The Great Gilly Hopkins (6 page)

“Zat's me, Maime Trotter, baby,” squeaked Gilly.

From the kitchen she could hear Trotter's laugh rumbling. “C'mon in here and get yourself a snack, Gilly, honey.”

Gilly was tempted, but determined not to yield. She was too smart to be bought with food, no matter how hungry she felt. She stomped up the stairs past the open kitchen door from which came the definite smell of chocolate chip cookies. Double-damn you, Maime Trotter.

Later, behind her carefully closed door, Gilly took out the money from the bureau. Then she pulled out the whole drawer and dumped it upside down on the bed. She smoothed out the bills on the drawer bottom, and then took from her pocket the masking tape she'd taken care to steal from Miss Harris's desk and taped the bills to the bottom of the drawer.

Without warning, the door flew open. Gilly, to cover the money, fell chest down over the drawer.

A frog-eyed William Ernest stood on the threshold, trying to juggle a small tray which held a plate of cookies and a glass of milk.

“What in the devil?” screeched Gilly.

“Tr-tr-tr-tr-Trotter…” was all the child could manage in the way of an answer. He was rattling the tray so hard that the milk glass was threatening to jump the edge.

“Well, put 'em down, stupid.”

W.E.'s eyes searched the room in desperation. Gilly was beginning to feel like a fool lying chest down on a bureau drawer. She raised herself enough to turn the drawer over. Then she sat up and turned to face him.

“Didn't Trotter ever tell you about knocking before you bust in?”

He nodded, eyes wide, tray rattling.

She sighed. What a weird little kid. “OK,” she said, reaching out across the narrow space. “Give it here.”

He shoved it at her and ran blamety-blam down the stairs. Gilly turned the drawer back over to make a table on the bed and put the milk and cookies on it. She shut the door and then sat down cross-legged on the bed and began to eat. Oh, thank you, thank you, Maime Trotter. What a delicious-smelling plate of cookies. My, my, and ahhhhh-men.

In the middle of the last cookie, an inspiration came to her. It wasn't Agnes Stokes whom she would use. Agnes couldn't be trusted between freckles. It was William Ernest. Of course. Trotter's honey baby engaged in a life of crime. She laughed out loud at the pleasure of it. Baby-Face Teague, the frog-eyed filcher. Wild-eyed William, the goose-brained godfather. The possibilities were unlimited and delectable. The midget of the Mafia. The Orange Reader Squeezer. No. The Orange Squirt.

She jumped up and put the room to order, danced down the stairs, balancing the tray high on one hand, and skipped into the kitchen.

Trotter looked up from the table where she was spooning cookie dough onto a baking sheet and gave her the eye. “Feeling good, now?”

Gilly gave her the 300-watt smile that she had designed especially for melting the hearts of foster parents. “Never better!” She spoke the words with just the right musical lilt. She put her dishes by the sink, started to wash them but thought better of it. Trotter might get suspicious if goodness was overdone.

She skated out into the hall and around the bottom of the stairs right into the living room where W.E. sat on the floor staring at
Sesame Street
. She slid down beside him, and when his eyes checked her out sideways, she gave a quiet, sisterly kind of smile and pretended to be enthralled with Big Bird. She said nothing through
Sesame Street, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood
, and
The Electric Company
but occasionally hummed along with one of the songs in a friendly sort of way, never failing to smile at William when she caught him snatching a quick stare in her direction.

Her strategy seemed to be succeeding. At any rate when suppertime neared, she said to him, “Do you want to set the table or get Mr. Randolph?” and he answered with hardly a stutter, “Get Mr. Randolph.”

So she set the kitchen table, humming under her breath the “Sunny Days” theme from
Sesame Street
. And after supper she folded an airplane for him from notebook paper, and at her suggestion he even followed her out on the front porch to fly it.

W.E. squinched his little nearsighted eyes together, wrinkled up his stubby nose, drew his arm way back, and pitched the airplane with all his might. “
Pow
,” he whispered. The plane swooped down off the porch, then suddenly caught an updraft and climbed higher than their heads, looped and glided smoothly to the grass.

