Author of the best-selling

E D U C A T IN G E S M É : Diary o f a Teacher's First Year

SAHARA

4'beCyL-AX
 SAHARA
e

E S M É R A J I C O D E L L

S C H O L A S T IC INC.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission
of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Hyperion Books
for Children, an imprint of Disney Children’s Book Group, LLC, 114 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10011.

ISBN 0-439-65370-3

Copyright © 2003 by Esmé Raji Codell. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic
Inc., 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, by arrangement with Hyperion Books for
Children, an imprint of Disney Children’s Book Group, LLC. SCHOLASTIC and
associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9/0

Printed in the U.S.A. 40

First Scholastic printing, February 2004

The poem “Autobiographia Literaria” (pp. 111 and 174-175) is from Collected
Poems by Frank O ’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith,
Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, a division of Random House.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products

of the authors imagination or used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is

intended or should be inferred. Likeliness of any situations to any persons living or dead

is purely coincidental.
 Love and thanks to Russell and Jim, ever patient and

brilliant. A debt of gratitude to Julie Froman, Steven Malk,

Sarah Packer, and Donna Bray, whose support and

insight made this book happen.

To Beverly Cleary,
thanks
 CONTENTS

1. M e and Darrell Sikes i

2. M y True A m bition 14

3. At the Library 24

4. N ew Things A ll the Tim e 30

5. We Got H er 37

6. The Lion’s Lesson 56

7. George Gets Busted 68

8. The W ay Things Are Built 78

9. M iss Pointy Gets M e W here I Live 95

10. Orphans no

11. W h y Teachers Get Apples 124

12. Nam e-calling 150

13. Autobiographia Literaria 167

vavHvs
 I

M e and D a r r e l l S i k e s

hy did I write them? Love letters to

nobody, nobody who loved me back. They made
me feel foolish and better at the same time. I
didn’t know where to mail them, so I just saved the
letters in my desk.

Dear Daddy,
HoW are you, I miSS you, I love you,
I ytill love you, IJII always love you.

Sometimes I wrote, When are you coming home?

Sometimes I wrote, So you’re never coming home, or
are you coming home? Sometimes I wrote, You can
come home now. Sometimes I wrote, Why didn’t you
take me with you?
I didn’t keep a very tidy desk.
One day the letters poured out over my lap,
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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

my feet, my teacher’s feet. I got some of the letters

back, but most of them went to the counselor,
Mr. Stinger. The worst part of being in his office
was watching my mom read those letters. Her
face looked gray, like my letters were bad news,
death news. Was she thinking I loved her less
because I missed my daddy more? I felt like I was
floating on the ceiling, like smoke from something
burning.
When I came down from the ceiling, I pouted.
I wanted my letters back, all of them. I was so mad.
Isn’t there a law against reading other people’s
mail?
Mr. Stinger took out a stack of papers, a file full
of the history of me. No, not the history. A history.
A history that didn’t include when me and my
mom go to the bookstore. I can pick any book I
want, even a book in hardcover. That’s the way it’s
always been. We never have much money, but
Mom doesn’t blink when the numbers ring up. She
hands over the big bills like she was buying milk or
eggs, something we just can’t do without. I love
choosing books by the pile at the library, too, and
2
 Me and Darrell Sikes

listening to my mom read them to me, when she’s

not too tired from working. She has been my best
teacher. But that’s not in the history.
Mom looked at the file and her face went gray
again, and again I felt gravity give out. Look at that,
a pile of messy work, of unfinished work, a sloppy
diary of me since Daddy left. W hy didn’t I write
more carefully in third grade? W hy didn’t I finish
that assignment in fourth grade? I watched as Mr.
Stinger fed my letters back into the long file cabi­
net. The cabinet closed with a metal sound, a safe
full of evidence against me. Waiting there for when
they need to pull it out and call me dumb.
When we got out o f the office, my mom
talked in a low voice. “What do you want me to
do, Sahara? Say I’m sorry that I couldn’t keep
him? Fine. I’m sorry. I tried my best. Can’t a woman
get a divorce without her kid going special ed
on her?”
I wanted to say, Don’t be sorry, Mom, I couldn’t
keep Daddy either, but I was wise now. I kept my
mouth shut.
“You gonna let Daddy walk out with your
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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

brain, too?” she grumbled. “Well, then, there’s not

going to be a vital organ left between us, is there!
You just do your work, Sahara. They’ll see they’ve
made a mistake. You’ll do it, won’t you?”
I stared her in the eye, but I didn’t answer her.
I knew I was being fresh and bad, but I couldn’t lie
and say yes. Do it for what? Do it for who? They
took what I gave them, they took what I didn’t give
them, they used it all the same way, to feed the file.
I was through with giving them evidence. They
wouldn’t get anything more out of me.
Mom looked at me, furious. I thought
she would slap me for the first time in my life.
She didn’t. She stomped away. I stood there,
wishing she had slapped me. You’re supposed to
put an exclamation point at the end of strong feel­
ings. A slap would have felt like that. But instead,
her heels clicked out her punctuation, dot dot
dot.. . .
I couldn’t see where my sentence would end.

That file full of letters meant I met with a Special

Needs teacher in the hallway to get something

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 Me and Darrell Sikes

called Individualized Attention, and let me tell

you, working in the hallway with a teacher is like
being the street person o f a school. People pass
you by, and they act like they don’t see you, but
three steps away they’ve got a whole story in their
heads about why you’re out there instead of in
the nice cozy classroom where you belong. Stupid?
Unlucky? Unloved? If I could have put out a cup,
I would have made some change. People from
my class would hiss, “Hi, Sahara Special” as they
passed to go to the washroom, and don’t think they
meant special like a princess or a movie star or
something sparkly like that. I pretended like I
didn’t hear, but oh yes, I heard, and you don’t just
hear meanness with your ears. My cheeks heard it
and turned red, my eyes heard it and stared at the
wall, at my lap, at my shoes. My fingernails heard it,
and hid away in my teeth. I heard it all through my
clothes and skin and blood and all the way to my
bones, where it rattled in the hollow of me.
The Special Needs teacher told me her name
when I met her, but I forgot it right away. Seeing
her day after day, I was too embarrassed to ask

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

what it was. In my mind, I just called her Peaches.

In the real world, I didn’t call her anything at all.
In the hallway Peaches played board games with
me and talked in a whispery, cooing voice like I
was a doll and we were having a pretend tea party.
I ignored her as best I could to keep from throw­
ing up on her. She would sometimes ask me if I
had done my homework and I would pretend I
didn’t hear. She spoke about using time well, get­
ting things done. “Don’t you agree that would
make life a lot easier?”
I’d nod; sure, I’ll agree to that. In fact, I
thought, if I were really the school street person,
I could drink to that, toast to it using the white milk
in a carton they give at lunch, only keeping it in a
brown paper bag. Herme’sssss to the people who usssse
timmmme well and get thinnnngssssss donnnnne!
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
I’d just shrug. She probably wouldn’t think it
was funny. I’d never seen her laugh. She’d write
something down. Probably: Laughs for no reason.
Finds organization funny.

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 Me and Darrell Sikes

Peaches seemed very organized. I bet nothing

fell out of her desk in her whole life.
Then shed ask if there was anything I wanted
to talk about, and when I would say no, she would
smile sweetly and look unhappy at the same time.
Sometimes Darrell Sikes would sit with us in
the hall. I think he has been Special Needs ever
since dinosaurs roamed the earth, or at least since
the Declaration of Independence was signed. He
kicked a teacher in the shins when he was in first
grade, and when he was in third grade he was finally
tall enough to punch one in the nose. At least, that’s
what people say, but who knows what’s true? Mom
says not to judge a book by its cover. Even so, I
couldn’t help but think that if Darrell was a book,
the cover would read True Crime Stories. Darrell
never spoke one word to me, and wouldn’t look at
me, and I thought he was a real gentleman for it. I
did the same for him.
Darrell had a different set of manners for
Peaches. Darrell grunted at her as if anytime she
asked him something she was disturbing him
from a nap. If we were playing a board game, he

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

would roll the dice and move his piece backward.

If Peaches asked him a question, he would answer
by asking, “Are you married?” and batting his eyes,
looking very interested. Sometimes he would
smash everything off the table with a clatter, and
swear.
“I’m afraid I am going to have to call your
mother” Peaches said calmly.
“Well, don’t you be afraid! You just go ahead
and call her!” Darrell hollered. “You think she
care? If she care, why the hell would I be out here
in the hall with you?”
I told my mom about this, and all about oh how
funny Darrell is, and the next day she came to the
school and we had another meeting with Mr.
Stinger and Peaches. “I want her out of the pro­
gram” she said, “or whatever it is you’ve got going on
here. I’m not sending her to school to sit in the hall­
way with some lunatic.”
“He’s not some lunatic,” corrected Mr. Stinger.
“He’s a human being with special needs.”
“Special needs!” my mom sputtered. “The only
special need that boy has is for an old-fashioned

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 Me and Darrell Sikes

crack across his behind! My daughter isn’t spend­

ing part of her day with a teacher beater.”
“It’s just what people say, Mom.” I pulled on
her sleeve. “Don’t judge a book—” She shook me
off.
“Your daughter needs support during this
time” Mr. Stinger reminded her, and Peaches nod­
ded. I thought to myself, that teacher just wants
someone to play Uno with.
“Maybe we should ask Sahara what she wants,”
Peaches suggested, with her usual sad-happy
smile.
“Is this Christmas? Are you the Special Needs
Santa Claus? Ask Sahara what she wants!” Mom
twisted in her seat and made a noise between a
cough and a laugh. “Look, I don’t have time for
this. I know she’s capable of fifth-grade work. She
reads at home. She reads plenty. I think she writes,
too,” she said accusingly. I didn’t look at her. She
whirled around in her chair and growled at me,
“Sahara, tell them you like to write.”
She was telling it true. I read at home, and
write, too, but whatever I write, I make sure I’m

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

by myself and then, when I’m done writing, I rip it

out of my notebook. I hide it in a binder behind sec­
tion 940 in the public library, where all the books
about Somewhere Else are located. This very paper,
for instance, will someday be an archaeological
find. Someday, someone will reach behind section
940 and find the dusty works of me, Sahara Jones,
Secret Writer, and that person’s life will be made
more exciting, just by reading my Heart-Wrenching
Life Story and Amazing Adventures. Someday, people
will be glad I kept track. Someday, people will see I
am a writer. And because I am writing a true story
of my life I have to talk about school, since I am still
a kid and it is a very big part of my Heart-Wrenching
Life Story and Amazing Adventures. I am sorry to
report that school is heavy on the Heart-Wrenching
but so far has been running low-to-empty on
Amazing Adventures. But I still go, because maybe
one day I will have an Amazing Adventure there.
Also, both the law and my mother make me go,
unless I am sick with chicken pox or getting a tooth
pulled or going to a funeral. So school is a lesser evil.
Usually.

