Real

by Carol Cujec

  When I was six, I was not able to take dance classes with other little girls, so Dad had the improbable idea to teach me ballet. My sixth sense told me he was trying to make up for the fact that I had almost no friends. Believe me when I say he is no dancer. Dad’s dancing is all finger-pointing and shaking his hips like a hula girl.

  He was serious about this.

  He made foot-shaped cutouts in different colors and taped them to the garage floor so I could see how to stand for each of the five positions. Instead of surfing on Saturday mornings, he inserted a Swan Lake CD into an old boom box and, dressed in his usual Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, practiced pliés and relevés with me—those are fancy ballet words for bending your knees and standing on your tiptoes.

  The music’s racing violins and crashing cymbals made me feel I could leap to the clouds. My jumps flew my feet more than five inches off the ground.

  On warm days, when the garage door stood open, we got big smiles from passing neighbors, especially kind Dr. Singh, a gray-haired lady who walked her beagle, Sadie, up and down the block twice a day now that she was retired. “Good for you, young lady. I expect you will be a ballet star soon.”

  Coach Dad launched an even bolder plan when I was eight and way too big for my tricycle. “I’m gonna teach you to ride a bike, a genuine two-wheeler, Princess Charity,” he announced one Saturday morning. “Every princess needs a stallion.”

  The Thinkers said I could never ride a bicycle.

  Never say never to my dad.

  He did not tell Mom about his plan, not right away. As Safety Sheriff of the house, she would have outlawed it. He waited for a day when Mom was shopping with Gram.

  “Better to ask forgiveness than permission,” he told me.

  Turns out Dad was a decent Safety Deputy too. It took him twenty minutes to suit me up in a helmet, elbow pads, double knee pads, and a pillow duct-taped to my back. I bounced around like a multicolored marshmallow. When we got to the big, empty parking lot at the high school, he opened the trunk and pulled out a brand-new bike with a basket in front, purple metallic streamers on the handlebars, and twenty-eight silver, shiny spokes on each wheel.

  “Your stallion, m’lady.”

  My heart jumped to the sky. My hands clapped.

  He lifted me onto the seat and placed my hands and feet in position.

  Then I looked down.

  No training wheels?

  “Let’s begin with a slow trot.” With one hand on the handlebar and one on the seat, he jogged the bike in a big circle. “Pedal your feet. You can do it, Cherry!”

  Dad pushed me for more than an hour till his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. Little by little, my feet got the idea to push down on the pedals.

  “You got it, Cherry. Keep going!”

  He took his hand off the handlebar and ran alongside with a hand on the seat to keep me steady.

  “Haha! I knew you could do it!”

  I noted his face stretched tight with a grin, and my chest puffed up with pride.

  On the next lap, my feet pedaled a little faster. Dad let go of the seat and pretended to gallop beside me.

  “Careful, honey. Not too fast.”

  Then my bulldog impulse took over—that’s the part of me that acts on instinct instead of logic. I love my bulldog, Hero, but he barks at his own reflection and attacks the vacuum cleaner on a regular basis.

  My feet heard the word “fast” and shifted into hyperdrive. I started pushing the pedals quick as a cheetah chasing prey.

  Push, push, push.

  Page 32: The fastest land animal, the cheetah can run up to 75 miles an hour in short bursts.

  I sped along the black pavement, feeling the wind on my teeth because I could not stop smiling. For the first time in my life, I felt freedom, pure freedom.

  Push, push, push.

  “Squeeze the brakes, Cherry! Squeeze with your hands!” Dad’s screaming reached my ears.

  I guess braking should have been lesson one. My eyes focused forward. My mind screamed.

  Danger! Thorny bushes ahead!

  My hands could not grip the brakes. My brain hollered STOP!

  Probability of crashing? Falling? Bleeding? HIGH!

  I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath.

  A second later, I was on the ground. My shoulder stung from where it scraped branches.

