When Dad finally pulled up in front of a square stone building, I sighed with relief. It looked bigger than our old school, but at least it was only one building. It looked really old, too. There was ivy growing from cracks all over the front, and the stones it was made of looked smooth and worn.
“Built in 1883,” Dad chirped.
Aeisha and I ignored him. Dad and Mama had been killing us with little facts about historic Walcott all week. I don't know why they thought it would impress us that Walcott was as old as the Pilgrims. That was one of the things I found strange about our neighborhood. The rest of Walcott was old. In downtown Walcott, all the streets were made of cobblestones and the houses were built in that old style that Dad said was called “colonial.” Our neighborhood, with its brand-new look-alike houses, didn't seem to fit into this town at all. Just like us.
There were three big yellow school buses lined up in front of the school, and kids were pouring out of them. Aeisha and I sat there for a while and watched them without saying anything.
“The schoolyard is in the back,” Dad said, clearing his throat and looking at us. “They also have a track, a football field and a swimming pool.”
“Great,” Aeisha answered halfheartedly. Our old school had no track, no football field and no swimming pool — which explained why most of our sports teams never won anything. But Aeisha and I could walk to our old school instead of taking a dumb bus, and if we'd still been at our old school, Aeisha would already have been in the cafeteria tutoring and I would have been in the schoolyard playing Chinese jump rope with Karen and Margarita.
Dad looked at his watch and back at us. It was his first day of work. Before we'd left Roxbury, he'd gone and got another haircut. I was glad he was starting work before he went completely bald. “You want me to walk in with you?”
“No way,” I said, grabbing my backpack. “Come on, Aeisha.”
Aeisha followed me out of the car, and then we both stood there and looked at Dad. We'd both tried to dress normal so we could blend in. Aeisha had on jeans and a green polo shirt underneath her winter jacket, and I had on a blue T-shirt and brown corduroy overalls. The only thing that stood out on us was our shiny and unmarked new sneakers, which were a must for any first day at school.
Dad looked at us and nodded. “Okay?”
“Okay.” I turned around. “Come on, Aeisha.”
We tried to walk toward the front door of the school slowly but the other kids pushed us along faster. All around us I could feel people staring at us, and I tried hard to ignore them. Then I heard some tall boy with red hair say, “Move along, stupid new kids,” but before I could turn around to ask him who he was calling stupid, he was gone and we were inside the building. Aeisha and I stood in the middle of a hallway that had a marble floor with black and white squares on it. I could tell people were still staring at us because that hot prickly feeling that I had felt in the restaurant the day before was back.
“Kind of like being a movie star,” Aeisha said, nodding to herself. She looked at the piece of paper she had in her hand. “You're on the second floor and I'm down this hallway.”
“I know that.” Dad had gone over our schedules with us that morning.
“You want me to —”
“No way,” I said, cutting her off. Why was everybody treating me like I was a baby? “I'll see you after school.”
“Okay. Meet me right here. We have to take the number eight-oh-eight school bus and—”
“Yeah, yeah. See you later, Aeisha.” I turned around and joined the crowd headed up the stairs in the middle of the hallway. This time I moved as fast as everyone else so no one would say anything. I knew from my schedule that my homeroom was number 213 and that the teacher's name was Mrs. Woodstein. When I got to the classroom, I saw a girl with long, flat brown hair leaning against the wall beside the door. The only reason I noticed her at all was because the girl had attitude. She had on tight jeans and a colorful tie-dyed T-shirt, and she was slouching against the wall like it was her wall and she belonged there. I expected her to take out a cigarette at any minute and blow a puff of smoke in the air, just like the tough kids at my old school, who always hung out behind the building or in the second-floor bathroom. The other thing that made me notice this girl was that she didn't stare at me. She just looked at me and looked away like I was nobody special.
“That's Maria Poncinelli,” I heard someone say from behind me. I looked and saw another girl with blue eyes and the frizziest brown hair I had ever seen.
“What's her problem?” I asked.
“She's the mayor's daughter,” the girl said, disappearing into the classroom before I could ask her what that meant. I looked back at the girl against the wall. Maria Poncinelli didn't look like a mayor's daughter. I couldn't imagine her being a model citizen.
I was kind of glad to see there was somebody at this school like Maria Poncinelli. It gave me hope that this school just might be able to accept someone as unusual as me. Unfortunately, that hope faded as soon as I walked into the classroom. Everybody stopped talking and laughing and stared at me as I walked over to Mrs. Woodstein's desk. I wished I'd got lost trying to find the classroom. I wished I'd stayed outside with Maria Poncinelli. I even wished I'd let Dad or Aeisha walk me to homeroom. Most of all, I wished I was back at my old school in my old neighborhood, where I could know that people were staring at me because I was the new kid and not because of anything else. Back at my old school, having everyone's full attention like this would have been the opportunity of a lifetime to do something or say something funny, but here I didn't think anybody would laugh at anything I had to say
I stopped in front of Mrs. Woodstein's desk and handed her my schedule. I could tell she was a new teacher because she was pretty young and she didn't have either that tired, worn-out look or that hard-nosed, don't-mess-with-me look that experienced teachers have. She had long blond hair and she was wearing light blue eye shadow and a pink flowered dress. She was also smiling so hard it made me nervous.