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 Me and Darrell Sikes

“Yes, I like to write,” I squeaked.

Mom bounced her purse on her lap and
smiled as if to say, “So there.”
Mr. Stinger looked at me sideways for a
moment. “Yes. The letters.”
No, not just the letters, I wanted to tell him. Not
just those stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid letters
that grew legs to follow me around. “So, can I have
those letters back now?” I tried to sound like
honey with sugar on top.
“Well, we need something to show that you
like to write, don’t we, Sahara?” Mr. Stinger smiled.
“We certainly don’t have any schoolwork to make
that point. And this is what I’m talking about.
Where is the work, Mrs. Jones? Where is the work?
She doesn’t do it here.”
“You’re saying she doesn’t do her work? So take
care of your business! Fail her! Fail her like a nor­
mal kid. The failure will be between me and my
daughter, then. You won’t like it if her failure is
between me and you.”
“There are serious repercussions to retention.. . .”
“Blah blah blah!” My mother can be very rude.

l l
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

So they promised to fail me. “Remember, you

asked for it,” they said to my mother. They made
her sign a form. Then another. Then another.
The door closed, and we stood out in the hall.
I knew they were talking about my mom behind
the glass, saying mean things about her, about
What Sort of Mother Would Deny Her Child
Individualized Attention. But Mom was smiling
and I was proud, really proud of my mom not
being afraid of failure. I am. Id sooner not try than
fail. They may think I’m stupid, but I’m not.
Knowing I’m not stupid is enough for me, I’m
enough for me. When my mother smiled at me, I
could see I was enough for her, too. At least, for
that moment.
I walked back to my classroom, past the little
table outside the door where Darrell was sitting in
the public of the hallway waiting for Peaches to
return, drawing on the side of his shoe with a
black marker. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t
look at him. But in my head, I said, Oh, thank
you, Darrell Sikes, for being wild and nasty and rude
and getting me out of The Program and making me

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 Me and Darrell Sikes

Normal Dumb, not Special Dumb. I owe you one,

Darrell Sikes.
But I could not imagine how I would ever pay
him back.

13
 2

My True Am bition

4
(O T like when my mom listens to me in the
kitchen, when she asks me about my day. She
always asks if there’s anyone new I’m hanging out
with or if I’d like to bring anyone by the restaurant.
She asks even though my best friend stays the
same: my very own cousin, Rachel Wells.
Rachel is a year younger than I am. Rachel’s
voice is like pages turning, whispery and smooth,
and there’s time in between each thing she
says. She looks at her feet when she speaks in
her paper voice, and her cheekbones get pink like
she’s telling you about the time she forgot to
wear her underwear even if she’s just telling
you what she had for dinner last night. Rachel
moved away for a while with her mother, father,
and little baby brother, Freddie. She came back

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 My True A mb i t io n

with her mother and brother. My mom and her

mom find a lot to talk about together. Rachel left
the same time my father left. But Rachel came
back.
That is reason number one she is my best
friend.
Some of the girls at school thought Rachel
was stuck-up, but I knew she wasn’t. For real, shy
girls usually aren’t. They usually care more than
anyone else about what other people think. It’s
like they’re walking on ice, and the ice is made of
other people’s opinions. But there’s something
not-nice about shy people, too. Something kind of
stingy in the way they make you talk first, and
then their answers are just one word. That’s why it
took so long for Rachel to join us upper graders in
double Dutch. Always holding back. I had to go
over to the fence, special, to get her.
“Rachel, oh come on, take your turn, jump,
jump!’’
But she wouldn’t, not for the longest time.
Even now, she always lets other people jump first
while she turns the ropes. So reason number two

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

that she is my best friend is because I always have

to look out for her.
And reason number three is the fact that she’s
the only one who knows my True Ambition.
But for now, nobody can see my True Ambition,
so nobody believes it. I only believe it because I saw
it, just once, just for a second. I saw it in a crystal
ball. All right, it wasn’t a crystal ball, it was a goldfish
bowl turned upside down. It was the middle of
summer, and Rachel and I needed something to do,
so we tried telling fortunes at the kitchen table.
“What do you see?” I asked Rachel.
“Nothing,” she shrugged.
I waited for her to ask me the question back,
which is the polite thing to do. I got tired of waiting.
“Know what I see?”
“What?”
“Nothing” I said, just to be mean. But I did see
something. I saw my own reflection, turned
upside down. Something in me tilted, and I knew.
“No, wait, I see something” I announced to Rachel.
“I’m going to be a writer.” The words came out all
by themselves.

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 My True Ambi t i o n

“You?” She blew some air through her nose

and shook her head.
“What?"
“Like, a writer writer? With a book? In the
library or something?”
It sounded so good! “Uh-huh.”
“What are you going to write about?”
“Oh, ju s t. . . stuff.”
“What stuff?”
What stuff? “Everyday stuff. Interesting
stuff.”
She looked at me like I was homework.
“Everyday stuff isn’t interesting stuff,” she pointed
out. She took out a deck of cards from the kitchen
drawer and began to shuffle them. “Writing a
book’s too hard.”
“How would you know? You’ve never even
tried.”
“I never tried ’cause it’s too hard. I wouldn’t
write a book unless somebody made me. I have no
in-ter-est” she explained.
“Well, I’m going to make me” I announced.
“I have interest. I am going to be the youngest

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

writer ever to have a book in the library. You’11

see.
Rachel looked at me hard, like she saw the
sparkling of Lake Michigan in my eyes. I smiled at
her, and hoped she saw good things, exciting
things. She blinked, and frowned. No, she just saw
my eyes, brown. Brown like brick, like the high-
rises that block my view east, block my view of the
lake, block my view of what’s moving with hard­
ness and stillness and curtains hung crooked. The
buildings hunker there, like boxes in a closet,
blocking the way to hidden birthday gifts or other
surprises the grown-ups haven’t told us about. But
I know exciting things are there, hidden, just a
matter of pushing past.
“Then you better get a good teacher this year,
Sahara” Rachel warned, like I have anything to do
with that. W hy does she have to talk to me like
she’s grown?
“I need support, huh.” I flashed her a look.
Rachel must have decided there were no more
fortunes to tell, because, back and forth, she dealt
the deck for War. She turned over an ace of

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 My True Amb i t io n

spades. “Jeez, Rachel. Don’t you ever make any

wishes?”
“W ell... I would like to be able to see without
glasses. And to not have to watch Freddie so much.
And . . . I guess I wouldn’t mind having a cousin
who’s a famous writer” she said, collecting my two
of hearts.

I bring home a big pile of books to read every

week. I usually stay inside, because we do not live
in a good neighborhood. When my mom sends
me to the corner store, she watches for me out the
window the whole time, and I see Mrs. Rosen
watching, too. She is so old and shrunken, her
head is hardly higher than her window box, but
there is her head, like one of the flowers. I don’t
like the men sitting in the cars and drinking on
the street, or the low-riders that pass with the bass
so loud on the radio that my fillings rattle. Rachel
and I are allowed to skate up and down the block,
but in the summer Rachel usually goes to Cordelia
Carbuncle’s house to play in their yard, and I am
not invited. I tell myself it is because I am older. I

19
S A N A R A S P E C I A L

tell myself I am glad. I don’t even like Cordelia.

Rachel has lost her glasses three times on purpose,
because Cordelia told her there is not one single
famous model who wears glasses. So when I went
to the dentist I borrowed a copy o f Seventeen from
the waiting room and drew glasses on all the girls.
It made Rachel laugh, but she still tries to copy
Cordelia and does what she says. For instance,
Cordelia’s momma lets her wear makeup. Rachel
complained so much that her momma let her wear
lip gloss on Sundays. It did look kind o f pretty, so
I asked my mom if I could wear makeup on
Sundays, too.
‘The only reason a girl your age should wear
makeup is if she’s a rock star or a hooker, and the
minute you start showing promise in either of those
areas we’ll hop on down to Target and stock you up
with everything you need” she promised. “Don’t you
tell your auntie I said that, now. What she does with
Rachel is her business. I just happen to think there
is nothing more attractive than a sensible girl” she
said.
“To who?”

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 My True Amb i t io n

“To who? To God” she said. “And when you go

to God’s house, it ain’t got to be no fashion show.
You just come as you are.” She gave me a squeeze. I
think if my mom had to name her best friend,
I might top the list.
But Cordelia tops Rachel’s list. Rachel and
Cordelia like to sit out front when she comes to
visit. When the teenage boys say hi to Cordelia,
she says hi back. Rachel doesn’t exactly say hi, but
she acts busy with her baby brother on her lap or
smiles that terrible well-I-don’t-know-what-else-
to-do smile that makes me cluck my tongue and
want to pinch her.
“How come you don’t say hi?” Cordelia asked
me once.
“I don’t know them.”
“They’re just being friendly.”
“They’ve got no business being friendly.”
“That’s why you don’t have any friends” said
Cordelia in a perky way.
“I do too have friends.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Beezus. Beezus Quimby.”

