Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  It took Rocky’s grandmother a moment to put it together. Then she pointed at me, and I flinched. “Is that one yours, Fay?”

  “You could say so,” Aunt Fay said.

  §

  It looked like I’d been released into Aunt Fay’s custody. Will was in the backseat. Maybe she’d told him to get in the car.

  Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to miss anything. I’d spit out the wadding, fearing my tongue would come with it. Now I held the bloody mess of cotton in my hand, examining it for something to do. I’d already found out that drying blood turns brown. I’d learned that not long before.

  Aunt Fay drove one handed with an elbow propped out the window. And I was hoping that when we got home, Debbie would be there. Debbie sitting out at the curb in a new car with somebody she liked, Debbie waiting to take me away.

  Nobody spoke till we swung out of the school parking lot. I didn’t think I wanted to hear whatever Aunt Fay was going to say. She took up more than her share of the front seat.

  But Will spoke first, piping up from the back of the car. “That big leather woman was mean.”

  “Tell me about it,” Aunt Fay said. “I went to school with her. You should have seen her before she got civilized.”

  She’d gone to school with Aunt Fay? How could this be? “But she’s a frosted blond,” I said, “and wears high heels.”

  I felt Aunt Fay’s glance. “Don’t let her kid you. That hair comes out of a bottle. She’s my age. In fact she’s a year older, because she had to repeat fifth grade. What happened?”

  “He grabbed me,” I mumbled, meaning Rocky. “He started it.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Aunt Fay said. “Tough little customer, isn’t he? Talking about tough, you should have seen his mother. Marlene Bledsoe’s girl. They about got up a posse and run her out of town on a rail.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Where’d it happen?”

  “In the girls’ rest room,” I said. “I was at the sink, and he came out of a stall and – ”

  “They still have those sinks low to the floor?”

  I nodded.

  “Me and Wilma McKinney got into it in there one time. Will’s grandma, that is.” Aunt Fay nodded back at him. “She could be sassy, and she said something I took exception to. I stuck her head under the tap and I’d liked to have drowned her. She had a big old bow in her hair, and it was sopping. She was so mad, she didn’t speak to me for an hour.”

  I wondered if I was off the hook here. “Did the school call you at work?” I said, thinking about Rocky’s grandmother, Marlene.

  “No.” Aunt Fay’s eyes were on the street. “I was over at Wilma McKinney’s.”

  “You could hear your phone from there?”

  “No. They called me there.”

  “How’d they know – ”

  “I told them,” Will said from the backseat. “When I was shooting hoops, I saw Miss Throckmorton dragging you and Rocky across the gym to her office. I run up and told the principal. You were a mess.”

  We were down by the 7-Eleven now, waiting for a gap in the Jefferson Street traffic.

  “Where’d he grab you?” Will said, and I guess he was trying to help.

  “My top part,” I mumbled. “My chest.”

  “That’s harassment,” Will said. “You’ve got a case there. That’s definitely harassment.”

  “Is that what they call it?” Aunt Fay said. “Then Marlene really will mop and wax the floor with that kid. She’s a cocktail waitress out at the Ramada.”

  So that’s what her job was.

  Aunt Fay made the turn in front of a Wagoneer. “Look,” she said to me, “I’ve got a full load as it is, and a bad leg. I’m in and out. Maybe I’ve taken on more than I can handle here. Maybe I’ve bit off more than I can chew. You know I never had kids.”

  I wanted to tell her it was the first real fight of my life, but I couldn’t prove it. From the backseat Will’s voice welled up. “It was Rocky’s fault. What was he doing in the girls’ – ”

  “I got that part of it,” Aunt Fay said. “All I’m saying is I can’t be running to that school every whipstitch. There’s limits on what I can do.” She turned her head and looked back at Will, a long look. I just sat there, picking skin off my knuckles.

  Then from the silence of the backseat, Will spoke again. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  I could have popped him one, and Aunt Fay swallowed hard. I’d never heard her laugh, but she’d just come close.

