“Cooties!” say the girls. “Mimi’s cooties.”
All but Stacey, who yells, “It’s my fault,”
over the chorus,
and touches my arm. “Now I’ve got them.”
“Next!”
As stupid as cooties are,
I’m happy she took them from me.
But even though she made a big deal about rubbing my arms
to catch the cooties, no one pays attention—
they just keep yelling
“Mimi’s cooties, Mimi’s cooties,”
as if they’ve been waiting to say that
ever since my first day at school,
and now they can.
Notes
Linda, the girl who sits next to me in history,
slips a note on my desk.
I tuck it into my notebook
and look at Stacey, who sits next to her.
She smiles, so I know her note says something good.
When Miss O’Connell turns to write on the board,
I unfold it quietly and read:
Want to do something after school?
She signed it S
with a long, loopy tail.
I could just nod at her,
but I’ve never passed notes before,
so I write back:
The drugstore!
I’ll have to ask Papa
and figure out how to get home,
but I want to sit at the soda fountain with Stacey
and eat a sundae and look around the store.
The note is too small to explain all that,
so I just sign M
with no loops or flair,
then fold it up and slip it onto Linda’s desk.
She covers it with her hand and passes it to Stacey,
who coughs and opens it.
“I’ll take that, Miss LaVoie,” Miss O’Connell says,
holding out her hand at the front of the room.
Stacey hands it to her,
then goes back to her desk without looking at me.
Miss O’Connell puts down her chalk and opens the note.
“It’s too bad,” she says, “that instead
of sitting at the soda fountain this afternoon,
you’ll be in my classroom.”
I’ve never had detention before
and my neck prickles.
Now Stacey looks at me with a big-eye face
like she’s pretending to be scared,
but I wonder if her heart is pounding
as hard as mine.
Detention
I had to tell Papa after school
about the notes and detention.
He blinked and said, “I’ll be back in an hour.”
The way he pressed his lips together
told me he was disappointed in me.
That stung more than getting caught passing a note.
Detention in Miss O’Connell’s room
means sitting far away from Stacey,
and watching dust drift through the slanted sunlight,
and listening to kids’ voices in the corridor
fade away,
and willing the red hand on the wall clock
to speed up
while Miss O’Connell helps a boy with homework.
When he leaves, Miss O’Connell says,
“An hour watching the clock is the longest hour you’ll ever spend.”
Stacey and I nod.
“But you can help yourselves. You can take five minutes off
for each history question you answer correctly.”
I raise my hand. “Can we answer them together?”
Miss O’Connell sticks out her chin, and says,
“Okay.”
Stacey and I smile at each other,
and I sit next to her.
Miss O’Connell takes out a stack of index cards,
shuffles them, and sits on her desk.
“First question—
What was the first battle of the American Revolution?”
I wink at Stacey, and say, “Lexington and Concord in April 1775.”
“Yes,” Miss O’Connell says. “You got five minutes off.”
Thank you, Papa, I think.
She shuffles the cards again. “Hmm, let’s see about this one—
What does the first section of the Declaration of Independence state?”
she asks,
and looks at Stacey.
“Do you know?” Stacey whispers to me,
and I answer, “All people are born with equal rights.”
Miss O’Connell says, “That’s another five minutes.
Now, let’s see . . . ,” she says, looking at the cards. “Here’s one—
How many times was Franklin Roosevelt elected president?”
Stacey says, “I know that . . . four.”
“Very good. I’m impressed,” Miss O’Connell says. “Last question—
I bet you girls can’t get this one—
What was the name of the first
American-manned space mission?”
How easy can a question be? I think. “Freedom 7.
It was on May 5, 1961, and lasted fifteen minutes.
And Alan Shepard was the astronaut.”
“Whoo-ee!” Stacey says.
“That’s right, Mimi,” Miss O’Connell says slowly.
“And for a bonus point—where was he born?”
She sits back on her desk and taps the cards in her palm,
waiting, I think, for me to get it wrong.
But I don’t. “Derry, New Hampshire.”
Miss O’Connell doesn’t look impressed.
“These are not easy questions, Mimi.
Are you looking at the answers?”
