Free Verse (11 page)

“I know it. I didn't mean now. I mean later. When I'm grown.” It's only a partway lie.

“Later, when you're grown,” she tells me, “you can choose a place to live that feels right to you. But it has to feel right to
you
, Sasha. Not to me or Mr. Powell or your brother, or to anybody else.”

I am all full up with choices. I lay my head on the window, overwhelmed, and fall asleep before we reach Caboose.

It's Thursday, which means poetry club, and I've been looking forward to it all day long. The buses pull away past the windows while kids bang locker doors closed out in the hallway. Poetry club kids come in one or two at a time, snagging popcorn or pushing chairs together to sprawl out on, until there are nine of us in the room, plus Miss Jacks.

I love how different the classroom is now from how it was twenty minutes ago in English class. It doesn't feel formal anymore. Kids make themselves at home, getting comfortable. I'm surprised how quick they've accepted me as one of the group. They've accepted Jaina, too, even quicker than me. She acts like she was born here. The two of us sit on the floor side by side. Jaina's tossing a beanbag back and forth with Angie, who suddenly wings it at
Anthony's head. He catches it almost without looking, and Jaina applauds.

“Who wants to start?” Anthony asks, tossing the beanbag into the air and catching it a few times. “Oh, wait, wait, that'd be
me
. I need everybody to write down their email addresses if I don't already have them. That means you”—he points at Jaina—“and you.” He points at me. “I'm going to email you the contest rules, and I want everybody to email me back a poem.
Everybody!
Email me back a poem by this time next week! The deadline's at the end of the month, and the next one's not till August! I need your entries so I have time to let Miss Jacks tear them to pieces!”

“Give constructive feedback,” Miss Jacks corrects.

Anthony rips a sheet of paper from his notebook, tears it in half, and paper-airplanes each half to me and Jaina. “Writing down your email address means I have express permission to email you the summer newsletter.”

“Is there poetry club in the summer?” Jaina asks.

“No, but like I said, there's a newsletter. And that newsletter, penned by author, poet, and world-class journalist Anthony Tucker”—he takes a bow—“will suggest various poetry forms you can be practicing so that when we come back at the end of August, you'll have something written for the competition. Because, so help me, people, somebody who is sitting in this room right now had better win one of those scholarships—
or else!
”

I'm not wild about the idea of Anthony Tucker having my email address. I write it down, but I don't hand it back yet.

“Now. Who wants to start?”

“I wrote an acrostic,” Lisa volunteers, puffed up with importance.

Anthony chucks the beanbag at her and she jumps, startled, and misses it. Angie kicks it back over to her, and she picks it up by a corner. “What do I do with this?”

“It means you have the floor,” Anthony says. “Take it quick, before I change my mind.”

“Like you can stop me from talking.”

“Go on, go on. An acrostic?”

“I remembered it from elementary school, and I looked it up online. It's where you use the letters of a word, like your name, as the first letter in each line. Like—okay, I'm Lisa. So I wrote
L–I–S–A
down the page, and each of those letters is the first letter in that line.”

She reads:

“Little girl

Is growing up

So fast.

Almost adult.”

I actually like this, but I can't bring myself to tell Lisa. Something about her polo shirt and her thin, straight,
neatly cut red hair. If I think it's hard talking to Jaina, I'd probably never manage to pull together any words to say to Lisa. I can't imagine we have much in common.

“Can we do other people's names?” Anthony asks, super casual. His eyes also stray to Lisa. I work to hide a giggle.

I see Miss Jacks fight a smile before she says, “Let's stick to our own names for the moment. It's much safer.”

We take a few minutes to write. But I don't like this form. It sticks to my pencil.

Still, it's kind of cool how many directions the members of poetry club take with each letter. In different kids' poems, the letter
C
might stand for
Cheetos
,
Camping
, or
Courageous
.

When Anthony tosses me the beanbag, I read:

“So

Annalisa

Suggested we all use our

Heads and write

Acrostic poems. Ugh.”

Lisa shrieks with displeasure. “My name isn't Annalisa. It's just Lisa!”

“Well, that would make my name S-
llll
-sha! And you don't have the beanbag!” Turns out she's not so hard to talk to after all, once she's got me mad.