  Dad lifted me up, breathing hard, his eyes full of fear. “My poor Charity. My princess. It was all my fault. Are you okay, honey?”

  He dusted the dirt and leaves off my jacket. His eyebrows scrunched together with worry. “Let’s get you home and make sure you’re okay.”

  I squirmed out of his arms and pulled my bike out of the bushes with Dad’s help. I quickly scanned its parts—the purple streamers, the white basket, the raspberry-colored seat, twenty-eight silver, shiny spokes on each wheel . . . thank goodness it was still in one piece.

  I grabbed the handlebars and swung my leg over.

  Dad shook his head and wiped his forehead on his arm. “No, honey, I think it’s . . .”

  My feet tried to pedal, but he held the handlebars tight. I pushed my leg hard as I could and grunted like a wild boar. “Grrrrraaaaaaaa.”

  Dad’s eyebrows jumped, and a grin lit up his face.

  “That’s my girl. Right back on the horse.”

  Yes, it did hurt, but I cannot stand pity.

  Especially not from my dad.

  Boredom Academy

  The wedding disaster weekend was followed by the usual miserable Monday. Mom pulled up to the drop-off curb, and Miss Marcia poked her head into our car, wearing her same orange, saggy sweater. Her breath stank like a cigarette-smoking donkey, even with all the wintergreen mints she stashed in her cheeks like a squirrel. When she talked, she was a symphony of crunching and sucking sounds.

  “Morning, Mrs. Wood [crunch]. Hope you packed more of Charity’s extra clothes. She’s been having lots of accidents lately [suck].”

  Mom gave me a worried glance. “That’s strange. She hardly ever has a problem with this at home.”

  Miss Marcia unbuckled my seatbelt. She yanked me out of the car with one hand and grabbed my Wonder Woman backpack with the other.

  What a joke—a helpless girl with a superhero backpack.

  Still, I sometimes imagined my body spinning round and round—I love to spin—and in a burst of smoke I would transform into Wonder Woman. Strong and powerful. Ready to kick butt.

  “I put three dollars in Charity’s front pocket so she can buy hot lunch today,” Mom said.

  Miss Marcia smiled sweetly, putting on her angel face, her I-care-deeply-about-your-child face that she wore in front of parents.

  “Oh, I’ll make sure she gets it,” Miss Marcia sang. “Sloppy joes today. I know how much she loves those.”

  “And I packed some of her sixth-grade vocabulary flashcards we’ve been working on,” Mom said. “Could you go over those with her as well?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Wood.”

  As soon as Mom’s car drove away, Miss Marcia’s smile disappeared. She reached into my pocket, pulled out the three dollars, and stuffed them into her own pocket. I saw her do this to other kids too, and I knew I would not be eating sloppy joes today. I also knew the flashcards would never leave my backpack.

  If I ever do become Wonder Woman, watch out, Miss Marcia. You are first on my kick-butt list.

  Kids who cannot talk are easy targets for bullies. At Borden, I learned teachers can be bullies too.

  Probably the only thing I ever learned at Borden.

  …

  My first few years of school, I was passed around like a radioactive potato to special education classrooms at four different schools. Most teachers made up their mind about me the second I stumbled through the door. Only one teacher believed I could learn—Miss Am
ira in first grade.

  Because she loved nature, Miss Amira took us on field trips to the park, the forest, and the beach. We sniffed wild sage, observed ground squirrels, learned about bird calls, and searched for roly-poly bugs under rocks. She helped us grow a vegetable garden in the school courtyard and taught us how to make a blade of grass sing by blowing on it through our fingers—well, she taught other students that. I still cannot blow out my birthday candles. She even hung picture books from the trees outside our classroom to create what she called our “reading forest.” Most important, Miss Amira looked at me with possibilities instead of limitations. When she saw I liked animal books, she sat with me to read, and then asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up, Charity? Maybe you’d enjoy working with a vet . . . or in a zoo? Maybe even a vet in a zoo.” She grinned wide, and I smiled inside thinking about how to take an elephant’s pulse or diagnose a sick skunk without getting sprayed.

