“Look, I’m not going to let you fall, man.” She put her hands loosely around his ankles. She could feel him relaxing under her fingers. He reared back and shot. “Pow,” he said a little louder than before, sending the white craft with its pale blue lines as high—well, almost as high—as the house, looping, climbing, gliding, resting at last in the azalea bush in Mr. Randolph’s yard.
William Ernest scrambled off the post and down the steps. He was slowed by the fence, but not stopped. You could tell he’d never climbed a fence in his life, and it would have been faster by far to go through the gate and around, but he had chosen the most direct route to his precious plane.
He fell in Mr. Randolph’s yard in such a way that one arm and leg seemed to arrive before the other pair, but he picked himself up at once and delicately plucked his prize from the bush. He turned around to grin shyly at Gilly and then, as though carrying the crown of England, came down Mr. Randolph’s walk, the sidewalk, and into Trotter’s gate.
About halfway up the walk, he said something.
“What you say?” Gilly asked.
“I say”—the veins on his neck stuck out with the effort of raising his voice to an audible level—“I say, It sure fly good.”
He wasn’t as dumb as he looked now, was he? thought Gilly smiling, without taking time to calculate which of her smiles to put on. “You throw good, too, William E.”
“I do?”
“Sure. I was just admiring your style. I guess you’ve had lessons.”
He cocked his head in puzzlement.
“No? You just taught yourself?”
He nodded his head solemnly.
“Gee, man, you’re a natural. I’ve never seen such a natural.”
He straightened his thin shoulders and marched up the stairs as though he were the President of the United States.
They were still flying the plane, or rather W.E. was flying it with Gilly looking on and making admiring remarks from time to time, when Trotter and Mr. Randolph came out on the porch.
“You gotta see this, Trotter. William Ernest can do this really good.”
W.E. climbed unassisted to the top of the concrete post. He didn’t need Gilly’s hands or help now. “Watch,” he said softly. “Watch here.”
Mr. Randolph lifted his sightless face upward. “What is it, son?”
“Gilly made him a paper airplane, looks like,” interpreted Trotter.
“Oh, I see, I see.”
“Watch now.”
“We’re watching, William Ernest, honey.” W.E. leaned back and let fly—“pow”—for another swooping, soaring, slowly spiraling, skimming superflight.
Trotter sighed as the plane gracefully landed by the curb. William Ernest rushed to retrieve it.
“How was it?” Mr. Randolph asked.
“I ’clare, Mr. Randolph, sometimes it’s a pity you gotta miss seeing things. I never thought paper airplanes was for anything but to drive teachers crazy before.” She turned to Gilly. “That was really something,” she said.
Gilly could feel herself blushing, but W.E. came up the steps and saved her. “It’s ’cause I fly it so good,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Gilly, patting his shoulder. “You sure do.” He looked up into her face, his squinty little eyes full of pure pleasure.
“Thank you,” said Trotter softly.
For a moment Gilly looked at her, then quickly turned away as a person turns from bright sunlight. “Want me to walk Mr. Randolph home?” she asked.
“Thank you, Miss Gilly. I would appreciate that so much.”
She took his elbow and guided him carefully down the stairs, taking care not to look back over her shoulder because the look on Trotter’s face was the one Gilly had, in some deep part of her, longed to see all her life, but not from someone like Trotter. That was not part of the plan.
HARASSING MISS HARRIS
By the third week in October, Gilly had caught up with her class and gone on ahead. She tried to tell herself that she had forced Miss Harris into a corner from which the woman could give her nothing but A’s. Surely, it must kill old priss face to have to put rave notices—“Excellent” “Good, clear thinking” “Nice Work”—on the papers of someone who so obviously disliked her.
