Chapter 17 2004
The third-grade teacher was a man named Mr. Gray, and he was as uninspired as his name.
Drab and droning, he taught with the enthusiasm of a slug.
I had the same classmates as the year before except for a new boy, Dylan.
Tall and thin, he had hair the color of honey and eyes that almost matched.
His desk was on the opposite side of the room, and Heddy had already decided to make him her friend, which meant he wouldn’t be a friend of mine.
Not that I had any friends, but something about him made me wish it was possible.
I sat at the misfits table at lunch and missed Kai terribly.
The loneliness stone had returned and so had my fear.
Bart watched me from across the room as I ate, a twitchy grin on his face each time I looked up.
He had turned ten over the summer. I was seven.
He’d grown a foot. I hadn’t grown an inch.
He was going to exact his revenge, and I knew it. I just wasn’t sure what to do about it.
I did my best not to show I was scared. Kai had taught me the importance of camouflage. “Don’t let them see what’s on the inside. The more the enemy knows, the more they can hurt you.” I didn’t know how Kai knew so much about getting hurt, but clearly he was an expert on it.
That first afternoon back, I didn’t hear a word Mr. Gray said, my eyes fixed on the clock as it ticked toward PE.
When the bell rang, I shuffled after my classmates, feeling like the worst sort of coward, willingly submitting to my own doom like a spineless jellyfish floating on a current, knowing I was drifting toward the open mouth of a whale because I was simply too scared to do anything else.
I went to the locker room. Got changed. Walked into the gymnasium.
While Coach Stevens took roll, I fingered Boodo’s amulet in my shorts pocket and prayed running would be the sport that day.
“Basketball,” Coach Stevens said, deflating all hope.
The gym had two full courts with hoops on either side.
The second and third graders were assigned to the court on the left.
And the fourth and fifth graders were assigned to the court on the right.
The fact that Bart and I weren’t on the same court did little to lessen my fear.
It was clear that, now that Kai was gone, he was itching to exact his revenge.
To avoid too many kids playing on the court at one time, one class practiced skills on the sidelines while the other grade competed. As I walked with my class to the area between the courts to work on dribbling and passing, Bart feigned hurling a basketball at me.
I flinched so violently I crashed into the girl behind me. “Sorry,” I mumbled, my heart misfiring.
Bart laughed.
Five minutes later, he did it again. A cat toying with a mouse, he knew I was terrified and was amusing himself.
“Switch!” Coach Stevens bellowed.
I walked onto the court. My classmates knew not to throw me the ball. I had no hand-eye coordination and was useless in most sports.
Dylan, the new boy, not realizing this, saw me open and looking at him (I was actually looking past him at Bart on the other court, tracking his every move).
He chucked the ball at me, and at the last second, I saw it and flailed my arms and ended up batting it into my face. A complete and total calamity.
“Oh geez!” Dylan said, running up as I pressed my hand to my gushing nose. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Bart stood behind him, holding a basketball beneath his arm and smirking.
Coach Lee hurried over.
“You need to go to the nurse,” she said, handing me a sweat towel. “Dylan, go with her.”
I wanted to protest, but Dylan nodded vigorously, eager to do something to make up for what he’d done. So I walked with him into the hall.
When we were out of sight, I stopped.
“I’m okay,” I said, the words muffled by the towel and nasally from my wounded nose. “I don’t need you to go with me.”
I had no intention of going to see Nurse Jackson. I still had nightmares about what she’d said about my flesh being eaten by fire.
Dylan shook his head, and that’s when I noticed he was looking straight at me.
This was very unusual. Everyone, even people who knew me, always at least glanced at my nevus when they talked to me.
It was like a pulsing neon sign that said Look except instead of being neon, it was poop brown, hairy, and lumpy.
I wasn’t upset when people looked at it.
It was like when I looked at Kai and saw his protruding forehead first. Your eye simply goes to the oddity, the puzzle piece that’s out of place.
But Dylan’s gaze was steady and unflinching, his expression earnest as he said, “I need to make sure you get there okay.”
It was the first time I’d heard him say more than a few words, and I noticed that his voice lifted and fell in a way that told me he wasn’t from Minnesota.
“Your nose is bleeding pretty bad.”
I stood unmoving, unsure how to get out of the situation.
A drop of blood dripped to the floor, and I bent to wipe it away, but Dylan got there first. Using his sneaker, he smudged it out.
His sneakers were old and worn and not a name brand, and it made me wonder more about him.
Most of the kids at the school had an array of fancy sneakers.
It was their way of showing off their wealth and personality in a sea of uniformity.
Perceptively, Dylan said, “You don’t want to go to the nurse?”
I gave the smallest nod, embarrassed and not sure what he would think of that.
He shifted his weight. “Okay. Then I’ve got another idea.”
He led me from the athletics building and around the back of the main building.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To see my ma.”
He opened a plain black door beside a loading ramp.
Loud disco music blasted us as we stepped inside the school’s kitchen.
The three Black women who served us our meals looked up from their chopping, stirring, and mashing.
When I first arrived at the school the year before, I’d tried talking to them, thinking we might be friends, but they’d made it clear talking to the students wasn’t encouraged.
“Yo, Dylan,” the one closest to us said and set down her knife to high-five him. She was the youngest and friendliest of the cooks, always giving me a little extra of whatever she was serving and offering it with a sly smile and sometimes a wink.
“Dyl?”
I turned to see a fourth woman, this one white, walking toward us. She was tall and had the same gold hair and eyes as Dylan.
“Hey, Ma,” Dylan said.
“What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”
Before he could answer, she noticed me and said, “Oh. Oh my.”
“I hit her in the face with a basketball,” Dylan said sheepishly.
“I hit myself in the face with a basketball,” I corrected.
“Come. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She gestured for me to go with her, and it was then that I noticed she also didn’t look at my nevus, and I wondered if it was a genetic thing, some sort of sight disorder, like color blindness, a condition that prevented them from seeing nevi.
She led me across the kitchen to a stool.
“Pickle, get me some ice and a dish towel,” she said.
I giggled at the name, then stopped sharply from the dart of pain it caused in my nose.
She smiled a crooked smile crowded with teeth. “Dylan. Dill. Dill Pickle. Pickle,” she explained as she turned my chin to the side to examine my nose. She dabbed gently at it with a corner of the towel Coach Lee had given me. “Sometimes, when he’s being a dork, I call him Gherkin. And I’m Ivy.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Patch.”
She offered another smile. Her eyes crinkled when she grinned, and there was a thin white crescent scar on her right temple that pulled tight.
Dylan returned with a baggie of ice and the dish towel.
“Thanks, hon,” she said. She set them on the table beside her and went back to dabbing at the blood. “Let’s get you cleaned up, and you’ll be pretty as a peach again in no time.”
I furrowed my brow. Even people who loved me never went so far as to call me pretty. But she hadn’t said it in a mocking way. She’d said it in a way that made me think she actually believed it.
She continued to clean my face, and though it didn’t hurt too much, out of nowhere, I started to cry. It was as if her kindness was my undoing, all the stress I’d been holding since returning to Gaines pouring from my eyes.
“Sorry,” I hiccuped, embarrassed and feeling sorry for Ivy and Dylan stuck there beside me.
“Ain’t nothing to be sorry about. Pain needs a way out. That’s what tears are for,” Ivy said. Then she did the most remarkable thing. Just like Boodo would have done, she lifted me from the stool and set me on her lap.
“I’m going to help mash,” Dylan muttered uncomfortably and pivoted away.
“Sometimes it’s good to cry,” Ivy soothed, stroking my hair.
Finally, when my tears ran out, embarrassed, I climbed off and went back to the stool.
“Hold this to your nose,” she said, handing me the ice pack wrapped in the towel.
She walked to a cutting board a few feet away and expertly started dicing tomatoes, the knife blazing.
“That’s an impressive nevus you’ve got,” she said, eyes trained on the blade.
The statement caught me off guard. First because it meant she saw nevi just fine, and second because most people had no idea my birthmark was called a nevus.
My particular one was a congenital melanocytic nevus, which was a particularly large, rare form that was lumpy and sprouted fuzz.
Twice a year, I endured the painful process of having thousands of tiny hairs, fine and soft as fur, plucked from it.
“It ever itch?” she asked.
I nodded. It was itching right then. It happened when I got upset.
“Mine flares up whenever I’m rip-roaring mad,” she said with a grin.
I looked at her curiously, and she set down the knife, untied her apron, then lifted the side of her chef shirt to show me a patch of brown on the left side of her waist four times the size of my own birthmark.
She dropped the hem and went back to chopping, leaving me stunned.
I’d never met anyone else with a congenital melanocytic nevus, and hers was even larger and furrier than my own.
“Did you know it’s a sign of a noble past life?”
“It is?”
“Yep. Proof we died in battle, the spot of the nevus the site of our mortal wound.”
I’m not sure if the statement pleased or upset me. The idea of the gallant person from my last incarnation dying from a spear or knife to the eye was distinctly unsettling.
She was about to say something more when one of the cooks approached. The woman was the oldest of the three cooks and clearly in charge when it came to dishing out the food.
“Bread,” she said, then waved her hands in some sort of gesture and pointed to the clock over the door.
“Bread?” Ivy repeated, brows pinched.
The woman was clearly at a loss, so I lowered the ice from my face and asked in Somali what she was trying to say.
A smile spread across her face, and she blabbered in relief about the rolls that needed to be made, and that the flour hadn’t arrived with that day’s delivery, and that she’d tried to tell that to Ivy earlier, but she was pretty sure Ivy didn’t understand because she didn’t do anything about it, and now, it was nearly four o’clock, and if they didn’t get the dough made, it would be too late, and Ms. Bamford would be furious because if there was one thing the director cared about more than her booze, it was her dinner rolls.
I translated all of it except for the booze part because I didn’t know what booze was.
“Oh,” Ivy said. “I thought what she said this morning was ‘no flowers’ and that she was talking about the flowers we sometimes put on the tables.” She looked from me to the woman.
“Thank you, Hawu. I’ll run to the store right now.
” She pointed to herself, then gestured driving.
She called to Dylan across the room, “Pickle, will you finish chopping the tomatoes for me?”
I continued to ice my nose as Dylan took over the chopping. His skills were almost as impressive as his mom’s, and I got the sense he was showing off.
Ivy returned with her jacket on and, in her hands, a plate with a large slice of the best-looking chocolate cake I’d ever seen, the kind with so much frosting between the layers it tilts. Two forks stuck up from its center.
“Now for the final step in making everyone feel better after a rough day. Cake.”
She set the plate on the table between me and Dylan.
“For after you finish icing and chopping,” she said.
And as I sat there listening to the Somali women chatter behind me, my mouth watering in anticipation of the cake, and Dylan chopping tomatoes beside me, it almost felt like I was home.