There was a commotion behind the reporter, and three hostages rushed out of the store with their hands in the air. The police grabbed them and pulled them away to safety.
“It looks like the gunman has released three hostages,” the reporter said. “We don’t know how many more people are left inside, but these hostages should be able to tell us more about who the others are, who the gunman is, and what exactly he wants.”
Norrie walked in jingling her keys and headed straight for the coffee. “Come on, Sass. We’ve got to leave.”
“Wait a second. I want to see this.”
“Jane’s all ready to go. I can’t be late this morning—I’ve got a French test first period.”
She dragged me out to the car, where I turned the radio to news. The just-escaped hostages had told the police what was going on inside the 7-Eleven. A crazy guy who used to work there had gone in with a gun and forced the clerk and the customers into the storage room. He wouldn’t let them out to go to the bathroom or get water or anything. He pointed his gun at each of their heads and threatened to blow their brains out. He shot two people for no real reason, and the rest of them had to sit for hours right next to the dead, bleeding bodies. They didn’t know what he wanted, just that he kept ranting about his girlfriend taking his baby away. The three hostages got away by tricking the gunman somehow, but they were worried about what he might do to the rest of the hostages now.
“Scary,” Norrie said.
“How is this going to help that guy get his baby back?” Jane said. “Dude’s not thinking things through.”
I tried to imagine it. I tried to imagine how bad it felt to have your baby taken away, or what it felt like when someone held a gun to your head. But my mind couldn’t hold on to those images for long. It wanted to drift toward happier thoughts.
Just as we turned into St. Maggie’s drive the radio announcer reported that the gunman had burst out of the store waving his gun and threatening to shoot. The police gunned him down. Inside the store they found four dead people.
Jane switched off the radio. “Thanks, Sassy. I’m going to be scared to get a Slurpee now. And I love Slurpees.”
“All you can think about is Slurpees?” Norrie said. “Five people just died.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Cherry-red Slurpees,” Jane said. “I won’t be able to slurp one without thinking of blood.”
“You’re so disgusting,” Norrie said.
“Yeah,” I said. She’s ruined Slurpees for me forever. I can’t get that image out of my head—the Slurpee machine dripping blood. And cherry used to be my favorite flavor.
I had history first period that morning, which was unlucky, because we were studying slavery and the Civil War. Not that it wasn’t interesting, but thinking about slavery reminded me of the 7-Eleven hostages, and I was having a hard time not thinking gruesome thoughts already. There’s so much suffering in the world that I can’t even fathom. Like, what would it really be like to be a slave? For your whole life? To live through beatings and losing the ones you love over and over again, and having no control over where or how you live…I think about these things sometimes, lying in bed at night. How would I act if I were in a concentration camp? Would I be selfish, or would I help others? How did it really feel not to have enough food to eat? How did it feel to be very sick and never get better? To have burns over half your body? To have soldiers ride through your town and kill everyone in sight?
How would I act? I didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine it. I failed to imagine it.
Nothing truly terrible had ever happened to me.
There was that time when I was four and I sliced open my upper arm on a sharp branch while climbing a tree and I had to have stitches. The nurse told me to clench my teeth together while the doctor sewed me up. It hurt. But then the nurse gave me a lollipop for being good, and everything was okay again. When I got home, Jane was jealous of my lollipop. I still have a little scar on the soft underpart of my arm.
How does that compare to feeling cold metal against your temple and hearing a click?
I’m a lucky girl. I know that. I’m so lucky I can fall down black holes and not get hurt. I might be the luckiest girl in the whole world.
In history class that day, Sister Martha talked about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, people running from terror and risking their lives to help the slaves escape. If I had the chance, would I risk my life to help someone? How will I ever know unless I’m tested?
Later that day, I found an answer. I went to a Community Service Committee meeting, and the senior who ran the committee, Nancy Blalock, talked about the projects she had planned for the year. Most of it was the usual stuff—clothing drives, food drives, fund-raisers for a needy kids’ summer camp. But one thing she said caught my attention. There was a tutoring center downtown for poor kids who were having trouble in school, and though it wasn’t an official St. Maggie’s activity, anyone who wanted to volunteer could. I joined the Community Service Committee and the first thing I did was volunteer to be a tutor.
“Why do you want to do that?” Lula asked me. “The tutoring center is probably some seedy place near the bus station, with fluorescent lighting and dirty bathrooms.”
“How do you know?” I said.
She shrugged. “That’s what every place downtown looks like.”
“That’s not true.” Some of the girls at St. Maggie’s are so ignorant it’s embarrassing. And I say that even though Lula’s my friend.
“Some little kid needs my help with her homework,” I told Lula. That was my cover. I did want to help someone. But I also wanted a chance to go downtown and look around by myself.
She laughed. “Your help? You’re terrible at homework! You’re always getting your sisters to help you.”
She’s right, of course. I’m hardly the brainiac of the family. I probably wouldn’t be much help to anyone. But I wanted to try.
I think you understand, Almighty. Once at tea you told us about when you were sixteen and worked as a candy striper in a hospital downtown. All you did was hand out magazines and clear away dinner trays, you said. But you must have volunteered for a reason. Maybe you had the same feeling I have—you wanted to help someone in some small way. You wanted to be useful and independent.
I don’t want to waste my life as a rich, spoiled girl. Who knows how long I have before some weirdo takes me hostage in a convenience store and kills me? Tutoring was the only useful thing I could think of that would get me out of my snow globe of a life for a little while and into the real world, where I could really test my luck.
When I got home from school that day, I decided to walk over to York Road and see what was happening at the 7-Eleven. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I thought I’d just step onto York Road and peer down the street in search of commotion.
I couldn’t see the 7-Eleven from the corner of Northway and York, but I could see police lights flashing. I started walking up York and kept going until I got to the 7-Eleven.
The store was closed and cordoned off by yellow police tape. A few police cars were parked in the lot. A woman in a trench coat talked to a uniformed cop. A truck from Eyewitness News was parked on the street, but there was no reporter in sight. Maybe she was in the truck, resting or reapplying her makeup.
There was nothing to see, no bloodstains or anything like that, at least not on the outside. Through the broken plate-glass window I saw a big steel door behind the counter. Behind that door was the storeroom where the hostages had been held all night.
I bought a pack of gum at a newsstand across the street and headed home. I was walking down Northway when a car backed out of a driveway and hit me. That was the first time.
THREE
I BOUNCED OFF THE TRUNK AND FELL TO THE SIDEWALK. THE car stopped and a woman got out, screaming and flapping her arms.
“Oh! Oh! Oh my God! Are you okay? Are you all right?”
I sat on the pavement in a placid stupor, sta
rs dancing around my head, sparks shooting out from the wires above me. But everything was okay. Everything seemed okay.
I pushed myself to my feet and brushed off my knees. “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.” I had a little scrape on my elbow, but that was all.
She was upset, though. She seized my head in her hands and stared into my eyes, gasping with worry, and shook my hands, one at a time, to see if it hurt me.
“I’m okay. No big deal,” I insisted.
She started crying. “I’ve never hit anyone before! I was so scared!”
“I know.” I felt strange, like I did at Lula’s house after falling into the room with no floor. Shaken up and disoriented. But this woman was more upset than I was. I tried to comfort her. “Don’t worry. I’m not hurt. Everything’s fine.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure? Oh, thank God. Do you want me to take you to a doctor or something? Do you want me to drive you home?”
“No, I only live a few blocks away. I’ll be okay.”
“Please, let me drive you home,” she said.
“I’m okay. Really. You can go on your way now.”
“If you’re sure—”
Her car was still running, and the exhaust fumes tickled my nose. I waved to her and started walking away so she would see that I wasn’t hurt. She was free. Free to go on her way and continue her life as before, not having hurt a soul.
I looked back. She was sitting in her car, still watching me. I waved again.
When I got to my room, I checked myself for damage, even though I didn’t feel anything. I had the scrape on my elbow, and that bruise on my thigh from before. That was all.
After school the next Monday afternoon, Norrie drove me downtown to the Fayette Street Learning Center for my first tutoring session. “I’ll go hang at the Starbucks and be back to pick you up at five,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do this every Monday.”
“Maybe next week I’ll take the bus,” I suggested.
“Yeah, right. Have fun.”
I was serious about taking the bus, and she was serious about it probably not happening, but I don’t see why. I’m fifteen, plenty old enough to take the bus by myself. When you were fifteen you were galloping around town like a wild pony—that’s what you told us. But everybody seems to think it’s not safe for me to take the bus alone.
The Fayette Street Learning Center is in a storefront not far from Lexington Market on the border between busy, commercial downtown and scary, deserted West Baltimore. I went inside and presented myself for duty.
“You’re in tenth grade, right?” the man behind the reception desk said. He had a shaved head and wore a white shirt, a thin blue tie, and a diamond earring in one ear. His heavy plastic name tag said LARRY GANT. “You’ve been assigned to an elementary school student. We figure by tenth grade you should have elementary math down.”
“Math?” I said. “I requested English. I specifically wrote on my application ‘Anything but math.’ I’m terrible at math.”
Larry Gant nodded. “Sure, but we need math tutors, so you’re tutoring math. You’ll be working with a fifth grader named Cassandra Higgins. You can handle fifth-grade math, right? You’re in tenth grade now! Way past that baby stuff.”
I didn’t appreciate his patronizing tone. When I said I was bad at math, I meant it. I feared for poor Cassandra Higgins.
“Will this involve fractions?” I asked.
“I believe so.”
“I’m screwed.”
“Nah. Come on. Just follow the book.” He passed me a workbook—Divide and Conquer: Math Adventures, Teacher’s Edition—and added, “The answers are in there. All you have to do is explain them.”
That’s what I was afraid of—trying to explain math to someone. It’s supposed to be logical, but it seems to me you either get it or you don’t. Why couldn’t they have assigned me to tutor English? I prefer subjects where there’s no right answer. Usually that means there’s no wrong answer either.
“Cassandra’s waiting for you in room six. Down the hall, make a left.”
I walked down the hall—fluorescent lit, just as Lula had predicted—past classrooms and meeting rooms full of students and tutors studying at cubicles. I walked into an office divided into four sections, each with its own desk and two chairs. There was no one in the room except for a chubby-faced girl, about eleven, wearing red-framed glasses. Her hair was braided in a dozen or so neat cornrows anchored with red beads, and she wore a red T-shirt over blue jeans and Adidas. In front of her on the desk was the student edition of Divide and Conquer, a red spiral notebook, and a red pen.
I approached the desk. “Hi. I’m Sassy Sullivan.”
“Sssassy Sssullivan?” She was not the first person to make fun of my super-sibilant name.
“Yesss,” I said. “Sssassy Sssullivan. I sssuppossse you’re Cassssandra Higginsss?”
“Yesss.”
“Sassy and Cassie,” I said. “Sounds like a show on the Disney Channel.”
“No. It’s Cassandra. No one calls me Cassie.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to teach me math?”
“Um, yeah. I mean, not teach, exactly. But I can try to help you with your math homework.”
“Try to help me?” She frowned. Her frowny face is intimidating for a fifth grader.
“That’s all anyone can do, right?” I tried to turn her frown upside down with a smile, but it didn’t work. It never does. I sat down at the desk. “So, what seems to be the problem?” Dr. Sassy is here to cure your mathematical ailments. “You’ve been in school for a few weeks now. Have you had any math tests yet?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“So what grades did you get?”
“An F, and then a D.”
“Great! That shows progress, right?”
“What did you get on your last math test?”
The memory of a red C-minus flashed before my eyes. Should I tell her? It might not inspire much confidence in my ability to help her. But then, I myself had no confidence in that, so maybe honesty was the best policy. Maybe she’d like me better if she thought we were both math morons together.
“This isn’t about me.”
“Hmmph. Heard that before.”
“Okay, let’s be honest here. I don’t like math. You don’t like math. But it’s a part of our lives and we can’t escape it. What subjects do you like?”
“Social studies. Language arts.”
“Me too. I was hoping to tutor you in language arts, but I guess you don’t need it.”
“No, I don’t. I need tutoring in math.” She pushed her latest test, the one with the D, across the table to me. I stared at it. Fractions swam before my eyes, scrambling and unscrambling in an unnerving way. I struggled to think of something—anything—relevant to say.
“So, um, what’s your teacher’s name?”
“Ms. Frazier.”
“Do you like her?”
“No.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Why not?”
“She’s crazy. She has a fake foot, and when she’s mad she pops it off her leg and says she’s going to throw it at us.”
“A fake foot? Like a prosthetic?”
“Yuh-huh. She waves it at us, shoe and all.”
I laughed. “You’re making that up.”
“It’s true.” But she smiled in this cryptic way so I couldn’t be sure.
“How’d she lose her foot?”
Cassandra shrugged. “She doesn’t say. We’re too scared to ask her.”
“Well. How can anyone learn math under terrible conditions like that? Living in fear of being hit with a prosthetic foot?”
“That’s what I say. But my moms doesn’t buy it. Probably because my friend Keema manages to get A’s on her tests somehow. Don’t ask me how.”
“My friend Lula can solve quadratic equations just by looking at them,” I said. “It’s like a superpower. But she’s terrible at French. She can’t pronounce la jeu
ne fille to save her life. ‘La june fee.’ If you saw her in French class, you’d think she was retarded. But if you saw me in math, you’d think I was retarded.”
Whoops. I’d said too much. Cassandra gave me a skeptical look, what Daddy-o calls “the hairy eyeball.”
“Your math level is retarded, and you’re going to tutor me?”
I showed her the teacher’s edition Larry Gant had given me. “Look! I’ve got the answers. We can figure it out.”
I wasn’t ready to give up yet. If I couldn’t help this girl—who, actually, didn’t seem to need help with much other than math—then what good was I? Besides, I liked her.
Cassandra opened the book. “Does it say how to multiply fractions in there?”
I found the chapter on fractions and read it out loud. “Multiplying fractions is easy! First try canceling. Divide one factor of the numerator and one factor of the denominator by the same number.” I looked at the first problem on Cassandra’s test. “Did you cancel?”
“You tell me.”
I had no idea. I kept reading. “Now multiply the numerators. Then multiply the denominators. Write the product of the numerators over the product of the denominators…” My eyes glazed over.
“The problem is the words they use—numerator and denominator,” Cassandra said. “Why can’t they just say ‘the top number’ and ‘the bottom number’?”
“You’re right. Why can’t they?”
Larry Gant knocked on the door. “Okay, girls. Time’s up for today. Cassandra’s mom’s here.”
“Wow, we didn’t get anything done,” Cassandra said. I wish she hadn’t said it in front of Larry.
“Sure we did,” I said more brightly than I felt. “We got lots done for the first day. See you next week.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
After she left, I sat in the cubicle and flipped through Divide and Conquer. It was filled with cartoon illustrations of math concepts reenacted by a family of pencils. They weren’t funny.