Broken Wings (35 page)

He nodded slowly, making it look hard to do, like someone who didn’t want to face his troubles.

“So,” I said, shrugging. “It’s just a matter of paperwork before you can have some fun. Unless you’re just going to join a monastery,” I quipped. His eyes heated.

“That’s enough of that,” he said. “Contrary to what your mother might have drilled into your head, sex isn’t the end-all of all things, Phoebe. It’s a horse that pulls you along, maybe, but you gotta keep it from going wild. All you’ll do is end up like she will someday, crying over a glass of cheap gin in some dump bar, deserted by men who found younger women and dumped her like yesterday’s newspaper. Just keep that picture in your mind whenever you stop to think about her.”

There was no doubt that was what he envisioned, or hoped.

“You really hate her now, don’t you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I really feel sorry for her, but the way I feel sorry for someone with a contagious disease. I don’t want to get too close.”

“You two weren’t always like that, Daddy. What happened to change it?” I asked.

He raised his eyes in surprise again. I thought he was just going to tell me not to think about it or say something to pretend it wasn’t so, but he nodded slowly instead.

“I guess you’re old enough to know. This is hardly the first time she betrayed me with another man. I caught her with someone once before, someone I trusted, too, and in our own home!”

“Why didn’t you throw her out?”

“It’s not that easy, Phoebe. I was hoping it would be different,” he said. “She seemed remorseful, and I thought if I forgave her, we’d get back to the way we were. That didn’t happen, but there’s no sense talking about all that now. Let’s just think about the future.”

“Right,” I said, “the future. Like I have one waiting for me out there.”

“It doesn’t wait for you. You have to make it for yourself,” he said.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Like you did?” But I didn’t feel that mean. Instead, I gazed around at our small apartment. I didn’t have any real affection for where we were living. My room was a two-by-four and we had trouble with roaches all the time, but even a rat gets used to its hole, I thought, and for a moment or two when it was time to leave, I paused at the doorway as if I was saying good-bye to a real friend.

“You won’t regret this,” Daddy said, seeing my small hesitation.

I said nothing. I just followed him out and into the car. This time it felt like we were in a funeral procession all the way to Stone Mountain. When we arrived, Uncle Buster was at work, and Jake and Barbara Ann were at school. Aunt Mae Louise greeted us without a smile. I supposed that up until the last moment she was praying it wasn’t going to happen.

Daddy brought in my suitcase, looking like some exhausted road salesman making his last stop. Afterward, he stood in the doorway with a face so sorrowful it made me sick to my stomach.

“Good-bye, Daddy,” I said. He kissed me on the forehead and hurried back to his car, now looking as relieved as a mouse that had outrun a cat.

“Let’s get to it,” Aunt Mae Louise told me then, and followed me to my room so she could hover over me as I unpacked my things.

“Don’t think they’ll let you wear that to school,” she said, pointing at my abbreviated blouse with spaghetti straps. “I don’t know why you bothered packing such a thing and bringing it here. I won’t let you go out of this house in such rags. You got to remember that everything you do now reflects on your uncle Buster and me. Every time you have to decide on something, no matter how large or small, you think of that.”

I didn’t say anything. When I was finished, she said we were going to the school so I could be registered. I was surprised at how much she had done in preparation for my coming. She had given the school guidance counselor information about me, and he had contacted my school in Atlanta. The new school already had my records. We met with the guidance counselor, Mr. VanVleet, a tall, red-headed man who smiled as if he had been waiting anxiously for me to finally arrive, as anxiously as he awaited some exchange student from another country.

“We want you to succeed here, Phoebe,” he began. He tapped the folder on the desk. “I see you have had some difficulties at your previous school.”

Aunt Mae Louise grunted and said,“ ‘Difficulties’ is too nice a word.” She squirmed in her seat, but Mr. VanVleet kept his smile.

Maybe it’s a mask, I thought. Anyone would need a mask to keep smiling in Aunt Mae Louise’s presence.