She checks the backs of the cards,
but there’s nothing there to see.
“I just like learning about the space missions.”
“And her daddy teaches history,” Stacey says.
“Well,” Miss O’Connell says, sliding off her desk,
“you girls may go now. But no more notes.”
We leave detention twenty-five minutes early.
“Do you want to meet my dad?” I ask Stacey
as we leave the building. “He’ll be here soon.”
“Can’t now—my mother’s here,” she says,
and points to a yellow car at the curb. “Let’s go to the drugstore
over vacation,” she calls over her shoulder,
then gets into the car.
I wave good-bye,
but I don’t think she saw.
Science Project
It’s my turn to talk to Mrs. Stanton
about my science project.
She shows me a book about lichen.
“But I don’t want to do a report on lichen,” I say
respectfully.
“That’s fine, Miss Oliver. What do you want to do?”
I’m not afraid to tell her, but I am afraid she might laugh,
like the homeroom kids on my first day.
“Something about the space program,” I say.
She doesn’t blink. “You mean Apollo?”
I nod and
hold my breath.
Mrs. Stanton takes the lichen book from me
and closes it. “That’s a wonderful idea. What will you focus on?”
There are so many things to study about the moon—
Training
Building the rocket
Living without gravity
Navigating there—
I know what I’ll focus on: “The moon’s topography and its phases.”
M
rs. Stanton rests her chin in her hand for a moment,
then says, “All right.”
I smile, relieved.
“Your report outline will be due next week,” she says.
“I’ll help you with whatever you need, and
I have a book on the subject at home.”
“Thank you,” I say, and
button my coat
and pick up my books.
But Mrs. Stanton doesn’t say “You’re welcome” or even “’Bye,”
or shuffle the homework papers on her desk.
She keeps looking at me,
and I know we’re not done.
“I hear you want to be an astronaut,” she says.
“Yes.” I put my books down
and wait for her to laugh
or tell me all girls want to be mothers
or teachers or secretaries or nurses.
Instead, she says, “I wanted to be a scientist.
I wanted to research viruses and find a cure for diseases.”
“But you didn’t?”
She shakes her head. “My father said I’d be a disgrace.
My mother wouldn’t talk about it.
They said I’d never find a husband—
they didn’t understand I could do both.
Then . . . my . . . I lost my husband. So I would have had nothing.”
“Don’t you like being a teacher?” I ask.
She smiles. “I love teaching. If I can help my students attain their dreams,
then I’m doing my job well. That makes me happy.
And when my husband died, I was happier than ever
to belong somewhere every day.”
It’s a big surprise to hear Mrs. Stanton talk about dreams
and belonging,
but now I would do anything to make her happy,
because she wasn’t able to attain her dreams,
and because . . .
“You didn’t laugh at me,” I say.
“Why would I laugh, Miss Oliver?
Our dreams are a serious matter.
When you take them seriously,
everyone else does too.”
“You sound like my dad,” I say.
Mrs. Stanton picks up her red pencil
and looks down at the papers on her desk.
“I will give you that book tomorrow.”
Stars
On this clear and moonless night,
Mama and I wrap up in our winter clothes
and go outside to watch and listen.
The trees beyond our backyard form a torn-paper line
between the snow and this sky
filled with stars.
The snow glows lilac
as we step on its crust,
guided by faint starlight.
Mama and I don’t need to talk.
We are in awe of the magnificence above—
impossible to understand, impossible to hold.
There were no skies like this in Berkeley,
where light from the cities chased the stars away.
Here I can’t look long, deep, or wide enough
at the Vermont sky
on a new moon night.
I hold out my arms and twirl,
etching the sky above me in rings of starlight.
“Don’t fall, Mimi-chan,” Mama says, then
holds out her arms
and twirls.
February Vacation
“Pattress!” calls the boy next door,
breaking the winter quiet.
The brown dog leaps off the back steps
and disappears into the snow,
and the boy follows her out of the house.
Pattress appears
and disappears in the snow
again and again.
“Ruh! Ruh!” she calls, begging to play.
The boy packs a snowball and pitches it
way to the back of his yard.
Pattress chases it,
sniffs around where it should be,
then looks at the boy. She waits.