  “And throw that wad of cotton out the window,” she said to me. “I’m sick of looking at it.”

  “That’s littering,” Will said, but in his smallest voice.

  ♦

  In some schools they kick you out for fighting, no matter what. In others, if they kicked everybody out for fighting, there’d be nobody left. And if I had a case for harassment or whatever, would I have to take Rocky Roberts to court? I’d seen Court TV, and I didn’t like it. The next morning I went to school with my stomach in a knot and my tongue smarting. Last night Aunt Fay had dabbed disinfectant on it with a Q-Tip, saying, “There’s not a whole lot you can do for a tongue.”

  Rocky wasn’t even in school, but then he wasn’t in school a lot. Besides, I’d made some alterations on his nose, and he might not want to show his face. So that left me. I supposed everybody knew. I supposed they were buzzing and looking at me the minute I turned my head. I looked back before yesterday when I’d been invisible, and it seemed like some other school. I lived through homeroom.

  The first period was Mr. Russell’s social studies. I moved from the back row to the middle, hoping the crowd would swallow me. Then he called on me by name. I remember why. He asked me if Haiti was an island, and the room waited to hear me say I didn’t know. But I knew things from watching TV, if we were living in a motel and had a TV. I’d watch Nightline, waiting for Debbie to come home. “No,” I said. “It’s part of an island.” So Mr. Russell knew me now and had spotted where I was sitting. He let me walk out after class, and the morning crept by. Every minute weighed a ton.

  By noon I’d decided that nothing was going to happen. They were going to turn a blind eye on both of us, Rocky and me – two of a kind. As long as I didn’t pop a local’s nose, maybe I was home free.

  §

  I got to an empty lunch table as soon as I could. Then when the table filled, there was an empty seat beside me and another across from me and whispering at the other end. I smoothed the brown bag for a place mat under my lunch. I was trying to be civilized.

  Will dropped down beside me. He’d bought his lunch. It was pizza day, pizza and nachos and chocolate milk.

  “Keeping an eye on me?” I muttered.

  “Everybody is,” he said. “Want a bite?” He held a pizza slice high to see how far the cheese would stretch.

  Then who started across the room but Nelson Washburn. He was a tall blond kid, the tallest in seventh grade. Every girl at the table looked at him. They looked at him all day long. He leaned over me like I wasn’t there. “McKinney,” he said to Will, “are you a girl?”

  I never looked up.

  “Say what?” Will’s voice hadn’t changed, but Nelson’s had.

  “You heard me. What do you think you’re doing at a girls’ table? Do you know how that looks? Listen, you’re new. I don’t know where you’re from, and I don’t want to know. It doesn’t bother me personally, but it’s not the way we do it here, okay?”

  I took a careful bite out of my sandwich, favoring my tongue, tending to my own business.

  Then Will piped up as Will will. “Washburn, I thought you were coming over here to congratulate Molly Moberly.”

  “For what?” Nelson said, still not looking down at me, though I could have taken a bite out of his sleeve.

  “For whipping Rocky Roberts’s tail. Do you see Rocky around school today? Peaceful, isn’t it? Rocky’s big old mean grandma’s got him at home today, mopping and waxing the floor with him. You can thank
Molly for that. Somebody had to do it, and here she sits.” He nudged me. “It was a job that had to be done, and I don’t picture you doing it. Old Rocky come up on you, and you’d be wondering if he had a boxcutter. Molly never even thought boxcutter.”

  That was true.

  “Old Molly here whipped Rocky’s tail, and Rocky could whip yours. She plastered his nose all over his face, and he could bring you down like a tree.” Will jerked a small thumb at me. “This is one tough tootsie, and I’m keeping on her good side because I wouldn’t want her for an enemy. That’s why I’m at a girls’ table, Washburn. Okay?”

  My ears were in flames, and Nelson Washburn had to be surprised. You could talk back to teachers, but nobody talked back to him. He gazed far down at Will. Then he shook his head and walked away, stopping for a word at another table like he was just out for a stroll. He was about to be elected class president, so he campaigned a lot in the lunchroom anyway.

