Ms. Saunders said we would play a geography game to see who had traveled farthest over the summer. Although the grand prize would go to the one who went the farthest, there would be other prizes for most unique travel.
“We will play by process of elimination.” Ms. Saunders’s accent sounded both familiar and different. Her long words were neat at the beginnings and ends but lilted in the middles. She was from a Caribbean island, although I couldn’t pinpoint which one.
I didn’t have a chance of winning, but I wanted to play as long as I could. At least Victoria had a real shot. She had just returned from Africa. West Africa. Nigeria. Unless someone traveled to East Africa or South Africa or China, Victoria had the prize in the bag.
We all stood up.
“Who left Queens this summer?” Ms. Saunders asked, surveying the room. She wore round glasses with lenses that magnified her eyes, which meant those eyes didn’t miss a thing. Even so, she had “nice teacher” written all over her. I could tell she was the kind of teacher who loved smart kids and was patient with the Juwan Spensers of the world.
Three of my classmates were the first to be eliminated. They hadn’t gone anywhere over the summer. Not even to the pier for the Fourth of July, to Yankee Stadium for a ball game, or to Bear Mountain for a picnic.
Ms. Saunders then asked, “Has anyone left the state of New York?” She circled the green pork chop on the map. By the time she turned away from the map, Juwan Spenser and half of the class had sat down.
Jerilyn Miller raised her hand. “Ms. Saunders, does going to a funeral in New Jersey count for out of state?” Jerilyn knew full well New Jersey was a state of its own. We were in Mrs. Ryan’s class last year, and Mrs. Ryan drilled us about the fifty states, the capitals, and their flowers. You couldn’t be promoted unless you knew them.
Then Ritchie Lewis asked if surfing on the Internet counted. If it did, he went rock climbing in Colorado, coral reef diving in Maui, and gliding through the Everglades.
Region by region, Ms. Saunders eliminated us, decorating the map with pushpins to mark the places we traveled to. She asked if anyone had traveled south of the Mason-Dixon line. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what she meant, but my face gave me away.
Why couldn’t my cousins live in Alabama like Janetta Mitchell’s family or in Mississippi like Kyla’s family? Silver Spring, Maryland, wasn’t far south enough. I hated that my chances of winning were over, even though I knew I would have been eliminated sooner or later. At least Victoria was still standing, I thought. I could root for her.
No one had gone farther west than Chicago, which was where Nahda went for vacation. Ms. Saunders then stuck red pushpins in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Trinidad, the countries where Carmen, Fedelina, Thurston, and Vincent visited. She also stuck a pin in Barbados, which is where she went for the summer to see her family.
Now only three players stood: Victoria, Zuhair, and Ida. I realized Victoria wasn’t going to win. Zuhair’s family was from Yemen and Ida’s family was from the Philippines.
Ms. Saunders asked Victoria which continent she traveled to—as if she couldn’t guess.
Victoria said, “Africa,” the first clear word I’d heard her speak since she came back.
Ms. Saunders got that “motherland” look that pushed her moon face out even rounder. I know that look all too well because my mother often wears it when she’s proud of and excited about all things African.
I glanced at Victoria. Have you ever seen that old photo of Queen Victoria in an encyclopedia? The one where she’s wearing a black dress, with a high, stiff collar, and her face is bulldog proud? That’s sort of like Victoria’s natural expression, which she copied from Queen Victoria, her heroine. But Victoria didn’t seem especially proud like the queen of England. She seemed nervous.
Ms. Saunders didn’t know Victoria looked different. How could she? Ms. Saunders was still excited about Victoria’s trip to Africa and asked which countries she visited. Before Victoria could answer, Ms. Saunders said, “Class, Africa is made up of how many countries?”
It was kind of funny to see a teacher act so giddy. Ms. Saunders must really love Africa.
I shot my hand up along with my classmates’. My face pleaded to be called on, especially when every number from twenty to two hundred was shouted out. Finally Ms. Saunders looked my way, searching for my name card that had fallen on the floor. She glanced at her attendance book, pointed, and said, “Jerilyn.”