He throws another snowball
and another and another.
Her bark—insistent, joyful—
echoes off the surrounding woods.
She does her leap dance toward the long bump that divides our yards.
When the snow melts, I’ll find a fence under there.
The boy throws another snowball,
and—whup!—
it hits the empty turkey coop,
making it rattle.
He raises his arms,
either like “I’m sorry” or “Sock it to me.”
I accept the challenge
and throw a handful of snow his way.
It doesn’t even reach the fence,
and he bends over, laughing . . .
At me? This time,
I pack a snowball tight as ice,
wind up,
and pitch.
It explodes against a tree, spraying
the boy and his dog.
Soon we’re having a snowball fight,
and we step closer and closer to the fence-bump
in the middle, laughing.
Pattress watches the snowballs sail past her,
biting and barking and leaping.
And just when I reach the fence,
ready to deliver the final blow,
Papa calls, “Mimi!”
his voice cutting through the laughter, slicing the mood.
“’Bye,” I say, and hold up my hand
empty of snowballs but coated in snow.
“’Bye,” says the boy.
I go inside
and take off my boots
and shake the snow off my clothes.
When I look out the door,
Pattress and the boy are still standing by the bump.
The Soda Jerk
Stacey and I spin the stools at the soda fountain.
Then we sit on them and spin.
“You girls want something?” asks the man behind the counter.
We stop spinning, and Stacey says, “Let me see,”
putting her finger on her chin as she studies the menu.
He taps his fingers and looks at her while she decides.
“What about your friend here?” he asks Stacey,
as if I’m not sitting right next to her.
I only have a dollar
and I also want to buy a headband.
“Can I have a hot-fudge sundae?” It’s fifty cents.
“Oh, you speak English,” he says. “I thought you was,
you know, a foreigner.”
“I’m from California.”
“Well you look kinda different.”
I look big-eyed at Stacey in the mirror facing us.
She looks back at me the same way.
“You ready, miss?” he asks Stacey,
and she says, “One scoop of pistachio
and one scoop of chocolate.”
He doesn’t say anything about the way she talks.
After he goes away,
Stacey asks, “Do people always ask you stuff like that?”
“You get used to it, kind of.”
“I’d want to cuss them out. Don’t you want to cuss them out?”
“I just want them to stop.”
“Well, I’d want to cuss,” she says,
and then we both giggle.
I can tell Stacey anything
and she won’t think I’m bad.
“You want to know what Mother calls him?” she asks,
her giggles like hiccups. “A .
. . soda . . . jerk.”
“Soda jerk?” I ask, my giggles choking me,
and she nods
hard, because she can’t talk.
Then we spin some more,
but a lady in the cards section gives us a dirty look,
so we stop
and I make a pig face in the mirror.
Just like my cousins, Stacey makes one back.
Then the man brings our ice cream
but doesn’t go away. I pick up my spoon
and he’s still standing there.
“So, I have to know,” he says,
“what are you?”
But just because he has to know
doesn’t mean I have to tell him
anything.
I put my two quarters on the counter,
then slide off the stool.
“Wait for me,” Stacey says,
and spoons a mound of pistachio in her mouth.
Outside, she says, “We know what he is—
a real soda jerk
minus the soda.”
A Girl Who Twirls
Before today, I’ve only skated on an ice rink at a mall,
where you go round and round
in the same direction,
while organ music gives your glide its tempo.
There is always one girl
with a little skirt
who breaks away from the crowd and skates into the center,
and twirls. She starts slow, throwing her arms out,
bent as if in worship to the ice and the force of gravity,
and turns, her skirt flaring
and hands weaving invisible ribbons in the cold air.
Then, arms crossed over her chest, she spins
faster and faster into a blur,
drilling the ice
until she stops—
a flash of skates and spray.
I’ve always wanted to be that girl.
Skating Pond
The pond behind our yard has frozen
solid, and Papa said it’s time to skate.
He brought Stacey and me home after school.
Mama gave us cookies and a thermos of cocoa
and told us to be very careful.
I know she wanted to come and watch
over us, but Papa said we’d never learn anything on our own.
Full Cicada Moon Page 4
