then you were pelted with water balloons, too? Would you still have laughed then?”

  The poetry group went silent. I had no idea seventh and eighth graders had been bothering Isaiah today. Why hadn’t he told me?

  “I don’t know who those kids are, Isaiah,” Red said quietly, “but I’m sorry they were acting like that.” He looked at me. “And I’m sorry about ruining your first day.”

  “Me, too,” said Bria.

  “I am, too,” added Alejandro.

  “Okay,” Teagan cut in, “but last I checked, initiations aren’t just one and done. So, are there more pranks coming up?”

  The seventh graders exchanged another three-way look. Teagan, Isaiah, and I exploded at the same time.

  “You can’t be—!”

  “It’s not—!”

  “Wh-Why w-would—!”

  Red held up his hands as though trying to shield himself from the force of our words. “Yes,” he said, “there are more pranks coming up.” Teagan, Isaiah, and I opened our mouths to protest again, but Red barreled on, talking more loudly now. “But it really is all in good fun.”

  I fixed Red with my most convincing You’ve-Got-To-Be-Kidding-Me face.

  “We promise,” Alejandro added.

  Isaiah and Teagan’s expressions matched mine.

  “It is,” Red insisted.

  I took a deep breath a
nd let it out like Mama always does when she’s stressed. It did seem like Red and Alejandro were sorry about the water balloons. I was still steamed, but these were the friends I’d written a haiku about only last week:

  My poetry group

  If I could will time to freeze

  I’d stay here with you

  If I was being totally honest with myself, I didn’t really believe they would do anything so horrible it would make our lives miserable.

  “Www-When d-does it get-get f-fun?” I asked.

  “When you go with the flow,” Bria said.

  I turned to Isaiah. Was he willing to go with the flow? He shrugged, as if he’d read my mind.

  “How about this?” Red said, his old Red spirit coming back. He wriggled his eyebrows. “We’ll go easy on the two of you. I mean, you are my friend, Isaiah, and, Gabby, you’re my cousin. And, it turns out, you’ve got an acid tongue.”

  Everyone laughed, even me.

  “Think of it as Diet Sixth-Grade Initiation,” Red went on. “All the same flavor, but with a lot less of the bad stuff. Not that there’s any real bad stuff,” he added quickly.

  Red’s eyes met mine. “Sorry,” he mouthed again. He looked it. And maybe he, Bria, and Alejandro were right. Maybe Sixth-Grade Initiation was Kelly’s weird way of welcoming sixth graders, and Isaiah and I just needed to go with the flow.

  After poetry group ended, I raced over to studio four for our first ballet class of the year with my second-favorite instructor in the world (after Mama), Amelia Sanchez. Amelia was already at the barre, warming up with a few of the other girls. She flashed me a smile in the mirror and tapped her index finger to the tip of her nose, the secret code we’d shared ever since we’d first met four years ago, when I was six and she was nineteen. That nose tap meant thank you, hello, good-bye, and everything in between.

  After the day I’d had, I couldn’t get my sweats off and ballet shoes on fast enough. I needed to move. I found my place at the barre—the same spot I’d been using since I was six years old—and began to warm up.

  My body was stiff at first, but by the time the class got to tendus, I was loosening up, the tension from this afternoon falling away with each port de bras. The more I danced, the lighter I began to feel, as if I were pulling off layer after heavy layer of sopping wet clothes. The water balloon incident started to feel like it wasn’t hours ago, but days. And had I really been in social studies with Aaliyah just that afternoon?

  It has always been that way for me. The dance studio could make the rest of the world disappear until it was just me and the music. Mama called it being “a natural dancer.” She used to tell me that when I was a baby I even slept with one leg in passé.

  It wasn’t long before we’d finished barre exercises, petit allegro, and adagio, and Amelia instructed us to spread out so we could work on turns.

  “We’re practicing fouettés again tonight,” she declared.

  A few of the other girls groaned. A fouetté turn was one of the hardest turns in ballet. A full pirouette, then a plié on the standing leg while the working leg extends out to the side for a split second before it comes back into passé for another pirouette. It required concentration, a steady spot, and, as Amelia always told us, Grade A Posture.

  You’ve got this, I told myself.

  And I thought I did, but maybe the day’s events were still throwing me off, because Amelia appeared at my side mid-turn and said, “You’re looking a teensy wobbly, Gabby.”

  At the sound of those words, I missed my spot, wobbled even more, and fell over to the side. Amelia tapped her index finger to her nose and whispered, “Tighten your core. Grade A Posture.”

  Annoyance flared up inside me and my face grew hot. I knew all of that. And I knew how to do a fouetté turn, too. At least I thought I did. For a moment my spirits sank—I couldn’t remember the last time Amelia had to correct me on fouettés—but then four words pushed their way into my mind: Go with the flow.

  I found my spot again. Passé. Plié. Tighten my core. Find my spot …

  Again.

  Passé. Plié. Tighten my core. Find my spot …

  “Now you’ve got it, Gabby,” Amelia called out. “Perfect!”

  Seemed like going with the flow made things turn out okay after all.