But Miss Harris was a cool customer. If she knew that Gilly despised her, she never let on. So at this point Gilly was not ready to pull her time-honored trick of stopping work just when the teacher had become convinced that she had a bloody genius on her hands. That had worked so beautifully at Hollywood Gardens—the whole staff had gone totally ape when suddenly one day she began turning in blank sheets of paper. It was the day after Gilly had overheard the principal telling her teacher that Gilly had made the highest score in the entire school’s history on her national aptitude tests, but, of course, no one knew that she knew, so an army of school psychologists had been called in to try to figure her out. Since no one at school would take the blame for Gilly’s sudden refusal to achieve, they decided to blame her foster parents, which made Mrs. Nevins so furious that she demanded that Miss Ellis remove Gilly at once instead of waiting out the year—the year Mrs. Nevins had reluctantly agreed to, after her first complaints about Gilly’s sassy and underhanded ways.
But something warned Gilly that Miss Harris was not likely to crumble at the sight of a blank sheet of paper. She was more likely simply to ignore it. She was different from the other teachers Gilly had known. She did not appear to be dependent on her students. There was no evidence that they fed either her anxieties or her satisfactions. In Gilly’s social-studies book there was a picture of a Muslim woman of Saudi Arabia, with her body totally covered except for her eyes. It reminded Gilly somehow of Miss Harris, who had wrapped herself up in invisible robes. Once or twice a flash in the eyes seemed to reveal something to Gilly of the person underneath the protective garments, but such flashes were so rare that Gilly hesitated to say even to herself what they might mean.
Some days it didn’t matter to Gilly what Miss Harris was thinking or not thinking. It was rather comfortable to go to school with no one yelling or cajoling—to know that your work was judged on its merits and was not affected by the teacher’s personal opinion of the person doing the work. It was a little like throwing a basketball. If you aimed right, you got it through the hoop; it was absolutely just and absolutely impersonal.
But other days, Miss Harris’s indifference grated on Gilly. She was not used to being treated like everyone else. Ever since the first grade, she had forced her teachers to make a special case of her. She had been in charge of her own education. She had learned what and when it pleased her. Teachers had courted her and cursed her, but no one before had simply melted her into the mass.
As long as she had been behind the mass, she tolerated this failure to treat her in a special manner, but now, even the good-morning smile seemed to echo the math computer’s “Hello, Gilly number 58706, today we will continue our study of fractions.” Crossing threshold of classroom causes auto-teacher to light up and say “Good morning.” For three thousand dollars additional, get the personalized electric-eye model that calls each student by name.
For several days she concentrated on the vision of a computer-activated Miss Harris. It seemed to fit. Brilliant, cold, totally, absolutely, and maddeningly fair, all her inner workings shinily encased and hidden from view. Not a Muslim but a flawless tamperproof machine.
The more Gilly thought about it, the madder she got. No one had a right to cut herself off from other people like that. Just once, before she left this dump, she’d like to pull a wire inside that machine. Just once she’d like to see Harris-6 scream in anger—fall apart—break down.
But Miss Harris wasn’t like Trotter. You didn’t have to be around Trotter five minutes before you knew the direct route to her insides—William Ernest Teague. Miss Harris wasn’t hooked up to other people. It was like old Mission Impossible reruns on TV: Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to get inside this computerized robot,
discover how it operates, and neutralize its effectiveness. The self-destructing tape never told the mission-impossible team how to complete their impossible mission, but the team always seemed to know. Gilly, on the other hand, hadn’t a clue.
It was TV that gave her the clue. She hadn’t been thinking about Miss Harris at all. She’d been thinking, actually, of how to get the rest of Mr. Randolph’s money and hadn’t been listening to the news broadcast. Then somehow it began sending a message into her brain. A high government official had told a joke on an airplane that had gotten him fired. Not just any joke, mind you. A dirty joke. But that wasn’t what got him fired. The dirty joke had been somehow insulting to blacks. Apparently all the black people in the country and even some whites were jumping up and down with rage. Unfortunately the commentator didn’t repeat the joke. She could have used it. But at least she knew now something that might be a key to Harris-6.
