“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
She shivered hard, all the way down her back, before she stepped inside. I wasn’t sure if she was mad, but she looked back at me, so I followed her.
“Silverware you have to take more time washing,” I said. “Because of how food gets stuck in the forks. Eggs especially are a pain in the ass once they get dried onto something.”
It was easy to talk to Wavy that way. She didn’t seem to care what I said, but her shoulders relaxed.
“Man, I’m hungry. I hope these burgers aren’t too cold.”
I made us up plates, a burger and fries on each one. She watched me do it and, when I put the plates down on the table, she got up in the chair across from me. I tucked in, wrestling with those little plastic packets of ketchup. She opened one, I figured for herself, but she squeezed it out on my plate. Then another one. The whole time I ate, she watched me, but didn’t so much as touch her food. After I finished, she picked up the plate in front of her and carried it down the hall to Mrs. Quinn’s room.
I fixed Wavy another plate, but when she came back she was toting Donal.
“Here, why don’t I hold him, while you eat your dinner?” I said.
She put the baby up on my lap, but she didn’t sit down. Instead, she went around the kitchen, one little hand running along the edge of the sink, the range, the front of the icebox, like she was testing how clean they were. When she came to the end of the countertop, she stepped behind me. I went to turn around, but then I realized she was checking me out, making sure she could trust me. My neck prickled up from her watching me.
“It hurts?” she said.
I rubbed down my hackles with the flat of my palm. Once my hair grew back out, you wouldn’t even be able to see the scar running up the back of my head. “Nah. I told you, I’m about as good as new. It wasn’t so bad, really.”
Besides the road rash going up my arm, I ended up with this scar like a centipede, the marks from the stitches coming off it like legs. She took another step to my left and looked at it.
“That one hurts a little. They had to operate on me.” I reached around Donal to hike my sleeve up and show her how long the scar was, just that urge to show off a good scar. The way she frowned, I wished I hadn’t.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I know better than to come up that road so fast. It’s lucky for me you were there. If I’d wrecked with nobody around, I mighta died.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t buying that.
6
MISS DEGRASSI
September–November 1977
Her first year teaching, Lisa DeGrassi had Wavonna Quinn in her third grade class. One of fourteen names on the roster. Lisa saw them all as possibilities.
Most of the kids’ parents came on the first day to meet the teacher, but Wavonna arrived alone and slipped into the desk nearest the door.
“Hi! I’m Miss DeGrassi. Are you in my class?”
The girl unzipped her backpack and handed Lisa a copy of her enrollment form. Wavonna Quinn, age eight, parents Valerie and Liam Quinn, a rural route address. The handwriting was hardly legible, and at the bottom of the form, where there was a place for parents to write comments—allergies, health restrictions—someone had scrawled two short lines. The first was “She won’t talk.” The second looked like “Don’t try to teach her.”
It unsettled Lisa. Were the Quinns backwoods antigovernment types? Opposed to the public school system, but legally required to send their child? Whatever her parents’ politics, Wavonna didn’t protest when Lisa moved her to a more central desk, and she eagerly filled out the math worksheet Lisa distributed after lunch.
The problem came when it was time to pass the worksheets forward, and the boy behind Wavonna tapped her shoulder. She turned in her desk and punched him in the arm, sending the worksheets flying.
“Wavonna!” Lisa stood at her desk, scrambling for something to say. “We are not allowed to hit.”
In the time-out desk at the back of the room, Wavonna seemed indifferent to punishment. With nothing to do, she didn’t fidget or lay her head on the desk. Given worksheets, she did them without complaint. During the planning period, while the kids were at PE, Lisa reevaluated the scrawled note on Wavonna’s registration form: Don’t try to touch her.
At the end of the day, after the kids left, Stacy, the other third grade teacher, came by to chat. She was a few years older than Lisa and the closest thing to a friend Lisa had found in Powell.
“You got the Quinn girl in your class,” Stacy said.
“Do you know her?”
“Not her. She transferred here from out of state. Her mother, though. I was in the office when she came to register the little girl for school.”