Addy's Race

by Debby Waldman

  Addy’s Race

  DEBBY WALDMAN

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Text copyright © 2011 Debby Waldman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Waldman, Debby

  Addy’s race [electronic resource] / Debby Waldman.

  (Orca young readers)

  Type of computer file: Electronic monograph in PDF format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-925-4

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca young readers (Online)

  PS8645.A457A64 2011A JC813’.6 C2011-903481-6

  First published in the United States, 2011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929399

  Summary: Addy joins her school’s running club and learns not only is she a great runner, but she can also be assertive and let others know there is more to her than hearing loss.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover artwork by Alana McCarthy

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  14 13 12 11 • 4 3 2 1

  For Elizabeth and Noah

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  You would not believe how many people expect me to be like Helen Keller. Not the blind part—it’s obvious I’m not blind. I’m not banging into walls or carrying a cane or being led by a dog wearing a harness. I don’t even need glasses.

  And it’s obvious I can talk. As soon as anyone asks, “Don’t you speak sign language?” (usually while waving their hands around as if they’re speaking sign language), I say, “I don’t have to. I’m not deaf. I hear fine with my hearing aids.”

  Then they act surprised. The ones who watch the Discovery Channel ask, “Why don’t you have those bionic things for your ears?” They’re talking about cochlear implants. I want to say, “Are you the one with the hearing problem? Cochlear implants are for deaf people. I just told you I hear fine with my hearing aids.”

  When I say that—minus the first sentence—they act disappointed, as if I said there’s no such thing as Santa or the Tooth Fairy. As if it would be better if I couldn’t hear at all.

  The people who feel sorry for me are worse. It’s not as if I’m dying of cancer or can’t walk or have flippers for arms. I can’t hear as well as most people, that’s all.

  Last week an old woman in the grocery store looked at my hearing aids and said, “Oh, you poor dear! It must be so difficult for you.” I wanted to say, Wait till you get hearing aids. It’s going to be a lot more difficult for you—you’ll have to get used to them. I’ve been wearing them my whole life.

  But instead I put on my sweet Addy face and said, “Thank you.” I don’t think my mother even heard the old woman talking to me. Which is a good thing. If she had, she would have launched into her “How I Found Out about Addy’s Hearing Loss and What a Tragedy It Was for Me” story, in which she is the heroine with a handicapped child and my role is to generate pity for her.

  My mother was an actress before she married my father. She was in commercials for dishwashing soap, laundry detergent, canned soup and salad dressings. She says making the ads prepared her to be a stay-at-home mom.

  I think she misses being in front of the camera. When she talks about how she found out about my hearing loss, she gets very dramatic. This is how she starts her story: “When we brought Addy home from the hospital, Rick (that’s my dad) rang a bell next to her ear. When she didn’t turn her head, he said, ‘I don’t think she can hear,’ and I said, ‘Rick, she’s four days old. No four-day-old baby can turn her head!’”

  If my father is nearby, he smiles as if he’s thinking, There she goes again. I roll my eyes. My mother never notices.

  The second part of her story goes like this: “When Addy got a little older, Rick got upset because she didn’t greet him at the door. I said, ‘Rick, she’s not like the dogs you grew up with. She’s not going to run to the door with your slippers and the newspaper as soon as you come home.’”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about. Even on television, I’ve never seen a dog run to a door with slippers and a newspaper. The dogs I know eat slippers and pee on newspapers.

  The third part of my mother’s story makes me the maddest: “When Addy was a year and a half, Rick came home from a business trip and all he could talk about was how the baby next to him could make animal noises. As if somehow I had failed as a parent because I hadn’t taught our daughter to moo, bark and oink.”

  This is where I want to say, No, Mom. I failed. Me. Addy. Not you. But it’s her story. Fortunately I can turn off my hearing aids, so I don’t have to listen.

  “You are so lucky,” my best friend Lucy says when she picks me up on the first day of school. “I wish I could turn off my mother.”

  “What did she do this time?”

  “She told Miss Fielding I’m joining running club. I hate running. She knows that.”

  I feel bad for Lucy. Her mother, Joanne, is a jock. She runs about ten miles a day, more if she’s training for a marathon, triathlon or biathlon—any kind of “on” that involves sweating and a finish line.

  She’s trying to make Lucy into a jock, but Lucy doesn’t even like gym. She’s the biggest girl in our school. She’s as tall as some of the teachers, and she’s not even twelve. My mother says she’s solid, “like a farmer’s wife.” She said that to my aunt on the phone when she thought nobody was listening.

  Lucy thinks she takes after her father. I’ve seen pictures of him. He does kind of look like a farmer. He died of a heart attack when Lucy was four.

  Joanne says there’s nothing wrong with Lucy’s heart, it’s just that she doesn’t want to try. That’s not true. Lucy will try anything, but why should she join a club she’s not interested in? One thing about Joanne though—she’s stubborn. So Lucy is stuck in running club.