  “‘One tough tootsie’?” I muttered. “McKinney, somebody ought to lock up your mouth and throw away the key.”

  “And you can stop pretending you’re not here, Molly. You’re here, and everybody knows it.” Will kicked back and tied a knot in his chocolate-milk straw. “I’m in,” he said.

  “In what?”

  “I’m just in. Till today Nelson Washburn acted like he didn’t know my name. Now he’s giving me the benefit of his advice.”

  I didn’t know if that proved Will was in or not. But then these things might be easier for a boy.

  “And you’re in,” he said. “You whipped Rocky Roberts’s tail.”

  “You keep saying that. Somebody ought to – ”

  “It took a while, but we’re both in, even strays Uke us. And there’ll be more of us coming. You know, even some of these people who came from the grade school are like us. They just got here sooner. And we got here ahead of some who are on the way. The world’s full of people coming back to old people in old towns Uke this one. It’s like a trend. Get used to it.”

  “I don’t get used to anything,” I said, muttering low. “I don’t care if I’m in or out. I probably won’t be staying.”

  “Maybe you won’t,” he said. “Maybe you will.”

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Four

  After lunch we had to go outside for language arts. They’d brought in a row of portable classrooms to handle the overflow, so the field south of the gym looked like a motel.

  Ms. Lovett put things on the blackboard in her portable, and people didn’t pay much attention. Today it was a very plain poem by Emily Dickinson.

  Fame is a bee.

  It has a song –

  It has a sting –

  Ah, too, it has a wing.

  I could almost relate to it. Maybe I hadn’t heard fame’s song, but I’d felt its sting. And I hoped my fame would wing away, or I would.

  Halfway through class my eyes bugged out of my head. Ms. Lovett kept a neat desk, a clean blotter with her attendance book centered on it, stacks of paper in straight piles. And at one end – my notebook.

  This is how tense I’d been all day, and all night too. I’d lost my notebook and hadn’t missed it. Yesterday I’d carried it into the rest room and put it down on the next sink while I washed my hands. Or did I carry it across to Miss Throckmorton’s office? Whatever. But there it was on Ms. Lovett’s desk. It was mine. There were spatters of brown blood on it.

  We were filling in workbook blanks that day. When the bell rang, I thought about trying to snatch the notebook off the desk when she wasn’t looking, but she was looking.

  “I need my notebook,” I said in a small, ghostly voice, making myself look at Ms. Lovett. Most adults were the same age to me, but she was young. And different, with big brown eyes in a fragile face. She almost always wore black.

  “I looked inside,” she said. “How did you learn to do that?”

  She opened the cover to one of the pages, but it was all right because we were in the portable alone now. It was a picture I’d drawn across the ruled blue fines, a young woman’s face. The curls of her hair, the tendrils, filled all four corners. Ms. Lovett turned the page.

  It was the young woman on a sofa with her feet tucked under her. I’d worked and worked and erased and erased, and still I hadn’t gotten the line of her back right. I’d drawn in a pillow to hide her back but erased it.

  On the next page she was in bed asleep, and I’d worked hard to draw her arm hanging down and her knuckles just brushing the floor.

  “You’re very good,” Ms. Lovett said.

  “I can’t draw hands,” I said.

  “But it’s so clearly the same person. All these different studies. Who is she?”

  “Just somebody I made up.”

  It was my mother, of course. It was Debbie. Not the real Debbie, but one I could carry around and keep with me. I’d done twenty pictures of her so far, and I had a lot of pages left. I thought by the time I’d filled up the whole notebook with Debbie, she’d be back for me. Sometimes I worked fast, hoping to hurry her. Sometimes I worked slow, to give her all the time she needed.

  “You left it in the gym office. Miss Throckmorton brought it over to me. She said she didn’t know anything about art but thought I might.”