  After first grade, school became more and more frustrating. I needed extra help, but the schools would not let Mom come with me. With no voice, no handwriting, and fidgety fingers that would not point to the answers my brain chose, I would think to myself diagnosis: doomed. If I colored outside the lines, I would grab an eraser, but couldn’t stop my hands from rubbing a big hole into my paper . . . which would make me crumple the paper and throw it on the floor, howling. That’s when I learned about “time-out.” But the time-out jittered me even more, so one time-out led to another. And another.

  By third grade, I was considered too special for public school. That’s when the Thinkers pressured my parents to send me to a private institution.

  Define institution: a place where people are separated from the world instead of included. Separate can never be equal.

  Borden Academy was not a real school. Schools are places for learning. Borden was a prison camp for disabled kids, complete with an escape-proof, eight-foot-high chain-link fence. Even the staff called it “Boredom Academy.”

  When Miss Marcia pulled the three dollars from my pants, she left the inside of my pocket sticking out. I get flustered by things not in their place.

  Great. That is going to bug me all day.

  Miss Marcia was the teacher’s aide for our class for three years straight. What grade were we in? What did it matter? Nothing ever changed from one wasted year to the next.

  Miss Marcia led me through the front gate. This day, as on many days, my feet refused to move any farther. My hopeless body plopped onto the blacktop about twenty-five yards from the classroom.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Miss Marcia yelped.

  My body rocked back and forth, back and forth. I knew what was coming.

  “Charity, get up. Charity, get up. CHARITY, GET UP!”

  I wanted to scream at her.

  I cannot do it, and your yelling does not help me!

  Back and forth, back and forth.

  …

  The Thinkers say I “lack gross motor coordination.” I call it motor madness. Sometimes I am a broken robot stuck on repeat, doing the same thing over and over and over and over. I tap-tap the table, squint-squint my eyes, rock back and forth back and forth, or flush flush flush the toilet. Other times, it’s like someone hits the off switch. And. I. Freeze.

  This happened at least once a week in the car when Mom pulled into our driveway. I knew I was supposed to get out, but my body became a marble statue. She tried to pull or push me in the right direction. Probability of my moving: zero.

  Finally, she made the best of it and stashed a few books in the front seat so she could sit and read to me until the oh-so-sweet moment my on switch worked again, and . . . hooray . . . I could control my movement. She did not get mad. She seemed to understand I could not help it.

  Miss Marcia, on the other hand, squawked like a peahen—that’s a female peacock—when my body froze. Her approach was to control me, not help me learn to move independently.

  “For the last time, GET UP!”

  Page 211: A group of peahens is called a party.

  A group of Miss Marcias? That’s no party.

  “Just sit there then,” she said. “I could give a rat’s rump.”

  She dragged her worn-out loafers into the classroom (which was actually a trailer) and left me sitting in the middle of the playground—the playground where no kids ever played. A couple times, she glanced out the window to see if I had “decided” to cooperate. Or maybe she wanted to make sure there were no visitors who might be walking through the courtyard.

  Another set of eyes peeked outside when Miss Marcia left—Isabella, my one and only friend in this place. Her small, round face was topped with a mop of red curls. She knocked on the window and waved for me to come inside. She kept waving until someone pulled her away.

  Sad to say, my legs still refused.

  And so I sat.

  And sat.

  Page 4: The albatross sits on its egg up to 80 days before the egg hatches.

  If Mom did not coat me with SPF 70 sunscreen every day, I would resemble a cooked lobster.

  Page 159: Lobsters turn red when cooked, but in nature, they can be many colors, even blue.

  A sharp pebble poked my bottom, but my butt was glued to the ground.

  Move, legs, move!

  I squinted my eyes from the bright sunlight until the world became blurry, and I imagined myself as a peaceful protester, like one of the brave people who fought for justice with Martin Luther King Jr. They sat down and refused to get up until they had equal rights.