He turned shining eyes on her. “See that?” he asked softly. “See that?”

“OK, OK.” Gilly ran out and picked up the plane. It was the best one she'd ever made. She clambered up on the concrete post that held the porch railing in place and raised her arm. Then she thought better of it. “You do it, William Ernest, OK?”

She climbed down and gave him a boost up. He seemed a little unsteady from the height of the post, glancing down, apparently afraid to move his feet.

“Look, I'm not going to let you fall, man.” She put her hands loosely around his ankles. She could feel him relaxing under her fingers. He reared back and shot. “
Pow
,” he said a little louder than before, sending the white craft with its pale blue lines as high—well, almost as high—as the house, looping, climbing, gliding, resting at last in the azalea bush in Mr. Randolph's yard.

William Ernest scrambled off the post and down the steps. He was slowed by the fence, but not stopped. You could tell he'd never climbed a fence in his life, and it would have been faster by far to go through the gate and around, but he had chosen the most direct route to his precious plane.

He fell in Mr. Randolph's yard in such a way that one arm and leg seemed to arrive before the other pair, but he picked himself up at once and delicately plucked his prize from the bush. He turned around to grin shyly at Gilly and then, as though carrying the crown of England, came down Mr. Randolph's walk, the sidewalk, and into Trotter's gate.

About halfway up the walk, he said something.

“What you say?” Gilly asked.

“I say”—the veins on his neck stuck out with the effort of raising his voice to an audible level—“I say, It sure fly good.”

He wasn't as dumb as he looked now, was he? thought Gilly smiling, without taking time to calculate which of her smiles to put on. “You throw good, too, William E.”

“I do?”

“Sure. I was just admiring your style. I guess you've had lessons.”

He cocked his head in puzzlement.

“No? You just taught yourself?”

He nodded his head solemnly.

“Gee, man, you're a natural. I've never seen such a natural.”

He straightened his thin shoulders and marched up the stairs as though he were the President of the United States.

They were still flying the plane, or rather W.E. was flying it with Gilly looking on and making admiring remarks from time to time, when Trotter and Mr. Randolph came out on the porch.

“You gotta see this, Trotter. William Ernest can do this really good.”

W.E. climbed unassisted to the top of the concrete post. He didn't need Gilly's hands or help now. “Watch,” he said softly. “Watch here.”

Mr. Randolph lifted his sightless face upward. “What is it, son?”

“Gilly made him a paper airplane, looks like,” interpreted Trotter.

“Oh, I see, I see.”

“Watch now.”

“We're watching, William Ernest, honey.” W.E. leaned back and let fly—“
pow
”—for another swooping, soaring, slowly spiraling, skimming superflight.

Trotter sighed as the plane gracefully landed by the curb. William Ernest rushed to retrieve it.

“How was it?” Mr. Randolph asked.

“I 'clare, Mr. Randolph, sometimes it's a pity you gotta miss seeing things. I never thought paper airplanes was for anything but to drive teachers crazy before.” She turned to Gilly. “That was really something,” she said.

Gilly could feel herself blushing, but W.E. came up the steps and saved her. “It's 'cause I fly it so good,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Gilly, patting his shoulder. “You sure do.” He looked up into her face, his squinty little eyes full of pure pleasure.

“Thank you,” said Trotter softly.

For a moment Gilly looked at her, then quickly turned away as a person turns from bright sunlight. “Want me to walk Mr. Randolph home?” she asked.

“Thank you, Miss Gilly. I would appreciate that so much.”

She took his elbow and guided him carefully down the stairs, taking care not to look back over her shoulder because the look on Trotter's face was the one Gilly had, in some deep part of her, longed to see all her life, but not from someone like Trotter. That was not part of the plan.

B
y the third week in October, Gilly had caught up with her class and gone on ahead. She tried to tell herself that she had forced Miss Harris into a corner from which the woman could give her nothing but A's. Surely, it must kill old priss face to have to put rave notices—“Excellent” “Good, clear thinking” “Nice Work”—on the papers of someone who so obviously disliked her.