“What we’d like you to do is get you at the proper reading level as quickly as possible. We have a class designed to do just that, and for a while, that’s where we want you to begin. Once you’re at the proper reading level, we’ll be able to schedule you into classes you should be in, but we don’t want to do that until we’re sure you’ll succeed. You understand that, don’t you?”

I shrugged. None of it mattered to me. I wasn’t going to be here long.

“Whatever,” I said.

“Well, look at it this way,” he continued, “you wouldn’t want a third-grade student put in an eleventh-grade class, now would you? How would he or she do? Not too well, right?”

“You saying I’m like a third grader?” I asked, not hiding my indignation.

His eyes shifted to Aunt Mae Louise for a second and then back to me.

“I’m afraid that’s about your reading level, but don’t you worry. We’ll fix that fast if you give it some effort.”

“You’re going to put me with third graders?”

I’d be sitting in a classroom with Barbara Ann!

“No,” he said, laughing. “But with other students who have some temporary reading difficulties. There are some who are older than you, in fact.”

I felt a little relieved about that, but still suspicious.

“She’ll do what she has to do to succeed,” Aunt Mae Louise promised him. “She knows how important it is now,” she added, stabbing me with her penetrating glare.

“That’s good,” he said. “Let me take Phoebe down the corridor to meet Mr. Cody, the remedial reading teacher. You’ll find him to be a very good teacher, Phoebe. He has had lots of success.”

“Go on,” Aunt Mae Louise ordered, and I stood up and followed Mr. VanVleet out.

“I know how hard it is to start somewhere new,” he said as we walked. “You don’t hesitate to come to me with any problems first, okay?”

Here’s my problem, I wanted to stop and say. My mother has run off with a cheap con man. My father is too weak to deal with anything and pawned me off on my ogre aunt and uncle. I feel like Cinderella without any hope of any prince and never a glass slipper. Do you have a pill or something that will make all that go away?

Instead, I was silent and walked along listening to him describe the school, some of its important rules and regulations, and why I could still turn my life around and be successful at something.

Teachers, I decided, live in a world of fantasy, a fantasy of their own making. If they blinked too hard, they would see their students for who and what they were and they would get so discouraged, they would run out the door. At least that was how I had seen the teachers in my school. Most of them looked defeated and taught to the one or two students who showed any promise at all. The rest were just a nagging reminder of how ineffective they were, and who wants to be reminded of failure?

But that was exactly what was happening to me at the moment. Failure was being rubbed in my face.

Mr. VanVleet opened the door, and I looked in at a dozen remedial reading students. There was an expression I had heard at my old school whenever teachers referred to students like this, I thought. They called them mentally challenged. We called them retards.

“This is a new student, Phoebe Elder,” Mr. VanVleet announced to the group. Some looked as disinterested as they had been the moment before we came. Some brightened slightly with curiosity, and one girl with a caramel complexion and long, reddish brown hair broke into a wide, happy smile.

I looked at them all and felt as if I had been forced to look into a mirror that hid no blemishes. Was this really where I belonged?

Mr. VanVleet saw the expression on my face.

“You’ll make fast progress here, I’m sure,” he said, “and get back on track quickly.”

The only thing that kept me from turning and running was the realization that I had no place to go. Mama hadn’t left a forwarding address.

“Welcome, Phoebe,” Mr. Cody said. He was a short, stout man with balding curly black hair, a thick nose, and soft, almost feminine lips. His chin cut in so sharply, it was practically nonexistent. “Sit right here,” he said, pulling the chair out a bit at the desk near the girl with the wide smile. She was still smiling at me that way. Is her face stuck? I wondered.

Mr. VanVleet pulled Mr. Cody aside, spoke to him softly, and then handed him my file.

“Okay,” Mr. Cody said. “While the rest of us work on these exercises, Phoebe, I’d like you to take this little test I’ve designed. It will help me understand how I can best help you, okay?”

Everyone is so eager to help me, I thought disdainfully. The truth was, they probably wished I never had come.

He handed me the test, and I reluctantly began to do it.

“You can’t fail,” Smiley whispered to me.

“What?”

“No one ever fails Mr. Cody’s tests. ”

“I’ll try to be the first one,” I told her. Her smile finally faded.

