Beginners Welcome

by Cindy Baldwin

  And the piano man was looking right at me. He was old, with a mostly-gray beard and pale skin like the bark on the birch tree by my apartment, as thin and saggy as if it had seen a hundred years of sun and wind. The baseball cap he wore was ripped at the brim, loose threads waving as he moved.

  His faded blue eyes looked right into mine. Like he could see me, invisibility cloak and all.

  “Hi there,” he said, and his voice sounded kind of like tree bark too, rough and scratchy. “What’s your name, girl?”

  My heart gave one enormous thump, and before my brain had even caught up with my ears I was turning around and running, running to the glass door and the sizzling August heat outside.

  4.

  Mama was tired when she got off work that evening, big dark circles painted under her eyes.

  “Thanks, baby,” she said when I brought her a slice of the frozen pizza I’d stuck in the oven earlier. It was the cheapest one she could find at Harris Teeter, and it tasted exactly like the cardboard it came in. Mama rubbed a hand across her face. “I don’t think I’m ever gonna get used to these hours. And I’ve got laundry to run tonight, too, else you’ll be wearing dirty clothes to school tomorrow.”

  In the other room the television gave a staticky popping sound, and then I could hear the voices of Mama and Daddy’s favorite goofy mystery show, the one with the guy who pretends to be psychic to solve crimes. Before Daddy died, Mama had spent all of Monday running clothes through the washer and dryer, and then after dinner on Mondays the three of us had hauled laundry baskets into the family room and folded everything while we watched TV. It made the chore almost fun, doing it that way.

  Mama’s shoulders crumpled inward. “That show isn’t even on TV anymore,” she whispered, her eyes unfocused, like she was saying it to somebody I couldn’t see.

  Mama and I hadn’t talked much about the strange things that had been happening since Daddy died—the shaving cream in the sink, the first-day-of-school donuts, the way sometimes the radio or TV flipped on to Daddy’s favorite stations without anyone being near them. Every now and then, the coffeemaker would start its own self up, burbling and clicking as it brewed a cup of Daddy’s favorite Panama coffee.

  Sometimes I wondered if it meant that Daddy was having just as hard a time letting go as Mama and I were.

  We’d both freaked out a lot more there at the beginning, right after Daddy had died, and then again when we’d sold our house and moved to an apartment and the strange things had followed us here. But we’d mostly freaked out by ourselves, in our own separate worlds. And because we didn’t talk about it, neither of us had said that word that was always on my mind:

  Ghost.

  “I’ll turn it off,” I said now, jumping up and hurrying in to find the remote.

  When I came back, Mama had finished her pizza and was loading dishes into the dishwasher, her face as expressionless as if the whole TV incident had never happened. “You mind getting the wash going, Annie Lee?”

  I shrugged and went to gather up the dirty clothes from my room and Mama’s. Somehow, even though there were two of us left, we only had half as much laundry as we did before Daddy died. Because his clothes were so much bigger than mine and Mama’s, I guessed. I missed the feel of his soft button-down shirts, the way they smelled like shaving cream and sugar.

  I had just closed the washer lid when the machine started making a weird noise—kind of a grinding, groaning sound, like I’d thrown a wrench into the washer along with the clothes.

  “Annie Lee, what’s that?” Mama called from the kitchen.

  Before I could answer, the washer gave a loud pop and ground to a stop. With a whoosh, water flooded the hallway so fast that my feet were wet before I even registered what was happening.

  Mama appeared around the corner, her mouth round and horrified. “Get towels!” she yelled, splashing toward the washer. “I’ll get the water turned off.”

  I ran to the linen closet a few feet away, my wet feet slapping on the linoleum, and pulled out all the biggest towels I could find before running back to spread them across the floor. Mama had the water off and the washer pulled out of its alcove. The whole hallway smelled like burnt rubber.

