New Boy (Hogarth Shakespeare)
Tracy Chevalier
Ice cream soda, cherry on top
Tell me the name of your sweetheart!
Dee noticed him before anyone else. She was glad of that, held on to it. It made her feel special to have him to herself for a few seconds, before the world around them skipped a beat and did not recover for the rest of the day.
The playground was busy before school. Enough children had arrived early that games of jacks and kickball and hopscotch had begun, to be abandoned when the bell rang. Dee herself had not been early—her mother had sent her upstairs to change her top for something looser, saying Dee had spilled egg on it, though Dee herself couldn’t see any yolk. She’d had to run part of the way to school, braids thumping against her back, until the stream of students heading the same direction reassured her she was not late. She had gotten to the playground with a minute to spare before the first bell rang.
There hadn’t been enough time to join her best friend, Mimi, jumping Double Dutch with the other girls, so instead Dee had headed to the playground entrance into the building, where Mr. Brabant was standing with other teachers, waiting for the class lines to form. Her teacher had a short, angled haircut that squared his head, and stood very straight. Someone told Dee he had fought in Vietnam. Dee was not the top student in class—that prize went to prim Patty—but she liked to please Mr. Brabant when she could, enough to make him notice her, though she knew she was sometimes called a teacher’s pet.
She took her place at the front of the line now, and looked around, her eyes on the Double-Dutch girls still jumping rope. Then she spotted him, a motionless presence by the merry-go-round. Four boys were spinning on it—Ian and Rod and two boys from fourth grade. They were going so fast that Dee was sure one of the teachers would stop them. Once a boy had been flung off and broken an arm. The two fourth graders looked scared, but could not control the merry-go-round, as Ian was expertly kicking the ground to keep up the speed.
The boy standing near the frenetic motion was not dressed like the other boys, casual in their jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. Instead he wore gray flared pants, a white short-sleeve shirt, and black shoes, like a uniform a private school student would wear. But it was his skin that stood out, its color reminding Dee of bears she’d seen at the zoo a few months before, on a school field trip. Though they were called black bears, their fur was actually deep brown, with a reddish tint at the tips. They had mostly slept, or sniffed at the pile of grubs the keeper had dumped in the pen for them. Only when Rod threw a stick at the animals to impress Dee did one of the bears react, baring its yellow teeth and growling so that the children shrieked and laughed. Dee had not joined in, though; she had frowned at Rod and turned away.
The new boy was not watching the merry-go-round, but studying the L-shaped building. It was a typical suburban elementary school, built eight years before, and looked like two red-brick shoeboxes unimaginatively shoved together. When Dee had started kindergarten it still had a new building smell to it. Now, though, it was like a dress she had worn many times, with its tears and stains and marks where the hem had been let down. She knew every classroom, every staircase, every handrail, every bathroom cubicle. She knew every foot of the playground too, as well as the younger students’ playground on the other side of the building. Dee had fallen off the swings, torn her tights on the slide, gotten stuck at the top of the jungle gym when she became too scared to climb down. Once she had declared one half of the playground Girl Town, and she and Mimi and Blanca and Jennifer had chased away any boy who dared to cross the line. She had hidden with others around the corner near the gym entrance, where teachers on duty couldn’t see them and they could try on lipstick and read comics and play spin the bottle. She had lived her life on the playground, laughed and cried and had crushes and formed friendships and made few enemies. It was her world, so familiar she took it for granted. In a month she would be leaving it for junior high.
Now someone new and different had entered the territory, and this made Dee look at the space anew and suddenly find it shabby, and herself an alien in it. Like him.
He was moving now. Not like a bear, with its bulky, lumbering gait. More like a wolf, or—Dee tried to think of dark animals—a panther, scaled up from house cats. Whatever he was thinking—probably about being the new boy in a playground full of strangers the opposite color from him—he padded toward the school doors where the teachers waited with the unconscious assuredness of someone who knows how his body works. Dee felt her chest tighten. She drew in a breath.
“Well, well,” Mr. Brabant remarked. “I think I hear drums.”
Miss Lode, the other sixth grade teacher standing next to him, tittered. “Where did Mrs. Duke say he’s from?”
“Guinea, I think. Or was it Nigeria? Africa, anyway.”
“He’s yours, isn’t he? Better you than me.” Miss Lode smoothed her skirt and touched her earrings, perhaps to make sure they were still there. It was a nervous habit she repeated often. She kept her appearance neat, except for her short blond hair that puffed out in a curly bob. Today she wore a lime green skirt, a yellow blouse, and green disks clipped to her ears. Her shoes were also green, with low square heels. Dee and her friends loved discussing Miss Lode’s wardrobe. She was a young teacher, but her clothes were nothing like her students’ pink and white T-shirts and bell-bottom jeans with flowers embroidered along the hems.
Mr. Brabant shrugged. “I don’t foresee problems.”
“No, of course not.” Miss Lode kept her wide blue eyes fixed on her colleague as if not wanting to miss any morsel of wisdom that might help her become a better teacher. “Do you think we should—well, say something to the students about him? About—I don’t know—about him being different? To encourage them to welcome him?”
Mr. Brabant snorted. “Take off your kid gloves, Diane. He doesn’t need special treatment just because he’s bl— a new boy.”
“No, but— No. Of course.” Miss Lode’s eyes turned watery. Mimi had told Dee that once or twice her teacher actually cried in class. Behind her back her students called her Cry Baby Lody.