Girls Like Us (10 page)

“Well, I did help her. I am helpin’ her. Does that mean I win somethin’?”

Ms. D.’s smile straighten out. “I hoped you wouldn’t keep score.”

I follow her out and there’s Biddy singing the “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” song to her duck. I plumb weary of that song. I sure wish she knew more.

Ms. Delamino tell us that she has both our paychecks. She’s taking us to the bank to help us open checking accounts. Then we going on a shopping spree. I don’t know exactly what that is. But I think we’re going to spend the money we made this week.

The bank was all quiet and scaredy. Ms. Delamino done most of the doing and handed Quincy and me our checkbooks. I take my check. I put it in the bank. Then I get some spending money. Quincy or Ms. Delamino or even Miss Lizzy can help me with the check-writing part.

Then we went off to a big store. I told Ms. Delamino and Quincy that I didn’t like those T-shirts that Granny bought me no more. I want to wear dresses, like a princess. But dresses that was OK to do my work in. Quincy said, “Halleluiah!” And, she sort of push me toward a row of dresses. They help me find three dresses they called jumpers. They was made of stuff like blue jeans. Then Quincy push me along to the place where there was pajamas and robes.

“Get you some pj’s and a nightie and a robe and some slippers,” she said. She took off and Ms. Delamino helped me.

When Quincy came back, she had a shopping bag in her hand, but she didn’t tell nobody what she bought.

I was out of money now. Quincy bought her some new shoes to wear at the Brown Cow. Then Ms. Delamino took us out to have lunch at a real restaurant. I showed I learned to eat like a princess.

We came back to our little house. Ms. Delamino said we done just fine our first week.

Later that evening, I went in my room. Sitting on my bed was four night-lights and an alarm clock.

Couple of weeks had gone by when Jen tapped me on my shoulder one day at work. I pulled back and give her a dirty look.

“Sorry,” she say. “I just thought you’d like to take your break with me. We could talk.”

I look over to Sandra. She nod. “It’s slow. Y’all go on.”

I take off my apron and follow Jen to the break room. She get me a Coke and put it down in front of me. “We haven’t had a chance to get to know each other,” she say.

I shrug. Ain’t nobody done this before. In school all anybody need to know is you in Special Ed.

“You been here more than a while now, and Ellen and me don’t know anything but your name.” She make a twisty-looking face. “We think you don’t like us.”

I push my straw up and down through the plastic cap and it make a squawky sound.

Jen tap her fingers on the table. “What did we do to make you mad at us?”

I didn’t know what to do. “You know stuff about me.” I didn’t look up. I kept on squawking my straw.

Jen kind of sighed and pull her paper hat off her head and rub at the place where the elastic make a red mark in her forehead. “You’re right. I know that you do your work without complaining. I know that you are fast and neat and clean. And I know that you don’t talk much. And you don’t seem to like being touched.”

I nodded. All that was right. “You left something out. You know I’m a Speddie. I know you got tole I was a special work program.”

Jen’s face got the red creeps, so I know I done hammered the right nail.

“You’re not exactly what I thought,” Jen say.

I clonked my cup down. “Right. You ’spected somebody to come in here talking all weirdy — with they mouth all hanging loose and saying they words all ‘Duh, duh, duh’ kinda like. And you thought I’d look all stupid in my face, so you could just see that I was Special Ed by giving me the eyeball. And you thought, ‘Here we go, I’m gonna have tell her a hunert times how to do every little thing and pro’lly have to do it myself anyway — shoot-a-goose, she’s so dumb she cain’t even live on her own.’ ” I crost my arms over my chest and lean back in my chair. “That about right?”

Jen rub that red crease in her forehead again. Then she smile. “That’s about right. I didn’t expect you to be so, well, normal.”

“I ain’t normal. I got problems learning. That’s what Special Ed means. We all got some kind of dys. It don’t mean we need help remembering to breathe in and out.”

“Some kind of what?”

“We all got a dys. One kind of dys means you cain’t read. Biddy got that kind of dys. I cain’t say all the dys words ’cause they long. But I can say mine. Dysgraphia. That dys means I can read a word and know how to spell it, but when my hand goes to write it — it just don’t come out.” I lift up my chin. “I can write. It’s just hard and I’m slow at it.”