  Mama’s fist clanged down on the top of the broken washer. “It’s toast. I think. I have no idea, really.” She laughed, a sound that was almost like crying. “I don’t know how to fix a washer, Annie Lee! I don’t even know where to start! We’ll be lucky if we can scrounge up enough cash to pay somebody to haul this down to the Dumpster for us. And a used washer would cost more than a hundred bucks! If that life insurance payment doesn’t come through soon—”

  She stopped, like the alternative was too awful to think about.

  I finished sopping up the water; all the towels were soaked and heavy now, not to mention covered in sticky laundry soap. “Where should I put these?”

  “The bathtub, I guess. Hand-washing stuff in the tub isn’t exactly how I expected tonight to go, but it’s not like we have options.”

  “What about the Laundromat?”

  “When would we cart our stuff to a Laundromat, Annie Lee? It’s not like I’ve got oodles of spare time and money lying around. Besides, it costs at least three dollars to wash a load at a Laundromat. It makes more sense to save that money and put it toward a new washer. If we take what we’d spend once a week on the Laundromat and put it into a Washer Fund, we could have a washer in . . . less than a year. Sooner, if we can figure out what happened with the insurance money, though who knows how much longer that will take.”

  Less than a year sounded like a pretty long time to me. From the way Mama scowled as she did the math, I was pretty sure she felt the same way.

  I rolled up the towels and carried them, armful by armful, into the tub. By the time I’d finished, the shirt I was wearing was soaked through. Mama sat in the hallway next to the busted washer, her head in her hands, shoulders shaking with sobs.

  If Daddy had been here, even the washer breaking down might have been fun. He’d have cranked “Splish Splash” up on the CD player and tied bath towels to his feet, swishing around in the water and pretending to sing into an invisible microphone. He’d have challenged Mama and me to a water fight, maybe, and even though me and Mama weren’t as good as Daddy at being spontaneous or silly, we all would’ve ended up grinning.

  Before Daddy died, Mama had loved the way he could turn anything into a celebration. Even when she was frustrated with him, she had a hard time staying mad too long. Daddy had a way of making her laugh so hard her face would turn red and tears would squeeze out of the corners of her eyes. Sometimes, when Mama was stressed, Daddy would come up behind her and put his arms around her and say, It’s going to be all right, Joanie, like he was protecting her from the world.

  Annie Lee, Mama used to say to me, someday, when you’re looking for somebody to settle down with, you make sure to find a person who makes you laugh.

  Now I stood and watched Mama cry, my arms crossed over my wet shirt. How had one June day changed everything so much?

  The Bad Day hadn’t just taken away my daddy. It had taken Mama, too. On nights like this, watching Mama cry on the floor beside a washer full of wet, soapy clothes, I felt more alone than I’d ever been in my life.

  5.

  The bus brakes squealed as we pulled into the middle school parking lot the next morning. I sat up, trying to ignore the queasiness in my stomach. Yesterday had been okay—I’d just kept my head down and my invisibility cloak pulled tight—but Tuesday classes were different from Monday classes, which meant that everything was new again today. I rubbed the two-headed quarter in my pocket.

  I’d barely made it up the steps and through the front entrance of the school when there was a whir-thud-scrape behind me. Some kid nearby screamed and dropped the books she was holding as a freckle-faced girl I vaguely recognized from the bus slid her skateboard right up the railing beside the front steps and landed with a bang on the shining linoleum.


  She hopped off the board and kicked it so that it flipped neatly into her waiting hand, all the while looking as careless and unconcerned as if she didn’t know that an entire hall full of students was staring at her with wide eyes. The skater girl had a white knit beanie over her wild dark curls. She didn’t seem to care that it was August and hot as Hades any more than she cared about the frowning lady teacher who rushed toward her, high heels clicking against the floor.

  “What in the—What’s your name, girl?” the teacher asked.

  “Mitch Harris,” said the skater. Her cheeks were pink, but I couldn’t tell if it was from nervousness or exercise.

  “Congratulations, Mitch Harris,” said the teacher. “You just earned yourself a trip to the principal’s office.”

  My eyes followed them until they disappeared down the hallway.

  At least my day hadn’t started off quite as badly as hers.

