by Jodi Picoult
"M-E-A-N-S."
"Corn."
"C-O-R-N."
"Argue."
"A-R-G-U-E."
"This is stupid," Rachel said. "You don't even have to try. Why doesn't your teacher bump you up a level?"
Ruth didn't know the answer to that; there were other students who had more challenging words, although she had never gotten less than a 95 on a spelling test.
"Well, I know why, even if you don't," Rachel said. "Because your teacher doesn't think a Black girl can be at the top of the class."
"That's not true," Ruth immediately said, defending Ms. Thomas. "She knows I'm smart."
"Uh-huh," Rachel answered, in a way that meant anything but that.
"She doesn't even see me as Black," Ruth countered.
Rachel laughed. "Yeah, 'cause she's too busy seeing you as a charity case."
Ruth knew that her sister meant this as a dig, but she fiercely believed that Ms. Thomas saw more than just her skin color. She saw a girl who always said please and thank you and who never interrupted someone else if they were talking. She saw a student who was one of the best readers in the class, who loved learning astronomy. She saw a good listener, a willing friend.
She saw someone who was one of them.
Smugly, Ruth told Rachel what had happened that day at school. How Ms. Thomas had identified her.
"You really think the reason she pointed you out by your sneakers was because it was the only thing she could use to describe you?" Rachel asked.
That was all it took--that chink in the foundation, that worm of a question--for Ruth to peek behind the fancy wrapping of the story she'd created in her own mind. The justification, the wishful thinking--it was swept away by the broom of doubt like so much smoke.
Ruth knew she was partly right: Ms. Thomas had been showing a kindness by not singling Ruth out for her appearance. She was trying to be inclusive by not calling Ruth "the Black girl."
But that was because to Ms. Thomas, to Maia, to Miss Van Vleet--to everyone in that school--Black wasn't just any adjective.
It was something they'd never want to be.
--
"I know you don't want to be my friend," Ruth said by way of prefacing her conversation with Christina in the sedan on the way to school. "But can I ask you something?"
For almost a week now, they had moved in similar orbits, but they had not interacted unless they were forced to in a group project. Christina didn't look at Ruth, but she jerked her chin: Okay.
Ruth explained what had happened with Ms. Thomas and Miss Van Vleet. "If you were in a crowd with a lot of people and someone asked me who you were, I wouldn't say you're the one with the scar on your ankle from where you fell last summer. I'd use something everyone would see right away, like...your purple shirt or your Holly Hobbie lunch box. Doesn't it seem weird?" Ruth asked. "To not call something what it is?"
Christina didn't answer, and Ruth thought it was because she was still mad at her. But then she turned in her seat so that she was facing Ruth. "Maybe no one notices that you're Black," she said. "I mean, you act and sound just like we do."
Ruth thought about this. It couldn't really be true, could it? If she dressed in pants and played baseball and did gross things that boys did, like have burping contests, would teachers not know that she was a girl? You couldn't unsee what was right before your eyes, could you?
Before she could mull on this further, Christina spoke again. "I never said I didn't want to be your friend," she said, her voice small. "It's just...all of a sudden you're at my school, with my friends, and I thought...I thought..." She raised her hand to the window and spread her fingers like a starfish. "What if they liked you more than they like me?"
Ruth didn't know what to say. It was the first time she realized that a person might look like Christina, and live in a fancy home, and dress in designer clothing, and have everything her heart desired, and still go to sleep at night worrying.
Maybe we are more alike than we're different, Ruth thought.
--
When Ms. Thomas turned off the lights in the classroom, everyone got quiet. Then she flicked them back on again. "Now," she asked, "how long did it take for the light to come back?"
It was instantaneous, immediate. There was probably a word for faster-than-a-heartbeat but Ruth didn't know it.
"Light moves fast. It can move 186,000 miles per second," Ms. Thomas said. "The reason it seems like we see light the instant I turn on the switch is because light is so quick, and because we're so close to it. But some light comes from much farther away--light from stars. They're so far away, in fact, that we don't even measure the distance in miles. We measure it in light-years--the amount of time it takes for light from that star to reach us, on earth. The reason stars look so small in the night sky is because they're so far away from us."
