Addy's Race (2 page)

Emma had what my grandmother would call diarrhea of the mouth—no control over what came out, no matter how unpleasant. “Why do you care?” I said.

“I’m not talking to you.” Emma looked at my hearing aids. “I guess you couldn’t tell.”

“Excuse me?” I said. Was she trying to make a joke? Or had the summer turned her from stupid and annoying to just plain mean?

Emma flipped her hair back. “I said, I guess you couldn’t hear. And obviously you couldn’t.” She looked at Stephanie and gave her a high five. Stephanie looked surprised, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard either. But she high-fived her back. I wanted to high-five both of them. Across the face. Lucy pulled me away before I had a chance.

“I can’t believe her,” Lucy said as we hurried down the block.

“It’s okay,” I said, although it wasn’t. Whenever anyone says something mean or stupid, my grandmother says, sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you. My mother says, consider the source. I don’t know why grown-ups think cute sayings make things hurt less.

Lucy stopped at the corner. “I wish we went to a different school.”

“I wish they did,” I said. “In a different country. Or a different solar system.”

“It’s all Stephanie’s fault I have to be in running club,” Lucy said.

“What do you mean?”

“The only reason my mother knows there is a running club is because we bumped into Stephanie’s mom at Safeway last week and she said Stephanie was joining.”

Stephanie’s mother, Sandy, is friends with Joanne. Lucy and Stephanie have known each other their whole lives, longer than I’ve known Lucy. But they stopped being friends the first day of kindergarten, when Stephanie discovered Emma.

“My mother said, ‘Isn’t that wonderful! Lucy’s joining running club too!’” Lucy shook her head. “I was like, ‘I am? I don’t want to be in running club,’ and she said, ‘Of course you do,’ and Sandy said, ‘You’ll have such fun with Stephanie.’”

We were at the edge of the schoolyard. My favorite thing about the first day is watching the kindergartners. Some of them are excited, but most cling to their parents like barnacles to a rock. On my first day of kindergarten, I was a barnacle. So was Lucy. Our mothers stayed that whole morning. Emma and Stephanie’s mothers disappeared right away, but Stem didn’t care. They were drawn to each other like magnets. My grandmother would say they’re like two peas in a pod. I hate peas.

“Do you remember in kindergarten when we were playing kickball and Emma fell and blamed it on me?” I asked Lucy.

Lucy nodded. “She said it was because you were in the way and didn’t hear her coming. But it was because she tripped over her shoelace. Hey, what are those two doing?”

She was looking toward the playground at Miranda and Kelsey, who are twins but don’t even look related. Miranda’s hair is the color of Becel margarine, and she has so many freckles that from a distance her skin looks brown. Kelsey, who comes up to Miranda’s shoulders, has dark hair and plain skin.

They were crouched in a circle with a bunch of kids, looking at something. “They’re shells from the Great Barrier Reef,” Miranda said when we got closer.

“Our uncle lives in Australia,” Kelsey added, moving over so we could see. There were dozens of shells, all different shapes and sizes. “We went last month.”

“It’s illegal to take stuff from the Great Barrier Reef,” said a nerdy-looking boy I didn’t know.

Kelsey looked insulted. “They’re from the beach, not the reef.” She held out a curved shell almost as big as my fist. “Put it up to your ear and listen. It’s really cool.”

Lucy took it. “Wow. That’s amazing.” She handed it to me. “It’s all whooshy.”

I put it up against my hearing aid. All I could hear was the crunchy sound of shell against plastic.

“Isn’t it cool?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “I didn’t hear anything.” I tried not to sound mad. It wasn’t her fault.

“Maybe if you take off your hearing aid?” Lucy suggested. “And go somewhere quiet?”

I shook my head. Some things I will never hear.

Chapter 3

Lucy kept apologizing. “It’s okay. Stop already,” I said. We were hanging our backpacks in our cubbies at the back of the grade six room. Everyone looked at us to see who was talking so loudly.

I could feel my face turning the same color as Emma’s red lululemon hoodie. Stephanie, who says her hair is strawberry blond even though it’s orange, was wearing a green one. The combination of her hair and the hoodie made her look like a life-sized bag of frozen peas and carrots.

Beside her sat a new girl who was busy tying her plaid high-tops. She wasn’t paying attention to anyone. She looked like a GapKids model with perfect hair: long, straight and so blond it was white.

I walked to the front of the room to give Mrs. Shewchuk my fm transmitter. She wears it around her neck, like a necklace. Whatever she says goes from the transmitter microphone straight into my ears. I hate it, but my mother says I have to use it; otherwise I might not hear everything my teacher says. What she doesn’t realize is that I don’t always
want
to.

In grade two, the substitute forgot to turn off the fm when she was helping Stephanie write in her journal. Stephanie asked how to spell
cooties
because that girl over there—she pointed at me—had them.

The sub said there was no such thing as cooties. Stephanie said, “Then I’ll just write she smells bad.” I turned off my hearing aids, so I never heard if the substitute told her there was no such thing as smelling bad.