  I got lost on the way to science that afternoon, so turned around I was pretty sure I was going in circles but still couldn’t find the classroom I wanted. I was so busy looking at my hall map, trying to figure out where I was, that I bumped right into the skateboard girl from that morning.

  “Hey,” she snarled. “Watch where you’re going!”

  “Sorry,” I squeaked. A trio of older girls walked past, their arms linked. I stared after them, missing Monica and Meredith so hard that the sadness was a lump in my stomach. Back in fifth grade, we’d walked like that sometimes. If I tried, I could remember just exactly what it felt like to be between them, Meredith’s red curls tickling my cheek, Monica telling a funny story about one of the animals her dad had treated at Hsu Zoo Veterinary that made us all laugh.

  I hugged my notebook tighter against my chest, like a shield. Even if Monica and Meredith went to this school, it wasn’t like the three of us would be arm in arm anymore, anyway.

  When I looked back at the skater girl, she didn’t look quite so scary anymore. Instead, her expression was thoughtful, her head tipped just the tiniest bit to one side. Up close like this, Mitch Harris was pretty. Really pretty. Her whole face was delicate and sweet—pale, freckled skin stretched over high cheekbones that could’ve belonged to a model, gray eyes, long black eyelashes underneath her frizzy hair. She looked about my age, even though she was taller, and definitely wearing a real bra instead of the stretchy-undershirt kind I had.

  Up close, Mitch seemed like the kind of girl who could either rule the sixth grade or destroy it.

  “Where are you trying to go?” she asked.

  “Science.”

  Mitch jerked her thumb toward a nearby door. “Me too. You’re close. It’s right up here.”

  I was pretty sure this was more words than I’d exchanged with another kid in weeks. Yesterday I hadn’t said a thing, and nobody had talked to me, either.

  “Thanks,” I said, but Mitch had disappeared into the classroom.

  I followed and managed to slide into the last seat in the room—a few desks away from Mitch—about two seconds before the teacher stood up and introduced himself. He had wrinkled brown skin and wiry gray hair that made him look old enough to have lived on the earth alongside Adam. Even his eyebrows, bristly as toothbrushes, were silvering. Still, he had enough energy to outdo any of the other teachers I’d met. He never seemed to be still—his feet tapped, his hands fidgeted, he looked like at any minute he might break into a Broadway-style song about how awesome it was to teach science to a bunch of nervous sixth graders.

  Daddy would have loved him.

  “Afternoon, class! My name is Mr. Barton. Who’s ready to explore the wonders of the natural world?”

  A few students murmured something halfheartedly.

  “Excellent!” Mr. Barton said, not seeming to care. “Now, I firmly believe that the best scientific discoveries arise from dedicated communities of learners! So to begin our semester together, I’d like for us all to get to know one another better. You’ll each have five minutes to freewrite about something interesting you did over the summer. When the time’s up, I’ll choose a few of you at random to read your essays aloud.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Barton?” A girl in front of me with sleek black hair and golden-brown skin raised her hand. “What does this have to do with science?”

  “As I said, Miss—”

  “Kavya Lahiri,” the girl supplied.

  Mr. Barton nodded. “It’s a community-building exercise. But more than that”—he paused for a moment, wiry eyebrows up, and I almost expected him to give a dramatic flourish—“I don’t think there’s any discipline out there that isn’t part of the scientific world. For instance, since we’re on the topic: writing. What do you do after completing the first draft of an essay, Miss Lahiri?”

  “Um . . .” The black-haired girl shifted uncomfortably. “I guess, read it and see if it’s any good?”

  “Yes! You assess your initial efforts and revise until it’s as strong as possible. Much like the process of testing a hypothesis.”

  “Okaaaaay . . .”

  Mr. Barton set an egg timer on his desk and twisted it. “Begin! You have five minutes.”

  I stared down at the notebook in front of me. How could I write about anything that had happened that summer? How could I sit there and write down the story of how my daddy died without warning one day playing pickup basketball with some friends—one second going in for a basket, and the next second crashing to the ground? Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the doctor had told Mama when we’d made it to the hospital, where Daddy was lying with a sheet over his face. It was a fancy way to say a disease nobody knew he had until he was dead.