Ms. Thomas talked about the star that was closest to earth--the sun. She made Marcus stand at the front of the class with a flashlight and told him to turn it on. "If he was on the sun, and turned on a very bright flashlight...and we were all waiting in the classroom, we wouldn't see that light for eight minutes. That's how far away the sun is from us." The next closest star was called Proxima Centauri. It was 39.9 trillion kilometers away from us, or 4.2 light-years, which meant that it would take four years--not just eight minutes--for Marcus's flashlight to reach us on earth from there.
Ms. Thomas said that when we look at a star, we're looking backward in time. We're seeing a moment that happened millions of years ago.
Ruth thought about that. She knew Marcus's little flashlight wasn't powerful enough, but even so. What if there were kids on another planet who, years from now, saw it flash? What if, in the future, they had a piece of the moment Ruth was living right now?
It made her feel like yesterday and tomorrow weren't all that far away from each other.
Then Ms. Thomas gave everyone a toilet paper roll and a circle of black paper. Each student could choose to create either the Canis Major constellation or Orion. Ruth looked over and saw Maia pick Orion. She reached for the other one.
They had to trace the spiky limbs of the constellations, and poke tiny holes in at their joints to make the stars. Ruth carefully drew the T of Canis Major, and its split legs. It looked to her like a stick figure without a head. She used a pin carefully to mark the stars. Then with Ms. Thomas's help she affixed the black circle to one end of the roll, with electrical tape to seal the edges. When everyone in the class had finished, Ms. Thomas gave each of them a small penlight and pulled the drapes shut and turned off the classroom fluorescents. Everyone lay on the floor, shining their penlights through the toilet paper rolls, projecting their constellations onto the ceiling.
Ruth felt someone lie down beside her, and she turned to find Ms. Thomas staring up at the ceiling. "You see that star in the middle on top?" she asked, pointing, and Ruth nodded. "That's called Sirius. It takes light from that star eight and a half years to reach us here."
"That's how old I am," Ruth said.
"Well, then." Ms. Thomas laughed. "If you can see it in the night sky, you're looking at light that's the same age as you."
Ruth liked the idea of a star that she had something in common with. She wondered if she could convince her mother to let her out on the fire escape tonight to try to find it.
"It's easy to find Sirius," Ms. Thomas was saying, "because it's the brightest star we can see." She rolled to a sitting position and squeezed Ruth's shoulder. "Sometimes, it even casts a shadow."
The whole rest of the day Ruth found it hard to concentrate. She kept looking out the window at the cars below, and the people walking their dogs, and the ladies pushing strollers. She pictured a world bigger than the classroom, bigger than Manhattan, bigger than the boundaries of her imagination.
--
The scariest part of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test was climbing the rope that hung from the ceiling of the tiny gymnasium. There were two: one with knots, and one without.
Ruth was worried she couldn't even shimmy her way up the one with knots. You had to excel at all the sections: the shuttle run, the one-mile run, the curl-ups, the pull-ups, the rope climb, the V-sit reach. If you did, you got a gold certificate as an award.
Ruth, who got straight As, didn't like failing at anything, even gym class.
Because of their last names, it was Maia's turn just before Ruth's. She picked the rope with the knots (girls had a choice, boys didn't) and made it halfway up before she started to panic. Her eyes squirreled shut and her face went red and she clutched the rope like it was a lifeline. Even when Mr. Yorkey, the gym teacher, told her to come on down, she couldn't unhook herself. It took two other teachers to help pry her off the rope, and when Maia reached ground level the other girls flocked around her like worker bees to the queen. Lola was chosen to help walk Maia to the nurse's office.
When it was Ruth's turn, she wiped her hands on her shorts and pulled with all her might to anchor her feet to the bottom knot. Then she closed her eyes and inched her right hand up to the next highest knot, and then her left, and then she crunched her legs up until her feet found their next hold. She did this again, picturing herself as a caterpillar, bunching and relaxing, concentrating only on getting to a knot higher than the one Maia had reached. When her hand reached up to grab the next knot and instead she found the bell on the ceiling to ring, signaling that she'd reached the top, she was surprised. She skittered down the rope, flushed and proud, and imagined coming home with that gold certificate. Mama would put it up on the refrigerator.
