by Henry Wells
1st Grade
She is six years old, and she reads better than the others. She is loud and expressive. She wants your approval and sometimes you give it. Especially when she reads. Sometimes you try and read to her, but she won’t let you. She must do it herself; the words are worthless to her unless they are read in her own voice. You are freshly twenty, and you left the expensive institution your parents were so proud of after three drunken semesters. You have been sober for two months now and you can’t eat anything at all.
You can’t hold your eyes open, and your clothes don’t fit. They call the bus over the intercom, and she sprints down the hall. Pink bookbag over blue coat. She embraces you and embraces you. She squeezes your limbs with such force that you can’t move, and you pry yourself free. You know that when the morning comes, and you open the heavy classroom door, and your eyes are still sticky with dreams, she will embrace you again. She will jump and run and call your name, and your heart will drip like candlewax onto the tile floor.
You sit in the back of the classroom at a table so sticky with glue that you try not to rest your hands on it. She and three other children take these seats at lunch each day. You read them “The Hundred Dresses,” and “My Father’s Dragon”. Sometimes they understand. Most of the time they do not. You don’t know how to explain what a telegram is.
Once you asked her what she wanted to be when she was older and she said,
“A boss.” Her own mother is worn, but not bitter, and there is a humor to her that suggests something wasted or lost. It has been found again now, and no one knows it yet. Her mother works at Buffalo Wild Wings, and she packs chicken wings and ranch for the girl’s lunch and the blue cheese and celery leaves stains on the pages of “My Father’s Dragon.” The hours and tables and tips have turned her from mother to crone, and the woman loves deeply.
After she finishes her work, the eight dancing symbols of her name marked hastily across the top in print, you open her bulky, school-issued laptop. Why six-year-olds need laptops, you cannot reason. But she is next to you in a desk that your knees wouldn’t fit under, and there are crayon marks on the glossy wood material, and you need this laptop. You pull up Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and hand it back to her. She holds it close to herself and strains her eyes. Brown eyes. Two shades darker than the desk. She does not read but announces the first few lines. She wants everyone to hear her. You do not. It is January, and the last time it snowed you were thirteen, and your brothers threw snow in each other’s eyes, and you all walked to the golf course and slid down the hills on the blue and green campaign signs that bore your father’s name. The corrugated plastic sheets held two boys at least. She was a few weeks old then, and you didn’t know it. It hasn’t snowed since.
2nd Grade
She is seven years old, and her hands are clasped around the chain links that hold the swing to its metal frame. You push her forward and she moves with the wind. She is like a pendulum, and you know that she is the daughter of time. You know that she will be the mother to all things good and repulsive. This is your own quiet revelation. You have seen the face of God.
She wears her box braids long and they rise in the air as she rises. The oil her mother anointed them with stains your fingers, it smells like pine tar.
“The girls in Africa cut their braids and sell it so we can buy it from the hair store,”
She tells you this with confidence, and you believe every word. You picture a colorful dress and the African woman oily black and wonder if the woman wept. You know nothing of hair, or women, or Africa. The other children are around you now, and they lean up against the metal structure of the swing set and ask questions. Some want to go in, others have forgotten their faded, polka-dotted, Wal-Mart coats. They all want your attention. You propel the girl forward, and your hands stink of frankincense and myrrh.
She sings a song and wants you to guess the song and she can’t sing. She sounds like a goat, and you don’t know the song.
“I don’t know, tell me,”
You say and this is not satisfactory at all. You’ve spoiled the game, so you do guess, and she doesn’t know the name of the song either. It’s an invented song. Now it’s your turn, and you pick a folk song, and it may as well be invented too. She laughs and carries the laughter forward with the swing and out into the air.
“I hate white people music, `” she tells you. Now its your turn to laugh, because she should hate it, and you both know you don’t hate each other. The air is thin. The mulch is soft, and it gets in your shoes. She wants to stop swinging so high now, and you grab the chain to slow her down.
You sing a song together now:
“I don’t wanna go to Mexico no more more more
There’s a big fat policeman at the door door door”
You clap hands, both out of rhythm. There are giggles and screams.
“If he grabs you by the collar
Boy, you better holler!
I don’t wanna go to Mexico no more more—”
The bell rings and the other teachers have called you in and the swing is still, and time has stopped around the world.
3rd Grade
She is eight years old, and it is seven o’clock in the morning. There is mist and nervousness, and it is the first day of school. You are standing in the carline, greeting students as they come in on the arms of tired mothers and grandmothers. It reeks of marijuana. You have a hangover.
You see her coming, taller now. Three months of summer and now her limbs hang longer. She has been fed fireworks and the sound of the AC unit at night and bare feet on grass and now she has grown. Her mother lags a few feet behind; you notice the dark spots on the mother’s face.
“Are you ready for third grade?” you say.
She walks past you. She does not even look at you. “No”
Her mother smiles and you see she is missing teeth. But the smile is real. “That child has been saying that for days. We keep asking her and asking her and she keeps on saying no. Now what’s her teacher’s name again?”
They are both gone, and you are still there and desperately wish that you had not been looking forward to seeing her. You work in kindergarten now and she is in third grade, and you could not follow.
You see her in the hallways, and she waves sometimes, and you wave back. You always turn your head to see if she is waving. She walks and talks and makes her eyes like the other children, and you know she is nothing like the others. You don’t want her to be like the others at all. She slaps. She jeers. She insults. She murders. You want her to be like yourself. To murder in your way. You want to hold her under the pools of your mind until she stops kicking, then everything will alright.
One day you are on the big kid playground with her class, and it is only for one day. You sit on an outdoor table coated in thick green rubber, and you act out scenes with her. You make voices at each other. You are the raging manager of a grocery somewhere in New Jersey, and she is trying to buy her eggs. She is selling you a new car. She shows you the makes and models and colors and you buy the red one. You are both space rangers, and you are both on a strange planet and the brown rocks explode when they touch your feet. You become everything, and you both are everything and nothing at all. You are wind and poetry and smoke and molecules. You have a cockney accent, and she laughs, and she does not know that England is a place, and she has never heard Dick Van Dyke.
You see her laugh with her friends at lunch. Two round girls, mean faced. One on each side of her. You teach her to throw a football. She’s no good and neither are you. You hear her tell another girl that “so and so little white girl needs to shower because she stinks and her momma’s poor and she needs her ass beat,” and you pretend not to hear at all. She sits in the front office one day and she has hit some boy and the principal is coming. She is choking and sobbing and her body shakes. You wish you were shaking instead. You would carry her past death on your shoulders.
She is neither yours to craft nor to comfort. You can only love her, and so you do. You pluck the leaves from the trees and the words from books and the breath from your chest, and you love her.
Henry Wells is a twenty-three-year-old college student studying English at the University of South Carolina Aiken. Born and raised in Aiken, South Carolina, a town with a rich culture and creative history, he has a strong love for literature and the arts. Prior to his studies at USCA, he worked for three years as a Teacher’s Aide in South Carolina schools
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