“What?”

“Quiet, Lana,” Mr. Cody told her. “Don’t disturb Phoebe. Just work on your reading exercises.”

She pulled back into her chair and squinted, looking like she was going to cry.

Because I had arrived late and all, there wasn’t much time for me to do any more than take the test. I heard bells ring at the end of periods and heard students pass through the hallways, talking loudly, laughing, but none of the remedial reading students got up to go anywhere else. It was clear that all we left this room to do was go to the bathroom and to lunch. I hadn’t understood.

“Don’t I go to a science class or a history class?” I asked Mr. Cody after the first change of classes was over.

“For a while you’ll have all that here,” he said. “I divide the day into the subjects and work on the reading that applies to each subject. Everything involves reading, Phoebe.”

“This is like grade school,” I complained. “I guess they just dumped me somewhere.”

“Oh, no, no,” he assured me. “We give you and the others here very individualized treatment. You’re very special.”

“I don’t want to be special,” I muttered.

The others listened to my complaints with some interest. I was sure most of them felt like saying what I was saying.

“For now, it’s the best way,” Mr. Cody insisted.

How was I supposed to meet anyone or get to know anyone, locked up in here like this? I thought. And when I did get out, they would all know I was one of the mentally challenged. I remembered how those students were treated at my old school. They might as well have had leprosy.

All of this just added to my sense of entrapment. Daddy had thought I’d be like a mole coming up into a world of bright light and hope, but all I did was go deeper into the darkness. At least, that was how I saw it.

It took me hours to finish the evaluation test. Mr. Cody let me go to the bathroom once, and I left hoping to meet someone maybe smoking in a stall and borrow a cigarette, but there was no one else there and besides, I saw they had a teacher monitoring the hallways, checking passes, and making note of the time a student left a room and returned to a room. To my further surprise, the teacher already knew my name. What, was the whole school warned about me? I wondered.

When the bell rang at the end of the day, the teachers were out there herding the students into the buses to keep them from loitering in the hallways. Mr. Cody promised to have my test results first thing in the morning and then design a program for me.

“Every student gets his or her own program to fit his or her special needs,” he explained after the others had left. “That way we can be sure we’ll strengthen your weaknesses. Sound good?” he asked.

“Sounds like you think I’m sick,” I retorted.

His lips held the friendly smile, but his eyes turned a little dark and cold. He was obviously someone who expected to be appreciated.

“Well, in a way that’s what’s happened. We take your mental temperature and treat your problems and make you a better student,” he said, obviously proud of his answer.

I didn’t say anything else. I left the room and followed directions to the exit where my bus was waiting. Barbara Ann was standing by the bus, looking for me.

“You gotta hurry so you don’t miss the bus or don’t get a good seat,” she chastised.

That was just what I needed to finish my day—an eight-year-old bawling me out. She stomped onto the bus ahead of me, expecting I would sit beside her. Instead, I slipped in next to a white boy with curly light brown hair who was glaring out the window like he was fixing to smash it with his fist. He didn’t even notice I had sat beside him until we were under way. Barbara Ann was sulking in the rear with her friends. I supposed she had bragged how she was going to boss around a high school girl.

Finally, the white boy turned and looked at me. His eyebrows rose and then dipped in at each other.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The Queen of England,” I replied. He stared a moment and then laughed.

“I wish I was in England,” he said. “I wish I was anywhere but here.”

“That makes two of us.”

“You just come to school here?”

“That’s right, and not because I wanted to, either.”

“Well, where you really from?”

“Atlanta. I’m living with my aunt and uncle for a while.”

He nodded as if that was something very common.

“I know why I hate being here. What’s your problem?” I asked him.

He looked out the window again and then turned back to reply.

“I just got thrown off the basketball team. My father’s going to bust an artery.”

“Why’d you get thrown off?”

“Got caught with these,” he said, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. “In the locker room. Didn’t think the coach was anywhere nearby so I went into a shower stall and lit up. No second chances with Coach McDermott. I was on the starting five, too,” he added.