The Daring Escape of Beatrice and Peabody (13 page)

Generally it is a good idea to look at each day as a new beginning, a shiny copper penny just waiting to be spent. My first day of school is not one of those days.

Mrs Swift walks on one side of me and Mrs Potter limps on the other. The dampness from the road climbs through the holes in the bottom of my work boots and into my socks. I wear my overalls, mended by Mrs Potter. ‘A frock would have been so much nicer,’ Mrs Swift says.

The school stands in front of me, a brown wooden building with a bell ringing on top. Mrs Potter stops on the side of the road and reaches for me. I feel her soft cheek against my own and smell the rose water on her skin. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ she whispers.

I shake my head. That’s the thing. I’m not going to be fine. New tears slide down my diamond. ‘I can’t,’ I whisper.

Mrs Potter pulls me close again. ‘You need an education, Bee.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do. To make your own way in the world, you do.’

‘I am fine staying home and reading and cooking.’

Mrs Potter gives me another hug and then Mrs Swift reaches for her arm.

‘You can’t hide, Beatrice,’ Mrs Swift says. Peabody leaps for me, but already Mrs Swift has the rope tight. ‘Stop that,’ she tells him, and he sits down right where he is and whimpers and Mrs Potter has to reach into her skirt and pull out another tea biscuit.

Then Peabody is all interested in the biscuit and he forgets about me.

A boy on a bike rushes toward us. His army-green lunch box waves as he tries to hold it and the handlebars at the same time. He whooshes so close I see the sweat on his forehead and hear his pedals squeak. Mrs Swift steps out of the way just in time.

‘He didn’t see you?’ I whisper.

‘No, I guess he didn’t,’ Mrs Swift says quickly, and pulls Peabody close and tells him to stop barking.

The boy jumps off and leans his bike against the school and flies up the steps. Already the bell is quiet.

My overalls do not reach the top of my work boots. I have been growing from all the honey cake.

I stop on the top step and look back at Mrs Swift and Mrs Potter. An uneasy feeling fills my heart. I know now that I live with two old ladies who only I can see.

Peabody jumps and tugs at his leash, trying to run after me, and he gets himself wrapped up in Mrs Swift’s skirts. When she sees me still on the top step, she tries to wave me in the front door. I sigh, pull my hair tight and step inside.

The school office is panelled in heavy wood and the victory blackout shades are half closed. A picture of President Roosevelt hangs on the wall beside one of George Washington and another of Abraham Lincoln. A lady in half-moon glasses looks up from her typewriter. I pull my hair tighter.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I …’ I stop. I have practised what I’m going to say, but now I’m not sure. I want to rush out and wrap myself in Mrs Potter’s pink shawl.

A girl in a plaid dress walks into the office and pushes
up beside me. I stub the toe of my work boot on the floor.

‘I haven’t got all day, child.’ The lady glances at the other girl. I fidget. I suck in my breath, not sure what I want to say.

‘Well, spit it out.’

I push the words out quick as I can, like bullets, to get it over with. ‘I need to sign up.’

‘That so? Well, where’s your mama?’

I look at my boots. I feel my diamond burning. My head smarts from holding my hair so tight.

‘I haven’t got a mama,’ I whisper.

‘A father, then?’

I shake my head.

‘Where did you go to school?’

‘I didn’t,’ I whisper. ‘Pauline taught me.’

She stares at me. ‘No school ever?’

I shake my head.

‘Well then. This is going to take a while, isn’t it? You better have a seat so I can help Francine first.’

She nods to the other girl. I go over and sit on a wooden chair in the corner and wait while the lady and the girl talk a whole conversation. ‘What a pretty dress, Francine. Is it new?’ she asks.

‘Yes, it is.’ The girl’s voice is tinkling bells. I have to listen to a whole long story of how her papa bought it for her and how her mama warmed it by the woodstove so it was toasty when she came downstairs from her cold
bedroom. Then when she was dressed, she sat by the stove and ate hot buttered blueberry pancakes.

That gets me to thinking about my mama and papa and how I do not have either one. Finally, the lady gives Francine a box of paper for her class, and before leaving, the girl watches the way I am holding my hair.