She borrowed some money from Trotter for “school supplies,” and bought a pack of heavy white construction paper and magic markers. Behind the closed door of her bedroom she began to make a greeting card, fashioning it as closely as she could to the tall, thin, “comic” cards on the special whirl-around stand in the drugstore.
At first she tried to draw a picture on the front, wasting five or six precious sheets of paper in the attempt. Cursing her incompetence, she stole one of Trotter’s magazines and cut from it a picture of a tall, beautiful black woman in an Afro. Her skin was a little darker than Miss Harris’s, but it was close enough.
Above the picture of the woman she lettered these words carefully (She could print well, even if her drawing stank):
THEY’RE SAYING “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL!”
Then below the picture:
BUT THE BEST THAT I CAN FIGGER
IS EVERYONE WHO’S SAYING SO
LOOKS MIGHTY LIKE A
And inside in tiny letters:
PERSON WITH A VESTED INTEREST IN
MAINTAINING THIS POINT OF VIEW.
She had to admit it. It was about the funniest card she’d ever seen in her life. Gifted Gilly—a funny female of the first rank. If her bedroom had been large enough, she’d have rolled on the floor. As it was, she lay on the bed hugging herself and laughing until she was practically hysterical. Her only regret was that the card was to be anonymous. She would have enjoyed taking credit for this masterpiece.
She got to school very early the next morning and sneaked up the smelly stairs to Harris-6 before the janitor had even turned on the hall lights. For a moment she feared that the door might be locked, but it opened easily under her hand. She slipped the card into the math book that lay in the middle of Miss Harris’s otherwise absolutely neat desk. She wanted to be sure that no one else would discover it and ruin everything.
All day long, but especially during math, Gilly kept stealing glances at Miss Harris. Surely at any minute, she would pick up the book. Surely she could see the end of the card sticking out and would be curious. But Miss Harris left the book exactly where it was. She borrowed a book from a student when she needed to refer to one. It was as though she sensed her own was booby-trapped.
By lunchtime Gilly’s heart, which had started the day jumping with happy anticipation, was kicking angrily at her stomach. By midafternoon she was so mad that nothing had happened that she missed three spelling words, all of which she knew perfectly well. At the three o’clock bell, she slammed her chair upside down on her desk and headed for the door.
“Gilly.”
Her heart skipped as she turned toward Miss Harris.
“Will you wait a minute, please?”
They both waited, staring quietly at each other until the room emptied. Then Miss Harris got up from her desk and closed the door. She took a chair from one of the front desks and put it down a little distance from her own. “Sit down for a minute, won’t you?”
Gilly sat. The math book lay apparently undisturbed, the edge of the card peeping out at either end.
“You may find this hard to believe, Gilly, but you and I are very much alike.”
Gilly snapped to attention despite herself.
“I don’t mean in intelligence, although that is true, too. Both of us are smart, and we know it. But the thing that brings us closer than intelligence is anger. You and I are two of the angriest people I know.” She said all this in a cool voice that cut each word in a thin slice from the next and then waited, as if to give Gilly a chance to challenge her. But Gilly was fascinated, like the guys in the movies watching the approach of a cobra. She wasn’t about to make a false move.
“We do different things with our anger, of course. I was always taught to deny mine, which I did and still do. And that makes me envy you. Your anger is still up here on the surface where you can look it in the face, make friends with it if you want to.”
She might have been talking Swahili for all Gilly could understand.
“But I didn’t ask you to stay after school to tell you how intelligent you are or how much I envy you, but to thank you for your card.”
It had to be sarcasm, but Harris-6 was smiling almost like a human being. When did the cobra strike?
“I took it to the teachers’ room at noon and cursed creatively for twenty minutes. I haven’t felt so good in years.”
She’d gone mad like the computer in 2001. Gilly got up and started backing toward the door. Miss Harris just smiled and made no effort to stop her. As soon as she got to the stairs, Gilly began to run and, cursing creatively, ran all the way home.