“Can you do math?”

I tighten my arms crost my chest and tried not to knock that woman plumb silly. She already silly enough. “Yes, I can add, and subtract and multiply and divide. Cain’t do much more than that, though. You need somebody to do more math than that back there sorting out the celery and the onions?”

“Nope,” Jen say. “I was just hoping you could do math, because Ellen and me flunked math and if we don’t have a calculator, we’re kind of screwed.”

I loosed up my arms a little bit. “I might could help you out,” I said. “And if it get busy, I could help you at the register, maybe.”

“Mr. Dunne would have to approve, but it works for me,” Jen said. She started tucking her hair back under her paper hat.

I get up and throw my cup in the trash. I want to make sure she understand. “Sometimes Speddies got to learn different ways. I live with another Speddie name Biddy, and you cain’t just tell her a bunch a stuff straight out. She don’t get it or remember it. But if you tell it to her like it’s a story — that girl don’t never forget.”

Jen and me left the break room and walk back to work. “Biddy sounds interesting,” Jen say.

“She real different from me,” I say. I didn’t say what I was thinking. I was thinking about Biddy and that Mama Duck. Difference between Biddy and me was . . . I didn’t know ’zactly how to think it, but it was kinda like I think about the outside of stuff and Biddy, she think about the inside.

Mama Duck been doing good. She been eating corns. Drinking water. And taking good care of her eggs. She makes sure I don’t bother her eggs none. That means she’s a good Mama Duck.

That boy Stephen, he don’t bother me. He say “Hey” when he see me. But he don’t try to give me no candy. He don’t try to get me alone in no dark places either. He just tend to his work. I tend to mine. I heard he and Miss Lizzy talk about me. He wondered what he done to scare me so much. That make me feel some kind of bad. But not bad enough to talk to him ’bout it. Quincy give him the evil eye when she see him. That Stephen boy, he kind of sull up around her too. I don’t think they will ever be friends together. That’s good. If Quincy gonna have a friend, it needs to be me.

Miss Lizzy been fretty. And I think her inside ear is making her dizzier than ever. I had to keep her from tumping over two times. That makes her cranky.

It makes me feel a little bit more easy around Miss Lizzy knowing she can be cranky sometimes. If somebody smiles all the day every day, you know that you ain’t the reason. Now when she smile at me, it’s kind of like I made a cat purr.

Quincy been in a good enough mood. Except for once she came home from work and she looked scaredy. I never saw Quincy look scaredy before and it made me scaredy too. I asked her what was wrong.

“Biddy, you ever see a ole beat-up-looking car hanging ’round here?”

I told her I didn’t. She asked was I sure. Why Quincy afraid of an old car?

Sometimes she’d sit on the little porch and watch the street. She must not saw nothing, because she get in a better mood every time she came in after watching.

Lizabeth calls to tell us that she is in bed for the night. Biddy frets that Lizabeth might fall or sumpin’. So she don’t get easy till after that phone ring.

When she hanged up, I said, “You worry ’bout that ole lady too much.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout who I worry ’bout,” Biddy say.

Woo, that girl nothing like the one used to cry all the time in school.

“I don’t see you worryin’ ’bout your ole granny,” I say.

Biddy thump down on the couch and get puzzled in her face.

“You don’t never call her or go see her,” I say.

“She don’t got no phone,” Biddy say.

“Is it ’cause she was mean to you?”

Biddy sigh. “I thought that’s just how it was. Didn’t know much different. I know teachers was nice. But Granny said they was paid to be nice.”

“So why don’t you never go see her?”

Biddy studied me. It was like she couldn’t figure out why I didn’t understand something so easy.

“Because I live here now,” she said.

After Quincy go to her room, I thought of something. Her light showed under her door, so I knocked.

“Quincy, you still awake?”

“Cain’t sleep with somebody peckin’ on my door. What you need?”

I opened the door and Quincy was sitting in bed looking at her cookbook.

“What about all your foster folks?”

“What about ’em?”

“Do you call them? Why don’t you ever go see ’em?”

I close my book. “Biddy, some of them fosters was ’bout like your granny. They give me a room and some food ’cause they got a check from the state. And treated me worse than a dog. One family sent me back ’cause they said it wasn’t worth the money to have to look at me crosst the supper table.”