Ghost Girl (5 page)

“Very good,” Miss Vest said when we got to Z without stopping. “Now, how about vowels. Luella?”

Luella was our prize student. She never made a mistake.

Next were letter sounds, and after a while we were doing so well Miss Vest made a game of it. She wrote a letter on the blackboard and called somebody's name, and that person had to say, as quick as they could, what sound the letter made.

She wrote a
B
and called on Dewey.

“Buh,” Dewey said.

She wrote a
L
and called on me.

“Luh,” I said, glad to get my turn out of the way.

Ida made the sound for
N
, and Rainey Walker managed to remember both sounds for the tricky
G
.

We were answering faster and faster and Miss Vest was smiling. Then she wrote
W
on the board and called out, “Poke!”

At first he didn't answer. Then he said, “Duh.”

I knew why he said “Duh.” Because of double-
U
. “Duh” for double-
U
.

But all of a sudden, we heard a snicker behind us. Then two or three more of the St. Anne's girls started giggling. Miss Vest looked mad enough to spit.

“Girls!” the headmistress lady snapped. “Quiet, please!”

But it was too late. A dark shade of red was already creeping up Poke's neck, past his big Adam's apple, up to the roots of his tangled black hair. He stared down at the top of his desk.

I was surprised. I didn't think the day would ever come when I felt sorry for Poke McClure. I turned around and glared at the line of girls leaning against the back wall. One of them still had a smirk playing along the corners of her mouth. The words were on the tip of my tongue. “Go back to where you came from,” I was aching to say. “I wouldn't wear your old castoffs if you paid me.”

I wasn't the only one who refused to go near the boxes of hand-me-downs. Nobody wanted to touch those clothes after the St. Anne's girls had laughed at us. And not long after their visit, the marines set up sawhorses at the bottom of the schoolhouse road and started turning all the reporters and other callers away. I was tickled. Maybe now I'd be able to learn something without a bunch of busybodies looking over my shoulder.

But we hadn't heard the last of the reporters. One morning Sergeant Jordan showed up with a fat brown envelope from the White House filled with newspaper stories about the President's Mountain School. Even though it was time for penmanship, Miss Vest loosened up on the rules for once. She passed around the stack of clippings and let everybody laugh and talk and take turns squinting at the photographs and the long rows of tiny print.

“Hey, there's me again!” Dewey kept shouting. It was true. Almost every article showed a picture of Dewey, standing by the blackboard, lounging on the schoolhouse steps, him and Ida walking home with big grins on their faces.

“You're famous, Dewey,” Miss Vest said as she glanced over some of the clippings. “The
Washington Post
, the
Evening Star
, the
New York World
. Did you know they're calling you possum boy?”

“Yep,” Dewey said proudly. “On account of me giving President Hoover that baby possum for his birthday. That's when he and Miz Hoover got the idea to build our school.” He looked around to see who was listening.

Beside me, Poke made a disgusted noise in his throat. We had all heard that story fifty times already. And everybody had seen the reporters slipping Dewey change, even dollar bills, as he fed them more and more of his tall tales for their newspapers. I had overheard Ida telling her friends that Dewey had saved up enough money to buy himself a new suit of clothes at Taggart's.

When the pile of clippings finally came around to me, I flipped through the stack as quick as I could, scared of seeing a picture of my ugly boots spread across a whole page. But luckily, I showed up in only one photograph. We were all sitting at our desks in the picture. I looked scrawny, with my mouth hanging half-open and my hair a white blur around my head. I had to stop myself from reaching down and smudging out my face with my finger.

Just then Miss Vest announced that it was time for penmanship.

“Oh, come on, Miss Vest,” Dewey begged. “Can't you read some of the newspapers out loud? Please? So we can see what they're saying about us?”

“Not now, Dewey,” she told him, gathering the clippings back into a stack. “We're already way behind on our lessons this week. I'll tack the articles up on the bulletin board later so that you can all look at them more this afternoon.”

Everybody sighed, and we pulled sheets of paper out of our desks.

Penmanship meant we had to copy long rows of letters and rhyming words from the blackboard. Miss Vest read the words out loud:
bat, hat, cat, bed, fed, red
. But as usual, whenever I started writing, the letters seemed to swim together, and my hand felt sweaty and cramped holding on to my pencil.

When I first started school, I thought reading might come fast and all at once like a streak of lightning. But now a month or more had already gone by, and still no lightning bolt had hit. As soon as I got home every afternoon, Mama asked to see my work. She wasn't too impressed with my pages full of letters and crayon drawings. “When are you gonna start reading books?” she wanted to know. “Soon,” I kept saying.

I could never tell her that the letters just didn't make sense, that all the blackboard exercises made me feel itchy and restless, like my whole body was covered in poison ivy blisters.

Poke must have been feeling the same way. During penmanship, he stared out the window, jiggling his legs like always. I sneaked a look over at his paper. He had copied only one row of letters from the blackboard so far, and his writing looked even worse than mine, all running downhill and smeared with pencil lead.

Miss Vest was watching Poke, too.

“Poke, are you having trouble with this assignment?” she asked.

“No,” he muttered, hunching over his paper.

Miss Vest started to walk toward us. Poke wouldn't look up at her. Instead, he kept filling in a big
O
on his paper, making the circle black and angry looking, until all of a sudden, his pencil point snapped.

“Can I help?” Miss Vest asked quietly.

