Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink (18 page)

She did, of course. The minute he came through the door, Lucy squared off with him in the kitchen.

“Please tell Inez I can go to the soccer field after I finish the fifty million other things I have to do after school now.”

Dad unzipped his jacket. “Watch your tone, Luce.”

What other tone was there for this huge injustice?

“How’s it going, Inez?” Dad said.

“Da-ad — can you please tell her?”

Dad’s face went stiff. “If you expect me to do it before I get my coat off, then no. I won’t.”

Lucy slapped one arm over the other across her chest and breathed in short chops. Inez moved soundlessly back and forth to the table with dishes and silverware.

“Tell you what, Luce,” Dad said, “why don’t you take your attitude to your room and shake it out a little. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Lucy felt her chin drop.

“I don’t hear footsteps.”

She gave him footsteps, hard loud ones that would have put Januarie’s to shame — all the way down the hall to her room.

What had just happened?

There was a lot of we’re-talking-so-the-kids-can’t-hear murmuring in the kitchen before Inez and Mora left. Then Dad tapped on Lucy’s door.

“How’s the ’tude?” he said.

He sounded like a stranger trying to make friends. Lollipop f led to the toy chest.

“It’s the same.” Lucy sat up on her bed and hugged her soccer ball and waited for him to come in, to ask if she’d cleared a path. Then they would get this sorted out.

“Okay,” he said through the door, “let me know when that changes. Then we’ll talk.”

He moved off down the hall. Lucy heard him rattle plates and forks, smelled the tamales, felt the aloneness of her room. She was just there with Lollipop and the soccer ball and her attitude. And she wasn’t even sure what an attitude was.

Dad insisted around 7:30 that she come out and eat. While she pushed beans and rice around on her plate with a fork, he told her he’d rather she didn’t go all the way to the soccer field while she was under Inez’s care.

“Da-ad!”

“I’m done, champ,” he said. And he was.

“Why?” J.J. said when she told him the next morning.

“Because of Inez.”

“The babysitter?”

“She’s not a — ” Lucy stopped at the door to the portable. “Yeah. Her.”

“That stinks.”

Lucy started through the doorway.

“It’s like at my house,” J.J. said.

He followed her in and folded into his chair. Even though the conversation was over, Lucy wished she could sit at his table.

“All right, team,” Mr. Auggy said. “Everybody take your chair to your collage.”

“Our what?” Carla Rosa said.

Lucy noticed for the first time that their pictures-on-poster-board were all tacked to the wall in various places around the room.

“And take pencil and paper with you.”

“I knew we was gonna hafta write,” Oscar said.

Yeah. Everything good eventually turned into something that did not rock.

Putting the pictures of her “problem” into words — just words, not sentences yet — did one thing for Lucy. When recess came around, she decided she knew what “attitude” was. She’d have to write it in the book later:

Feeling like you collided with a cactus on your inside.

Waiting for somebody to say one wrong thing to you so you can rip their lips off.

Outside, Lucy chipped the ball against the wall while the group was gathering around Mr. Auggy. And then suddenly Dusty was there, trying to intercept it with her head, and Lucy knew whose lips she wanted to rip. She grabbed the ball and walked away so she wouldn’t. In the process, she almost tripped over Januarie, who sat on the ground at the edge of their field, face in her pudgy hands. Her shoulders went up and down like someone was filling them with a bicycle pump.

“You should get up, Januarie,” Lucy said. “Somebody’s going to step on you.”

“They can’t miss me,” she said into her fingers. “I’m too fat.”

“Would you get over it?” Lucy set the ball on the ground and perched on it. “I did not say you were fat.”

“They told me — ”

“They lied. Who are ‘they’ anyway?”

Januarie shook her head, jittering her ponytails against each other. Mr. Auggy’s whistle blew, and Lucy latched onto her sleeve.

“Come on. Tell me.”

“No. If I do, I can’t play.”

“What are you talking about?”

Januarie raised her face. Her eyes were puffed out like Inez’s so-papillas. She’d been crying for a while.

“We can’t tattle and fight, Mr. Auggy said. We have to get along or we’re out.”

The whistle chirped again.

“The Posse and Los Amigos are missing some players,” Mr. Auggy called out.

Januarie stuck a hand up and let Lucy pull her to her feet. She didn’t let go as she whispered, “Am I too fat to play, Lucy?”

Lucy felt something give in her chest. “No,” she said.

Okay, so maybe she was. But what gave “them” the right to decide who was fat and who was pretty and who was anything?

“We’re going to play Double Jeopardy today,” Mr. Auggy said. “We need two even lines — about this far apart. And to make things a little more interesting, you don’t have to play as Los Amigos and the Posse; you can get in whatever line you want.”

The space looked small to Lucy, compared to what she and her real team were now used to. She wound up next to Dusty, across from Veronica. Even a kid in a support class could figure out who told Januarie a whopping lie.

“One ball on each side,” Mr. Auggy said. “You’ll pass the ball back and forth. The line that gets both balls on one side is the winner. Miss Lucy, may we use yours?”

Lucy tossed the ball to him, but her eyes were on Veronica. She could tell Veronica she looked dumb with her mouth always hanging open like that. But what good would that do? One more reason Lucy wasn’t one of them. Huh. Like that Ruth person.

The whistle blew, and Mr. Auggy tossed the balls to each team. Gabe rushed in and booted theirs past Januarie. J.J. trapped it. Lucy kept her eyes on the ball Veronica whacked at several times with her foot before she got it across the line.