“Welcome, Ayeola,” she said, not even looking at my schedule, and pronouncing my name exactly right. Impressive.
“Just Ola,” I corrected, nodding.
Mrs. Woodstein stood up, still smiling. “Class, this is our new student, Ola Benson. Say hello.”
Half the class said hi and the other half just continued looking. I wanted to stare at the floor, but I forced myself to look back. There's nothing worse than a new kid who looks scared.
“Ola comes to us from … ?” Mrs. Woodstein waited for me to fill in the answer.
“Roxbury,” I muttered at first, then I straightened up. I was proud of where I came from. “In Boston.”
No one said anything. I noticed that the classroom was bigger than my old homeroom, but there were only half as many kids. Dad had boasted that one of the best things about the Walcott school system was that there was more individual attention. From a parent's point of view, I guess that's important, but for students it means it's easier for the teacher to keep an eye on what you're doing. It means you get picked more often to answer the homework questions. It means no sneaking off to the rest room for a long time with three of your friends without the teacher noticing. There couldn't have been more than twenty kids in the classroom. Now, I'm not a juvenile delinquent. I do all my homework and get decent grades. I even pay attention to the lessons most of the time. But school can get pretty boring, and you need something to shake it up every once in a while. I was always a shake-things-up kind of student. Things like letting the class pet out of its cage and putting signs on people's backs were my specialty. Harmless and anonymous stuff. But with only twenty people to a classroom, it was gonna be awfully hard to be anonymous. Being the only black kid in the class was gonna make it impossible. Suddenly, looking out at all those other students, I realized that my school pest career was probably over. I was gonna have to become like Aeisha and get perfect grades and be an upstanding student. I felt depressed.
“Ola.�
� Mrs. Woodstein, who was standing next to me, put one hand on my shoulder softly. “Every new student has a buddy for their first day.”
“A buddy?”
“Someone who gives you a tour of the school, makes sure that you get to all your classes okay and introduces you to people that you should know.” Mrs. Woodstein was still smiling. “Someone has already volunteered to be your buddy.”
I wanted to say, “Oh, yeah?” in a really tough way, but I didn't. This buddy system seemed kind of fishy to me. In my old school, anybody who would volunteer for such a position was someone you didn't want to be friends with — either the class bully or the class pet, or sometimes the class weirdo.
“Anna, come up and introduce yourself to Ola.” To my relief, Mrs. Woodstein turned her smile away from me to someone else in the classroom. In the third row, a girl with a blond ponytail stood up and started walking toward me. I had her sized up within three seconds. Class pet—type A. Anna was a short, dumpy girl with a moon face, gray eyes, and a nose that turned up like a pig's. She was wearing a blue dress like the kind Mama would point out in the store for me when she's joking because she knows I'd say, “No way—too babyish.” Anna definitely looked like the type of person I would not get along with.
When she finally reached the front of the class, she held out her hand and gave me a phony smile. “Anna Ban aster.”
“Hi,” I said. Up close, Anna seemed more like the class snob than the class pet. She had on a gold necklace and a bracelet, both with her name spelled on them. At my old school, you learned fast not to wear gold around where everybody could see it—it would get stolen easy. I figured this was like that kid who left his bike on the lawn all night. I'd checked first thing that morning and the bike was still there. The kid was practically giving it away, but no one cared. And from the way Anna was looking at me, I could tell she was sizing me up. I wondered why she had volunteered to show me around. “Just call me Ola.”
“Okay, Ola.” Anna had barely touched my hand when the bell for first period rang, and she dropped it like a hot potato. “Come on, I'll get you to your first class.”
I followed Anna. I felt relieved I'd gotten through homeroom.
As we stepped out the door we were joined by two of Anna's friends, Daphne and Diane. They were twins, and both had long brown hair that went all the way down to the middle of their backs. They weren't wearing dresses, but, like Anna, they had necklaces and bracelets with their names on them, too. It was like they were part of some secret club and Anna Banaster was the president. Daphne and Diane did everything Anna told them to do.
“She's gotta go to history, room B-six,” Anna ordered, passing me off. “I'll pick her up after that.”
Then Anna just walked away. The last thing I noticed before following Daphne and Diane was Maria Poncinelli, still leaning against the wall outside of homeroom but with a big smirk on her face.
Daphne and Diane didn't say anything to me, but every once in a while one of them would glance at me real fast, then look away. It didn't take me long to figure out that they were scared of me. When I moved my hand to hitch my school bag higher, both of them moved a little further away. Normally I would think that this was very funny, but this time I didn't. I hadn't given them any reason to be scared of me — not yet, anyway. Normally this would be a good situation to take advantage of, but for some reason I felt like I needed to put them at ease and show them that I was a regular person, just like them.
“Hi,” I said experimentally.