  Nobody was marching or sitting down for people like me.

  Isabella poked her head in the window again and held up a book. She waved at me like a baseball coach waving a runner to home plate. That finally triggered my legs to stand, and I staggered into the classroom.

  Mom and Dad only saw this place when it was scrubbed and decorated for parents’ night once a year. If only they could get a peek any of the other 364 days—Mom would have a heart attack. One look at our chaos-filled, zero-education classroom, and Mom would know. She would just know.

  And she would save me.

  Isabella ran up and squealed my name. “Charity, Charity, Charity is here!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the beanbag chairs. “Come with me to look at books!” Her freckled cheeks puffed up in a smile, and her blue eyes, slanted a little from her Down syndrome, sparkled. Even this rotten place could not squeeze all the joy from her heart.

  Isabella could not read, and I so wished I could read to her. She deserved a chance to learn. Everyone here did.

  She patted the green plastic beanbag chair, its holes covered with duct tape. I sat down, and Isabella held up a book about elephants for both of us to see. I wanted to tell her all the amazing facts about them.

  Page 62: African elephants feel a wide range of emotions, like grief, happiness, and compassion.

  Most people do not know that I feel these emotions, too.

  Clever Isabella made up her own story about a mama elephant who wanted to take her baby elephant to the hair salon. Her copper curls bounced as she told her tale.

  I tried to focus on her sweet smile and eyes that grew wide when she got to the exciting part of her story. But every cell in my body itched to get out of this place, this waiting room for hopeless cases. According to the Thinkers, we were all throwaway kids that did not deserve an education.

  Kids in wheelchairs were parked in front of an ancient television in the back of the room, forced to watch Barney for the ten thousandth time.

  I wanted to scream.

  They have brains, you know! So do I!

  My ears were drowning in the noise—shouting and moaning kids, silly singing blaring from the television. It was the singing that made me want to stuff these beanbag chairs into my ears. No escaping the horrible smell either—like a mixture of sweat socks, wet dog, and Miss Marc
ia’s donkey breath. My brain overloaded.

  Woodpeckers chipped at my skull.

  Page 320: The woodpecker’s chisel-like bill pecks at a rate of twenty times each second.

  I wondered what kids in a real school were learning today—maybe how to calculate the area of a circle, or what Shakespeare meant by “To be or not to be,” or why rotten eggs smelled like farts.

  Do those kids know how lucky they are?

  Probability: low.

  Miss Marcia patrolled the room like a prison guard, snapping at kids to “Knock it off!” or “Put a lid on it!” and threatening to banish them to the dreaded time-out closet. I lived in fear of it every moment. Each lockup chipped away at my already broken heart.

  Could I escape it today?

  My body felt restless. I got up and shook my hands and legs. Maybe I could shake off the hopelessness.

  Shake, shake, shake.

  My feet walked toward a boy named Jacob playing with Lego blocks. He could not talk either, but he built amazing structures from the sad, mismatched Lego collection kept in a plastic laundry basket. How could they not see his cleverness? He stacked his bricks in tall towers—seventeen blue, nineteen red, twenty-three green, twenty-nine yellow—all prime numbers.

  I reached out to touch a soaring tower, and he screamed with full force.

  That made me scream too.

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

  “You will be okay, Charity. You will be okay.”

  Kind Isabella was there in a flash, patting my cheek.

  Thank goodness. Her kindness helped my mouth to close and my body to settle. But my peace did not last long. Miss Marcia pulled me by the arm and sat me in the nearest chair. She plunked a jack-in-the-box on the table in front of me.

  Behavior data reports were due every day, so it was time for me to fail another test.

  “Turn the handle. Turn the handle. Turn the handle.” She repeated the same words robotically.

  I begged for words.

  First of all, a jack-in-the-box is a toy for a four-year-old, not a thirteen-year-old. Second of all, I would not turn the handle if I could. I do not want to see that white clown face jump out with his creepy smile, yellow hair, and missing eye.