by David Gordon
The morning got off to a bad start for Sami.
Like all of the kids in her class, she slung her backpack onto the back of her chair and sat down at her table. In her class everyone sat at tables instead of at individual desks. On each table there was a box of pencils and erasers, a stapler, a stack of math workbooks, a stack of writing journals, and their bottles of water. There were four kids to a table, two to a side. Except for Sami’s table. Sitting across from her were Carlos and Ming. The seat next to Sami was empty.
At this particular moment the kids also had their reading anthologies open on their tables. Miss Fox was walking around the room, picking students to read parts of the story and asking the class questions. The class was reading a story about a Masai boy, named Konoko, who lived in Kenya. Everyone pointed excitedly at the photographs in the story, which showed Konoko and his family dressed in long pieces of color-splashed cloth, thin leather sandals, and nothing else (except for the girls and women, who were wearing layers of necklaces made of metal and colored beads). Their house was a hut made of sticks and mud, and this was surrounded by a high fence made of nasty looking thorn bushes. The Masai kept their cattle inside the thorn bush fence at night to protect them from predators. Every day Konoko’s job was to take the cattle outside the fence to graze on the yellow grass of the savannah. While Konoko was out all day with the cattle—often very far from the safety of the thorn bush walls—he was supposed to protect them from lions and leopards. That really drew some excited comments from the kids in the class. Lions and leopards. Then Konoko described what he and his family ate every day, which was goat meat, milk, and blood from the cattle. The whole class started yelling “Yuck! and “Gross!” and twisted up their faces and made wonderfully disgusting barfing sounds.
Miss Fox was a pretty good teacher, so she let everyone enjoy their barfing for a minute. Then she said, “Alright, everyone, that’s enough.” The kids kept making faces, but they quieted down. All except Tim, who was still grabbing his throat and gagging and falling out of his chair. Miss Fox frowned. “Tim! I said that’s enough.” He yanked himself up, but he was grinning.
Sami liked Miss Fox, most of the time. She was pretty old, of course. Sami had asked her once how old and found out that Miss Fox was thirty-one. Still, Sami thought she was kind of cool. Miss Fox liked to bake, so on Fridays they had cookies for a treat (if the kids were good, that is). Once she even taught them how to bake their own cookies in the school kitchen, and that was the best time Sami had ever had in school. The thing that Sami most liked about Miss Fox was that she often asked the class questions. Sami liked this because what Sami liked most was to answer questions. She liked being right, and especially being right in front of the other kids. So when Miss Fox turned away from Tim and asked the class, “Okay, who knows where Kenya is?” Sami stretched herself right out of her chair to wave her hand.
“That’s easy!” said Alejandro. No matter what the question was, Alejandro always said, “That’s easy,” then he usually gave the wrong answer. This drove Sami absolutely nuts.
“I know I know!” she called out.
But Miss Fox ignored her flapping hand. “Yes, Alejandro?” Miss Fox said.
“It’s in South America,” he answered proudly.
“No it’s not! You don’t know anything!” yelled Sami. Now she was standing all the way up.
Every head in the classroom, including Miss Fox’s, whipped around to face Sami. Alejandro looked daggers at her. In a voice as stiff as an icicle, Miss Fox said, “Samantha, we do not talk like that in here. You know that.”
“But what he said is dumb. Kenya—”
“You need to sit down.”
Sami sat down, but kept on explaining. “But Kenya isn’t—”
“Samantha!” Sami looked up at Miss Fox, who was scowling at her. “Did you raise your hand?”
Sami looked down at her hand, which was resting on the desk, then raised it in the air and said, “Okay, well his answer is dumb because—”
“Samantha, put your hand down!” Sami lowered her hand. Now what does Miss Fox want? she wondered. She’d raised her hand! Grown-ups can be so weird! She stared up at Miss Fox. Miss Fox closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes and did her best to smile at Sami.
“Samantha, do you have a different answer?”
Sami squinched up her face and shook her head. “No.”
“Well then—”
“I have the right answer. Kenya is in Africa. Here, I’ll show you.” She jumped up and raced over to get the globe on Miss Fox’s desk. Miss Fox closed her eyes again. This time she took a lot of deep breaths.
Now you know why the other kids avoided Sami. And why the seat next to her was empty.
For the rest of the morning, Sami had one problem after another. Miss Fox and some of the other kids—especially Alejandro—were already annoyed with her, so they looked for new reasons to be angry with her. Almost every time Sami opened her mouth she got into trouble.
Recess was bad. Because of the water shortage, the kids had to play inside the gymnasium. It was cooler in there, so they would not perspire as much and, so, need to drink less water. Some kids played basketball, some played handball, some played foursquare, some jumped rope, some thumbed their PSPs (fighting out The Gathering Storm), while other kids listened to music on their mp3 players and iPods. Sami played nothing. No one wanted her to join them. And that was fine with her. Instead, she sat against a wall, imagining that she was drinking blood from her cattle and fighting off leopards and lions.
Journal writing time was bad. Miss Fox told the class that today they had free choice and could write about anything they wanted to. They had been working for about ten minutes when Miss Fox walked by Sami’s table and glanced down at her paper. Her journal entry began, “Alejandro is a big fat…” Miss Fox snatched up Sami’s journal and chewed her out. Sami reminded Miss Fox that she had said they could write about whatever they wanted. Naturally, this made Miss Fox even angrier, and Sami had to erase the entire page she had written. As she scrubbed at the paper with her eraser Sami mumbled, “I guess some choices are freer than others.”
Lunch was bad. (Actually, considering the standing in line, the noise, the yucky food, the mess, and the cleaning up, lunch was bad every day.)
Computer time was bad. Sami spent her twenty minutes at the computer trying to get past a message that said, invalid password! please try again. Miss Fox was too busy to help her, and the kids at the other computers did not want to help her.
Math was bad. When Sami asked Carlos a question about the worksheet they were doing, Miss Fox warned her to do her own work and not bother the other kids. When Sami broke her pencil, she asked Ming if she could borrow one of hers. Ming had four, perfectly sharpened pencils lined up on the desk in front of her. “No,” Ming answered. “You see, these are my very special pencils.” When Sami tried to use the pencil sharpener, Alejandro came up and shoved his way in front of her. Then he kept breaking his lead in the sharpener so that he could stay there.
A totally rotten, horrible day.
At last it was almost time to go home. Sami was relieved that her terrible school day was nearly over. She looked up at the clock on the wall above Miss Fox’s head and thought, “At least there isn’t time left for things to get worse.”
Then the door to the classroom opened.
Chapter 4
“Whoa, it’s an alien!”