  “I’ll do it with you,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I nodded, wishing I could take it back. Running makes me sweat, and sweat makes my hearing aids slimy. Plus, I’m not very fast. Then again, neither is Lucy.

  Chapter 2

  “You know who’s going to be in running club this year?” Lucy said.

  Before I could guess, Stephanie and Emma appeared on either side of us. Stephanie looked at Lucy and said, “Hey, my mom says you’re joining running club.”

  She was acting so frien
dly, if you didn’t know better, you’d think she was nice. But Stephanie and Emma are never nice. They think they’re better than everybody. And because they dress alike and wear their hair the same way and spend all their time together, they’re like one person in two bodies, which means they take up twice as much space, like some kind of superhero, but not the good kind. I think of them as Stem. Like part of a plant. A stinkweed plant.

  They always behave around teachers, so teachers love them. If you get stuck doing a project with them, they’ll suck up to you until you end up doing the work, which frees them to brush their hair, compare notes about what their mothers bought them at Aritzia and lululemon, and flirt with boys.

  They were the most irritating people in grade five. Also grades four, three, two, one and kindergarten. The first day of school hadn’t officially started yet, and already it looked as if they were going to win the award again for grade six.

  “You’re not even good in gym,” Emma said. “Why would you want to be in running club?”

  Emma had what my grandmother would call diarrhea of the mouth—no control over what came out, no matter how unpleasant. “Why do you care?” I said.

  “I’m not talking to you.” Emma looked at my hearing aids. “I guess you couldn’t tell.”

  “Excuse me?” I said. Was she trying to make a joke? Or had the summer turned her from stupid and annoying to just plain mean?

  Emma flipped her hair back. “I said, I guess you couldn’t hear. And obviously you couldn’t.” She looked at Stephanie and gave her a high five. Stephanie looked surprised, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard either. But she high-fived her back. I wanted to high-five both of them. Across the face. Lucy pulled me away before I had a chance.

  “I can’t believe her,” Lucy said as we hurried down the block.

  “It’s okay,” I said, although it wasn’t. Whenever anyone says something mean or stupid, my grandmother says, sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you. My mother says, consider the source. I don’t know why grown-ups think cute sayings make things hurt less.

  Lucy stopped at the corner. “I wish we went to a different school.”

  “I wish they did,” I said. “In a different country. Or a different solar system.”

  “It’s all Stephanie’s fault I have to be in running club,” Lucy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The only reason my mother knows there is a running club is because we bumped into Stephanie’s mom at Safeway last week and she said Stephanie was joining.”

  Stephanie’s mother, Sandy, is friends with Joanne. Lucy and Stephanie have known each other their whole lives, longer than I’ve known Lucy. But they stopped being friends the first day of kindergarten, when Stephanie discovered Emma.

  “My mother said, ‘Isn’t that wonderful! Lucy’s joining running club too!’” Lucy shook her head. “I was like, ‘I am? I don’t want to be in running club,’ and she said, ‘Of course you do,’ and Sandy said, ‘You’ll have such fun with Stephanie.’”

  We were at the edge of the schoolyard. My favorite thing about the first day is watching the kindergartners. Some of them are excited, but most cling to their parents like barnacles to a rock. On my first day of kindergarten, I was a barnacle. So was Lucy. Our mothers stayed that whole morning. Emma and Stephanie’s mothers disappeared right away, but Stem didn’t care. They were drawn to each other like magnets. My grandmother would say they’re like two peas in a pod. I hate peas.

  “Do you remember in kindergarten when we were playing kickball and Emma fell and blamed it on me?” I asked Lucy.

  Lucy nodded. “She said it was because you were in the way and didn’t hear her coming. But it was because she tripped over her shoelace. Hey, what are those two doing?”

  She was looking toward the playground at Miranda and Kelsey, who are twins but don’t even look related. Miranda’s hair is the color of Becel margarine, and she has so many freckles that from a distance her skin looks brown. Kelsey, who comes up to Miranda’s shoulders, has dark hair and plain skin.

  They were crouched in a circle with a bunch of kids, looking at something. “They’re shells from the Great Barrier Reef,” Miranda said when we got closer.

  “Our uncle lives in Australia,” Kelsey added, moving over so we could see. There were dozens of shells, all different shapes and sizes. “We went last month.”

  “It’s illegal to take stuff from the Great Barrier Reef,” said a nerdy-looking boy I didn’t know.

  Kelsey looked insulted. “They’re from the beach, not the reef.” She held out a curved shell almost as big as my fist. “Put it up to your ear and listen. It’s really cool.”

  Lucy took it. “Wow. That’s amazing.” She handed it to me. “It’s all whooshy.”

  I put it up against my hearing aid. All I could hear was the crunchy sound of shell against plastic.

  “Isn’t it cool?” Lucy asked.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t hear anything.” I tried not to sound mad. It wasn’t her fault.

  “Maybe if you take off your hearing aid?” Lucy suggested. “And go somewhere quiet?”