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“That’s a peculiar name,” said Cordelia.

“So’s Carbuncle” I said. “Maybe if you didn’t
make fun of people’s names, you’d have more
friends. Come on, Rachel, let’s go upstairs.”
On the stairwell, I talked low. “Don’t talk to
strange men, Rachel. We don’t have daddies to beat
them up if they come bother us.”
Rachel nodded and asked me, “Who’s Beezus?”
“I met her when you moved away!’ I said, “and
then she moved when you came back to town.”
Rachel does not like to read. She likes to watch
TV So does Freddie. He bounces in his playpen
when the people on the talk shows start throwing
punches. Sometimes I am in her apartment, but
mostly I stay in mine, which mom says is fine as
long as I lock the door if she’s at work. I open all
the windows and the breeze and music from the
ice-cream man floats through and lifts the curtains.
I lie on my bed with my feet up on the wall and
read. I roller-skate around the apartment until Mr.
Martinez knocks his broom on the ceiling. I write
in my notebook and rip out the pages to take to the
library. I make lunch of canned sweet corn and

22
 My True Amb i t io n

boiled hot dogs, which I pierce with a fork and

hold over the gas burner to turn the skin black, just
like a real campfire, just like my daddy taught me.
My daddy was a great cook. He even did it for a
while for a living. My daddy could do anything. He
liked to try new things.
New things all the time.

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 3

A t the Li bra ry

*2 / I VSom tries to get the Saturday morning

shifts at the restaurant. The tips are good,
and I love it because she drops me off at
the library. I can stay until noon, and then she
runs and gets me and brings me back to
the restaurant, and I can have pancakes. The
library is so air-conditioned that I have to bring a
sweater, and when I go in I just have to say
“Ahhhh,” it feels so cool. I sit near the librarians,
like sitting near the bus driver on the bus, it’s just
safer. They smile and say hello, but they don’t talk
to me, which doesn’t feel as mean as it sounds. It
just feels calm and ordinary. I sit in a big brown
straight-back chair at a big brown table of smooth
wood. I like to sit there and write my life story or

24
 A t the Library

read the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. When I

read those books, the rest of the world melts away
and I am on Klikitat Street. Ramona has a dad, and
sometimes the mom and dad have fights. But they
never break up. Sometimes I read the books twice,
but the endings never change. In a story, if you
write a happy ending, it never has to change. It
stays happily ever after.
Sometimes the books have pictures of the
authors on the inside back covers. It’s fun to see
what they look like. Sometimes they look much
older than I thought they would be, or are a dif­
ferent color than I imagined. Sometimes there
isn’t any picture of them at all, just a description of
how they live in Massachusetts with two dogs or
something. But real, live authors wrote every one
of those books, so the shelves are like lines of quiet
people, sitting up straight and polite, waiting to
talk to me. Someday I’ll have a book of my own.
Someday my book will talk.
The library has regulars on Saturdays, mostly
mothers with babies and toddlers, but there is one
girl I notice who is close to my age. She usually

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

wears pigtails, but her hair is so kinky that they

look round and funny, like mouse ears. She has a
nick, some kind of scar in the hair of her left eye­
brow that makes her look serious even when she
is smiling. She is skinny and always comes with
her skinny brothers, all older than her, who swarm
around her but don’t seem to bother her as she
picks out books. She mostly goes to the arts-and-
crafts section, but sometimes she pokes around my
section, with all the books about faraway places. I
have to watch her then, because I am worried and
excited that she might discover that my papers are
hidden there, but she doesn’t. She just pulls out
the books and reads them cross-legged on the
floor. She puts a pencil in the spot where she takes
out a book so she can put it back in the same place.
She’s very organized.
Once I was watching her and she looked up at
me, straight into my face. I almost died. But her
eyes were steady.
“Hi,” she said.
I waved, even though she was right in front of
me.

26
 A t the Library

“You look familiar,” she said, and pulled her lip,

trying to remember where she might have seen
me before. Probably sitting out in the hallway at
school, I thought. I felt my cheeks get warm, and I
couldn’t decide what to say or where to make my
eyes go. She shrugged, and seemed to give up try­
ing to figure it out. “You’re here regular, huh?” she
said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Me, too.” She smiled. “My mother makes my
brothers take me. She hopes they’ll look at some
books, but they never do. They just wait for me
and drive the librarians crazy.” She let out a little
laugh, and I joined her. “I’m Paris!’ she said.
“The city?”
“No. The girl.” She looked in the direction of
her brothers, who seemed to give her some secret
signal. “Well, see ya” she said all of a sudden, and
jumped up to join them.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Paris and imag­
ining talking to her. My name is Sahara. The girl, not
the desert. Oh, do you like to read? So do I. What do you
like to read? So do 1.1 like your hair. How do you get it

27
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

to do like that? Sure, I would love to come over. Let me

ask m y m o m .. . .
“Who you talking to?” Mom calls from the
kitchen. I did not notice I had said anything out
loud.
“NobodyT I answer. I rehearse some more, but
I am careful to keep it inside my head. I imagine
bringing Paris to the restaurant where my mom
waitresses. I imagine sitting on the high stools at
the counter with her. Look what a big pile of pan­
cakes! Oh, Sahara! I imagine my mom’s face as she
heads back to the kitchen, after putting down
plates for me and my best friend. The thought of it
makes my insides bubble.
The next Saturday, though, Paris brought just
one brother and a girl, a Spanish-looking girl with
long black hair and glittery butterflies on her
shirt. They leaned over a cookbook together, at the
big table. Let’s make this. Let’s make this. I sat apart
from them, behind them. As they left, Paris
noticed me in my corner. “Oh, hi!” she said. “I was
looking for you! I didn’t see you.”
Really? “Hi;’ I said.

28
 A t the Library

“Didn’t you see me?" she asked.

The question took me by surprise. “No” I lied.
She looked at me, holding her cookbooks against
her chest, as if trying to decide something. I
looked away from her and pretended to go back to
reading. Who cares about you? I thought. Go bake
your brownies.
But she didn’t leave right away. She seemed to
stand there staring at me for a long time. Her
friend waited patiently in the doorway. What were
they waiting for?
“W ellll. . . bye,” she said finally.
She left. “Well, bye,” I said.
I sat for a long time and counted the books in
a pile in front of me. I counted them up and I
counted them down. But just then I didn’t feel like
reading any.

29
 li

New T h i n g s A l l the T i m e

“I f q
Iou nervous about school?” Mom asked
) °
the evening before school started. She was wash­
ing potatoes at the sink as I packed a peanut-butter
sandwich at the table.
“No, it’s going to he fine," I said, thinking o f
being in the same class with Rachel and no more
Special Needs in the hallway.
“You do, huh. Well, I hope so.” Mom gave me a
poison eyeball. I guess she was not thinking about
my being with Rachel and no more Special Needs
in the hallway. I slowly folded the foil around my
sandwich and slid it into my backpack.
“All those books you read,” she went on, not
even looking at me while she peeled potatoes in
short, fierce strokes. She was smacking them with

30
 New Things All the Time

the peeler like she wished they were my bottom.

“What a waste, Sahara, what a waste. Talk about a
crying shame, Sahara, it’s just a crying shame, you
read all the time and what for? Repeating fifth
grade! How can such a sm art. . . ! Tsk! Huh! I just
don’t understand you.” She turned around sud­
denly and faced me, her chin jutting out and
moving back and forth, but no words came then.
She turned back to the sink. Peel. Peel. Peel. Trying
to find me somewhere under the skin, the daugh­
ter she could be proud of. I just ran my finger over
the smooth finish of my folders. I’m getting better
at keeping things tidy, I told myself.
“I’m going for a walk” I surprised myself by
saying.
“Oh, no you’re not," said Mom. “Where you
think you’re walking to?”
“It’s still light out,” I said. I walked out before
she could say anything and ran down the stairs,
even though I could hear her through the door,
calling me.
I walked toward the corner store, but once I
hit the corner, where was I supposed to go? I still

31
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

turned it, because I knew my mother was watch­

ing me through the window, and I was mad at her.
But once I was out of her sight I didn’t walk
anymore. I just sat on somebody else’s stoop and
put my head on my knees and cried.
My mom was there in a minute. She walked
me back, holding my shoulders.
She sighed. “Let’s just take it a day at a time,
okay, Sahara?”
But I’m too lonely, I wanted to tell her. I can’t do it.
But the sun rose again, on the first day of fifth
grade for a second time. It rose and said, You’re
going to have to do it.

As I was walking in, no teacher was there,

and the door was open. I took a seat in the back of
the room, like always. Rachel chose a seat in the
row in front of me, to my left. She turned and
smiled apologetically. I smiled back. No hard feel­
ings; the back row’s not for everybody. She
motioned to the seat in front o f the one I’d chosen,
but I pretended to be busy organizing my folders.
I couldn’t explain to Rachel that the seat in front of

32
 New Things All the Time

me was reserved, hopefully for someone very tall

and easy to hide behind.
I looked at my new classmates. I knew a few
of the girls from double Dutch: there was Sakiah
and Tanaeja, and I knew Kiarre by sight, she’s so
tall and tough. I knew a couple of the boys: big­
mouthed Raphael, Ernie who comes to the library
sometimes, and Darrell, held back like me, legs
spread, frowning in the back-row corner. Was that
handsome boy’s name Dominique? There was
Paris on the other side of the room, and the girl
with the black hair, too, chatting away. Paris
waved, and I waved back. They seemed nicer than
my old class, maybe because Cordelia hadn’t made
it back in time from her family vacation to Disney
World, maybe because it was the first day, and
everyone was clean, everyone was on good behav­
ior. I looked at Darrell. Better behavior. The class
was smaller than most. I noticed that this was usu­
ally the case when Darrell was in the roll. Maybe I’ll
have new friends, I thought fleetingly, but my mind
was not really on my classmates. There was some­
one left I needed to meet.