The lady turns back to me. ‘You need an adult to enrol in school, you know.’ She holds one hand up and inspects her nails, all painted cherry red.

I hand her a letter written in Mrs Swift’s thin spidery script:

The letter is signed
Abigail Swift
and then, in even more wavy handwriting,
Elizabeth Potter.
It put a song in my heart when Mrs Swift wrote the letter at the kitchen table. I hugged Mrs Swift and then Mrs Potter, who was already stuffing my lunch box with hard-boiled eggs and biscuits. Their hugs felt just like Pauline’s. Only older.

‘Well, why didn’t they come themselves?’ She inspects the other hand.

I pull my hair tighter and shrug.

‘Well, I’ll have to see about this.’ She disappears into the back room, and I hear her talking. Soon a man follows her out.

I stand up. I turn my face so only my good side shows. I want Pauline.

‘No adult with you?’ The man looks a little like Mrs Marsh, with a high thin neck and a tight face. I wonder if they are related.

I tap my work boot against the wooden floor. I hold on to my hair and tremble. Each new person is a hazard, a flashing light, a warning deep in my belly.

‘I already told her we need some sort of record to know what grade to put her in.’ The woman takes off her glasses and wipes them with the hem of her sweater.

I look her over good. I think perhaps she cannot hear right. I have already told her Pauline taught me everything, but I start again, very carefully, so my words will stick this time like maple syrup poured awful slow.

‘I did not go to school. My Pauline taught me.’

‘Well, all children must go to school,’ the man says. ‘Are you telling me your mother and father never took you to school?

I stub the toe of my work boot on the floor tiles again.

‘Well, that’s not an answer. Yes or no?’

I pull my hair so tight my head hurts. I watch the floor and wonder how somebody who talks to children all day long could be so terrible at it.

‘We need a record of your progress,’ he says. ‘How will we know what class to put you in if we don’t have your records?’

I watch the floor and whisper how my mama and papa are dead and my Pauline left with Arthur, and even Bobby left. I think it is a long sad story that makes you lonely just to think about it.

‘How old are you?’

I am starting to wonder why this has to be so hard. Just give me some books and a desk to sit at.

‘A bit feeble, I’d say,’ the lady whispers to the man. I pull my hair tighter.

‘Very well,’ he tells her. ‘Test her reading and we’ll see. In the meantime, put her in with Mrs Spriggs until we figure things out.’

Feeble, feeble, feeble.
I’m pretty sure this is not a good thing to be. The lady comes back beside me with a book and motions for me to sit down. She runs her finger against the words, slow like corn syrup. This makes my blood boil. The letters are big enough for Peabody.

She looks at me like I am light in the loaf. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Can you or can’t you?’

I stare at her, refusing to say a word.

‘Humph,’ I say finally, looking at her like I have won.

‘Humph,’ she says, looking at me like she knows better.

The lady marches me down one hall and then another, her soft soles squeaking. My work boots are so full of holes they barely make a sound. I try not to look at myself in the shined floor and pull my hair tight. I hold my breath and try to be nobody at all.

The lady leads me past one classroom after another, a row of dominoes, all with heavy wooden doors shut tight. We pass the janitor’s closet with a deep steel sink and a heavy metal bucket with a mop sticking out. She stops at the very end of the hall, right near the back door.

‘This is your room, Beatrice,’ she says, steering me in by the shoulder. I pull my hair tighter over my cheek, my helmet in place.

The room is darkened by a blanket that hangs over a window to block out the sun. When my eyes figure out the dark, I see a teacher knitting in a rocking chair and five children colouring.

‘Hey,’ says a skinny boy, who jumps up and airplanes around his desk, yelling, ‘Zoom, zoom, zoom.’

The teacher drops her yarn. ‘Jonathan!’ Even when the teacher gets up the boy doesn’t stop zooming and she
can’t get a hold of his arm until he airplanes around the room two more times. He is thin as a broom handle and very fast.

Finally, she grabs his shoulders and shakes him, once, twice, three times. He slips and she grabs his collar and hurries him to his seat and shoves him down. ‘Now, stay.’

Everyone has forgotten their colouring. My heart is aching. The teacher smooths her dress and walks over to us.

‘This is Beatrice.’ The lady from the office presses me forward. ‘Please make a place for her, Mrs Spriggs.’