  I shook my head. Some things I will never hear.

  Chapter 3

  Lucy kept apologizing. “It’s okay. Stop already,” I said. We were hanging our backpacks in our cubbies at the back of the grade six room. Everyone looked at us to see who was talking so loudly.

  I could feel my face turning the same color as Emma’s red lululemon hoodie. Stephanie, who says her hair is strawberry blond even though it’s orange, was wearing a green one. The combination of her hair and the hoodie made her look like a life-sized bag of frozen peas and carrots.

  Beside her sat a new girl who was busy tying her plaid high-tops. She wasn’t paying attention to anyone. She looked like a GapKids model with perfect hair: long, straight and so blond it was white.

  I walked to the front of the room to give Mrs. Shewchuk my fm transmitter. She wears it around her neck, like a necklace. Whatever she says goes from the transmitter microphone straight into my ears. I hate it, but my mother says I have to use it; otherwise I might not hear everything my teacher says. What she doesn’t realize is that I don’t always want to.

  In grade two, the substitute forgot to turn off the fm when she was helping Stephanie write in her journal. Stephanie asked how to spell cooties because that girl over there—she pointed at me—had them.

  The sub said there was no such thing as cooties. Stephanie said, “Then I’ll just write she smells bad.” I turned off my hearing aids, so I never heard if the substitute told her there was no such thing as smelling bad.

  At least with hearing aids, if my hair is loose, nobody can tell there’s anything wrong with me. But the fm is like a billboard that says, I’m a freak. On my first day of kindergarten, Mrs. Ferris stood in front of the class and looked at me, tapped on the transmitter and said, “Addy? Addy? Come in, Addy. Can you hear me?” As if I were in outer space and she was at Cape Canaveral.

  Of course I could hear her. Everyone could. But I was so embarrassed I couldn’t answer. Finally Mom got out of her chair at the back of the room and took the fm into the hall to check it. She made me go with her. That was even more embarrassing.

  At recess, Mom told Mrs. Ferris it wasn’t a good idea to tap on the transmitter and single me out. But by then it was too late. The class was convinced I was part robot. It wasn’t until a few days later, when Trevor Finney peed his pants during story time, that people stopped thinking I was so interesting.

  Because it was the first day of school, Mrs. Shewchuk hadn’t made a seating chart. I sat up front anyway, beside Lucy. The new girl took the desk on the other side of Lucy. Her posture was perfect, as if she had a board against her back.

  I surveyed the room. Kelsey and Miranda were next to each other, arranging their supplies in their desks. Behind them, Trevor Finney, wearing a T-shirt with mud stains down the front, chewed his pencil and jiggled his legs.<
br />
  Next to Trevor sat a new boy with curly dark hair and a Bench T-shirt. It was almost the same color blue as his eyes. Behind him was the nerdy-looking boy who had been checking out Miranda and Kelsey’s shells. He needed a haircut.

  When I turned to the front again, I noticed Mrs. Shewchuk was wearing a boom mic attached to a headband. It looked like the kind of mic Lady Gaga and Madonna wear in videos. A second fm transmitter hung around her neck.

  Boom mics are for people with really bad hearing. Someone in my class was more deaf than me.

  Was it the nerdy boy? He was in the row behind me, on the other side of the room. His hair covered his ears, so I couldn’t tell for sure. When he saw me staring, his face brightened into a big, dopey smile.

  Yuck. I do not like you! I yelled inside my head. He didn’t get the message and kept smiling.

  “Class!” Mrs. Shewchuk clapped her hands to get our attention. She stood by the SMART Board and beamed at us. “Welcome to grade six. We have three new students this year. Let’s welcome them with a big Mackenzie School round of applause, shall we?”

  She waited while we clapped. Then she looked at the new girl. “Sierra, why don’t you say hello?” Straight-backed Sierra waved as if she were on a float in the end-of-the-day parade at Disneyland.

  “And over here we have Henry, who comes to us from”—Mrs. Shewchuk looked at her desk briefly— “Calgary.” The nerdy boy stood and waved. No one waved back. He winked at me. I looked at my desk, hoping no one had noticed.

  “And behind Henry is Tyler, who comes to us from Black Diamond.” The Bench T-shirt boy stood and bowed, a big, exaggerated gesture. Some kids laughed. Tyler didn’t seem to notice. Was he the deaf kid? It was hard to tell—his curly hair sprung out everywhere and covered his ears too.

  Who was the deaf kid? Shouldn’t Mrs. Shewchuk have told me last week, when Mom and I met with her to go over my program plan?

  Sometime between writing out all the things she has to do to make me stand out in class—like putting me in the front row, repeating things to make sure I’ve heard them, and telling everyone not to shuffle their feet, flip through their books or whisper anywhere near me—she could have said, “Addy, you’re not going to be the only hard of hearing child in Mackenzie School anymore. You’re not even going to be the only hard of hearing child in our class! You’ll have company! It will be…”