33
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

The vice-principal was standing there. “Are

you our new teacher?” someone asked.
“No.” He looked relieved. “The fifth-grade
teacher moved on over the summer” he said.
“She quit!” a voice called out.
The vice-principal frowned, but he couldn’t
tell who said it, so he ignored it. “Yes, well! Your
new teacher is on her way.”
“Is she a teacher from another class?” someone
asked. Our minds raced. The patient kindergarten
teacher, wagging a puppet on each hand? The short-
tempered seventh-grade teacher with hair growing
from his ears, the one who likes to be called
“Lieutenant”? I shivered.
“It’s no one you know,” the vice-principal
explained. “She’ll be transferring in from some­
where else. Be seated. Someone will be with you
shortly.” He excused himself.
A teacher from Somewhere Else sounded good
to me. Sometimes, I wish I were from Somewhere
Else myself. I wish I were from the sort of place that
inspires you to write long sentences about the shapes
of clouds and the smell of things growing. But when

34
 New Things All the Time

you’re from Chicago, it’s hard to write sentences that

sound like anything except coins going into the
change machine on the public bus. Clink. Clank.
Clunk.
Clunk.
“Teacher’s coming!” hissed a boy who was
standing guard at the door o f the classroom. “I
think this is her!” He slid into his chair.
“Is she ugly?” asked another boy.
“Shhh! She’ll hear, fool,” snarled a girl.
“Momma says, ‘You never get a second chance to
make a first impression.’” She folded her hands
and smiled at the ceiling.
I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the feeling
of the teacher not knowing me yet. I think I could
do my work here. It’s been a while. But what’s the
use? Even if this teacher I’m dealt is a queen of
diamonds, I don’t want to give them any more
material for their file about me. Their precious file,
so different from my own file of my summer,
tucked behind books in the low shelf of the
library. I try to put this file out of my head and sit
up straight.

35
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

And that’s when I notice it is so quiet we can

hear her coming down the hall. We are not even
blinking, frozen like statues in our first-impres­
sion poses.
What’s in her file, I wonder? And then I can’t
help snickering a little, even though it breaks my
pose.
Because if they kept files on grown-ups, it
would be a different story, wouldn’t it?

36
 5

We G o t H e r

4
(D yn she walked. Our new teacher!
I blinked, and blinked again. Her hair was cop­
per like a lucky penny, but when the light hit it a
certain way, it seemed almost green, a deep green,
like she colored it with a dye made from tree
leaves. It was held back with sparkling dragonfly
barrettes, but there was no help for it. It was wild
hair. She was pale, but I couldn’t decide for sure if
she was white or Asian or Puerto Rican, or maybe
light-skinned black. When someone is wearing lip­
stick as purple as an eggplant, it’s hard to tell. She
wore lime eye shadow and heavy black liquid eye­
liner, making her expression catlike. She wore a
yellow dress that looked like it was made of tissue
paper, kind of old-fashiòned and grandmotherly,

37
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

but hanging slightly over her shoulder. Her bra

strap was showing. It was also purple. She looked
less like a teacher and more like one of those
bumt-out punk-rocker teenagers who hang out in
front of the Dunkin’ Donuts on Belmont, near the
L stop. Only grown.
Her arms were full of flowers. She opened up
her desk drawer and pulled out a scissors, and sat
down, cutting each stem at an angle. Then she
swiveled in her chair and pulled out a vase from a
cabinet behind her, and arranged the flowers. We
all watched, caught up in where she moved the
daisies and sunflowers, tilting our head along with
her, this way, then that way. “Ever been to a farm­
ers’ market?” she asked the air, her eyes still on the
flowers. “The flowers there aren’t like the ones at
the grocery store, oh no, it’s a whole different deal.
Imagine, these beauties, for sale in the middle of a
parking lot! I swear, you can get anything your
heart desires in the city, I don’t see why anyone
ever settles for less" She swiveled again, and pulled
out a watering can. “Please.” She thrust it at a girl in
the first row. We all jumped— it was the first time

38
 We G o t Her

she seemed to notice that any o f us were there, and

we had all forgotten where we were, too.
The girl left the room to fill the can. In the mean­
time, the woman sized up the space on the wall
behind her desk. Then she whipped out a hammer,
and a nail went into the wall with a brisk bang, bang,
bang. We jumped again. She hung a framed diploma
on it. If I narrowed my eyes, I could see it said MRS.

f r u m p e r ’s f a b u l o u s s c h o o l f o r t e a c h e r s in fancy
handwriting. She straightened it carefiilly, put her
hand over her heart and blew through her lips in a sat­
isfied way. Then she pulled out a table lamp with a
shade of thin red glass, shaped like a tulip. Six clear
crystals hanging all around the base of the shade shim­
mered and sang like small bells when they moved
against each other. She unhooked each crystal and pol­
ished it with a handkerchief she pulled out from what­
ever it was she was wearing under her clothes. She held
each crystal up to the light in turn, and squinted. We all
squinted.
A boy raised his hand.
The teacher glanced at the clock on the wall, five
minutes until nine, then back at the boy.

39
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“Do you have to go to the washroom?”

“No.”
“Then put your hand down,” she said, hard
and quick, like the hammer banging. The boy
obeyed.
She hung the last polished crystal, and turned
the little lamp on and off, to test it. “Working
lights are important things,” she remarked, again,
to the air. “A light that won’t go on, well, that’s just
sad.”
The girl returned with the watering can.
The woman filled the vase and pushed it forward
on her desk. She felt for her pearls and adjusted
them, making sure the clasp was at the nape of her
neck. Then she sat, her lips against her fist, and
looked us over one by one, with the concern of a
dentist peeking into a very wide and decaying
mouth.
The bell rang.
The teacher sighed and got up, moving around
to the front of her desk and leaning against it, her
arms crossed. She looked like she might be smil­
ing, but the smile was tucked away like a mint

40
 We G o t Her

against her gum and cheek. “Well,” she said.

“Another year.
“My name is Madame Poitier, Miss PWAH-
tee-YAY. It rhymes with touche, a French word that
means, ‘you got me.’” She smiled openly then, even
though it was the first day of school. I had never
seen a teacher do that before.
“Most children call me Miss PointyJ’ she con­
tinued. We giggled. “Some children just call me
Madame.”
“My damn what?” Darrell called out.
“Your damn teacher,” Miss Pointy replied
without blinking, “and this seems like a perfect
moment to talk about rules. What do you think
some good rules would be?”
Kids called out. No talking. No pushing. No
chewing gum. No taking other people’s stuff.
No swearing. No not doing homework. No
pulling hair. No chair-kicking. No copying.
No calling names.
Miss Pointy yawned. “How about, No rules
that start with the word no? Haven’t you kids ever
heard the word yes?” She wrote on the board:

41
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

yE 5 Looking

y i S Listening

yt-5 consideration

“What’s consi. . . consid ..

“Consideration? Treating other people the way
you want to be treated. If you don’t like being
pushed, or having your stuff taken, or having your
hair pulled, don’t do it, or you may be paid back in
the same coin. That’s common sense. YES com­
mon sense. And YES, hard work, harder than
you’ve ever worked in your whole lives, so if you
want extra credit, get a head start on sweating. I’m
the meanest teacher in the west.”
“Do you shoot from the hip?” snickered
Raphael.
“You’ll find out, cowboy” Miss Pointy’s nostrils
flared.
She wrote the schedule on the board.

PicyyLing, ^-.10 Lo 10-^0

Time TraveL a n d ViorLd iypLoring or

42
 We G o t Her

Mad Sccence,
albemabe days, IOAO bo / 1-.30
R,ead Aêoud, afber lunch,
fiead Togebfier afber fiead Atoad,
fiead Alone af-be-r fiead logebfier
Arb of language, end of bhe day

What did it all mean? We looked at each other.

None of us knew, none of us asked. We were all
feeling too shy, except for Darrell, who maybe
didn’t care.
Miss Pointy passed out thick composition
books with black-and-white marbled covers. “You
each owe me two dollars,” she announced as she
passed them out.
“I don’t got two dollars," complained a boy.
“You may not have two dollars now, but some­
day you will. Then you’ll pay me.”
She continued to pass out the books, and one
skidded across my desk. I stopped it with my
hand, and smiled. It was nice to get something
new.
“This is your journal” she explained. “You will

43
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

write in it every day. Begin each entry with the date.

‘Dear Diary’ or ‘Dear Journal’ is optional, or up to
you. I’ll read and sometimes comment on what you
write, unless you make a ‘P’ with a circle and a line
through it on the top of the page, like this.” She
drew on the board.

“This means, ‘None of your business, Miss

Pointy’ What you write is between you and the
paper, and sometimes me,” she promised.
“And the Special Needs teacher” Darrell grum­
bled.
“I don’t like bureaucrats” she told Darrell, “but
I don’t mind cynics.”
“What’s a bureaucrat?” Darrell asked suspi­
ciously.
“A tattletale who likes to write things down,”
Miss Pointy explained.
“Oh, like Sakiah,” a girl called out.
“I don’t know that Sakiah tells on people yet”
said Miss Pointy. “So far, I only know that about you.”
The girl turned red; Miss Pointy winked, forgiving.