Lucy swung from her hips and smacked the ball squarely in the middle, right back at Veronica. She was staring, gape-mouthed, at Gabe and let it hit her in the side.

“Foul!” Veronica yelled.

Mr. Auggy blasted his whistle.

“Lucy hit me with the ball on purpose!” Veronica said. She left her lower lip hanging at the end.

“You weren’t watching the ball,” Lucy said.

Mr. Auggy crouched next to Veronica. “Are you hurt?”

“Maybe.” Veronica stroked her side.

“Can you give yourself a big hug?” Mr. Auggy said.

Veronica giggled and wrapped her arms around herself.

“She was fakin’,” Oscar said.

“Was not!” Veronica shot back.

“Guess what? They win.”

They all looked at Carla Rosa, who was pointing at Emanuel. He had both balls between his feet.

Gabe stuck his arms out to his sides like the wrestlers on TV. “That’s cheating.”

“Shut up,” J.J. said.

Lucy put her hands over her ears. These were not the sounds of soccer, not like she’d dreamed them, not like she knew they should be.

“Could I have my ball?” she said.

Emanuel passed it to her. She picked it up and turned toward the building.

“What’s up, Miss Lucy?” Mr. Auggy said.

“I just want to play soccer,” she said. “This isn’t soccer.”

“So you’re going to take your ball and go home,” Gabe said.

“Yeah,” Lucy f lung over her shoulder.

But since she couldn’t go home, she got as far as the sixth-grade wing so she could put her soccer ball in her cubby — for the last time. She was so done with them. She and her own friends had their own soccer field. If she ever got to go there again.

She rounded the corner and stared. All her papers were on the f loor, and her backpack lay in a heap on top of them. Her jacket hung halfway out of the cubby, the tear in the sleeve open like an angry mouth that wanted to tell her who had done it.

Like she didn’t already know.

“You’re not the neatest student we have, Lucy,” said a voice behind her, “But this is out of control, even for you.”

Lucy barely glanced at Mrs. Nunez.

“I didn’t do it.” Lucy said. She shoved her jacket into the back of the cubby and stuffed her soccer ball in after it.

“You’re saying someone else got into your things?” Mrs. Nunez’s kindergarten voice sounded like she didn’t believe it. “We don’t usually have that problem here.”

You do now
, Lucy thought.

Mrs. Nunez leaned over and picked up Lucy’s backpack. Her nose twitched.

Lucy took the pack from her. “It wasn’t like this before recess. I’ve been out playing this whole time.”

She crammed it into the cubby and stood with her back to it, arms folded, eyes down. She was afraid she’d burn a hole through the principal if she looked at her.

“All right, then. Any idea who would have done this?” She sneezed. “Or why?”

Idea? How about a fact?

Lucy heard a nervous giggle near the door. Great. Now they had an audience.

Besides, what was the point? Mrs. Nunez wasn’t going to believe her over Dusty and Veronica. They had names like Terricola and DeMatteo, not Rooney.

“Lucy?” The principal was actually tapping her booted foot.

“I don’t — ” Lucy started to say. But then it all seemed to happen at once. Januarie ran in crying, “I’m not fat! I’m not!,” and Dusty and Veronica were behind her, looking so innocent they could have won an Academy Award. That’s when the words tumbled out of Lucy’s mouth, all by themselves.

“They probably did it,” she said. “Dusty and Veronica. They hate me and everybody else who isn’t — like them.”

Januarie wriggled her warm, round self under Lucy’s arm and made it easier to stay standing under Mrs. Nunez’s suddenly pointed face. Until she heard Carla Rosa say, “Guess what — see — ”

The big sequins on the white hat shivered as Carla Rosa let go of Mr. Auggy’s hand in the doorway and pointed at Lucy. “She’s in trouble.”

“Well, somebody is,” Mrs. Nunez said. She sneezed.

“Not me!” Dusty said.

“Me neither,” Veronica said, and folded her long arms like pretzels.

They were getting more convincing by the minute, with the start of tears in Veronica’s eyes and clenched fists at Dusty’s sides. Both of them chattered things in Spanish to Mrs. Nunez, who made a wall with her hands.

“I do not have time for this.” Her voice now matched her face in pointiness.

“I do.” Mr. Auggy stepped forward. His hands were parked lazily in his sweatshirt pocket, but his eyes looked anything but laid-back. “I think I know where this is coming from. You want me to handle it?”

Mrs. Nunez hesitated, and then she sneezed again, three times. “All right, yes,” she said. She sent one more look at Lucy’s offensive cubby that could have withered a cactus. “And I want that backpack cleaned before you bring it back to school.” She rubbed her nose. “It smells.”

“I’ll do it,” Januarie said.

“Would you?” Mr. Auggy said. “I need to talk to Lucy.”

Me
?
What about the Gigglers
,
who were still looking like someone had
gone through
their
stuff and dumped it all over the floor
? They turned from Lucy and marched off down the hall, heads bent together so they looked like one person.

“Let’s take a walk, Miss Lucy,” Mr. Auggy said.

And since it wasn’t in a tone that left her any choice, Lucy followed him outside.

12

Lucy blinked as she and the coach walked out into the afternoon sunlight. No cloud faces smiled from the sky today. It was a happy blue that didn’t match Lucy’s “attitude.”