The teacher frowns. ‘You know I am only supposed to be here until the school finds somebody else. I can’t have this many pupils.’

‘Just until we determine where she needs to be.’ The lady turns to me. ‘We do not like troublemakers in this school, Beatrice, and we do not put up with them, either. Not for a minute.’ Then she marches to the door, opens it, walks out and slams it behind her.

Mind your britches,
I say in my head to the children, who are staring. I pull my hair tighter against my face and make myself breathe, in and out, in and out, the way Pauline showed me. Nobody moves. I don’t move. Inch by inch, I make myself invisible: first my diamond, then my face, then my chest, my arms, my belly. I wonder if Pauline would recognise me.

There are three boys and two girls in this class. I see
how I will make six. The girls are at one table, the boys at another. A little girl with pigtails and thick glasses jumps up and rushes over and grabs me around the waist and hugs me so tight I let go of my hair. I reach out to steady myself and pull my curls tight.

In an instant, everyone is up out of their seats. Two boys come over by me and try to get a good look at my diamond and then Jonathan is airplaning around the room again.

A tall girl with many, many freckles hobbles toward me. Her right leg is in a brace and she moves pretty quick by dragging her leg behind and then skipping a little to pull it up to the other. It looks really hard, walking like that. One of her shoes is a saddle shoe, the other has a black sole as thick as a book. She smiles shyly at me and tries to pull the girl in the glasses away.

‘Sit down, Susan!’ Mrs Spriggs hurries to the girl in the glasses, who is now saying, ‘I lub you, I lub you.’

‘Sit down, everyone,
NOW
.’ The teacher pulls at the girl, but she won’t let go. The girl’s glasses go flying.

‘I lub you, I lub you, I lub you,’ the girl is saying, holding on to my leg.

‘That is very naughty to do, Susan,’ says Mrs Spriggs, who takes the girl’s arm and shakes her and pulls her back to her seat. ‘We just don’t go telling everyone we see that we love them.’

When Mrs Spriggs finally gets all the children back in
their seats, she points me to the empty space at the girls’ table and I go over and sit with them on their wooden bench. She pulls a fistful of broken crayon pieces from inside a green metal can and drops them onto the table. She gives me a piece of grey paper that somebody has already coloured on. ‘Use the back,’ she tells me, and then she goes back to her rocking chair and picks up her knitting.

Susan-with-the-glasses sits in the middle and the girl with the brace on her leg sits on the right. ‘My name is Ruth Ellen,’ she whispers, turning to me when Mrs Spriggs is counting her knitting rows.

I pull my hair tight. I don’t like to colour. I look around the room. A Victrola stands silent. A chair is pushed into a corner, with its back facing us. The teacher’s desk is big as our old hot dog cart. It stands in the front of the room, with two blackboards behind. There is a big wooden cupboard off to the side with the doors closed and nothing on top. There is a penmanship chart on the wall, a map of the United States, shelves for lunch boxes and hooks near the door with several coats hanging and army-green rubber boots lined up underneath. The floor is wide wood boards with dirt between the cracks. The walls are the same as along the hallway outside: brown halfway up and battleship grey on top.

I do not think I was missing much by Pauline snuggling with me and teaching me to read on our soft bedrolls in
the back of our hauling truck.

‘Why aren’t you colouring?’ Mrs Spriggs asks, looking up from her knitting.

Susan scribbles with a red crayon in one hand and a blue one in the other. I pick up a butterscotch colour and draw a picture of Peabody. I have to hold my hair with my left hand, and I make him all sad-looking that we are not together.

‘That’s really good,’ whispers Ruth Ellen.

It might be the first time someone my age ever said anything nice to me.

‘Lunchtime,’ says Ruth Ellen, just as my belly starts growling and the teacher rings the heavy brown bell on her desk.

‘We eat right here at our tables.’ Ruth Ellen pulls herself up off the bench and skip-hops over to the coat hooks and brings a lunch box back from the shelf. ‘We can talk if we are quiet.’ Susan is grinning like a jack-o’-lantern as Ruth Ellen unloads half a dozen cloth packages.

‘She never comes with any food so my mama always packs enough for her. There’s enough for you, too.’