44
 We G o t Her

“She does shoot from the hip!” Raphael

howled. We laughed some more.
“What’s a cynic?” asked Paris.
“Someone who sees the world through mud-
colored glasses. Mud’s easy enough to clean up,
though. ‘God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt) that’s
what my little brother used to say. Right before he
ate dirt.”
We looked at Miss Pointy and couldn’t help
smiling. A teacher who had a brother who ate dirt!
A teacher who would lend you two dollars! A
teacher who was going to show us how to travel
through time and to solve puzzles! So, she used big
words and shot from the hip. Those two things
could be overcome. All other signs pointed to
human.
“Now. Line up against the wall. I’m picking
your seats. No whining. Come on, come on. Now.
You—there. You—there. You—there; no—there.” I
was relieved when I was seated in the back of the
room again. When all of us were seated, she scru­
tinized the arrangement. “You” she pointed.
“Who, me?”

45
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“Change places with her.”

Second row. Rachel and I passed each other.
How did Miss Pointy know I was . . . w e ll. . . hid­
ing? “And you,” she pointed to Darrell Sikes. “Up
here, too.”
“Why I gotta sit in the front row!”
“All the better to see you, my dear” said Miss
Pointy.
“Dang!” Darrell got up as slowly as if he
weighed eight hundred pounds and sauntered for­
ward. He finally slammed his book bag and body
into place with such force, he could have been
crash-landing off the top of a skyscraper.
“Oh, a thespian.” Miss Pointy sniffed. “Your
stage business is sluggish. We’ll have to work on
your pacing.”
“What’s a thespian?” asked Tanaeja.
“An actor.”
“I ain’t no actor!” Darrell exploded. “I’m Darrell
Sikes, and you better watch your back, teacher!” All
of us straightened. One boy made a sound, and was
quickly hushed by another. Miss Pointy raised an
eyebrow and scratched it.

40
 We G o t Her

“How is it I’m supposed to watch my back?

I haven’t any eyes in my back.” She seemed gen­
uinely perplexed by the request. She even glanced
over her shoulder, to see how it felt. “No, I’d never
be able to watch my back and teach at the same
time. Never.” She shook her head sadly, and sighed.
“Oh, well. Can’t be helped. Note to self. ” She wrote
on a pad on her desk. “Assign. Back. Watching.
Monitor. Darrell? Darrell Sikes, isn’t it? Would you
mind watching my back for me, since you were
initially kind enough to show concern in that
regard? It would be the first assigned job of the
school year.”
He was confused. We were all confused. But
we were smiling. Darrell was not.
“YES make life easy on yourself,” Miss Pointy
said. “Don’t mess with your teacher. Speaking of
making life easy and of messes, I need your help
to lighten the daily load. First, may I have a vol­
unteer to stay and help me after school, clean
up the erasers and such? Someone from the
neighborhood, no one who needs to catch
the school bus, sorry. This is a permanent job. I’ll

47
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

call and get permission from your parents. Your

name?”
“Rachel.”
There went my walk home. Oh, well. I
thought of raising my hand as she named other
classroom jobs, ones that would rotate so we all
would get a turn: messenger, homework returner,
current-events reporter, on and on. Maybe she
could use more help after school, maybe I could
ask her and she would say yes and I could clean
erasers with Rachel. But I hadn’t raised my hand in
years. I wasn’t sure my hand still knew how to
raise. I lifted my wrist limply. It wasn’t going to
happen.
“You’ll be leaving before lunch today. Just
enough time to pass out textbooks.” Miss Pointy let
out a little private laugh. “Any of you ever read a
textbook under the blankets, with a flashlight?”
We looked at each other, then shook our
heads.
“Anyone ever recommend a textbook to a
friend? Did you ever say, ‘This is so great! You’ve
got to read this!’?"

48
 We G o t Her

No.
“Anyone cry at the end of a textbook?”
We laughed. No.
“Huh,” said Miss Pointy. “Well, they make
lovely paperweights anyway, don’t you think? I’ll
find something else for us to read for the most
part. Now, while I’m passing these out, as I’m man­
dated—”
“What’s ‘mandated’?”
“Bossed. You work in your new jour­
nals. Some days you will write about your life—”
“Bo-ring,” someone called out.
Miss Pointy stopped cold. “Who said that?”
Nobody answered. “Boring is a swear word in this
class. I don’t want to hear boring. Ever.” She picked
up a textbook, a heavy one, and slammed it on her
desk. We all jumped. “If that word comes out of
your mouth you will be sent down to the nurse.
She’ll give you a shot on your south side to cure
your boringitis and send you home. You just test
me once and see if I’m kidding. Understand?
Anyone here not understand?” Her voice was low.
She really looked angry. She was crazy. She walked

49
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

a full circle around her desk and took a deep

breath. “As I was saying, you will write about your
life. If your life happens to be b-o-r-i-n-g,” she
spelled, “then you had better learn to make life a
little more interesting, because I don’t read any­
thing b-o-r-i-n-g.”
“W hy not?” Raphael ventured.
“Because. It’s . . . it’s . . . b-o-r-i-n-g.” The mood
seemed to lift as suddenly as it had come. “Now.
I’ve told you all about myself, haven’t I? How my
first husband was a pirate, and I’m using this job to
supplement my night job selling encyclopedias,
yadda-yadda-yadda? Now, I need you to tell me
everything I need to know about you.”
Everyone stared at her.
“Make hay while the sun shines! Today!
Go!”
We all started writing, or asked to borrow some­
thing to write with. Miss Pointy rolled her eyes, passed
out a School Supply List and a Lista de Utencilios
Escolares. Soon everyone was either writing or chew­
ing on their pens and looking like they were trying to
see their eyebrows. Everyone except me. I stared at

50
 We G o t Her

everyone in turn, imagining what they would

write.

Rachel:
I re a lly d o n 't se e w h y I should s it in
the. ba cA ro w plus som ething yo u should
K now is 1 neejd n e w p a s s e s on ly m y m oth er
has n o t ta K e n me. y e t so I don V* se e w hy
I m ust s it in th e bacK ro w w h e re I can
hardly s e e so p le a s e te a a h e r p le a s e
p le a s e change
m y s e a t.
Love yo u r loving h e lpe r Rac.he\.

Or Darrell:
Sowe+L^\)\ y o u sl>\d r\o about w e \s
X a»\+ ^oi\ wacU> yo u r bacVc y o u wacU>
yo u r owrv bac\c +eecU>er p ,s . y o u are.
s+opuJ ar\d uc^ -y, ai\d 'SOTZXM d*
^OTZXlU ^ ^ © T Z X l^
'SOTzxM ^ ^ © tzx M^

And then everyone else:

51
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

T hk<£- ^^C.eSS.

TÍU^ fcg, MAÍfiAs U, y&Lnru^ h aw , a, (hjÂa^ inru

ÍÂ aj& s 'mfrniAâ,.

I -w a n t a (Same C vhe f o t m y
hirthcf&y.

I WAn*r A P e r B u r ik/ my 0 uil"Din/G

i t *S N/o "DOGS Allow e"D; k/o t cvcn/ OATS.

T^lc^ ^ <v? ^ lu/ich/oo/w,

but they do/7 1 ycVe e/?ouyh cheese.

I spend summers with my grandma

in Alabama.

I like boys even though they can be sooo

immature.

I hove, t o go t o the. b a th ro o rn a
/oty p l e a s e don V y e J ! a t rrye.

«Soree Aeeher^ no «speck \n^\\sh.

Then, I tried to think of what I wanted to say.

I thought of saying how I was held back, but then
I realized this wasn’t something I wanted to say. I
wanted to say I was sorry I made my mother feel

52
 We G o t Her

so disappointed, but then I realized that was some­

thing I should say to my mother, not my teacher...
and this, too, wasn’t something I wanted to say. I
wanted to tell Miss Pointy I am good at looking at
things and smelling things and seeing things and
touching things and hearing things and thinking
things and remembering things, but so what?
These aren’t things that are important to know at
school, are they? They don’t fill in any blank, do
they? So all these things I know are a secret, I keep
them inside myself, in a box made of myself Only
I seem to have lost the key and now I don’t know
how to take it all out when I need it.
I wanted to tell the teacher that the world
looks different from the second row, that I liked
the flowers and the red lamp, and that I wished
she knew I wanted to be a helper even though I
didn’t raise my hand. I wished she were a goldfish
bowl turned upside down and could see me
reflected in her, the way I want to be seen, without
my having to tell her. I want to be seen in a way
that takes her by surprise, upside down and back­
ward from what’s before her eyes.

53
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

The bell rang. A blank page stared up at me.

“Pass up your journals” she instructed. Kids
started twisting around in their seats, collecting
books from behind them. I felt panicked. I picked
up my pen. I wrote:

I am a Writer

And then my journal was one in a pile, being

pushed forward. I could not tell which one was
mine. I grew red and hot and foolish-feeling at the
thought o f Miss Pointy looking at those words.
What was I thinking?
After all, in the end, she was going to be a
teacher about it.

54
I Qry) Q Writer

J S&tijerve, you.

