Rocky Road (4 page)

U
h-oh. 8:14
. I’d hit
OFF
instead of
SNOOZE
. I’d be late on my first day of school here in Antarctica. No wonder—I hadn’t fallen asleep until past two. Ma says insomnia runs in our Dobson blood. So do morning grumpies. Jordan was still sleeping as I jumped from the bed and wiggled into my jeans with a ten-pound chip on my shoulders.

“Bus is coming, Tess. Git your motor in overdrive!” Ma shouted from the kitchen.

“Big deal if I’m late,” I growled to myself.

Ma handed me my lunch and an envelope as I scrambled out the door. “Take these registration forms. Bus picks up a block south, by the fire hydrant. Hurry!”

I tried, but hurrying on snow-covered ice is no walk in the park, especially without winter boots. Just a few steps from the lobby door I slipped and fell. Then I flopped again near the apartment-complex entrance, right where the snow plows had dumped a pile of gray, sludgy snow.

As I got up and brushed dirty snow off my jeans, I saw the big wooden sign. The sign that I missed when we arrived after dark:
MOHAWK VALLEY VILLAGE
—
INDEPENDENT & ASSISTED SENIOR LIVING
.

The words struck like a cane to the head. This place was for
old people
! What was Ma thinking, moving us here? But I had no time to let it sink in. The bus pulled up and I ran to catch it.

By the time we reached Ottawa Creek Middle School, my hair was messy, my jeans were damp, and my sneakers were soaked. I wanted to find the girls’ room and peek in the mirror to check if my big ears were poking out or if my neck was covered with nervous blotches. No time. A bell rang, so I hurried to the main office.

They sent me to guidance.

“Have a seat, please. I’m Ms. Hockley. Is Tess short for something?” the guidance counselor asked matter-of-factly as she escorted me to her office, which faced the reception area.

“Just Tess,” I answered. She was the tallest woman I’d ever
seen. Way over six feet. With a deep voice too, like a Texas prison warden. (Pop once told Ma and me that Texas has the toughest prisons in the country, though he never explained how he knew this. Years later Ma admitted that between his thirst for booze and his crummy driving record, she had a feeling he might’ve had firsthand experience with those wardens.)

“Fine then, Tess. Let’s get down to business so you can get to class.”

Out in the reception area a skinny boy with orange curly hair was staring back at me, making goofy faces. Our eyes met and I looked away.

Ms. Hockley thumbed through my registration papers. “Based on your records, I think we should place you in grade-level math, period three.”

“I was in advanced math back in Texas,” I interrupted.

“Yes, I noticed. But New York has a challenging math curriculum. Grade level is the recommended starting point for most out-of-state transfers.”

Years back, Pop used to brag to his work buddies about how fast I worked numbers in my head. For fun I used to memorize square roots. Once when I was in first grade, Ma took me to visit Pop on a construction site and he called out, “Go on, Tess, tell these guys what the square root of 1,225 is.” Without skipping a beat I shouted, “Thirty-five!” That got them all raising their eyebrows approvingly, which doesn’t happen every day around men in hard hats pouring concrete.

No matter, I didn’t want to take advanced math to please Pop. He hadn’t called or sent a single letter to Jordan or me in two
years, and I didn’t expect an “Attagirl” now. I wanted to take this class because I knew I could handle it.

“Really, math’s my best subject,” I insisted, sitting up straighter.

Ms. Hockley looked up from behind her glasses. “Give grade-level math a try, and we’ll see how things go,” she said.

Case closed. So much for the new kid’s opinion.

Then she ran down a checklist of questions.

“Do you play a sport, Tess?”

“No.”

“Dance or act in school plays?”

“No.” I stared at a shelf behind her desk that held dozens of fancy Pez candy dispensers. Beside them was a sign:
PLEASE DON
’
T TOUCH
.

“What about band or orchestra?”

I shook my head and peeked out into the reception area. That orange-haired boy was still making goofy faces. Was he trying to be funny, or was he making fun of me?

“Any interest in student council?”

My head was still shaking.

“How ’bout the Go-Green Gang, our environmental club?”

“No thanks.” I had a hard enough time getting Ma and Jordan to stick the pop bottles in the recycle bin, never mind policing others.