At least with hearing aids, if my hair is loose, nobody can tell there’s anything wrong with me. But the fm is like a billboard that says,
I’m a freak
. On my first day of kindergarten, Mrs. Ferris stood in front of the class and looked at me, tapped on the transmitter and said, “Addy? Addy? Come in, Addy. Can you hear me?” As if I were in outer space and she was at Cape Canaveral.

Of course I could hear her. Everyone could. But I was so embarrassed I couldn’t answer. Finally Mom got out of her chair at the back of the room and took the fm into the hall to check it. She made me go with her. That was even more embarrassing.

At recess, Mom told Mrs. Ferris it wasn’t a good idea to tap on the transmitter and single me out. But by then it was too late. The class was convinced I was part robot. It wasn’t until a few days later, when Trevor Finney peed his pants during story time, that people stopped thinking I was so interesting.

Because it was the first day of school, Mrs. Shewchuk hadn’t made a seating chart. I sat up front anyway, beside Lucy. The new girl took the desk on the other side of Lucy. Her posture was perfect, as if she had a board against her back.

I surveyed the room. Kelsey and Miranda were next to each other, arranging their supplies in their desks. Behind them, Trevor Finney, wearing a T-shirt with mud stains down the front, chewed his pencil and jiggled his legs.

Next to Trevor sat a new boy with curly dark hair and a Bench T-shirt. It was almost the same color blue as his eyes. Behind him was the nerdy-looking boy who had been checking out Miranda and Kelsey’s shells. He needed a haircut.

When I turned to the front again, I noticed Mrs. Shewchuk was wearing a boom mic attached to a headband. It looked like the kind of mic Lady Gaga and Madonna wear in videos. A second fm transmitter hung around her neck.

Boom mics are for people with really bad hearing. Someone in my class was more deaf than me.

Was it the nerdy boy? He was in the row behind me, on the other side of the room. His hair covered his ears, so I couldn’t tell for sure. When he saw me staring, his face brightened into a big, dopey smile.

Yuck.
I do not like you!
I yelled inside my head. He didn’t get the message and kept smiling.

“Class!” Mrs. Shewchuk clapped her hands to get our attention. She stood by the SMART Board and beamed at us. “Welcome to grade six. We have three new students this year. Let’s welcome them with a big Mackenzie School round of applause, shall we?”

She waited while we clapped. Then she looked at the new girl. “Sierra, why don’t you say hello?” Straight-backed Sierra waved as if she were on a float in the end-of-the-day parade at Disneyland.

“And over here we have Henry, who comes to us from”—Mrs. Shewchuk looked at her desk briefly— “Calgary.” The nerdy boy stood and waved. No one waved back. He winked at me. I looked at my desk, hoping no one had noticed.

“And behind Henry is Tyler, who comes to us from Black Diamond.” The Bench T-shirt boy stood and bowed, a big, exaggerated gesture. Some kids laughed. Tyler didn’t seem to notice. Was he the deaf kid? It was hard to tell—his curly hair sprung out everywhere and covered his ears too.

Who was the deaf kid? Shouldn’t Mrs. Shewchuk have told me last week, when Mom and I met with her to go over my program plan?

Sometime between writing out all the things she has to do to make me stand out in class—like putting me in the front row, repeating things to make sure I’ve heard them, and telling everyone not to shuffle their feet, flip through their books or whisper anywhere near me—she could have said, “Addy, you’re not going to be the only hard of hearing child in Mackenzie School anymore. You’re not even going to be the only hard of hearing child in our class! You’ll have company! It will be…”

Who was it?

“Addy?” Mrs. Shewchuk was standing by my desk. How long had she been trying to get my attention? “Are your hearing aids on?”

I gulped. Some people giggled. I couldn’t bring myself to see who. It was probably Emma, high-fiving Stephanie again.

The hearing aids were on, but the fm receivers weren’t. Mrs. Shewchuk and Mom had said if I didn’t keep the receivers on I’d have to stay inside for recess. Did this mean I had to miss recess? I’d forgotten, that was all. And not even on purpose.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”

“I asked about your summer,” she said.

I wanted to say, “I told you about it last week at my program meeting, right after my mother told you about my first hearing test when I was three years old. The one where she sat in the testing booth and cried because I wasn’t responding to the beeps. Just like I’m going to cry if you make me stay inside for recess.”

But instead I told Mrs. Shewchuk the highlight of my summer was a road trip to see my grandmother, and that we visited Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore.

She moved on to Peter Connelly next. He sits behind me. When I turned to get a better look, Henry was smiling at me again, as if he felt sorry for me. Maybe Mrs. Shewchuk had told him he had to stay in for recess too, if he didn’t turn on his receivers.

Chapter 4

By the time the recess bell rang, I’d forgotten about everybody’s summer holidays except Stem’s. And obviously Mrs. Shewchuk had forgotten about the deal she made with my mother, because she let me go out.

It figured Stephanie and Emma had been to a summer running camp at the University of Alberta and were training with the Tornadoes. At first I thought they said tomatoes, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would train with tomatoes.