  So there were these two teachers working behind my back, knowing who I was.

  “I wish the school had an art teacher,” Ms. Lovett said. “I think there used to be art teachers in the schools here.”

  “They probably can’t afford them anymore,” I said, firming my jaw, “now that so many of us got sent back here.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This is my first year.”

  So that was why she looked younger than a teacher. Maybe that was why she never smiled in class. “Can I have it back?” I asked her.

  “Of course. Put your name in it.”

  “Why? It gets found anyway.” I never put my name on my things because they came and went. This notebook was my most precious possession, and I hadn’t put my name in it.

  “Work as good as your should be signed,” she said.

  At the door of the portable, I looked back to thank her since I was just visiting here. Then I cut out for math and spent that hour drawing petals around the blood splotches on my notebook cover and giving them stems and leaves to turn them into flowers, brown autumn flowers. Even though I wasn’t the flower type.

  §

  Was it that afternoon when I came home and found Aunt Fay in the front hall, waiting for me? She was in her nurse’s whites, and the car keys were jangling in her hand. She’d never been there when I got home from school. She was always someplace else, and I suppose I was a latchkey kid, except she never locked her house. “What would they steal? My TV’s black and white,” she told me once.

  “I’ve taken on Mrs. Voorhees,” she said. “You can give me a hand.”

  In the car she jumped the clutch, and we lurched forward. “I haven’t got time to take on another patient,” she said, scattering the fallen leaves down Cedar Street before one of her quick swerves out onto Jefferson.

  So I supposed she’d taken on Mrs. Voorhees because of me, because of another mouth to feed and my school clothes.

  “I’ve worked for her before. Her and me go way back. She’ll wear a person out.”

  “Mean?”

  “I don’t know about mean,” Aunt Fay said, “but difficult. She’s in a big house with nothing to think about but her aches and pains.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Aunt Fay waved me away. “Just play it by ear. She likes company. She don’t know it, but she does. She likes attention.”

  I thought maybe Aunt Fay was taking me to work to keep an eye on me. Maybe I was the one who needed some attention.

  We were downtown now, which was empty storefronts and cannons in the courthouse square. Then we charged along Lee Boulevard up the only hill. I hadn’t been up here to see how the houses got nicer. I pictured old Mrs. Voor
hees in a ruined castle with lightning rods.

  Aunt Fay skidded onto Park Place, and here the houses were like mansions to me. She pulled up in front of one. It was a big rosy brick with white shutters. The only Halloweeny thing about it was how the shrubs grew up over the windows. The door opened before Aunt Fay could ring the bell.

  “Well, Rose,” she said to a woman in a nylon uniform.

  “I’m just going to run on home and feed and water my kids,” the woman said. “I’ll be back directly to feed her.” She pointed upstairs.

  “How’s her appetite?”

  “She eats like a hired hand. I don’t know where she puts it.” Then Rose was gone, and we were in the front hall. It was kind of gloomy, but it reminded me of a house people live in on TV.

  “What this place needs is a good airing.” Aunt Fay started up the curving stairs. I kept with her, though this was about as far as I wanted to go.

  She thumped a door and walked into a room as dim as downstairs. I knew there’d be somebody in a bed.

  “Fay?” a voice said. “You been playing hard to get. I was beginning to think you’d retired and put your feet up.”

  “Well, here’s how it is, Edith.” Aunt Fay planted a hand on her hip. “I’ve got mirrors in my house. It wouldn’t do to sit around watching myself starve to death.”

  A snort came from the bed that sounded like Aunt Fay herself, trying not to laugh.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m just as you see me,” Mrs. Voorhees said. “I fell out of bed last night. Who’s that with you?”

  I’d kept behind Aunt Fay, but she waved me around. “This here’s Molly.”

  I edged around her. I had to. A little woman sat propped up in bed. There was a reading light on, with a crooked shade, but she hadn’t been reading. She just sat there in the bed with her hands arranged in front of her, and she gave me a quick, hard look. Then she blinked me away.