Daphne and Diane looked at each other before answering me. Finally they mumbled hi in my direction while moving an inch further away from me. That really bothered me. When we reached room B-6 I went inside without saying anything to them, and I made sure I was out of the classroom before Anna Banaster could show up to take me to my next class. I wasn't going to waste any more of my time making people I didn't even like feel better about me.
The rest of the day went just as bad until lunch. Most people didn't seem to care about me one way or the other, but there were a few who kept staring at me. Nobody except the teachers said much of anything to me. In the schoolyard, I went looking for Aeisha to see if the same thing was happening to her, but I couldn't find her. Finally I sat down at a bench in a corner of the schoolyard. I remembered what Mama had said about people needing time to adjust to us, and I wondered how long that was going to take. This whole move had been one big mistake.
“Hey”
I looked up to find the girl with the frizzy hair from my homeroom standing next to me. She was wearing a huge red-and-white striped poncho with big side pockets.
“What'd you do with them?” she asked, sticking her hands into the pockets.
“With who?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “You know—Anna Banana and the ding-dong girls.”
I shrugged.
The girl sat down beside me. “It's kind of hard to get rid of Anna.”
“Not if you're me,” I said seriously. I'd seen Anna Banaster twice since homeroom and both times she'd kept her distance. Just like everybody else at this school, I thought.
“Well, who're you?”
I looked at her, surprised. “I'm just Ola.”
The girl looked me up and down. “Well, that doesn't sound too scary to me.”
I stared at her. This girl was strange. For a second I wondered if I had finally run into the class weirdo.
“So what's it like?”
“What's what like?”
“Roxbury. Everybody says you moved here because it was too dangerous there. Gangs and shootings and everything.”
“My neighborhood was a good one. Just because we don't have huge houses and schools with swimming pools doesn't mean good people don't live there,” I said hotly.
The girl shrugged. “So okay. Sorry.”
“We moved here 'cause of my parents' jobs,” I said loudly. “Anything wrong with that?”
The girl shook her head and was quiet for a moment. Then she stood up. “Well, I better be moseying along now. I have to patrol the schoolyard.”
I stared at her, annoyed but almost sorry she was leaving. As stupid as her questions had been, at least she had clued me in to what was going on with Daphne and Diane and all the stares Aeisha and I had been getting. It wasn't just 'cause we were black or the new kids here. The whole school probably thought Aeisha and I were gangsters. I tried to picture me looking tough in a black bomber jacket and carrying a switchblade. Ola the gangster? I was only nine years old! Then I tried to picture Aeisha in the same outfit and had to laugh out loud.
When the bell rang to go back to class, I finally saw Aeisha across the schoolyard, and she didn't look too good either. She was sitting on one of the benches on the other side of the schoolyard, hunkered over one of her textbooks. I could tell from the way her shoulders were hunched that she was worried about something. I wondered if she'd found out what everybody in this school thought about us. Then I noticed something strange. There was a short boy sitting at the other end of the bench, watching her. When she got up to go inside, he stood up and followed right behind her. I hurried to keep up with them and watched as he followed Aeisha all the way up to the third floor and into the same classroom, always staying right behind her. Once I saw Aeisha look back at him, but she didn't seem too upset. Who was he? What did he want with my sister? As soon as I saw Aeisha after school I was going to find out.
The rest of the day went pretty much like the morning. In my math class I found out that the name of the girl who'd talked to me in the schoolyard was River, but she didn't say anything to me or even look at me in class. I also had three classes with Maria Poncinelli, who was leaning against the wall outside before and after each one. Most of the teachers sent someone outside to drag her in when they started their lessons. By the time I went to meet Aeisha in the front hallway after school, I was ready to go home — or back to our new house, anyway.
Aeisha was waiting for me just where she'd said she would. She had
a mountain of books in her arms and she still looked worried. I looked around, and sure enough, the short boy was standing not too far behind her, watching her. I put on one of my meanest looks, ready to scare him off. But then I got a really good look at him.
“Who's that?” I asked Aeisha.
Aeisha glanced back and shrugged. “That's Otis. He's in my advanced science class.”
I looked again and tried to keep from laughing. Otis looked like he was falling apart. His shoelaces were untied, half of his shirt was hanging out of his jeans and he'd missed almost all the loops for his belt. That wasn't all, either. Otis had short brown-blond hair that stuck out all over his head like a porcupine's quills and his glasses were sitting crooked on his face. His blue school bag had a big hole in it. He'd left a trail of pencils and papers down the hallway. Behind his glasses I could see that Otis was a little cross-eyed. And both of his crossed eyes were stuck on Aeisha.
“What does he want?” I asked Aeisha in a whisper.
“I don't know. All I did was take a sign off his back,” Aeisha muttered, starting to walk to the front door. “Come on. Bus number eight-oh-eight.”
“What happened?” I asked Aeisha as soon as we sat down on the bus. I noticed that Otis was sitting in the seat behind us. I wondered if he was still following Aeisha or if he belonged on this bus. It was just like Aeisha to take that sign off his back. She doesn't like it when people make fun of other people. But something else was bothering her.
Ola Shakes It Up Page 5