About fifteen minutes later Maia walked back into the gymnasium, this time accompanied by the school nurse. Ruth heard the nurse say words like panic attack and heights and sue, and Mr. Yorkey agreed to let Maia sit out the rest of the test, and to be his assistant instead. He showed her how to work the stopwatch, and she sat on the start line of the mile run (eight laps around the gym track).
"Seamus, you're up," Mr. Yorkey said. "Ruth, on deck."
Ruth stood awkwardly next to Maia, not sure if she should say something like I hope you're feeling better now. But she didn't know how without it coming out sounding like Ruth was lording over her the fact that she had rung the bell and Maia hadn't, and pride was a sin, so instead, she just tugged at the bottom of her shorts and scuffed her sneaker on the squeaky polyurethaned floor. It sounded like a chipmunk.
Maia pushed the button on the stopwatch to get it ready. Ruth put her toe on the red starting line, as close to the inside edge as she could, without cheating.
"On your mark," Mr. Yorkey called out.
"Hey, Ruth?" Maia said quietly.
"Get set..."
Ruth twisted her neck.
"You're gonna ace this," Maia said, smiling. "Just run like the KKK is chasing you."
"Go!" Mr. Yorkey shouted.
--
Last year Granny's best friend in the world had died of cancer. She and Miz Lonnie had come up north from Mississippi when they were seventeen and had gotten jobs in a factory together and got married a year apart. Miz Lonnie was the sister she'd never had, and at her funeral, Granny wept so hard that she had to be helped out of the church.
She took to her bed, drinking the medicinal whiskey. An hour later Ruth cracked the door open to make sure she was all right, because it was scary to see someone you were used to envisioning as the very definition of solid break into pieces before your eyes. Granny was sitting on the bed, still in her black lace dress, a shoe box in her lap. Spread all around her were photographs so old that they had wavy edges, with handwritten ink on the back that had turned brown with age. "Baby girl, you come sit with me," Granny said, and Ruth crawled onto the mattress and tucked herself tight underneath the old woman's arm.
Ruth pointed to one scalloped photo. "Is that you, Granny?"
The picture was of a woman younger than Mama, even, with hair pulled back into a bun and a crisp white shirt tucked into her skirt. She was pointing at the camera and laughing.
"That's me," Granny said. "And look, in the background here, that's your great-granny." Ruth looked closer and saw a woman with a pinched mouth standing on the porch in the background, her arms crossed. "She was mad because Lonnie and me, we were always foolin' around."
"Where's Miz Lonnie?" Ruth asked.
"On the other side of the camera," Granny explained. "She had just got it that day, and she said I could be her model."
Ruth snuggled closer. Granny smelled of talcum powder and rosewater and Maker's Mark. "What about this one?" she said, holding up a picture of four austere youths--two young men stiffly holding the elbows of Granny and Miz Lonnie, who wore flower corsages that had been bleached white by the exposure process.
"Well, that was a church social. Lonnie, she was wild for that boy, but she wasn't allowed to go on her own, so he brought along a friend as my date. Go figure, I fell hard for him."
"That's Granddaddy?" Ruth asked.
"No, his name was Jerald. He was the first boy I loved. Granddaddy was the last."
They sat on the bed sifting through the entire shoe box, each photograph a memory. Granny talked about creeks she used to swim in with Miz Lonnie and the coonhound her family had that used to attack porcupines. She pointed to a gold cross Ruth's great-granny wore in one picture, which was the same gold cross Granny had around her neck at that very moment. There was a photo of her and Miz Lonnie in Times Square with old-time cars that Ruth had seen only in movies, and one of Granny pregnant with Mama, holding Miz Lonnie's toddler son, Abraham, like he was a practice run. Then Ruth found a picture that had gotten wedged in the cardboard at the side. This one, though, wasn't from Miz Lonnie's camera. It was a newspaper clipping of a hanged man. "What happened to him?" Ruth asked.