“I
said
no,” Poke hissed, keeping his teeth clenched. Then he flung his pencil down and slouched back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

Miss Vest tried not to flinch. She stood over him for a minute, staring down at the top of his head without saying a word. When he still wouldn't look up at her, she started back to her desk. I heard her sigh as she walked away. The truth was, nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the assignment. Luella had borrowed Ida's compact to paint two red spots of rouge on her cheeks, and up front some little kids were whispering and poking each other in the ribs.

Then Dewey spoke up. “Most of us are done, Miss Vest. Recess ain't for another ten minutes. Don't we have time for some of those newspaper stories now?”

At first I thought Miss Vest was getting ready to lose her temper. She swiped a mussed piece of hair behind her ear and stared at Dewey hard, but then she said, “As a matter of fact, I think we
do
have some time.” Everybody looked up from what they were doing. Her voice sounded funny, too high and too cheerful.

“Maybe hearing what those reporters have to say about us is just what we need right now.” She grabbed up the stack of clippings and started shuffling through them. “Let's see. . . . Here's one called ‘Clans of Hillbilly Folk Welcome Book Learning in Hoover's Dark Hollow.' Or what about ‘Wild Young Mountaineers Swarm to Hoover School'?”

She glanced up at us. Her face was flushed and her dark eyes glittered. “Not that one?” she asked, pretending to be surprised. “Well, how about this one from the
Washington Herald
?”

She cleared her throat and began to read: “Deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where snow now sifts through the wild oak branches, President Hoover's trim little school for mountain children opened its doors to more than twenty education-starved people last Monday. The First Lady will find ample outlet for her well-known humanitarian sympathies in the ragged little mountain children who have trooped from their mud-chinked log cabins scattered through the wooded depressions of the hills. Some of these sad little wraiths are as shy as wild rabbits. They have never ridden on trains. Some have never even seen one. The biggest excitement in their lives has been ‘hog-killin' time' at their mountain homes—”

“Hog-killing time?” Ida cried. “They think I like
hog killing
?”

But Miss Vest barely took a breath. She flipped through the stack and found another article to read, and then another. Why wouldn't she stop? The newspapers were all the same. All of them made us sound ignorant in one way or another, more like dumb farm animals than just regular folks without much money or nice clothes.

Finally, Miss Vest finished reading. She sat back on her desk with her shoulders drooped like all the life had just run out of her body.

“They're wrong,” Ida shouted. “They didn't get nothing about us right.”

“I know, Ida,” Miss Vest said in a tired voice. “I'm sorry.”

“
Sorry?
” somebody called out.

It was Poke. I jumped at the sound of his voice. Like me, he had barely said a word since school started, but now he was talking faster than ever, spitting out words like he was trying to get rid of a sour taste in his mouth. “You must think we're just a bunch of hillbillies, too,” he said. “Must be why you keep giving us all these fool exercises. How you reckon we're gonna learn real reading and writing, copying them baby words off the blackboard all day long?”

Miss Vest looked shocked. “Poke,
of course
I don't agree with those reporters. I hate what they wrote. The only reason I read those silly articles out loud was to get your attention . . . everybody's attention.”

She took a deep breath and went on, using her hands to talk again. She hit the air with her fists. “I
know
we can prove all those reporters wrong. But it takes work, and we all have to start with the basics. It wouldn't matter if I was teaching in the Blue Ridge or New York City, I'd still use the same methods to teach you. Learning to read and write takes time and patience and—”

“Well, I don't have that much time,” Poke cut in, his jaw muscles working. “I reckon my pa would sooner have me home clearing stumps than sitting here making this hen scratch.” He glared down at the paper on his desk with an evil look. Then before we knew it, he had shoved himself out of his desk and started scuffing up the aisle.

“Wait, Poke!” Miss Vest called out, her voice sounding panicky.

But he was already out the door. Miss Vest dropped her hands to her sides. “Don't worry,” she said softly, almost like she was trying to comfort herself. “He'll be back tomorrow.”

But the rest of us knew better. Poke was gone for good.

I was leaning against
my chestnut tree at the beginning of recess a few days later when Dewey started whistling again. It was that same song he always whistled—“Let Me Call You Sweetheart”—and as he started the tune over and over, I could almost hear the man's voice from our old record, singing the words so waltzy and slow.

Dewey was pitching a baseball back and forth with Vernon Woodard. Every time the ball smacked his stiff leather glove, his whistling seemed to get louder. For a while I huddled down into my sweater, trying to block out the cold wind and the mournful sound of Dewey's high-pitched tune.

If they had given me half a chance, I would have joined Ida and Luella and the other girls sitting on the porch steps. They were bunched together looking at the new Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalog. Ever since Ida had spotted it on Miss Vest's desk the week before, she and her friends had met at recess every day to flip through the pages and
ooh
and
aah
over all the fancy things for sale.

Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore.

“Stop it, Dewey!” I yelled.

It seemed as though everybody in the schoolyard turned at once to look at me. Even the girls on the porch tore their eyes away from the catalog to stare.

“Stop what?” Dewey asked with a smirk.

“That whistling,” I said, trying to keep my voice down. “You've whistled that song four times through already.”

Dewey looked confused for a second, then his eyes lit up. He walked toward me, tossing the ball up and catching it in his glove. “I know why you want me to quit,” he said with a sly smile creeping across his face. “I'm singing one of your old records. You're just sore 'cause
we
got the Victrola now instead of you. . . . Well, too bad, ghost girl, you better get used to it.”