‘No,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘I brought lunch.’ I bring my lunch box to our table and wait to see what Ruth Ellen has brought. La-di-da, I am a little jealous.

Ruth Ellen has the real deal: peanut butter sandwiches, carrots sliced thin as dimes, two fat red apples that somebody shined up real good and a couple of pieces of peach cake so heavy with peaches she can hardly lift them. Glory, I think as I watch the things come out of her lunch box.

My own lunch box is neat and orderly. The eggs and biscuits that Mrs Potter insisted I needed, plus some
boiled potatoes and a little pickle jar of milk and a fat slice of my newest recipe: mocha honey cake. It turns out Susan wants a bite.

‘Thomas and Robert don’t like to eat with girls,’ Ruth Ellen whispers. ‘And they make Jonathan eat at the end of the table. He peed over by the coats last week, right on top of Robert’s boots.’ Ruth Ellen rolls her eyes.

Mrs Spriggs pulls a sandwich out of her desk and eats it by herself. ‘She’s the substitute,’ Ruth Ellen says. ‘The regular teacher got married and won’t be back. She didn’t like us much anyway. Most teachers don’t.’

When Mrs Spriggs rings the bell again, it is time for recess. Ruth Ellen skip-hops outside and leans against the rough wood of the building. Susan holds her hand. The sun is hot on my cheek.

All the children from the other classes are already outside. The girls jump rope and play hopscotch on one side of the playground; the boys hit a baseball on the other.

‘Why aren’t we out there?’ I ask, stepping away from the building so I don’t get splinters in my shoulder.

‘They don’t let us mix with the other children,’ Ruth Ellen says, watching them. ‘We have to stay here on the dirt so Mrs Spriggs can watch us.’

My skin sizzles. Robert and Thomas hunch over a puddle and build a stick bridge for their trucks. ‘Don’t get your trousers wet,’ Mrs Spriggs calls.

Jonathan airplanes around the dirt, moving his arms as he changes direction and racing around and around our dirt area. He runs with his face lifted like he is looking at the clouds and there is a smile on his face. Come to think of it, he runs just like Cordelia.

You can just tell he is not paying attention to where he is going and he flies over the puddle, knocking the bridge over. Robert is up on his feet very fast, chasing Jonathan. He pushes him in the dirt, screaming, ‘That was very bad,
JONATHAN
.’

Already, Ruth Ellen is hobbling over. She bends down and pulls Jonathan up by his arm. His face is red and then tears are streaming down and Ruth Ellen is smoothing them away with her hands.

All this time Mrs Spriggs sits in a chair under a big pine tree with another teacher. She’s knitting and talking and hardly paying attention to us at all. Ruth Ellen is the one who keeps an eye on Jonathan. He plops onto the pavement and watches a line of ants. He pokes a stick down and scoops up a few and pops them into his mouth. I think maybe I am in the wrong class.

Ruth Ellen skip-hops over and knocks the stick out of his mouth. ‘Don’t eat those, Jonathan. Bugs are not to eat.’

She reaches into his mouth and pulls out several ants. Now I am sure I am in the wrong class. ‘We have to watch him all the time,’ she tells me. ‘He will eat anything.’

Jonathan looks normal. A little skinny, but lots of kids
are skinny. ‘He does everything very slow,’ Ruth Ellen says.

We watch the hopscotch girls. The girl Francine is with them. I start thinking how I could blow my top, I am so mad that those girls get to play all shaded under the maple trees. I would never make anyone stand in the sun like this. Susan stops saying she lubs me and reaches up to hold Ruth Ellen’s hand. She sucks her other thumb. Then the bell rings.

‘We have to wait here for the others to go in.’ Ruth Ellen takes another stick out of Jonathan’s hand. ‘Get ready to line up,’ she tells Thomas and Robert. Even they are quiet when the hopscotch girls walk by. I pull my hair tight over my cheek. You do not judge a book by its cover, I want to say.

I walk back to class behind Ruth Ellen and try to do the little skip-hop she does. Susan takes my hand and Thomas is snapping Robert with a rubber band. Jonathan is looking like he would like to eat the rubber band.

One good thing about this class is nobody makes a big deal about my diamond. Everybody has bigger fish to fry.