55
 6

T h e L i o n ’ s Lesson

v j/ I V)iss Pointy is . . . pointy. Her nose is

pointy. Her ears are pointy. Her shoes are pointy.
And boy, are her fingers ever pointy. Sometimes
even her voice is pointy. Especially when she says
you. The you she’s usually talking to is Darrell
Sikes. Darrell Sikes always has fire in his eyes.
Anything Miss Pointy tells him, he looks at her
like she just told him she ran over his dog. He
makes these grunting sounds and talks under his
breath, until Miss Pointy can’t ignore it anymore.
She takes him out in the hall, she thinks we can’t
hear, but we’re real quiet then, so we can. She says
things like, “I can’t make you do anything, it’s your
choice, please help me” when she’s not too frus­
trated, but when she’s mad, she says things like,

56
 The L i o n ’ s Lesson

“Keep talking to yourself all day in that crazy way,

you’re going to end up a crazy man sitting at the
back o f the public bus with dead pigeons in a
Hefty bag! How’s that sound?” I hear Darrell say­
ing nothing, and I feel mixed up. I know that
angry feeling of grown-ups trying to push their
way into the room of your mind, and I know that
feeling of trying to hold the door shut against
them with quiet and looking down. But I knew
why I was angry, at my teachers, at my counselor. I
don’t know why Darrell is angry. At everybody.
Miss Pointy tries to get us to leave our prob­
lems at home. She stands at the doorway every
morning, smiling like she’s auditioning to be a
movie star, but she blocks the door and nobody
gets in until they use the trouble basket. We pre­
tend to put our troubles into the big green basket
she holds out before we enter. Our troubles are
invisible to the eye, but they are heavy. She practi­
cally breaks her back, holding all those troubles
for us, but she says we can’t carry them into the
classroom ourselves or we won’t be able to work.
She offers the troubles back to us at the end of

57
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

the day, since they don’t belong to her. Nobody’s

ever taken them back. Still, they seem to follow us
and find us at home, like black cats.
In class, Miss Pointy ignores Darrell’s Special
Needs. She calls on him the same as everyone else.
She waits a long time for him to answer. Then we
all have to wait.
“Darrell? I’m waiting on you.” Silence. ‘“I don’t
know1is an acceptable answer.”
“How ’bout ‘I don’t care’?" he sneered. As a
class, we made a low moan.
“Less acceptable,” said Miss Pointy, and contin­
ued to wait. And wait. Finally, she moved on.
“Stupid Miss Potty!’ Darrell grumbled.
“Yes, Darrell? You have something to say, now
that your turn is over?” Miss Pointy grumbled back.
“You called me a barrel!” yelled Darrell. Some
boys snorted through their noses, because Darrell
is kind o f round and solid, barrel-shaped. He
crossed his arms and pouted.
“I certainly didn’t call you a barrel, Darrell.
Why would I call you a barrel?” She sighed. “Please
stop talking crazy talk.”

58
 The L i o n ’ s Lesson

“You always calling me crazy!” he roared.

“You’re always acting crazy!" she roared
back.
Then Darrell got up, kicked Miss Pointy’s
desk, and sat back down, his chest heaving. I
would have been afraid. Miss Pointy looked
unhappy, but not afraid. She got up and stood next
to Darrell’s desk.
“Excuse me” she said. She kicked his desk
firmly with her toe. He jumped. “Huh. Did kick­
ing a desk work for you? It’s not working for me.”
“You’re not kicking it hard enough,” said
Darrell sweetly.
“Mmmm” she nodded. “I see. Would you
mind getting up again?” Darrell stood. She shooed
him a few paces away, and then she picked up the
hem o f her long ballroom skirt just slightly before
punting the desk so mightily that it tipped over
with a terrific crash and slid about three feet.
We stared.
“Ouch,” said Miss Pointy.
She took her foot out o f her high-heeled shoe
and rubbed her toe. Then she hobbled back to her

59
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

own desk. “It still doesn’t work for me. Well,

thanks anyway, Darrell. Or Barrel. Or Feral. Or
whatever it is you want people to call you. Now
let’s get back to work.”
Darrell-Barrel was too pigheaded to go and get
his desk so he had to do his work on his lap. When
we came back from lunch, the desk was set right
again.
The point o f this story is, don’t try to out-crazy
a crazy.
You see, even Miss Pointy’s stories have points.
She likes to tell stories about foxes and crows a lot.
Crows putting pebbles in jugs and making the
cool water rise. Foxes snapping sharp jaws at
grapes just out of reach, walking away, not caring.
Dogs losing bones to reflections in the stream.
Ants working, grasshoppers playing. She told us a
story about a fox and a stork. The fox invites the
stork for dinner, but serves food in a flat saucer, so
the stork can’t eat. The stork invites the fox to din­
ner, and for revenge serves food in a narrow­
necked jar, so the fox can’t eat. “What’s the lesson
here?” she asked.

60
 The L i o n ’ s Lesson

“Foxes and storks don’t know how to eat din­

ner" said Leon.
“Fox should of just ate stork,” Angelina
observed.
“Maybe he was still full,” suggested Michael.
“When people aren’t nice, everyone ends up
hungry and suffering,” Ernie said.
“Hmmm, that’s a good one.” Miss Pointy
rubbed her chin.
“No, it ain’t!” argued Leon. “There’s no people,
just foxes and storks.”
“When you go to someone else’s house, some­
times they don’t serve what you like,” offered
Mariah.
“Yeah! I slept over at Veronica’s, and her momma
served government cheese!” said Sakiah. Veronica
turned around and sent Sakiah a stabbing look.
“Well, she did!”
“Girl, your mouth is as big as a saucer!”
Raphael laughed. “Come on, Miss Pointy. Tell us
what’s the lesson.”
“Tit for tat,” said Miss Pointy. This sent Raphael
and some of the boys into such uncontrollable

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

giggles, she sent them out of the room, one at a

time, to the water fountain.
“That story nasty, Miss Pointy,” said
Dominique upon his return.
“I didn’t make up these stories, you know.
Aesop did.”
“W hy he always writing about animals?”
demanded Kiarre. “Didn’t he know no people?”
“He was writing about people. He gave the ani­
mals the qualities he saw in people: bitterness, perse­
verance, foolishness, trickery, pride. But Aesop had
certain qualities, too, that made it so he had to tell sto­
ries for survival. He was a slave to King Xanthus, in
ancient Greece. He was mute, he couldn’t talk. He was
ugly. They say he had a humped back, bowed legs, a
potbelly, and he was short as a dwarf.”
“Dang! That is ugly!” Tanaeja agreed.
“The Greek gods looked upon him and didn’t
just see what was on the outside. They saw he was
decent on the inside. So they gave him the gifts of
speech and storytelling. Do you think those were
good gifts?”
“I’d rather be handsome" Larry admitted.

62
 The L i o n ’ s Lesson

“Would you have known Aesop was ugly if I

hadn’t told you?”
No, we shook our heads. “He writes hand­
some stories” said Rashonda.
“I think so, too. He used his stories to advise
the king. Sometimes he disagreed with the king’s
way of thinking, but he couldn’t say so outright, or
guess what?”
“They’d kill him!” We cheered.
“O ff with his head!” Sakiah shouted.
“You gotta watch The Man,” warned
Dominique.
Miss Pointy did not argue. “Instead of dis­
agreeing with the king, he used his stories to offer
the bit of common sense the king might have
been missing. Maybe he used animals so the story
wouldn’t seem too personal.”
“He tricked him!” Ernie said.
“Persuaded.” Miss Pointy winked.
Then she told us a fable she said was one of
her favorites, about a lion trapped in a net, who is
chewed out to freedom by a little mouse. She
asked what the story showed.

03
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

“Be careful o f traps, whether you’re a mouse or

a lion” said Ernie.
“That’s a good piece of advice for a king,” said
Miss Pointy, nodding.
“Or if you’re a mouse or a lion” added Ernie
emphatically.
“You gotta watch The Man,” suggested
Dominique.
“Perhaps” Miss Pointy said, “but please try to
think of a new lesson, Dominique. That was not
the moral of all of Aesop’s fables.”
Dominique slumped down in his seat, blush­
ing. “I’m just saying” he muttered. “Ya’ll better
watch him.”
“That’s your daddy’s moral, not Aesop’s,”
laughed Tanaeja.
“You be quiet about my daddy!" Dominique
said.
“Now, now, stay on business. What’s the lesson
of the story?”
“Pay back favors” said Ameer.
“GoodJ’ said Miss Pointy, smiling. “Anyone
else?”

64
 The L i o n ’ s Lesson

“It doesn’t matter if someone is different, they

can be your friend and help you when you need it
most,” said Paris. She was smart. Miss Pointy took
out her Happy Box, a little box full of stickers she
takes out sometimes if you impress her. We
moaned, jealous.
“Paris is right. No one is so weak that on occa­
sion he can’t be a help to you. That’s what Aesop
meant, so that Xanthus shouldn’t overlook the
smaller countries in efforts to make alliances,”
explained Miss Pointy.
“What’s ‘alliances’?”
“Friendships. If there’s a conflict, a war, you
need all the friends you can get.”
“If you’re in a war, we’ll be your allies,” Ernie
spoke for all of us. Almost all of us. Darrell had
been quiet, burning his look into Miss Pointy’s
forehead all along, silently crushing his teeth
against each other inside his mouth. I could see
his jaw moving.
“I’ll be counting on it,” said Miss Pointy. “Let’s
write in our journals now."
I imagined what Darrell would write. Later I

65
S A N A R A S P E C I A L

was able to see, because it was my turn to check in

homework on the chart. I stayed after with Rachel
and peeked when Miss Pointy took the rest of the
class out.
“I don’t think you should look in people’s
journals” said Rachel.
“Just one person’s, I promise,” I said.
“Whose?””
“Darrell’s.”
She laughed. “You’re crazy. He probably can’t
even write.”
“Come on. Want to see?”
She leaned over, but then pulled back. “No,”
she said. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
What a way to die, I thought. “Did Aesop say
that?”
“No, your momma did. Get in trouble by your­
self, cuz. I’d like to get out o f the fifth grade.” She
went back to cleaning the board in wide, wet lines
with a sponge. I read.

66
 The L i o n ’ s Lesson

Q \^s a b'\cU\ a b\^ one w ly sU,e sa^Vv.

+t>a+ X aryf never sed no+W'n +o U,er '«na
+euu n y mowa -H^en. w\uu see

Well, I wasn’t too far off.