“Girls,” Miss Jacks interrupts before me and Lisa can come to blows over who gets to keep her given name. “Consider it artistic license,” she tells Lisa. Then to me: “Consider putting your shoulder into the assignment.”

So I write:

Someday I will

Answer when

Somebody asks me a question I wish they

Hadn't

Asked.

I look up to find that Lisa has been reading over my shoulder. Rage burns.

“You don't read over a person's shoulder; that's . . . that's rude!” The words will hardly spit out. I see the other kids look up.

“You don't have the beanbag!” Lisa mimics. “Anyway, that doesn't make any sense! That's not a poem about you, just because it has your name in it.”

“How about we keep the tempers in check?” Miss Jacks suggests.

“It says
Sasha
, doesn't it?” I snap. “So shut up. What did you write?”

“I already did mine!”

“Girls.” Miss Jacks is standing now.

“Okay,” me and Lisa both mutter. I scoot even farther away.

There is silence for a minute. Then Jaina raises her hand and Angie tosses her the beanbag.

Jaina reads:

“Joyful

And

Interesting.

Never forget to be

Awesome.”

“That's not about you, either,” Lisa mutters, but Miss Jacks silences her with a raised eyebrow.

“I like it,” I say, a little louder than necessary, because I want my voice to matter more than Lisa's. Anger has made me less shy and given me a little more volume.

Jaina watches me long past her turn. When I catch her eye, she glances toward Lisa and then, when she is very sure Lisa isn't looking, sticks out her tongue. Some of the tension bleeds out of me, and I smile back, glad I haven't scared Jaina off with my temper.

Anthony raises his hands for the beanbag, and a smile creeps onto my face before he can even start reading. I'm surprised to find how much I'm looking forward to his words.

He reads:

“Anthony is

Never on

Time for anything, Mrs. Tucker.

He needs to turn in his homework

Or he will flunk.

Next week is report cards.

Yes, that's right. Next week.”

Everybody laughs. But I notice Anthony doesn't laugh much. Miss Jacks was wrong. Writing about our own names isn't safe at all.

I look at Anthony, but he never looks back. He's missed a few opportunities to pick on me since last poetry club. It's almost like we're friends now because we share Thursdays.

So I write:

Anthony is

Never as boring as

The other kids.

He writes

Okay poetry and

Never forgets to be funny.

Yes, that's right. Funny.

I don't read it out loud, because it has broken the rule about other people's names. When we're leaving, I want
to hand it to Anthony, but I'm too shy.
Maybe next time,
I think. For now, I keep it in my notebook, and I hand him my email address instead.

•   •   •

Phyllis drives slowly through the rain. I gaze out the window at wet springtime leaves. Dead leaves from last fall still coat the ground. They're grimy from passing trucks. I reach across the front seat and take Phyllis's hand. She squeezes my fingertips with hers.

“Sasha, hold it still. Don't move it so much.” I've never heard Phyllis's voice sound quite so high-pitched. It's still Thursday, but much later, and Phyllis is reaching across the car, holding Shirley's dish towel against my hand.

“You're squeezing too hard!” My voice sounds strange. Too slow or something.

“I have to squeeze,” Phyllis says. “I have to stop the bleeding. I know it hurts—”

“No, it doesn't.” It really doesn't. I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

After poetry club, we'd gone home as usual. Phyllis started dinner, and afterward, we made dessert. We were going to take some to Mikey and the girls, but we only got halfway through the yard to their front porch before we heard Shirley screaming.

I ran ahead, ignoring Phyllis's hollering for me to stop, and I found Mikey crouched in a corner of the kitchen with his hands over his head while Shirley hit him with the dish towel.

It was only a dish towel and it couldn't really hurt him, but the anger pouring out of Shirley made me feel cold and hot all at the same time, and she kept hitting and hitting him, and he wasn't doing anything besides sitting there. In another corner of the kitchen, Sara and Marla sat on the floor, both wailing. Marla's high chair was turned over, and Sara had her sister on her lap, their arms and legs all tangled up.

I hollered for Shirley to stop, and when she didn't, I wrenched my sleeve from Phyllis's grip and went in swinging. Shirley ducked, but her kitchen window didn't. Maybe I hit it at just the right angle, or maybe it was weak from all the hot dishwater she was always running below it. Whatever the reason, it shattered before I even understood what was happening.

