Prairie Evers (7 page)

Not one of the kids in that room gave me a welcoming look. Some of them were making noises and laughing. I sat real still and looked straight ahead at the blackboard. I pretended to
myself I was a coyote, watching from the edge of the woods, making sure it was safe to move before I did. A coyote is smart; you can do worse than to follow a coyote’s way.

On the blackboard Mrs. Hanson had written “Please welcome Prairie Evers.”

That explained why some of those kids were making whooshing noises. Probably they meant to be wind blowing through prairie grass. Others of them made chuffing noises and stomped their feet, to be buffalo I guess. Some were hooting; they meant to be wild Indians I imagine.

I am real dark. I have brown hair that is almost black, and brown eyes, and my skin turns brown in the sun faster than you can say spit. I’d been outside all summer, so I was about as brown as garden dirt. A coyote would not move a muscle in this situation, I thought to myself. A coyote would just bide his time. So that’s what I did.

Mrs. Hanson said, “Class,” real sharp. It surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought she had such a sharp voice in her. It was like the slap of a leather strop against a table. “Class,” she said again, and after a minute those kids quieted down.

One student didn’t hoot and holler and make prairie noises. She sat in the next aisle over, three chairs back, just like me. She had long blond hair and wore a faded blue T-shirt that looked comfortable. She looked quiet. I tried giving her a little smile. She didn’t smile back, but she didn’t frown either.

Mrs. Hanson said, “Open your books to page twenty-three, please.”

I looked over at the quiet girl to see what book Mrs. Hanson meant. The girl held up her book so I could see: it was the reading book. I pulled mine out and opened to page twenty-three.

NEW RULES

I’d never been
as tired as I was after sitting in school all day that first week. I barely had the energy to check for eggs when I got home, and it was all I could do to go outside in the morning and set the hens and Fiddle free. I felt jealous every time I watched them amble out and start pecking the dirt for bugs and grubs like nothing was wrong.

Every day the bus roared up to fetch me and I trudged aboard. There was always room near the front to sit by myself, and that’s what I did. At school I couldn’t keep out of trouble. I thought I
could get a drink of water or sharpen a pencil or go to the restroom whenever I needed, but that was wrong. Even after I knew the rules, it was hard to stay put. I felt like I’d crawl out of my skin, and I didn’t see how the other kids could stand it. I guess they just had more practice than me at waiting for the different bells to ring. When we got let out for recess, they’d go tearing out of the building like ants streaming off a burning anthill.

I didn’t hurry to get out for recess. There was nothing much to do. It wasn’t like there were any woods I could go tromping around in, and it was just like I thought with the other kids. They all knew each other and didn’t know me, and didn’t want to.

At first some of the boys teased me. They’d call “Hey, Field!” and then break down laughing. I got it: hey, field—hayfield—prairie. Ha-ha. I didn’t answer. I’d just lean against the fence in my sharp-edged new clothes, or sit on a swing and wait for the bell to ring. Before long they didn’t even bother with teasing me.

It wasn’t much better inside. I was used to the way Grammy did things. With her I always just blurted out whatever I wondered and whatever I knew, but it wasn’t like that in school. Mrs. Hanson was always having to tell me to wait until I was called on, or to give someone else a turn. Pretty soon I just kept quiet. A lot of those kids didn’t like that I had so much to say—they thought I was showing off.

On the playground one day a girl named Amabelle who sat in
my same row bumped into me real hard where I was leaning against the fence. “Hey,” I told her. “Watch where you’re going.”

She had three other girls with her, and they were all glaring. “You think you’re so smart,” Amabelle said. “You better watch it.”

I was scared for just a minute. I saw in their eyes that they wouldn’t mind lighting into me. Then in the next second I was mad. I stood up straight and took a step toward them. “
You
better watch out.”

I didn’t know what I’d do next, but I didn’t have to figure it out. One of them tugged on Amabelle’s arm and said, “Somebody’s coming,” and they all turned and ran. I leaned back against the fence.

The quiet girl from the next row over had been watching. Her name was Ivy Blake, I now knew. When I looked at her, she quickly glanced away.

WEEK TWO

Monday morning
of week two I came downstairs and told Mama I didn’t feel good. “I think I have the flu.”

She put the back of her hand up against my forehead. “You don’t feel warm. Does your stomach hurt?”

I nodded. It did.

“Do you feel achy?”

“Yes.” I felt achy and slow all over.

“You seemed quiet all weekend. Maybe you’re coming down with something.” She sighed. “Probably it’s being around all those germs you’re not used to.”