  How could I write about how my two best friends weren’t my friends anymore?

  How could I write about how Mama sold our house in the suburbs and we moved downtown to a horrible apartment with mice and ants and, now, a broken washing machine? How could I write about the way she hadn’t finished washing our clothes in the tub the night before, so I was wearing the same T-shirt and shorts I’d worn yesterday, the feeling of them gritty and gross against my skin?

  I’d spent the whole day trying harder than ever to be invisible, so nobody noticed those clothes. I could just imagine the way some kids would stare and whisper things behind their hands. Look at that Annie Lee. So disgusting. Doesn’t she have anything else to wear?

  “I want to see everyone writing,” Mr. Barton said, looking right at me.

  I took out my pencil and started tracing a spiral on the paper in front of me. Small at first, then bigger and bigger, until it was swallowing my page whole and the edges of the biggest rings floated off the notebook. It was soothing, drawing that line that went on and on, swirling endlessly across my desk. It meant I didn’t have to think about anything else at all.

  After Mr. Barton’s timer had dinged and we’d listened to four different kids tell us about their trips to Disney, he gave us our homework assignment and dismissed us, asking us to hand in our summer essays on the way out.

  “Miss Fitzgerald, wait a minute,” he called as I tried to slip out the side of the door farthest from his desk. “You’re not going to hand anything in?”

  “No, sir.”

  He cleared his throat and stood, coming around the desk. “Is there a reason why you weren’t able to complete the assignment?”

  I shrugged, looking at my shoes—glittery silver knock-off Toms that had duct tape on the inside where the sole had started to peel away from the top. I needed new ones, but when I’d brought that up to Mama a few weeks back, she’d just pulled her lips into a tight line and said, We’ll see, which was code for There’s no money for new shoes. Just like there wasn’t money for school clothes that fit, or a backpack that didn’t have a big iron-on patch to cover the hole on the bottom, or a washer that actually worked.

  Or maybe it meant as soon as we figure out the life insurance, because that had become our mantra: everything, everything was going to happen as soon as we figure out the life insurance.

  “I hope it
isn’t inappropriate for me to say, Miss Fitzgerald, that I knew your daddy,” Mr. Barton said. It wasn’t a huge surprise. Daddy hadn’t taught at this school, but he’d been awarded Durham Teacher of the Year once and always arranged slam poetry contests for all the high schools in the district, so lots of Durham teachers knew him. “I was very sorry to hear of his passing.”

  I wiggled my right toe, watching the way the shiny stuff on the outside of the shoe caught the light.

  “Well. I won’t make you do this assignment today, Miss Fitzgerald—Annie, right?”

  “Annie Lee,” I muttered to my shoes.

  “Annie Lee. It might be worthwhile to consider seeing the school counselor a time or two. She’s a very good listener. And please know that you can come to me if you need anything through the school year.”

  “I won’t,” I said, and ducked out of the classroom before he could say anything else.

  6.

  It didn’t take long for all my teachers to stop paying attention to me if I turned in my work on time. Most kids didn’t notice me, either. Sometimes, getting stuff out of my locker or handing in an assignment after class, I wondered if I really had gone invisible. In homeroom, I sat next to a pair of best friends who wore matching necklaces and even had names that sounded alike—Tonya and Shonda. Friday morning I’d dropped a pencil and asked Tonya if she could hand it to me, and she’d looked at me with round dark eyes like she’d never seen me before in her life, even after sitting next to me for five days in a row.

  On Friday at lunch, I picked a seat in a corner of the cafeteria next to Juan Diego Herrera and Malik Larson, who were always too busy fake-burping and throwing tater tots at each other to pay attention to anything else, and then I took out my book. I’d been sitting in this exact spot and reading this exact book every day all week long—it was my favorite part of the day, because I could let the whole noisy, smelly room fade out around me and pretend like everything in my life was normal and happy and good.