“What’d it say?” she asked.
I thought curiosity killed the cat? “You were
right,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

67
 7

G e o r g e G e t s Busted

v i/ V ) fter lunch we push the desks to the sides

of the room and gather in the middle. Then, there
in the soft rosy glow of her lamp, Miss Pointy
shares stories with us. Miss Pointy says some sto­
ries are for reading and some stories are for telling.
She told us the story about George Washington.
He cut down a cherry tree, and then his momma
came and said, “Boy, did you do this?” And he said,
“Yeah” which I thought was stupid, and so did
everybody else.
“Was he holding the ax when his momma
come?" Raphael asked.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Busted!”
“Dang! He should of put the ax down and said
he didn’t know nothing about it.”

68
 Ge o r ge Ge t s Busted

“She would have known he was lying” said

Miss Pointy. “She was his mother."
“Yeah, but she couldn’t prove it.”
“She didn’t have to prove it. She was his mother”
she repeated. “Do you have to prove everything to
your mother, or does she just know?” Miss Pointy
was looking so exactly the other way of Darrell that
I knew she was thinking about him. “George
Washington went on to become the first president
of the United States."
The class was silent.
“So?” came a voice.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, so what?” shrugged Raphael. “I don’t
get it. He chopped down a tree, he was busted, and
then he became president. I repeat,” he said, smil­
ing, “so?”
“For one thing, he wasn’t busted,” Miss Pointy
explained. “He had the chance to tell the truth,
and he did. People tell that story because it showed
he was an honest man, and that’s what the
American people wanted: an honest man. I tell
this story to you because I think that same quality

69
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

of honesty will get you far in life. Honesty isn’t

even really the right word, I think it’s more like
accountability.” She got up and wrote the word on
the blackboard. We couldn’t see it in the dim light,
but we could hear the tapping o f the chalk.
“Accountability means, if you’ve got the guts to do
something, at least have the guts to say you’ve
done it.”
“How come we don’t have presidents like that
no more?” asked Raphael.
“Maybe you’ll have to bring it back in style”
Miss Pointy said so matter-of-factly, we all turned to
smile at Raphael at once, and then we laughed. It
wasn’t a making-fun-of laugh, it was a gentle, embar­
rassed laugh, like we all saw the secret part of him
for a second, the part that showed him all grown up,
not just a smart aleck, but a man with a job.
“I don’t want to be president!” His face was
turning red, like the idea was buzzing around his
head like a fly and frustrating him. “Anyway, the
story’s not true.”
“Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, it doesn’t mat­
ter," said Miss Pointy.

70
 Ge o r ge Ge ts Busted

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

Angelina forgot to raise her hand. “The whole
story is about telling the truth. How can you say it
doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not?”
“True things don’t always happen in the world,
where you can see and touch them. True things
also happen in the imagination.” I stared at her as
she said this amazing thing so easily, as though she
were telling us the time. “If it happened that some­
body was living a life that made him wish for an
honest man, so he made up that story, then there’s
something true about that story, even if the events
didn’t really happen. Do you see?”
I wanted to see, because I wanted to be like
Miss Pointy, a woman who loved stories even bet­
ter than TV So I thought about this. I watched as
some of my classmates pretended to think about
this, but really were watching other people think
about this.
“So, if it’s not a true story about a man being
accountable, it’s a true story about somebody wish­
ing a man was accountable?” I said as I raised my
hand. I had to speak slowly. My mind felt like it

71
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

was trying to carry a shallow pie pan full of water,

and if I wasn’t careful, it would splash and spill. The
class looked at me like they looked at Raphael, but
they didn’t laugh. What were they seeing in me?
Miss Pointy was looking at me, too,
tenderly, like a mother who doesn’t need her child
to prove anything, but is just glad to know what
that child is made of.
“We can turn on the lights now” is all she said.
“Time to write in our journals.”

True things don^t always happen in

the World, where you can see and touch
them
True things also happen in the
imagination

I didn’t get a chance to write more than that

because the door opened and there was Darrell’s
momma. “I’ve got words for you.” She pointed a
crooked finger at Miss Pointy and stepped forward.

72
 Ge o r ge Ge t s Busted

Miss Pointy asked, “Did you stop in the office

for a pass?”
Darrell’s momma said, “I’m not going to stop at
any office, I’m going to speak to you right now”
“Surely you can see, I’m in the middle of teach­
ing a roomful of children!’ she said, real calm. I
wrote the word surely lightly on the cover of my
folder, in pencil, to surely use sometime.
Darrell’s momma eyed Miss Pointy up and
down, wrinkling up her nose at her fluffy dress. “I
don’t care what you in the middle of,” Darrell’s
momma said. “You called my son a jackass in front
of the whole class.”
We didn’t dare to breathe.
“I don’t know where you got that idea.” Miss
Pointy looked at Luz and her eyes pointed silently
to the wall. Luz got up and pressed the button
twice, to signal the office for an emergency. Luz
can be such a goody-two-shoes. But this time I was
glad.
“You calling my son a liar?”
“Class?” Miss Pointy looked at us as if she had
just asked us a review question.

73
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

“She never called him a jackass, and I have

perfect attendance, so I know.” Sakiah’s squeaky
voice came from the back. “He’s the one always
calling out her name and not doing his work, just
messing around.”
Dominique stood up. He is bigger than
Darrell, so he’s not scared of him. “He called her
Miss Potty, but that ain’t her name. It’s Miss
PWAH-TEE-YAY, it rhymes with a French word
that means ‘gotcha.’”
“Actually, ‘you got me,”’ Miss Pointy corrected
him. “Thank you, Dominique.”
Darrell’s momma looked around at us slowly,
but none of us said anything more. Then Darrell’s
momma marched right over to Darrell’s desk,
which was only about four steps away, because
Miss Pointy keeps him in the front row. Darrell’s
momma took the journal off of Darrell’s desk and
whacked him over his skull, yelling, “Maybe you
are a jackass!”
Miss Pointy stepped up and snatched the jour­
nal out of Darrell’s momma’s hand quick as a ninja
and whacked her once on the hands, real sharp.

74
 Ge or ge Ge t s Busted

Darrell’s momma’s mouth made a shape like she

was trying to inhale a hard-boiled egg.
“We don’t swear in my classroom. Hardly ever.
And we don’t hit. Much.” Just then, the door
opened, and there was the vice-principal.
“Is there a problem, ladies?”
“Children. Excuse us for a moment. Please,
continue to write in your journals. Maybe write
the moral of the story? Miss Pointy said hurriedly,
as they stepped out into the hall.
The door closed. We were too scared to speak.
Most of us.
“The moral is, mind your cherry tree, George
Washington,” Dominique growled at Darrell. “I’ll
kick your behind till you look like Aesop, lying
and bringing your crazy momma in here like that.”
“Dominique, be quiet,” hissed Tanaeja. “Ain’t
nobody in here be talking ’bout nobody’s
momma.”
“Anyway, that isn’t the moral of the story? said
Kiarre calmly, bigger than all of us and afraid of
nothing. “The moral is just what Miss Pointy said.
‘Stop in the office for a pass.’”

75
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

This satisfied us, and we didn’t speak any more.

Darrell didn’t look up. He was writing in his journal,
like Miss Pointy asked. I started thinking about him.
How does it feel to have a momma who doesn’t know
anything about you? A momma who needs you to
prove whether or not you’re a liar, who doesn’t just
know?
One thing for sure, Darrell Sikes makes school
more interesting.
I know it’s nosy, but I couldn’t wait until I had
another chance to see his journal. I hoped it had a
sorry in it.

a fcAcU* w Uy sL>e U>‘\t we %

\n ^ront
ofc tU>e Uyoue cuass X d\nt do ^ O T B X ^
and ^utl>uwore w Uy d\nt w*\ss P O T T Y
FO t t Y Y C rrrY s ay notion bout cauu\n we
banuy sL>e so ^o ne y. "PowaneeV: bet­
te r wUyacUx l^ s taue X w <jon w lvp U>‘\w bad.

As J onenbconed bo your nnobher, vre

do nob Swear en class. T^ou w ill wrcbe
“ btbcfi ” ben bc^neS so you lea rn bo sp ell

76
 Ge or ge Ge t s Busted

ib correcbLy a n d bhen J wiLL ne'ver see

ib or hear ib froom you again. SchooL
Language , ptease.
U iss Pobby
(onty you onay ca tt one bhab, bhen
we 'LL caLL lb even)

spee\cu\ oG /W\ss o o -u a -
ud w U y y o u spee\c eei\^.*\slv +t>'\s *\s
+l>e youKi+ed sta te s 047 aw enca n ot puan\t
oG tl^e apes» Y o u tau\c ^ancy but 31 no a
secrYt, y o u ant auu tl^a t f^\31^^. P O t t Y

DarreLL, see nme durin g recess bhiS

week, J'nn going bo beach you bhe
brand of EngLish J speak. J'on in'Vib-
ing Donninityue, so you won 'b be Lone-
Ly. you don 'b ha've bo bhank one.
nuss Oo-La~La
(beabs TYIl s s Pobby any day)

77
 8

T h e Way T h i n g s A r e Built

s£/ I vl iss Pointy loves to show us slides of the

way things are built. She says it’s architecture. The
way Miss Pointy talks about architecture, it’s as if it
is a person, something built from the inside out.
She gave us drinking straws to try to construct
what we think the skeletons of skyscrapers look
like. “Beams are the bones that hold the body?’ she
said. While we worked, she showed us black-and-
white photographs of men balancing on these
beams, eating lunch, talking, at home in the sky.
The sky is definitely Somewhere Else. Looking at
these men, I thought about Heaven. I wondered if
my father was working construction.

