Harry Sue

by Sue Stauffacher

  I ran back downstairs, aimed cereal at three bowls, splashed on milk, tossed a handful of plastic spoons on the table, and took off after Spooner.

  “I am not gettin’ dirty today,” I yelled into the marsh grass and duckweed at the end of the backyard. Pretty soon I heard the sound of water sucking into mud.

  “Dang it, Spooner.” I pulled off my shoes and socks and rolled up my jeans.

  “Okay, okay, look. I’m a stupid zebra coming down here all by myself for a drink of water.” I waded in. The grass could cut you like glass if you weren’t careful. And man, was it cold.

  See, Spooner’s mom was from Spain and his dad was from Portland, which made him exactly … a crocodile. Spooner loved crocodiles. It was the only way to get through to the kid. Call him an alligator and he won’t look you in the eye for days.

  “Crocodiles love zebras,” I said, wading up to my knees and watching the stink water soak into the rolled-up fabric of my jeans. I parted a clump of grass shot through with old stalks of purple loosestrife and was picking seedpods out of my hair when he sprang at me.

  Little bits of algae and swamp muck spattered my shirt. A crayfish clamped on to my sleeve.

  “Awww,” I screamed in a miserable way as he pawed at me. “Right on my muzzle. I’m a goner.”

  I wrestled the skinny little bit of nothing that was Spooner soaking wet onto land.

  “Now you’re gonna shake me and shake me until my arms and legs fly off and I’m nothing but a zebra burrito.”

  I dragged him back to the house, swamp stink clinging to my skin. Spooner wasn’t giving up any information. Of all the crumb snatchers at Granny’s Lap, Spooner and Hammer Head had my vote for “most likely to survive the joint.” Hammer Head because he’d scare the pants off all but the most experienced cons. And Spooner because he didn’t mind funky. Not one bit. That, and he seemed to me like a serious candidate for the ding wing.

  Chapter 10

  Granny was glaring at me from the window, a peppermint stick clamped between her teeth—no cigars until the graveyard shift had been picked up. I splashed cold water from the outdoor tap onto me and Spooner, hoping it would rinse out enough of the smell so I wouldn’t attract attention. At least so Ms. Lanier wouldn’t spray me with that fruit stuff. Harry Sue does not wear foo foo.

  “What the bee-jeezus happened here?” Granny asked, swiping at the chalk on the counter and grinding peppermint between her teeth. She still had on her pink shower cap, the one that covered all the pin curlers. Her red-rimmed eyes and naked lids hadn’t been painted and plastered over with makeup yet, so she looked like one of those pink hairless laboratory rats.

  Sink looked up from the table, where she’d joined the kids.

  “What is that stuff?” she asked me, knowing full well I wouldn’t answer to Granny.

  “That?” I plastered Spooner into his chair and slid a bowl over to him. “Why, that’s cocaine,” I told her.

  Sink rolled her eyes and began picking glumly at the dried-up bits of cereal on the table. Dip moved from her place in the doorway to a seat at the table and pulled the box of cereal toward her, pouring for Spooner and herself.

  Everyone used slow, deliberate movements in the morning to avoid getting a clout from Granny. They knew it was lockdown until she’d had two cups of coffee.

  “I’m gonna give it to the kids to keep ‘em happy all day long,” I said, loud enough for Granny to hear. Truth to tell, Granny was more than a little deaf, and the extra noise made everybody at the table jump.

  “See, I was gonna use cold medicine,” I kept on, calmly patting myself with paper towels, “but yesterday at school, I saw on the Internet how this lady down in Florida got sent up for an eight ball for accidentally killing a baby she was trying to keep quiet.”

  “You’re a liar,” Dip said, pinching a big fold of her bloated cheek.

  I yanked the wax bag of cereal out of the Frosted Flakes box.

  “Eight years and change …”

  I stopped then, knowing I had everybody’s ear, even the pink rat slurping coffee at the counter. Reaching into the junk drawer for a bottle of Elmer’s glue, I put two big blobs on the counter and smacked the empty Frosted Flakes box over them. About twice a year, Granny bought some nice name-brand cereal and let the kids eat it. For days afterward, she left the empty box on the counter for show.

  “Perfect,” I said, leaning back to admire my work, “for seeing when you walk in the door to pick up your kids.”

  Spooner stretched in his seat to get a look at what I was doing and accidentally knocked over the milk pitcher; what was left ran lazily to the edge of the table and started dripping on the floor. Granny was at him in a hot minute. She had a plastic spatula in her hand, and if I knew Granny, she was going to plant a few on the back of his head.

  But I was too quick for her. I yanked it out of her hand and pointed it at Sink and Dip.

  “www dot …” I jabbed the spatula in their direction.

  They both ducked. I could be as lousy as Granny if I wanted to. “www.angelsbeforetheirtime.com,” I said, taking a deep breath in. “Eight years and change. Think about it. No perfume. No boys. No sleeping in.”

  I grabbed my backpack, the one I’d had for the last four years, the one with the duct tape on the bottom to keep the guts from falling out, and paused in front of Serendipity.

  “Imagine a bright orange jumpsuit with ‘Dip’ embroidered on the pocket,” I said.

  Though the girls tried to act like nothing I said bothered them in the least, Dip had to shudder when I mentioned the color orange.

  Orange was a fall color, see? And whenever she worked up the colors that looked best on her, Dip was a summer every time.

  I heard tires crunching on gravel and watched Granny disappear, swearing under her breath, to get her company robe. I decided not to stay for the charade.

  “Have a loving and licensed day, all,” I said, and I was out the door.

  Glancing at the clock on my way out, I figured it would be a miracle if I made it to school before Ms. Lanier, as I’d planned.

  Which got me started on miracles again.

  “Do you believe in miracles?” Homer asked on his bad days. Since Mom went down, I got so good at lying, I could lie to my own self and believe it.

  But I couldn’t lie to Homer.

  Only one thing has ever happened to me that could be described as a miracle, but I suppose I sided with the policeman quoted in one of those articles Homer had me read to him over and over again.

  “If you look at it in a certain way, little Harriet was mighty lucky.”

  I burned through a lot of luck on that flight.

  I keep hoping I didn’t burn through it all.

  I don’t know why Homer was so endlessly fascinated with my fall. Was it because he jumped a fraction of the distance and things ended up so badly? Maybe it’s just that, as he puts it, I flew in the face of reason. And that puzzles him.

  For most people it’s forgotten history. What the old teachers at Trench Vista Elementary tell the new ones is that my father threw me out the window. Or they say I survived a ninety-foot fall. Mom doesn’t get much play in either version.

  She was an addict, I know, but she was addicted to good things, too. Like me, for instance. Like books.

  I remember sliding my hands over the stacks of glossy-covered library books that filled our arms as we rode home on the bus. I remember her reading to me late in the night on her days off, lying in bed, trying to ease me into sleep. My mom could be doing laundry, painting her nails, talking on the phone, but if I wobbled over to her with a book in my hand, she’d pull me onto her lap and we’d read it.

  She liked fairy tales best, liked getting lost in the pictures. We went east of the sun and west of the moon, more north than north, more south than south.

  And she had a powerful urge to know, not just the stories but the authors, too. She liked to talk back to them, tell them to lighten up some or change a scene to suit her wa
y of thinking.

  “They’re mysterious ones, Harry Sue,” she said, combing her fingers down the back of my head. “How else could they know everybody’s secrets?”

  That’s when she informed me of the little-known fact that the L in L. Frank Baum stood for Louise.

  “Boy name and a girl name, just like you,” she said, poking me in the gut. “I bet you’re gonna be a big famous writer someday, too.

  “Just do me one favor, baby, okay? Don’t make it so hard for the heroes to find their way home.”

  When things got real bad for the peasant girl, the one who couldn’t sleep until she reached the castle and had to prop herself up in the trees with wolves howling around, Mom cried. Or the prince who couldn’t make a sound when he was attacked by demons and kicked and punched and stung and bit … that just tore her up.

  Some teachers don’t want to read that stuff to kids because they think it’ll give ‘em bad dreams. But I could tell them real stories that would curl their hair. Even Louise Frank Baum got mixed up in all that when he wrote at the beginning to The Wizard of Oz that he didn’t want his book to be like the crummy old tales that scare kids with beasts and demons.

  What he said was—straight up, Fish! I copied this out of the book—what he said was this: “The modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.”

  He said that’s why he wrote The Wizard of Oz, because he wanted a story “in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

  Either that guy had a real sense of humor or he had no respect for the power of his words. Do you even know the real story of how the Tin Man got to be the way he did? He started out a man, a poor woodcutter who fell in love with a pretty Munchkin girl. But that girl served an old woman who didn’t want her to get married and leave, so the old woman promised a sheep and a cow to the Wicked Witch of the East if she’d stop it from happening. The witch cast a spell on the woodcutter’s ax and it chopped off his leg. He was down about that, you know, but he found a tinsmith to put a tin leg on for him and then he was good to go. Well, that didn’t set too well with the witch, so she bewitched the ax again.

  You get the picture. Over and over. A leg. An arm. His chest. His head. The ax cut it all off. And piece by piece the tinsmith replaced real flesh and blood with tin.

  Now, I don’t know about you. But that doesn’t seem like a sweet little bedtime story to me.

  I mean, seriously, Fish, what kind of tea was that guy drinking?

  Chapter 11

  As I padded down the silent halls of Trench Vista Elementary, I realized that I must have a little luck left in my share because today was Friday. I’d forgotten about Mr. Hernandez’s team meetings, where he called the teachers together before school on Friday to “assess” in his office.

  Every classroom was open and empty and as vulnerable as a sleeping con. I could be very efficient under the circumstances. First I spent a little quality time marinating Ms. Lanier’s erasers in the chalk dust I brought from Granny’s.

  Then I went looking for the art room. Our newest teacher was replacing a mousy little something just out of college who claimed the moldy air at Trench Vista gave her the shingles. Even though I don’t have a lot of good things to say about the air around here, it seemed to me like life was what gave Miss Rodenski the shingles.

  Miss Rodenski kept her room and her supplies in perfect order and seemed disappointed when the students had to use them for the day’s lessons. After the kids filed out, she worked feverishly on the last bit of dried-on glue or splotch of paint before the next class came in. If we got there before she had the room to her satisfaction, she’d make us wait in the hall while she stayed inside scrubbing and cursing the cleaning gods. All that cursing and cleaning didn’t set too well with Mr. Hernandez.

  The room was just as Miss Rodenski left it, looking like a picture out of a magazine: paint lined up on low shelves according to the color wheel, brushes stored tip up, markers stored tip down, colored pencils boxed and sharpened to a lethal point.

  I walked over to the desk. It was clean except for Miss Rodenski’s planner and a wooden carving of a hand with hinges at the fingers so you could pose it any old which way. It called to mind the Tin Man again and I ran my hands over the smooth palm, pressing each wooden finger to it, making a fist.

  As I stood there, I noticed a strange hot smell I couldn’t put a name to. I rattled the drawers, but they were locked. The smell, like spices and hot, hot sunshine, made me want to pick the lock and get at whatever it was. But I wasn’t here for that.

  My stomach rebelled as I turned away. I still hadn’t eaten even one handful of the Frosted Flakes I’d scored off Granny.

  I checked the planner and saw that the new teacher had a bunch of kindergarten crumb snatchers first period. I glanced around, trying to figure the best way to shoot to the bottom of her list.

  The new teacher was a substitute, Mr. Hernandez told us, just working out the rest of the year until a real art teacher could be found. But that didn’t matter to me. I had a reputation to uphold and substitutes were easier than most to mess with.

  Every new teacher needed my welcome-wagon treatment. It laid the foundation for my bad-to-the-bone character assessments. Every once in a while, somebody would catch me helping a crumb snatcher who’d fallen off the slide or busting up a fight so that nobody got hurt, and they’d think there was a little promise in the old girl. That’s when I had to hit back hard. Where it counted.

  With Miss Rodenski, it was easy. I just messed up her supplies. But I’ve also staged gladiator fights for Mr. Hernandez, snipped the tails off Mr. Pandowdy’s collection of snake skins, and put a stink bomb in Ms. Meyering’s coat closet to return my rep to lower-than-curbside Trench Vista trash.

  Homer was the clever one, with his concoctions and inventions. Me, I was low-tech. I either broke stuff or mad-dogged the teachers. When I saw the finger paints set next to the cookie sheets in their nice little squeeze bottles, I scooped them all up and headed for the sink.

  Carefully, I squirted half of each bottle down the drain before topping it off with water. That would make a nice mess when the crumb snatchers aimed their bottles at a cookie sheet. I even had a little fun while I was at it, seeing as I rarely got to art class due to certain restrictions Mr. Hernandez had placed on my movement.

  The last bottle I fixed was purple. Instead of shooting it at the drain, I aimed for the bottom of the stainless steel sink and used my finger to swirl it around. Just for a minute. I didn’t try to make anything, just enjoyed the way my finger felt in the cool paste. Like a blob of purple pudding. I pushed it round and round in a circle.

  “Even though I am a grown man, I still myself enjoy painting with my fingers.”

  I whirled around. In front of me stood a very tall man with skin so dark it was the color of blue midnight.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr. Olatanju. Your new art teacher.”

  “Harry Sue,” I mumbled, looking at the floor and swiping my hands on my shirt.

  “Harry Sue,” he said slowly. His voice was strange and deep, pronouncing each word carefully, just a little different than it was supposed to sound. Instead of “Harry” with a “hair” in it, he said, “Har-ee.”

  I almost forgot to glare.

  “Isn’t that a boy’s name? Har-ee?”

  “So?” I said, conjuring up mad and dumb.

  Mr. Olatanju said nothing. He looked at me as if I were a puzzle that he did not know how to figure. He held his chin in his hand.

  I wasn’t used to people looking at me directly, but I forced myself to lock into his stare.

  “In my handbook, it is clear that I must never touch a student, particularly if we are alone in the room. Since it is my first day, Har-ee Sue, I will not put my hands on your shoulders to see if they are as uneven as they look to me now.”

  He pulled a chair up and, twirling it around,
sat on it backward, his elbows on the chair back, considering me. I noticed how high his knees reached when he was sitting, almost to his shoulders.

  “My wife is a healer. She could help you with the pain.”

  I resisted the urge to knead my shoulder— which was aching—and give him the satisfaction. It was making more sense now. What with the funny way he talked and his dark, dark skin, this hack was from faraway Africa. I’d seen pictures in National Geographic of those voodoo ladies, all naked sagging boobs with rings around their necks.

  No voodoo lady was gonna lay a hand on Harry Sue.

  “You gonna give me detention?”

  Mr. Olatanju gave me a puzzled look.

  “You know, punish me for messing up your stuff.”

  “Punish you?” he asked, still peering at me. “For finger painting?”

  Chapter 12

  After I gave the guy several good reasons to punish me—note that most teachers don’t need help in that department—I went outside to line up for the day. I made sure to give Violet a big smile before I took my place behind her. She wrinkled her nose and turned to face forward. Yeah, yeah. I knew I still smelled from the morning.

  I wished I had some of that stuff from the art guy’s desk, the stuff that smelled like hot and sun, so that I would not smell like swamp and dead things. But I told myself that the joint would smell a lot worse. I had to get used to funky 24-7.

  I was just standing there in line, trying to figure out what happened in the art room, when I felt a hard pinch right between my shoulder blades. Somebody was pulling on my shirt.

  “Told you,” said Jolly Roger Chlorine loudly.

  I chose not to turn around.

  “She doesn’t wear one. Or should I say it doesn’t wear one.”

  Now that demanded attention. Nobody disrespects Harry Sue and gets away with it.

  I turned around to face Jolly Roger Chlorine, which was the nick I gave him because he has the conscience of a bloodthirsty pirate and a patch of hair so white it looks bleached. Maybe this morning wouldn’t be a waste of time, after all. I hoped Mr. Africa was looking out the window.