  Even though Red, Alejandro, and Bria promised they would go easy on Isaiah and me, I couldn’t help but be a little nervous the next couple of days, wondering if I’d be pelted with more water balloons, or have a KICK ME sign stuck to my back. But almost two whole days passed and nothing happened at all. Well, almost nothing. I was beginning to notice that in the hallways, even though the older kids weren’t pelting the sixth graders with water balloons, they weren’t exactly nice to us, either.

  Sometimes the upperclassmen had the habit of stopping in huge groups to talk, clogging up the hallway. And no matter how much a sixth grader said, “Excuse me,” they refused to move until they were good and ready to do so, usually just as the final bell rang, causing more than a few sixth graders to be late for class. And sometimes they’d do stuff like stop a sixth grader in the hallway and say something like, “Oooh, I love your hair” or, “Those sneakers are fire!” and just when the sixth grader would beam and say, “Thank you,” the older kids would burst out laughing in the kid’s face.

  I saw a group of girls do this to Aaliyah on the third day of school—they stopped her to say they loved her too-perfect, too-tight bun. “It’s, like, librarian chic,” one of them said, a short girl with extensions dyed a deep magenta at the tips. The girl could hardly keep a straight face.

  “Okay,” Aaliyah said flatly.

  “Aren’t you going to say thank you?” the girl with the extensions asked, still smirking.

  “No,” Aaliyah said, in the same flat voice, “I’m not.” And she walked away, leaving the girl and her two friends glaring at her retreating back.

  “Who does she think she is?” the girl hissed.

  “Somebody important,” one of the other girls replied. “That’s why she’s always alone, with her no-friends-having self.”

  I hurried by before they decided to pay me a “compliment,” too.

  There hadn’t been another big prank like the water balloons on the first day, though. That is, until just before last period on the fourth day of school. I was coming around the corner when I heard a boy cry out, “Hey, what’s that on your locker?”

  “What’s that on yours?” a girl replied.

  There was a sticky note stuck to the name tag on each of our lockers. I watched as one by one the kids around me peeled the small squares off and read the words on them. I did the same. My sticky note read: Your Newbie Nickname … Beneath the words was an arrow. I was about to flip the note over when a voice cried, “Oh no, not again!”

  I looked up to see Ms. Tottenham hurrying down the hallway, her dreadlocks flying as she stopped to collect nicknames as she went. Some kids were giggling as they handed theirs over, while others looked like they’d been poked in both eyes.

  “Boys and girls, ignore those notes. Just ignore them,” Ms. Tottenham said loudly.

  All I had to do was wait for Ms. Tottenham to walk up to me and take my nickname away. I never even had to know what it was. But I couldn’t help myself. I flipped the note over. On the back, someone had written a word in big, thick black letters: G-G-G-Gabby.

  My whole body jolted, like I was in the middle of a fouetté turn and missed my spot.

  But then I saw that someone had crossed out that name with a pencil, and written Twinkle Toes in the corner. I knew that handwriting. It was Red’s.

  “I’ll take that, Gabriela,” Ms. Tottenham said, her hand already outstretched.

  I smiled as I handed the note over to Ms. Tottenham. Red was looking out for me, just like he’d said he would. I walked into social studies, Ms. Tottenham on my heels.

  Aaliyah was already in her seat. When I passed her to get to mine she cut her eyes at me, but she didn’t say anything.
She focused her attention on Ms. Tottenham, who now stood front and center. Today, Ms. Tottenham wore wildly patterned pants with legs so wide they looked like a skirt and, if possible, even more bracelets than before. The major difference, though, was her smile. It was still there, but nowhere as bright as it had been that first day.

  “Before we begin,” she said, her voice tight, “if you are still in possession of a note that was left on your locker, please give it to me.”

  All around me, kids pulled nicknames from their backpacks or pockets. One kid pulled his from inside his shirt. Ms. Tottenham collected them one by one.

  “Aaliyah?” she said, stopping in front of Aaliyah’s desk.

  “I didn’t get one.”

  A bunch of kids turned to stare at her. Others turned to look at each other, but no one dared to say anything.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Ms. Tottenham said, and made her way back over to the trash can, where she tossed in two fistfuls of sticky notes. “Now,” she said, turning back to us with her usual smile, “let’s talk about this.” She pointed at the whiteboard, where she’d written a question: What will you contribute to the Kelly community this year?

  She stood before us for a moment expectantly, and my insides started to jitterbug. What if she went around the room and made everyone say one thing they’d like to contribute? I hated talking aloud in front of the class, especially if I didn’t have a clue what to say. But just as I was about to ask for the bathroom pass, Ms. Tottenham went over to her desk and came back with a stack of blank loose-leaf paper.

  “Your name on the top and your answer below it, if you please.”

  “Do we have to share?” Josiah asked, and I wanted to hug him for asking.

  “Not with the class,” Ms. Tottenham answered, and I wanted to hug her, too.

  I reached into my backpack for my pencil case just as Aaliyah reached down for hers. As she pulled her pencil pouch from her bag, a small orange square fluttered out and landed on the floor at my feet. I knew what it was at once. Aaliyah’s sixth-grade nickname: Lonely—

  Aaliyah slammed the toe of her shoe down on top of the note, but it was too late. I’d read the whole thing. The upperclassmen had nicknamed Aaliyah Lonely Loser. I watched, openmouthed, as she bent to snatch the note off the floor. She crumpled it up and shoved it back inside her bag.