"You'll have to impress them with your intelligence," Mom said as Brian and I headed off to school the next day. "Don't be afraid to be smarter than they are."
It had rained the night before our first day of school. When Brian and I stepped off the bus at Welch Elementary, our shoes got soaked in the water that filled the muddy tire ruts left by the school buses. I looked around for the playground equipment, figuring I could win some new friends with the fierce tetherball skills I'd picked up at Emerson, but I didn't see a single seesaw or jungle gym, not to mention any tetherball poles.
It had been cold ever since we arrived in Welch. The day before, Mom had unpacked the thrift-shop coats she'd bought us in Phoenix. When I'd pointed out that all the buttons had been torn from mine, she said that minor flaw was more than offset by the fact that the coat was imported from France and made of 100-percent lamb's wool. As we waited for the opening bell, I stood with Brian at the edge of the playground, my arms crossed to keep my coat closed. The other kids stared at us, whispering among themselves, but they also kept their distance, as if they hadn't decided whether we were predators or prey. I had thought West Virginia was all white hillbillies, so I was surprised by how many black kids there were. I saw one tall black girl with a strong jaw and almond eyes smiling at me. I nodded and smiled back, then I realized there was something malicious in her smile. I locked my arms tighter across my chest.
I was in the fifth grade, so my day was divided into periods, with different teachers and classrooms for each. For the first period, I had West Virginia history. History was one of my favorite subjects. I was coiled and ready to raise my hand as soon as the teacher asked a question I could answer, but he stood at the front of the room next to a map of West Virginia, with all fifty-five counties outlined, and spent the entire class pointing to counties and asking students to identify them. In my second period, we passed the hour watching a film of the football game that Welch High had played several days earlier. Neither of those teachers introduced me to the class; they seemed as uncertain as the kids about how to act around a stranger.
My next class was English for students with learning disabilities. Miss Caparossi started out by informing the class that it might surprise them to learn some people in this world thought they were better than other people. "They're convinced they're so special that they don't need to follow the rules other people have to follow," she said. "like presenting their school records when they enroll in a new school." She looked at me and raised her eyebrows meaningfully. "Who thinks that's not fair?" she asked the class.
All the kids except me raised their hands.
"I see our new student doesn't agree," she said. "Perhaps you'd like to explain yourself?"
I was sitting in the second-to-last row. The students in front of me swiveled their heads around to stare. I decided to dazzle them with the answer from the Ergo Game.
"Insufficient information to draw a conclusion," I said.
"Oh, really?" Miss Caparossi asked. "Is that what they say in a big city like Phoenix?" She pronounced it. "Feeeeenix." Then she turned to the class and said in a high, mocking voice. "Insufficient information to draw a conclusion."
The class laughed violently.
I felt something sharp and painful between my shoulder blades and turned around. The tall black girl with the almond eyes was sitting at the desk behind me. Holding up the sharp pencil she had jabbed into my back, she smiled the same malicious smile I'd seen in the playground.
*
I looked for Brian in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but fourth-graders were on a different schedule, so I sat by myself and bit into the sandwich Erma had made for me that morning. It was tasteless and greasy. I pulled apart the two slices of Wonder bread. Inside was a thin smear of lard. That was it. No meat, no cheese, not even a slice of pickle. Even so, I chewed slowly, staring intently at my bite marks in the bread to delay as long as possible the moment I would have to leave the cafeteria and go out to the playground. When I was the last student left in the cafeteria, the janitor, who was putting the chairs on the tabletops so the floor could be mopped, told me it was time to go.
Outside, a thin mist hung in the still air. I pulled the sides of my lamb's wool coat together. Three black girls, led by the one with the almond eyes, started moving toward me as soon as they saw me. A half-dozen other girls followed. Within moments, I was surrounded.
"You think you better than us?" the tall girl asked.
"No," I said. "I think we're all equal."
"You think you as good as me?" She punched at me. When, instead of raising my hands in defense, I kept clutching my coat closed, she realized it had no buttons. "This girl ain't got no buttons on her coat!" she shouted. That seemed to give her the license she needed. She pushed me in the chest, and I fell backward. I tried to get up, but all three girls started kicking me. I rolled away into a puddle, shouting for them to quit and hitting back at the feet coming at me from all sides. The other girls had closed in a circle around us and none of the teachers could see what was going on. There was no stopping those girls until they'd had their fill.
WHEN WE ALL GOT home that afternoon, Mom and Dad were eager to hear about our first day.
"It was good," I said. I didn't want to tell Mom the truth. I was in no mood to hear one of her lectures about the power of positive thinking.
"See?" she said. "I told you you'd fit right in."
Brian shrugged off Mom and Dad's questions, and Lori didn't want to talk about her day at all.
"How were the other kids?" I asked her later.
"Okay," she said, but she turned away, and that was the end of the conversation.
*
The bullying continued every day for weeks. The tall girl, whose name was Dinitia Hewitt, watched me with her smile while we all waited on the asphalt playground for classes to start. At lunch, I ate my lard sandwiches with paralytic slowness, but sooner or later, the janitor started putting the chairs up on the tables. I walked outside trying to hold my head high, and Dinitia and her gang surrounded me and it began.
As we fought, they called me poor and ugly and dirty, and it was hard to argue the point. I had three dresses to my name, all hand-me-downs or from a thrift store, which meant each week I had to wear two of them twice. They were so worn from countless washings that the threads were beginning to separate. We were also always dirty. Not dry-dirty like we'd been in the desert, but grimy-dirty and smudged with oily dust from the coal-burning stove. Erma allowed us only one bath a week in four inches of water that had been heated on the kitchen stove and that all of us kids had to share.