Shirley followed us out of the house. She'd always been so grim and quiet, it was a shock to see her screaming and sobbing. Phyllis held a dish towel, the same one Shirley'd been swinging, around my bleeding hand. She was maneuvering me and Mikey both out of the house when Shirley grabbed a handful of Phyllis's jacket.

“He knocked the baby out of her high chair.”

At that, Phyllis stopped, a shudder going through her
like she just plain couldn't figure out how she was going to manage one more child with her current number of hands. “Is the baby all right?”

“No thanks to him!” Shirley was coming unglued completely. Her voice was pitched shrill and she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands. They fluttered around her throat, then stretched out toward us through the air. I could see them shaking. I wondered if she would remember this later, because I recognized in her the same out-of-control that I'd been more than once, and I didn't always remember everything later.

“I didn't mean to!” Mikey hiccupped. “I was . . . I was just running—I didn't want the TV—” He stopped. “Dad didn't come home!”

“There's been another one,” Shirley said at last, something about her voice making all of us feel cold.

•   •   •

There's a doctor stitching my hand, so I can't write. I have to do it in my head.

I think:

Something bad happened

at the Dogwood Number Six.

Hubert's not home yet.

But this doesn't explain what really happened, so I write:

Fire

and smoke

block rescuers from

telling us the truth

tonight.

But I haven't followed the rules, and this is not a true cinquain.

So I write:

Mikey got upset.

He tried to run, didn't mean

to hurt the baby.

But this doesn't explain that the baby fell. That Mikey knocked her out of her high chair. He wasn't trying to hurt Marla. He was trying to run from the house before the TV man could say what happened.

So I write:

Shirley lost her head.

She's worried about Hubert.

I guess she loves him.

I wish I knew what to say to Mikey. He's sitting in the corner of the exam room with his knees pulled up to his chest, looking small, small, small.

•   •   •

In the dark night, Mikey's house is lit. Nobody's been to bed. The same lights are on as when we left. Shirley's pacing, holding Marla, who is screaming, red-faced, and trying to get down. Shirley doesn't seem to notice, but she's patting the baby's back with each step. Sara's on the porch boards, wearing only a diaper, running a three-legged toy horse back and forth. She makes it jump the cracks.

Hubert might not come back.

The thought steals my breath. Hubert's scrub-brush beard and his crinkled, kind eyes might be gone forever from my life and from Mikey's. I don't want Mikey to hear the news. I don't want
me
to hear the news. After the call comes, everything will be different. Everything will be darker. I've waited for this sort of news before. Sometimes it seems like I'll always be waiting for phone calls in the dark.

•   •   •

Mikey stays over. Nobody suggests that he go inside with Shirley. He doesn't talk to me and Phyllis about what happened. We wait, but the headlights never arc across my window like they do when Hubert comes in after dark. We don't admit we're waiting. We just keep staring at the window.

Phyllis and I sing to Mikey. He's outgrown songs at bedtime, but he tolerates us with a tired smile too old for
nine. We work our way through all of Phyllis's standby favorites: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, a Beatles song or two. Then all her old folk songs. So many of them are sad. She stops halfway through my mother's song, like she's just realized it's the same one that led me to break her guitar. But I meet her eyes and keep singing. It seems so long ago, that day I broke the guitar. It was only three months ago, only three months since I moved into Phyllis's house, but in the days since, there's been Mikey and there's been Phyllis and there's been poetry club, and everything's been better.

It was a trick; it was all a trick. I can see it now. I started to relax and then something awful happened. I understand my mother's song now. When Phyllis pauses, I keep singing “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and after a few lines, she joins me again. It's all about being trapped and unhappy, and the only way out is to die. That must have been how my mother felt, trapped in a place where nothing ever really changes.

I hold Mikey tight as we sing. That will not be our escape. Not like Ben and Michael and maybe Hubert. I'll make sure we have a chance to grow up outside this cage. I won't get tricked again into staying.

We fall asleep after three and get woken up by the ringing, like the sound in your ears after you fall. The lights are still on, and we are all propped on the same bed like
throw pillows. When Phyllis leaves to answer the phone, the room starts to seem smaller, the walls close, the lights dim. Mikey looks at me and doesn't speak. It seems stupid of us to just sit here and wait.

As dawn breaks, before Phyllis has a chance to come and tell us the news, I take Mikey and we leave this
place.