I scooped up my name card and said, “I’m Akilah. We switched. And there are more than fifty countries and about seven hundred million people.”
“Why, thank you, Akilah,” Ms. Saunders said. “Living up to the meaning of your name.” She winked at me, rather than tell the class that Akilah means “intelligent” in Swahili. I winked back.
Ms. Saunders said, “I began my teaching career in Kenya. Throughout the year, I will share many interesting facts about my experiences there.” She circled Kenya on the map. Then she returned her attention to Victoria. “Which country did you visit”—she looked at her name card—“Victoria?”
Victoria didn’t answer, so Ms. Saunders repeated herself.
Finally Victoria said, “Nigeria.”
Ms. Saunders was even more excited. “And was there a special reason for the trip?” She stuck a green pushpin in the heart of Nigeria. When her back was turned, I thought I heard Victoria say, “To die.” Or maybe it was my imagination.
Victoria shook her head no.
Head shake? Head shake? Victoria wasn’t a head shaker or a mumbler, for that matter. The know-it-all in me almost shot up my arm to answer, “There was a special celebration to mark her coming-of-age,” but I used my self-control. That was especially hard, having the answer ready.
“May I sit?” Victoria asked.
Two girls, whose names I did not know, mimicked her. They weren’t in the fourth grade with us last year. They didn’t know that Victoria was born in Nigeria and lived in England until she was eight and spoke like the queen.
Girl Warrior gave them both a mean look: If you mess with her, you mess with me. They got it and shut up.
Ms. Saunders let Victoria take her seat. That left Zuhair and Ida still standing.
No Laughter
We had to write an essay for language arts. Just a paragraph or two of suggestions about improving the environment so Ms. Saunders could “assess our writing skills.” I couldn’t contain myself. Two paragraphs? I covered every line on my paper, front and back.
Even though our first essay wouldn’t be graded, I was anxious to get mine back to read Ms. Saunders’s comments. Just like she was checking us out, I was checking her out too.
When we got our essays back, I looked over at Victoria’s paper, partly because I wanted to compare Ms. Saunders’s comments and partly because I missed Victoria’s loopty-loo Ls and jolly P stems.
First I tried to look on the sly, but Victoria didn’t make it easy. Her handwriting was tiny and scrunched together in secret code letters. She hadn’t even written entire lines from left to right. Instead, her two paragraphs looked like the Japanese poems we studied in Mrs. Ryan’s class, two and three words to a line.
On top of her paper Ms. Saunders wrote, Victoria, margins? Paragraphs? Topic? See me. I had no trouble reading those words. Big. Red. Slanting to the right. Each word ending in fishhooks.
For once I didn’t care about our little competition. From those big red letters, the See me, and those fishhooks, I knew Victoria was in trouble. Ms. Saunders had already “assessed” that Victoria’s writing skills weren’t up to fifth-grade standards.
Victoria didn’t seem bothered by all that red writing on her paper. She just opened her loose-leaf binder and neatly slipped the essay into the language arts section.
I panicked for both of us. I couldn’t let Mrs. Ojike see that paper. Victoria never brought home a grade less than a Very Good. Mental note: Rip out that essay the minute we leave the school yard.
/> In math we were doing review, and I had rocket arm so bad Ms. Saunders stopped calling on me. Juwan mouthed a cuss at me, but Ms. Saunders caught him and made him write, “Intelligent people do not curse” on both sides of a sheet of paper that his mother would have to sign. I couldn’t wait to get out on the playground to laugh, laugh, laugh at his sorry buzzard head.
“To figure out Jerry’s average score, we must…” Ms. Saunders circled the room with her eyes. “Who haven’t I heard from—Victoria Ojike. What a lovely name.”
Of course everyone snickered. Don’t teachers know when they’re embarrassing you?
Victoria was looking ahead but not up at Ms. Saunders, like she was doing a trick: How to pretend you’re there when you’re not.
Her mouth parted. She might have even said, “Yes?” but it was so low.
Ms. Saunders stood directly before Victoria’s row, tapping her foot. Victoria’s trick would not work this time.
“Victoria, are you with us?”
A voice in the back of the classroom said, “She’s in outer space.”
Juwan—as if he weren’t already in enough trouble—joined in. “She’s in the deepest, darkest Congo.”
I hated him and he knew it. He just gave me one big headache.
Ms. Saunders raised an eyebrow in Juwan and Darryl’s direction and the room got quiet. Ms. Saunders is such a nice lady, but when she becomes stern you know better than to mess with her. As if nothing had happened, she turned to Victoria with her moon pie face. Soft. Patient.
“Victoria,” she said, “what operation will we perform first?”
Then I saw it! The word operation made Victoria’s eyes jump.
“Operation?”
Ms. Saunders seemed truly dumbfounded. She wondered what I was wondering. Was this Victoria Ojike from 4–1? Mathorama champ? First runner-up in last year’s spelling bee?
Janetta called, “First you add up all of his scores, then you divide.” Ms. Saunders made the raise-your-hand gesture. Janetta raised her hand then blurted out her answer.
Before the dismissal buzzer sounded, Ms. Saunders reminded Victoria that she wanted to speak to her. I tried to linger behind, but Ms. Saunders cleared her throat and told me to get going. I stood outside the closed door until Mrs. Jenkins, the hall aide, showed me the way out.
I must have waited outside for thirty minutes. Almost every bus and van had left by the time Victoria finally came shlushing through the doors. That’s exactly how she walked. Kind of draggy, like she was shlushing through puddles in galoshes.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Say?”
“I hate when you do that and you do it a lot,” I said. “Ms. Saunders. What did she say?”
She took a few draggy steps before she said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Now I was doing it. “Ms. Saunders didn’t say ‘Akilah, beat it’ to tell you nothing. What she say?”
Victoria shrugged.
If she didn’t talk, my imagination was only going to take off. I already had a few ideas while watching the last bus pull off. I pictured Ms. Saunders saying, “Victoria, if you don’t snap out of it I will be forced to put you in the slow class.” Or “Victoria, I am going to change your seat so I can watch you better.”
Victoria wouldn’t even look at me. She just kept walking slow. I’d walk slow too if I had to show my mother all that red writing on my paper.
Sooner or later she’d have to tell me what was going on. In the meantime I changed the subject so we could laugh about how Juwan got snagged for cursing in class. I was starting to go on about Juwan’s haircut when Victoria said, “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Try to make me laugh.”
Well, now I was mad. “Excuse me, Queen Victoria. Off with my head, why doncha?”
“That’s from Alice in Wonderland, and it’s not funny.”
“First you say don’t make you laugh. Then you say I’m not funny. Girl, you better make up your mind.”
She stopped right there, pushed her finger in my chest, and said like she was a crossing guard, “No laughter.”
“What?”
She said, “You can’t make me laugh. No one can. So do not try.”
Why did she have to dare me? Daring me was like waving a red cape at a bull. I knew exactly how to make her laugh. I reached to tickle the sensitive skin under her chin to prove it. She slapped my hand away, hard.
I slapped her back. Harder.
We just stood there, eye to eye, neither one of us speaking or blinking. Then she walked away.
Sulking
When Dad tried to jolly me with a trip to the video store, Mom said, “Leave her alone. She’s sulking. Let her sulk.”
Dad wasn’t hearing Mom at all. He said, “Let’s shoot some hoops, baby girl. I’ll spot you eight points.”
I shook my head no. Then he started to sulk, which annoyed me because there wasn’t room for his sulking. Only mine. And on top of that, I had a headache. One that had been creeping up the back of my head for a while. I had the exact same headache last month at the start of the half moon. I knew, because the first time my head throbbed like this, I opened my window so I could howl at the moon, arroOUUU. There was the moon, with its face turned sideways, laughing at me.
Dad wouldn’t let things be. He was still trying to get me to open up. “Bad day at school, puddin’?”
Mom got annoyed. “Roy.”
He wouldn’t let go. “Someone giving you a hard time? Is it that Juwan character?” He turned to Mom and said, “That boy thinks he can get away with it because she’s an only. There’s always strength in numbers on the playground, Gladys.”
Out of nowhere, Mom and Dad’s ongoing argument, the one they think I can’t hear at night, worked its way into the living room. It’s all about the baby Dad wants Mom to have before they get too old. Dad doesn’t believe that I should grow up alone. Mom answered, “Fine, Roy. I’ll have another baby if you stay home to take care of it.” After that Dad was excited like a kid on Christmas Eve and started making plans to work at home. Mom saw her reverse psychology hadn’t worked and told him she wasn’t having any more kids. She said there were too many kids in the world as it was.
I wanted to go upstairs before they made my headache worse.
Dad told me, “If I have to escort you to school each and every day, I will.”
I wouldn’t talk. My head was killing me and I was mad at Victoria. I just wanted to be in my room with the door closed.
My refusal to talk only made Dad more concerned. “Akilah, I’m your dad,” he coaxed. “If there’s anything I should know about, you can tell me.”
Now I knew how Victoria felt when I kept bugging her, then trying to jolly her. I was still mad at her, but I understood.
“Dad, I don’t feel like talking,” I said.
“Is it girl stuff?”
I screamed. I didn’t know Girl Warrior had an ounce of sissy in her, but boy did it come out.
Mom told Dad what movie she wanted to rent, then pushed him out the door. Literally. I braced myself for some slicker interrogation from my mom. After all, she’s a pro at getting kids to open up. She deals with kids who clam up after seeing or going through horrible stuff. But today she did the unexpected. She fixed me a cup of chamomile tea with lots of honey and broke a Tylenol in half for my headache. Then she went upstairs to her room and closed the door.
My headache was gone by the next morning, but that feeling of things not being right between Victoria and me was still there. I thought we’d have an awkward moment when we sat down at our desks, but she didn’t even look my way. Not once. Well, two could play that game, I thought. If our fight didn’t bother her, I wouldn’t let it bother me.
For the next couple of days I stuck with Janetta and my other friends. I expected Victoria to play jacks with Nahda or Sadia, her other friends, but she stayed by herself during recess and lunchtime.
We still didn’t say boo to each
other. Not when we passed dittos from left to right or when we corrected each other’s spelling quizzes. When I thought about it long enough, I concluded that sitting next to Victoria was like it had been since the first day of school. She took her seat, handed in her homework, copied down the lessons, and stared ahead like she was listening, although I knew she was doing her “present but absent” trick. By the end of the week, I thought, if she turned my way first, I would say hi, but she just kept doing her trick.
I couldn’t help but notice that Victoria, Miss Mathorama, never volunteered to solve problems at the board, nor did she raise her hand, or laugh at anything. Not even when Ms. Saunders read a nonsense poem that was so hilarious that Ms. Saunders giggled through half of it. And even while everyone was laughing, I caught Ms. Saunders doing what I had been doing: checking out Victoria.
Falling off a Cliff
Ms. Saunders needed a volunteer to clap erasers and clean the blackboard, so I stuck my hand up. Not that I had to fight off anyone for the honor. She smiled at me, knowing I couldn’t help myself.
“This shouldn’t take too long,” Ms. Saunders said as the class, including Victoria, filed out into the hallway. “You might be able to catch up with your friends.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”
She was opening the lower window so I could stick the erasers out of it. Then she said, “Akilah, you’re friends with Victoria,” in a leading-up-to way.
“Not really,” I said.
She didn’t believe me. Isn’t it funny how a person can communicate a clear thought with one look?
I had to clarify. “We’re not speaking.”
“I see.”
I pounded the erasers together, bang, bang, ba-bang, creating a cloud of chalk dust. It didn’t bother me, but Ms. Saunders, who was a good ten feet away, started to cough.
“Sorry,” I said.
She said it was all right, but didn’t ask any more questions about Victoria and me.