78
 The Way Things Are Built

This arch in Paris, France. That dome in

Florence, Italy. This wall, that pillar, this doorway,
that window. Miss Pointy pointed out details in
stone that looked like piped whipped cream. She
showed us palaces, cliff dwellings, tipis, shanties,
bams. Fountains, filigrees, spires, gargoyles watching
from on high, stairs, pillars, bridges. I love these
words, I couldn’t write them down fast enough,
magic words that bring your mind to Somewhere
Else. But they aren’t all somewhere else. Some of
them are right here in Chicago. She showed us pic­
tures of our own city. The Bahá’i Temple, Wrigley
Field, the Water Tower, the Tribune building. She
showed us the beautiful stones in the Graceland
cemetery. She showed us the pink Edgewater Beach
apartments off of Lake Shore Drive near Bryn Mawr,
from the days when Uptown had movie studios and
fine hotels. She showed us the skyline of Navy Pier,
the long jetty with its elegant Ferris wheel slowly
turning amid the seagulls. She said she would take us
to see Buckingham Fountain at night when the
weather gets warm, she said she’d treat us all to chur­
ros and we could watch the colors change in the

79
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

water. She said we would all go to the bathroom at

the Palmer House Hotel.
She said she would take us to the top of the
Sears Tower someday. We were afraid, but we
didn’t mention it exactly.
“Grandma says skyscrapers is a sin, it’s bad for
man to try to reach God,” Angelina said.
“I think it’s a sin not to try,” said Miss Pointy,
“i f we are all God’s children, as your grandmother
would probably say, then isn’t it natural for a child
to reach up to a parent?”
I knew the answer. But then I had another
question: isn’t it just as natural for a parent to reach
for his child? When I thought of my father’s archi­
tecture, I hung my head and closed my eyes. In my
imagination I heard the roar of heavy machinery
approaching, I felt the walls of myself shimmy and
crack. Even though I told myself it was in my
head, I had to hold on to my desk for a minute,
a hand tight on each side, thinking the words I
didn’t write.

80
 The Way Things Are Built

Dear Daddy, M y heart is a shanty. So why

did you send a wrecking ball? W hy didn’t you
build me a house instead, or a skyscraper a
million stories high?

The only stories I can build are on paper, but I

thought of that hungry file cabinet in the counselor’s
office and I didn’t dare write anything here at school.
In my mind’s eye, I wrote the letter to my father. In
my mind’s eye, I crumpled that letter into a ball.
Then the sound I imagined rolls away. I
blinked, and I was surprised to see walls still
standing all around me. Everyone but me was
building skyscrapers.
“Finish your structures for homework” said
Miss Pointy.
Everyone finishes their homework for Miss
Pointy, because Miss Pointy gives beautiful glittery
stickers for prizes. Luz gets a lot of stickers from
Miss Pointy. I am not the sticker police, I just know
this because I sit right behind her to the left. I
couldn’t help but notice how after a short time had
passed, her collection had spread all over the front

81
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

of her journal like measles. Then it was so full, she

had to start putting them on the inside cover.
“Doesn’t that make your journal kind o f
heavy?” I asked.
“Eees okay!’ Luz smiled at me. “I don mind.”
Whenever a paper is passed back, I see
Luz bounce just a little bit on her bottom, she’s so
excited. Then she takes her fingernail and goes
pick-pick-pick at the corner of the sticker until it
comes off of her paper, and she re-sticks it on her
journal cover. Luz isn’t all that smart, but she gets
them anyway, because Miss Pointy says trying your
best is a success in itself.
What does that make me? I don’t have a single
sticker.
Once Miss Pointy saw that Luz’s cover was
filled and she said, “When I was a little girl, I col­
lected stickers, too,” and they smiled at each other.
I guess I wasn’t the only one who overheard this
gross conversation, because then all the girls and
some of the boys started peeling stickers off their
papers and sticking them on their journals. But I’ll
bet two bags of chips Miss Pointy brought her old

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 The Way Things Ar e Built

collection from home and secretly gave it to Luz,

because Luz suddenly turned up with glossy
photo-album pages of stars and hearts and uni­
corns and what-alL I also think Miss Pointy secretly
gave Ernie a book of Aesop’s Fables, too. For keeps!
I complained to Rachel about this.
“I don’t want a book of Aesop’s Fables.” She
shrugged.
“Even if she offered it to you?”
“She didn’t offer it to me. She offered it to
Ernie. I guess she must have been tired of him ask­
ing for the same old stories over and over." I must
have been looking grumpy, because Rachel added,
“I think it was nice of her. Don’t be jealous.”
“Jealous!” There was no use talking to Rachel.
I suppose she also thought it was nice that Miss
Pointy gave Boris the same book, even though he
doesn’t speak a word of English, not one word!
Ernie can go over to Boris’s desk and look at the
book with him whenever he wants, he doesn’t
even have to ask, he just goes, and there they are,
Miss Pointy doesn’t even look up.

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

This class has class pets.

I wanted to write, Why does some girl who just

learned to speak English two years ago get twenty mil­
lion stickers, while I get zero? But then I remembered
what Miss Pointy’s answer would be. She even
wrote it in my journal, in red ink, after I hadn’t
done a journal entry in four days straight.

A writer writes.

Why can’t she be normal and say “Do your work”

like any other teacher? Why can’t she take me out in
the hall like I was Darrell Sikes and tell me that I’m
capable of so much more, talk about disappointment
and railing my mother and grades? But no, she’s
trickier than that. A writer writes, she says. Like she’s
saying, Are you writing, or are you nobody? That’s the
way it feels.
Maybe she doesn’t mean it like that, maybe
she’s just giving matter-of-fact writing advice, like

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 The Way Things Are Built

she always does in my journal. I understand some

of it, like

// you hear a good word that

ietongs bo someone etse, wnibe it down
somewhere so it ietongs bo you, boo.

I already do that. What’s she telling me that

for?

Don ’b ever end a story, “And then

/ woke up. Jb was gust a dream! ”
That's a very cheap brick.

Don ’b kitt your characters. The

worst ones shoutd go on and on and
on, gust tike in reat Life.

Some of her comments I don’t understand

very well.

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

K,id vs . nature, k id vs. k id , k id

VS. h im self. Vick a figh t.
Words th at don ’t m ean much-,
nice, pretty, ugly, had, good.
hinow how to te ll who ’s the m ain
ch aracter? J t ’s not alw ays the one
you lik e the Best. Jt ’S the one who
changes.

During journal time, I stare at her words, mov­

ing each piece of advice in my mind like a hand
explores a stone in a collection o f stones. But the
same one stands out every time: “A writer writes.”
This is not a stone, this is a rock, and I don’t want
it. I just want a sticker, and I know she’d give me a
thousand stickers if I would only do my work. But
I’m no begging dog. I can buy me all the stickers I
want at the store.
I taste the flavor of sour grapes, like the fox on
the cover of Ernie’s book of fables. I swallow it
down.
Usually Miss Pointy hands back the journals,
but one bad day she was busy fixing some equip-

86
 The Way Things Are Built

ment in the back of the room, so she let Leon pass

the journals back. He wasn’t paying attention and
gave them to all the wrong people. A star-covered
journal appeared on my desk. I quickly slid it
under my desk and into my lap, and stared at the
collection of bears and clowns and unicorns and
brightly colored words:

Good J ob!

You Can Do I t !
F ar O u t !

I ' m I mpressed !

In the left corner was a star with a rainbow

streaming behind it. All that glitters is not gold,
says Aesop, but if it was gold glitter, that was good
enough for me. I felt my finger tweaking at one of
the star’s points, only it wasn’t my finger, it was a
robot’s finger, programmed to do some other, bad
girl’s bidding. I felt the useless resistance of the
sticker, trying to stay on poor Luz’s notebook. The
star curled away.
Luz raised her hand, waved it, panicked.
“Mees Pointee!Thees ees not my journal!”

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

“This isn’t mine, either” said Ernie.

“Well, don’t open them! They’re private!”
Everyone opened them. “Darrell! Sakiah! Hey! Close
those books!” Miss Pointy directed, turning away
from the VCR to confiscate the journals. “I’ll pass
them back myself. Heavens, Leon, can’t I count on
you?” I felt Luz’s notebook being lifted from my
grasp. I hadn’t had a chance to put the star back. I
meant to. I was just seeing how sticky it was. My
journal was handed back to me. I stuck the star on
the inside cover. I glanced over at Luz. She was look­
ing at the cover of her journal, then she began to
crane her neck. Would she raise her hand? No, she
just leaned back hard in her chair, and slowly ran her
fingers across the stickers she had left. Plenty of
stickers, in my opinion. She didn’t write anything,
she just made fists and rested her cheeks on them.
She frowned.
“Wanna see what I wrote in my journal?” Paris
offered, tapping my shoulder from behind across
the aisle. I was surprised.
“Sure|’ I said.
I read:

88
 The Way Things Are Built

?o‘\nAy3 ?\ea5e b o read.

lVA?O^TAK3T\\\
L_OZ.^> c.o\\ec.Aion iòn'4 -lhe only

■5A\oky AH\n^ \n -\h\<S roon^. ‘íoneone

ha<5 STICKY Flk^kR^- Ahovj^hA yovj

-Should know.

Mom says, in the city, there’s a million win­

dows. Someone’s always watching you, seeing what
you are doing, what’s happening to you. It always
made me feel safe, like wherever I was, I had
guardian angels. I realized, suddenly, that maybe
other people have guardian angels, too. I handed
the journal back to Paris, careful to keep my mouth
a straight, closed line. Then I couldn’t help it. I
turned back to Paris and opened my mouth.
“What do you want?” I hissed.
“Not a thing.” She smiled innocently. Paris
plays with Luz on the playground every day. Luz’s
best friend, kitty-corner behind me! How could I
have been so careless!
“I was going to give it back" I turned around
again.

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“So give it” Paris folded her hands.

“Stop acting so grown-up,” I growled.
“Sahara? