by Bruce Ingram
I’ve got Ms. Hawk for English 10 Honors first period again; she’s the only teacher that I had last year that I will have this year. With about a month left in the summer, she sent out an e-mail to all her English 10 students about a summer reading assignment that she expected us to complete before school started. We had to read one of five books on the list and have a 300- to 500-word critical analysis on it done by the end of the first week of school. Usually I don’t bother to read any of those summer reading books. It’s always been so much easier to read online descriptions of them, take a few notes, then bluff my way through any kind of assignment.
But one of the books was named Black Boy, and since I’m trying to change my ways anyway, I read it… and it was really good. Maybe I’ve been missing out on this learning thing, too. The book is about a black kid growing up in the 1920s and rebelling against just about everyone and everything he comes up against. I’ve never read a book so good, but I’ve also never read most of the books I’ve been assigned. I’m going to try to get my act together.
Chapter Four: Mia
My biggest worry is that my poppa won’t like me having a white boyfriend, but at least Mama is on my side now. All summer when Luke would come over to help me work on our business, I would make sure that he would come when Poppa was at work. For the longest time, I was worried that Mama didn’t like Luke either, that she, just like Poppa, wanted me to date a Hispanic guy. But one Saturday morning while Poppa was at work, Luke came over to help me butcher two young roosters for us to sell to clients. We were going to drop off the meat on the way to one of our client’s houses. I had been feeling bad all day, and I started to help him with the little roosters when I began throwing up.
Luke told me to go back inside and rest and he would take care of things. He came back late that afternoon and gave Mama a check for the two roosters and a check for my gardening work that he had done. Then, Mama told me later, Luke went into the henhouse and cleaned out the poop, which is what I have to do every Saturday. Mama said any boy who would do all that for me was worth hanging onto. She also finally confessed what I had already known… that Poppa couldn’t stand Luke because he was white and lower class. So Mama said she and I would just keep the knowledge that Luke and I are going to start dating this year between the two of us…maybe that was the best way to handle things for now. Maybe over time if Luke were around Poppa a little, he would start to see the same qualities in him that Mama and I do.
Over the summer even though we only had to read one of them, Luke and I read all five books on Ms. Hawk’s and Mrs. Kendel’s summer reading list: Black Boy, Salt to the Sea, Between Shades of Gray, Moby Dick, and Things Fall Apart. Luke never would have read any of them before we formed our book club last year, probably looking up summaries of them on Wikipedia and using his writing skills to bluff his way through the assignment. But now, I can tell he really enjoys reading and we talked about which book we were reading at the time whenever we took a break from working during the summer.
Luke says he is definitely going to college now, which makes me really happy. Last year, I was scared he was going to drop out of high school when he got old enough. Like me, he has really been saving his money for the future. He talks all the time about buying land out in the country and living there one day, and I think what it would be like to live out there with him. It would be so romantic.
I know I’m too young to fall in love and to know what love is. I want to find a man who is kind and sweet and makes me feel safe and secure and wants to have children and be a good husband and father. Luke might be that man one day, I don’t know. He has all the things I’m looking for, and I’m just going to enjoy being with him and see what the future brings.
When we have our first real date this coming Saturday, we’re going somewhere in the national forest on a picnic. I’m in charge of the food, and Mama and I decided that arroz con pollo would be a good choice. I’m going to devil some eggs, too. Luke said he would take care of dessert by gathering some wild berries; for me just to bring the main course and whatever else I wanted to bring. He knows everything about the outdoors. I bet we’re going hiking up in the mountains somewhere. Mama says she trusts him to be alone with me. She knows he has a good heart after being around him this summer.
Mama and I talked a lot this summer about my future education. I know how much she likes being a nurse, but I think I want to become a doctor and that’s what she has encouraged me to do. I think I would like to be a pediatrician and work with little kids but I know that I would need four years of medical school after college, and then I would need to be in residency at least three years. I also know my family doesn’t have the money for all that. Mama said that she and Poppa are expecting me to be the valedictorian of my class and that that would lead to scholarships. I know that, but I’m not going to be obsessed with being the best student in my class. That would make me all stressed out. I’m going to try to do the best I can, and I think things will work out. I know I can make an A plus in everything.
I start and end the school day with Ms. Hawk and English 10 Honors first period and Yearbook seventh period. I am going to be in charge of features for Yearbook, which should be fun. I have World History II second period then Ecology, Geometry, lunch, Phys. Ed. 10, and French II before Yearbook. I have Luke in my first, second, third, and seventh period classes, and we’re going to sit together. He asked me to tutor him on Tuesdays and Thursdays during lunch, just like last year, and then on Fridays, we can have our book club meetings. Luke got put in the “general” Geometry class fourth period; he said it’s for the “stupid in math” students, which was a little harsh but pretty accurate. I’m hoping I can get him through that class, but I’m not very sure I can.
First Day of School
Chapter Five: Luke
I got to first period English 10 Honors class early because, well, I was actually looking forward to it…which is hard to believe that I like some things about school. Ms. Hawk smiled at me when I came in and said she had “big plans” for me in Yearbook as sports editor. Soon afterwards, Mia came in and sat down beside me and showed me a computerized printout of our jobs for the next month and how we would work them around school and homework.
I noticed that this Saturday between 10:00 and 4:00 P.M. was left blank and all the other Saturdays of the month were the same way for those times, and I asked her why those blocks were open, and she looked at me and smiled and said that I knew what those open periods were for and stop pretending that I didn’t. That’s when we can have our dates and still have time to do jobs in the morning and evening.
English class went great, and so did World History II and Ecology, but the day just fell apart after that. Geometry was filled with kids just like me, people stupid in math that didn’t want to be in there. About five people, all guys, came in late, and it wasn’t because it was the first day of school—nobody was in a hurry to arrive in purgatory. Then the teacher, she said her name was Ms. Waters and that this was her first teaching job, introduced herself and talked about the “importance of geometry in our daily lives.” Oh, yeah, right, geometry is the one thing that’s been missing in my life, and if I only had geometry, life would be great when Dad is cursing at me. Why does the school give all the new teachers the hardest to teach students in the hardest to understand courses?
Then that woman started talking about the “Parallel Postulate,” how “that through a point that’s not on a given line there is exactly one parallel line.” Aughhhhhhh. What’s that supposed to mean? How in any known universe on any known planet can a point somewhere off in space somewhere have a line that is parallel to it and then have that line find that point and then run right through that point, and how is it still parallel to it if it is running through it?
I am still trying to wrap my mind around all this junk when Ms. Waters came up with another pearl of wisdom, that “concepts of congruence, similarity, and symmetry can be understood…” (No, I don’t understand them) from pe
rspectives of the “fundamental rigid motions” and “translation.” I understand the word translation and that geometry is a foreign language designed by evil aliens on a hostile planet that have come here to suck the life blood out of us. I’m not sure I got all that right, she was going so fast and I’m so stupid, and half the class was checking their phones or texting while all that was going on, and the other half was sitting in stunned disbelief that they were going to need to understand this crap to pass the class. I got no chance to pass this class.
I had lunch next, and Mia had offered to come to the library and sit with me at a computer and for us to be together, but I told her that I didn’t want to monopolize all her lunch periods, and she needed to sit with her friends on Mondays and Wednesdays. I meant that, too. I don’t want to be one of those possessive boyfriends. We can have Friday lunches to enjoy being together because there’s not going to be much joy when she’s tutoring me in geometry on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Things continued their downward spiral when I got to Phys. Ed and Health fifth period. After my mind was about to explode from the geometry, I needed to go outside and run or play some kind of game with a ball, anything to clear my mind. Instead, I found out that we were going to do health this week, and Coach Miley said that today’s topic was “sports rules.” What about how to drive a car, when is that supposed to happen? I need that information with Mom too sick to help me with my driving and Dad too angry and busy to take me. A fifty-five minute lecture on “what you should know about volleyball rules” was what we got instead. The lecture was highlighted by the world’s longest and most boring PowerPoint in recorded history. (I mean, does each bullet point have to be four lines long and can’t there be at least one picture on a slide. Everybody is just dying to see a picture of a volleyball on the screen.) Spanish I was next, and I didn’t understand much what Ms. Hurst was saying because she’s from Germany and still speaks with an accent from that country, and she was introducing us to the most common Spanish sayings, which would be confusing enough without her accent. I’m not worried about Spanish, though, Mia will help me with that.
Yearbook was great. Mia, Elly, and I are on the same team. Elly is going to take most of the pictures for Mia’s features and my sports coverage, so I get to work with the two nicest, prettiest girls in the whole school. Being with them and making plans for what we were going to cover almost made me forget what I had to do after school. As soon as I got home, I had to go mow a lawn two streets over, and I felt like I was running across the grass just to get it done in time, so I could trim the shrubbery and get home so I could wash one of Dad’s cars before dark and then get it vacuumed.
I finally finished all that around 8:30 and then I remembered that I hadn’t eaten since I had an energy bar for lunch, and I looked for Mom and she was already in bed asleep, which is where she is much of the time it seems. I’m really worried about her, something terrible has got to be going on. I looked in the freezer and all there was were macaroni and cheese packages (which I can’t stand because we have it for dinner all the time) and packages of cheap pizzas, which have something in them that give me hives. The refrigerator part was highlighted by rows and rows of Dad’s favorite beer, some Jack Daniels when he is feeling particularly festive, and some milk that had one day left on its expiration date. I had had a feeling that Dad had become reacquainted with Mr. Jack because of the way he’s been acting lately.
I found two very brown bananas, some stale cornflakes, and with the milk about to go bad, I ate and drank every bit of that stuff. I’ll try to get up early tomorrow morning and run my usual three miles and work on my English and World History homework. I’m not going to even bother with the geometry homework. I’ll tell the teacher I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do, which will be the truth. Knowing the students in that class, I’m sure tomorrow there’s going to be a long line of zeroes for homework scores in the gradebook. She can’t fail us all, can she? If I keep my mouth shut and don’t act up, I bet she’ll pass me on with a D just to get rid of me.
I’m guessing the refrigerator fairy is not going to visit overnight and stock up the old icebox. So what’s going to be on the breakfast menu? I guess that it will have to be that stash of energy bars that I keep under my bed. Yep, this is how I sure want to live when I’m an adult. Ain’t life grand!
Chapter Six: Elly
I got to first period English a little early so I could make sure that I did my summer reading assignment on Salt to the Sea correctly. I was glad to see Ms. Hawk, and I’m proud that she had enough confidence in me to make me the photography editor. I showed her the new Nikon that Dad bought me and she said for me to use that camera since it was way better than any she had for the class.
I was still chatting with Ms. Hawk when I saw Caleb come in and sit by himself, so I thought here was my chance to show him how much better I look without glasses. I totally forgot that I’m dating Paul; I’d dump Paul in a heartbeat if Caleb would notice me just a little, and if I thought I had any chance with him—he’s so good looking and athletic and the quarterback ( I don’t know much about sports but I know that’s a big deal) and …that long wavy hair of his! So I ended my conversation with Ms. Hawk and went over and sat down next to Caleb and fidgeted around for a minute or so, waiting for him to say hi or something, but he was so busy texting that I don’t think he had even noticed that I sat down.
I waited another minute or so, and he still hadn’t noticed me, so I said something lame like, “Did you have a good summer?” And his response was “Yeah,” and kept on texting. He didn’t even add “did you” to his “yeah,” and he still hadn’t looked up to notice how different I look now. I waited another minute or so, and there weren’t any more comments from him, and I was desperately thinking of something to say and I came up with, “How’s football going, are you ready for the first game this Friday night?” This time, he mumbled something; I couldn’t even hear what he said. And then I looked over and saw that Paige and Mary had come in, and Paige made eye contact with me, frowned and shook her head and motioned with a hand for me to come over and sit with them. Mary had this smirk on her face, like she was saying that I was making a fool of myself.
I was about ready to get up when Caleb practically leapt out of his seat because this girl came into the room. She must be a new student, because I had never seen her before, and she was absolutely stunning: long jet black hair and long legs and she was wearing a really short skirt. How did Caleb see her out of the corner of his eye from across the room and not even notice me while I was sitting right next to him? Who am I fooling, I think we all know the answer to that question. I got up and slouched over to Paige and Mary, and Paige whispered out, “Stop torturing yourself about him,” and Mary in typical blunt Mary fashion said, “Give it up, you look desperate.”
I felt absolutely humiliated by what they said, especially Mary’s comment, but they’re right…I’ve got to put Caleb out of my mind. I was so mad at myself and kept replaying the whole thing over and over in my head. Time went by and Ms. Hawk was welcoming us to class and showing the class syllabus on the Smart Board, and I was still obsessing on Caleb and my misery. Then Ms. Hawk called on me to read from the literature book, and I asked her where we were in the story, that I had lost my place and then a bunch of people, mostly the boys, started laughing. Ms. Hawk said we were at the beginning of the story, and then the guys laughed again.
So in the first minutes of the school year, Caleb ignored me and the rest of the boys in first period laughed at me. I know my face was red and it got even redder when I realized I was so out of it, I hadn’t even heard Ms. Hawk say the page we were on, and I had to ask her and this time her voice was a little sharp when she said “Page 32.” I stuttered and stammered my way through two paragraphs before Ms. Hawk cut me off (we usually have to read four or five paragraphs in her class) and asked somebody else to read. Great, now I’ve also made my favorite teacher mad at me… can this day get any worse?
&nb
sp; The next three periods were just a blur, I was so upset and mad at myself, and I couldn’t seem to focus and kept replaying in my head over and over the start of first period. When lunch came, I went over and sat with Paige, Mary, and Mia. Paige and Mary were talking about what they were going to do Friday night, Paige saying that Allen was going to take her out for pizza before they went to the football game, and Mary said that she and I were meeting Richard and Paul after the game for food wherever the guys wanted to go.
Mary then smirked and said that’s what she thought we were doing, unless “Elly wants to wait outside the guys’ locker room and wait for Caleb to notice her.” Then Paige said “Stop it, Mary, that’s enough, it’s getting old,” which made me think that I had been the topic of conversation before I got there.
Mary’s one of my best friends, but she’s got this cruel streak in her that comes out every now and then. I decided to take the high road and say I deserved to be made fun of after “my performance” in first block and then Paige said, “Who’s the new girl that Caleb was so interested in?”