I mashed oatmeal up against the side of my bowl with the back of my spoon. Then I pushed the bowl away. I could not imagine eating.

“Maybe you’d better stay home. I think I’ll call the school.”

I trudged up the stairs and got under the covers. Mama came and checked on me and asked if I wanted hot tea or ginger ale, but I told her no, “I just want to sleep.” But I didn’t want that either. I didn’t know what I wanted. I lay in bed all morning. In the afternoon I got up and sat in the rocker by the potbelly stove. I tried to write Grammy a letter, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I went outside and sat in the tire swing Daddy hung for me and watched the chickens for a while.

Fiddle was strutting about the yard like a king. He looked very handsome, with his curling tail and broad chest, his soft black feathers with their shiny green sheen. He carried himself so tidy and proud, like a little general, and that did make me smile. But even watching Fiddle didn’t really make me feel better. It just reminded me of what I was missing every day while I was at school. After a while I wandered to the barn and dangled a long piece of straw in front of the cats. Minerva—I had named the gray cat Minerva—batted at it with her paw. Pretty soon I didn’t have the energy even for that anymore, and I shuffled back in.

“Are you feeling any better?” Mama asked when I came into the kitchen.

I shrugged.

“Maybe you better not go to school tomorrow either. Maybe I’d better make a doctor’s appointment.”

I sighed. I knew in my heart that my fate was sealed. Things weren’t ever going to go back to the way they had been before. “No. I may as well go. I think I’ll feel good enough tomorrow.”

I slowly climbed the stairs to my room and got ready for bed. I sat by my window for a long time, looking out, thinking of something Grammy always said in the face of a trying situation. She always said, “Crying don’t get the oil changed.”

Probably she was right.

ADJUSTMENTS

The next day,
I tracked Ivy Blake down at recess. She was sitting on the bleachers by the ball field watching some kids kick a soccer ball around.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“I’m Prairie.”

“I know.”

I knew she knew, but I didn’t know what else to say. I stared off across the ball field. “You want to play soccer or something?” I asked after a minute.

Ivy shook her head. “Not with them out there.”

I saw what she meant. We were pretty much the two lowest kids on the totem pole in our classroom, along with Charlie, who wore a hearing aid, and Sasha, who barely spoke English. I thought a little and then I said, “Do you want to go swing on the swings then?” There was nobody over there.

She shrugged. Then she said, “Okay.”

“So how’d you get your name?” she asked while we were swinging slowly back and forth, the chains squeaking. “I never heard Prairie as a name before.”

“It was my mama’s idea. She thought it was pretty.”

“It is.”

“How’d you get yours?”

“I don’t know,” Ivy said. “Nobody ever said.”

I nodded like that made sense but it sounded sad to me. I twisted my swing until the chains wouldn’t twist anymore, and then spun the twist out as fast as I could.

“So where’re you from, anyway?” Ivy asked, twisting her chain too.

“North Carolina. My family has lived there for a long time. Forever.”

“I never met anyone with a real southern accent before.”

“I never knew anybody with a northern accent. Not before we moved here.”

She grinned, and right at that moment I thought maybe we could be friends.

“Jamie Smith says you’re a full-blooded Indian. Are you?”

I slid my eyes sideways at her. “Why? Does it matter?”

“I just thought it was sort of interesting. If it was true.”

I pushed myself off harder and swung deeper and longer, and stretched out flat and tipped my head backward so I was looking at the school building upside down. “I’m not a full-blooded anything.”

“I’m mostly Polish, I guess. That’s what my aunt Connie said. But other stuff too. Irish and English and German, I think.”

“Daddy says we’re who knows what. All kinds of things. Including Cherokee. Probably. We’re not in the tribe or anything. We’re just—us. But my great-grandma Evers was part Cherokee, and there was Cherokee on the Vine side of my father’s family too. That’s the story that got handed down anyway. My grammy always said it was the truth as far as she knew.”

“Uh-huh,” Ivy said. I couldn’t tell what she thought. She pushed back to get ready for a big swooping swing, but then the bell rang and we jumped off the swings and ran to get in line to troop back into school again.

SPEECH, SPEECH!

That afternoon
Mrs. Hanson told us that in two days we were each going to have to give a speech about something we were interested in. Everybody groaned, me included.

I decided right away I’d give my speech on chickens, and it was easy to think of what I’d say. But it was not so easy to imagine saying it to a room full of people. The idea made me nervous. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of the whole classroom. That evening while I waited for Mama to get done with her class at the Arts Center, I looked up
“How to Give a Speech” on the computer at the library. I read a bunch of articles and I even watched a few videos.