DUST AND DESPERATION
All at once, leaving Thompson Park became urgent. Gilly knew in the marrow of her bones that if she stayed much longer, this place would mess her up. Between the craziness in the brown house and the craziness at school, she would become like W.E., soft and no good, and if there was anything her short life had taught her, it was that a person must be tough. Otherwise, you were had.
And Galadriel Hopkins was not ready to be had. But she must hurry. It didn’t matter whether the people who hovered over her had fat laps or computer brains. For if a person could crack under heat or cold, a combination of the two seemed guaranteed to do in even the gutsy Galadriel.
By now she would have preferred to get Mr. Randolph’s money on her own and leave both William Ernest and Agnes Stokes out of it, but in her haste she acted stupidly and used them both.
The opportunity fell into her lap unexpectedly. Trotter had never asked her to baby-sit with William Ernest before, but suddenly two days after the card joke bombed, Trotter announced that she was taking Mr. Randolph to pick up a few things at the dime store and would Gilly watch William Ernest while they were gone.
It was too perfect. She should have realized that, but her anxiety to get the money and get going had fuzzed her common sense. With shaking hands, she leafed through the fat suburban phone book until she found the number for the Stokeses in Thompson Park who supposedly lived on Aspen Avenue. (Another of the world’s lies. The senior Stokeses had long before left the Washington area, abandoning Agnes to a maternal grandmother, seventy-five-years-old, by the name of Gertrude Berkheimer. But Agnes’s delinquent father was still listed in the directory just as though he had never left her.)
Agnes arrived immediately, nearly falling over herself with joy that Gilly had not only invited her over but was actually asking for her help in carrying out a secret and obviously illegal plot. She agreed, without objection, to being the lookout at Mr. Randolph’s house, although Gilly suspected she would have preferred an inside role. Agnes was to do her whistle, which she claimed could be heard a mile away, should the taxi bearing Trotter and Mr. Randolph return while Gilly was still inside.
Prying W.E. away from the TV and explaining his part to him proved far more difficult.
“I don’t understand,” he said for what seemed to be the thirtieth time, blinking stupidly behind his glasses.
Gilly started all over again from the beginning as patiently as she could.
“Mr. Randolp
h wants you and me to do him a favor. He’s got something on the top shelf in his living room that he needs, and he can’t see to get it down. I told him you and me weren’t too busy this afternoon, so he says, ‘Miss Gilly, could you and William Ernest, who is just like a grandson to me, do me a tremendous favor while I am busy at the store?’ So of course I told him we’d be glad to help out. You being just like a grandson to him and all.” She paused.
“What kind of favor?”
“Just get this stuff down off the shelf for him.”
“Oh.” Then, “What stuff?”
“William Ernest. I haven’t got all day. Do you want to help or not?”
He guessed so. Well, it would have to do. They had already delayed far too long. She gave Agnes some last-minute instructions out of range of the boy’s earshot. Agnes would have to be paid in cold cash to keep her big mouth you-know-what. Then she went and got W.E. by the hand, and using the key that Trotter kept, they let themselves into Mr. Randolph’s house.
The house was dark and damp-feeling even in the daytime, but fortunately the boy was used to it and walked right in.
Gilly pointed out the top shelf of the bookcase. “He told me he had the stuff right behind that big red book.”
W.E. looked up.
“See which one I’m talking about?”
He nodded, then shook his head. “I can’t reach it.”
“Of course not, stu—I can’t reach it, either. That’s why we both have to do it.”
“Oh.”
“Now look. I’m going to push this big blue chair over and stand on the arm. Then I want you to climb up the back of the chair and get on my shoulders…”
He drew back. “I want to wait for Trotter.”
“We can’t do that, William Ernest, honey. You know how hard it is on Trotter climbing up and down. It wouldn’t be good for her.” He was still hesitant. “Besides, I think it’s kind of a surprise for Trotter. Mr. Randolph doesn’t want her to know about it. Yet.”