But Miss Harris was a cool customer. If she knew that Gilly despised her, she never let on. So at this point Gilly was not ready to pull her time-honored trick of stopping work just when the teacher had become convinced that she had a bloody genius on her hands. That had worked so beautifully at Hollywood Gardens—the whole staff had gone totally ape when suddenly one day she began turning in blank sheets of paper. It was the day after Gilly had overheard the principal telling her teacher that Gilly had made the highest score in the entire school's history on her national aptitude tests, but, of course, no one knew that she knew, so an army of school psychologists had been called in to try to figure her out. Since no one at school would take the blame for Gilly's sudden refusal to achieve, they decided to blame her foster parents, which made Mrs. Nevins so furious that she demanded that Miss Ellis remove Gilly at once instead of waiting out the year—the year Mrs. Nevins had reluctantly agreed to, after her first complaints about Gilly's sassy and underhanded ways.

But something warned Gilly that Miss Harris was not likely to crumble at the sight of a blank sheet of paper. She was more likely simply to ignore it. She was different from the other teachers Gilly had known. She did not appear to be dependent on her students. There was no evidence that they fed either her anxieties or her satisfactions. In Gilly's social-studies book there was a picture of a Muslim woman of Saudi Arabia, with her body totally covered except for her eyes. It reminded Gilly somehow of Miss Harris, who had wrapped herself up in invisible robes. Once or twice a flash in the eyes seemed to reveal something to Gilly of the person underneath the protective garments, but such flashes were so rare that Gilly hesitated to say even to herself what they might mean.

Some days it didn't matter to Gilly what Miss Harris was thinking or not thinking. It was rather comfortable to go to school with no one yelling or cajoling—to know that your work was judged on its merits and was not affected by the teacher's personal opinion of the person doing the work. It was a little like throwing a basketball. If you aimed right, you got it through the hoop; it was absolutely just and absolutely impersonal.

But other days, Miss Harris's indifference grated on Gilly. She was not used to being treated like everyone else. Ever since the first grade, she had forced her teachers to make a special case of her. She had been in charge of her own education. She had learned what and when it pleased her. Teachers had courted her and cursed her, but no one before had simply melted her into the mass.

As long as she had been behind the mass, she tolerated this failure to treat her in a special manner, but now, even the good-morning smile seemed to echo the math computer's “Hello, Gilly number 58706, today we will continue our study of fractions.”
Crossing threshold of classroom causes auto-teacher to light up and say “Good morning.” For three thousand dollars additional, get the personalized electric-eye model that calls each student by name
.

For several days she concentrated on the vision of a computer-activated Miss Harris. It seemed to fit. Brilliant, cold, totally, absolutely, and maddeningly fair, all her inner workings shinily encased and hidden from view. Not a Muslim but a flawless tamperproof machine.

The more Gilly thought about it, the madder she got. No one had a right to cut herself off from other people like that. Just once, before she left this dump, she'd like to pull a wire inside that machine. Just once she'd like to see Harris-6 scream in anger—fall apart—break down.

But Miss Harris wasn't like Trotter. You didn't have to be around Trotter five minutes before you knew the direct route to her insides—William Ernest Teague. Miss Harris wasn't hooked up to other people. It was like old
Mission Impossible
reruns on TV:
Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to get inside this computerized robot, discover how it operates, and neutralize its effectiveness
. The self-destructing tape never told the mission-impossible team how to complete their impossible mission, but the team always seemed to know. Gilly, on the other hand, hadn't a clue.

It was TV that gave her the clue. She hadn't been thinking about Miss Harris at all. She'd been thinking, actually, of how to get the rest of Mr. Randolph's money and hadn't been listening to the news broadcast. Then somehow it began sending a message into her brain. A high government official had told a joke on an airplane that had gotten him fired. Not just any joke, mind you. A dirty joke. But that wasn't what got him fired. The dirty joke had been somehow insulting to blacks. Apparently all the black people in the country and even some whites were jumping up and down with rage. Unfortunately the commentator didn't repeat the joke. She could have used it. But at least she knew now something that might be a key to Harris-6.