I rubbed my ice-cube hands. The heater in this school didn’t work much better than the one in Ma’s Toyota.

Ms. Hockley’s down-turned mouth said it all. She’d sized
me up as a do-nothing slacker. Well, tough beef jerky.
I don’t even like your freezing school, Prison-Warden Lady
. I looked out the window. It faced an empty warehouse with broken windows. Icicles hung down from the gutters. I wanted to open a window, grab one of those Pez dispensers, and toss it at those icicles.

“How ’bout chorus?” she pleaded, desperate to write something.

I shook my head. Been there. Done that.

I joined chorus in sixth grade after Ma nagged me about not getting involved enough at school. “A baby coon can’t sit in the den and learn to catch frogs,” she said. “Be a joiner!”

I
was
involved: those ASL classes at the Y after school met three times a week. If Ma had given it a hard try, she would’ve known: learning ASL took concentration and lots of practice. But chorus, well, that met on Tuesdays during lunch. I could do that.

My short-lived middle-school chorus career ended on a flat note. Shooting Stars struck Ma right in the middle of the spring concert. As we sang “Singin’ in the Rain” onstage, Ma started crying in her seat—loud boohoo bawling like someone died. Later she said that watching me on the auditorium stage hit a nerve. All the emotion of the years passing by for me without Pop hit her like a ton of bricks and sent her into a crash. All the kids, teachers, and parents just kept staring at Ma sobbing, and wondering what on earth was wrong. Three days later, when I returned to school after taking care of Ma, I quit chorus. I couldn’t go back to those questions and stares.

“Is there
any
extracurricular activity that interests you?” Ms. Hockley asked, sighing.

I perked up. “Do you have an art club?”

Art was my favorite special back in elementary school. Mrs. Menendez, the art teacher, let us play our favorite CDs as we worked, and we made all kinds of masterpieces, as she called them. We turned old nuts and bolts into wind chimes, we made modern-art sculptures out of crushed Coke cans, and we created salt-dough potted-plant people to give our moms for Mother’s Day. She always asked me to float from table to table to help other kids since I usually finished early, and that was the best part of class. Art disappeared when I got to middle school because of budget cuts.

Suddenly the thought of art club was warming me up.

“Sorry. We don’t have an art club.”

Figured.

A tall, skinny girl blew into the office just as we finished talking. She had bushy eyebrows and she wore a red basketball jersey. I barely came up to her shoulder, but I sure outweighed her in the hip-and-thigh department.

“Ellie will be your meet-and-greeter,” Ms. Hockley explained. “Meet-and-greeters help new students find their way. And she’ll sit with you at lunch.”

Ma tells me not to act like the soda pop is always flat. Still, I knew right away I wouldn’t click with my meet-and-greeter.

And I was right. Ellie kept dribbling an invisible basketball and talking about the “big game against Shen” later. She played forward and led the team in points because she wasn’t afraid to
shoot threes. Shed has a zone defense—tough to penetrate, she explained. Like I had a clue.

Ellie led me down the seventh-grade hallway and stopped at room 228. “Here’s your English class. I’m off to French, which is
très ennuyeux
,” she said, cupping a pretend yawn. “Four more hours until tip-off. Can’t wait!” She took off down the hall, then turned around and shouted, “Oh yeah, I sit in the back of the cafeteria with the rest of the team. I’ll save you a seat.”

The morning went just as expected. Lots of kids staring at Tess the new kid. Teachers giving me beat-up textbooks needing covers, and what-you-better-do-in-my-class-or-else handouts. And just like I predicted, grade-level math was forty-two wasted minutes of figuring out percentages that I learned two years ago.

I stopped at the lockers before lunch. Ms. Hockley had written my locker number and combination down for me, but there hadn’t been a minute to find it earlier. I’d been carrying my backpack around all morning, and I wanted to unload some of the heavy books.

My stomach rumbled as I searched for locker 226, though I wasn’t sure if it was from nerves or hunger. There it was, in the middle of the blue row, with a big dent in the middle like someone had kicked it hard. The window was cracked open nearby, and the breeze made me shiver.

Would I fit in with Ellie and her basketball friends? The only hoop I cared about was the kind that holds needlepoint. Worrying about it made me mess up the combination.