"The KKK happened to him," Granny said. She reached for her bottle of whiskey and took another shot. "White men, with their pointy hoods, burning their crosses." She breathed fire at Ruth, who closed her eyes and held her nose. "They killed him. Lonnie and me, we saw it on the way to school. And I near passed out, but Lonnie, she caught me and she told me we had to get away. We were gonna leave town and go somewhere things like this never happened--"
Just then, Mama came into the bedroom. "What on earth is going on here?" she demanded, as Ruth slipped the newspaper clipping under her leg. Mama sniffed the air and frowned, taking the whiskey bottle and the shot glass off Granny's nightstand. "What kind of example you setting?" she chided, and to Ruth she said, "That's enough. You leave Granny to get some rest." As Ruth curled the newspaper clipping into her hand, Mama pulled back the covers and took off Granny's shoes, helping her get to bed. "Why you telling Ruth about all that?" Mama said. "She's a baby!"
By now Granny was slurring her words. "Them crackas wasn't shit," she muttered. "We left town and didn't look back. We left before Jerald even got buried."
Ruth hid the newspaper clipping underneath her mattress. Sometimes she would take it out and look at it, but the image was grainy and she couldn't connect that poor man with the one in a suit and tie who had stood for a formal photo holding Granny's arm like it was made of fine china. She couldn't imagine the man twisting on that rope picking out carnations and baby's breath for a pretty corsage.
Sometimes at night, Ruth would wonder: If not for the KKK, would Granny have stayed in Mississippi and married Jerald? If not for the KKK, would Ruth even be here?
--
"Go!" Mr. Yorkey shouted, and Ruth did.
She pivoted on her foot, and instead of running the mile to get a gold certificate of presidential fitness, she threw herself at Maia, yanking at her glossy ponytail, rolling with her on the floor until Ruth had her pinned down, one forearm across Maia's collarbones while the other hand drew back in a fist.
"Go ahead," Maia dared. "Punch me."
Ruth was so surprised, she hesitated.
"Because then you'll just wind up cleaning toilets like your mother."
Ruth could feel her heart beating so hard, it was practically external. She was sw
eating, her hair coming out of its elastic to curl natural around her face. It was like Cinderella all over again, turning back into her rags with her pumpkin.
She let go of Maia abruptly and walked away from her, her back to the rest of the class, which had gone absolutely silent watching the show.
Mr. Yorkey grasped her arm firmly. "Ruth," he said, "would you like to go sit down and control your emotions?"
She faced the gym teacher. "No," Ruth said honestly, because what she really wanted to do was smack Maia. What she really wanted to do was go back in time ten minutes to the moment before Maia had said anything. Or maybe further--say, two months--before she had ever set foot in this school.
"Go to the program director's office," Mr. Yorkey said tightly. "Now."
--
The director of First Program at Dalton was a very thin woman named Mrs. Grau-Lerner, who smelled of mothballs and peppermint. Ruth, who had never been sent to the principal's office in her life, was shivering.
"Do you know what you did wrong, Ruth?" Mrs. Grau-Lerner asked.
Ruth shook her head. She hadn't hit Maia, although she had wanted to, so why was she being punished?
"Not only were you involved in an altercation...you also were rude to Mr. Yorkey."
Ruth looked up at her. She thought Mr. Yorkey had been asking her a question. She didn't realize it was actually a test.
If Mr. Yorkey had wanted her to sit down and cool off, he should have told her so. Had it been Mama, for example, she would have said, Do your homework. No wiggle room there, just a direct order. Instead, Mr. Yorkey had given Ruth a choice, and now she was being disciplined for taking it.
"Mrs. Grau-Lerner, Maia said--"
The woman held up her hand. "Ruth," she replied, "we don't blame others at Dalton. We take responsibility for our own actions."
Ruth looked into her lap. "Yes, ma'am," she said.
Suddenly there was a knock on the director's office door, and a secretary opened it. "Ms. Brooks is here," she said, and through the slice that was opened Ruth could see Mama still in her uniform, crackling with questions.
"Why don't you wait in Ms. Thomas's room while I speak with your mother?" Mrs. Grau-Lerner said.
Ruth slipped out of the office and past her mama with her eyes cast down. She knew there would be a reckoning in private. She walked to the classroom, which was empty because all the other students in Ms. Thomas's class were still getting tested in the gymnasium. She sat down at her desk, and then stood up and walked toward the front of the classroom.