“Hee-haw to you, San Antonio gal!”

I turned around. Ugh. That redhead from guidance was standing nearby with two other boys. He must’ve been eavesdropping. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

“Hey, little lassie. Word at the water fountain is you’re from the great state of Texas!” he called over, looking back to impress his friends.

“Lassie’s a dog,” I mumbled softly as I twirled the lock knob.

“C’mon, let me hear that southwestern drawl,” he pleaded. “I love that drawl—and jalapeño peppers!”

What, like he
didn’t
have an accent? Maybe Texans stretch words out like taffy, but New Yawkers have their own speech quirks. Like dropping
r
’s off words that have them, and adding
r
’s to words that don’t.

I kept ignoring him, trying to open my locker. So far nothing was working. This thing looked so old, I bet it was rusted shut.

“You think I’m joking, but I’m not. I swear in another life I was riding horses and rustling cattle on a ranch in Texas. I’ve watched every cowboy movie ever made, especially the ones about the Alamo. Right, guys?” He had a birthmark on his cheek that moved up and down when he spoke, and his breath smelled nasty, like cheese.

The two other boys with him laughed. One said something about him looking more natural riding a circus elephant.

I wasn’t listening anymore. I was fed up with the Texas jokes. Sure, San Antonio has the rodeo and the buckaroos with their cowboy hats and silver studs, but it also has military bases, sunny
skies, and more Hispanic flair than this city could ever hope for. But I knew lecturing this kid would be like talking to a tree stump. I kept trying the lock.

The boy elbowed one of his buddies and turned to me again. “I’ll prove you’re not dealing with no dumb Yankee here. You know the Lone Star song? I do. Let’s sing it together!”

Was he for real? I didn’t even look at him, even though he started crooning.

“There’s a bullet in the heart tonight in the heart of Texas….”

I turned my body away from him. Round and round I twirled the knob: 24-26-6, that’s what the paper said. Why wouldn’t this blasted thing work?

One more time I pulled with all my might and finally it flung open. I started unloading my books and lunch bag from my backpack.

“Why so quiet? Is this a front, or do you always act deaf
and
dumb around new people?” he said, facing me and then turning to wink at his buddies.

That did it. Nobody sticks
deaf
in the same sentence as
dumb
.

“Watch your mouth, Pumpkinhead!” I shouted, and without even thinking, I pulled a pear out of the lunch bag in my hand and threw it at him.
Smack!
It hit hard, right between his eyes.

“Ouch!” he yelled, grabbing his nose.

No sooner had that pear left my hand did a lady in a shaggy
striped sweater grab my elbow and yank me to the center of the hallway.

“Where do you think you are, prison?” she roared. All the hallway traffic stopped as kids watched the new girl get grilled.

Miss Shaggy Sweater turned out to be a social studies teacher. She must have missed the lesson about the Bill of Rights, though, because she sent me to the main office before I could speak out in self-defense. And she didn’t make the redheaded jerk come along. He got sent to the nurse’s office for an ice pack, as if it was a steel pear or something.

Without even thinking, I stuck my lunch bag in my locker, slammed it shut, and walked to the main office, where I waited fifteen minutes until Mr. Godfrey, the assistant principal, returned from eating
his
lunch. At which point he took me in his office and rambled on about his “zero-tolerance-for-violence policy.”

The lecture lasted six minutes and thirty-five seconds. I know because I stared at a clock shaped like a New York Giants helmet above his desk the whole time. Pop hated the Giants. “Any day that the Cowboys kick the Giants’ teeth in is a good day,” he always said.

Mr. Godfrey kept asking for my version of what happened, but I said little. I knew who was the insider here and who was the outsider. Besides, having a deaf brother has taught me how much is said without words.

Then he asked if I wanted to resolve this conflict in something called peer mediation.

I shook my head, not even interested in hearing what that meant.

About now I was expecting Mr. Godfrey to dole out a hefty punishment, but instead he said he was giving me a one-time-only do-over at my new school.

“Pete is a decent kid but he does have a way of sticking his foot in his mouth, so I’m going to assume that’s what happened. At a bare minimum, I’ll expect you to apologize to him. And from now on, keep your nose clean and quit throwing fruit,” he advised.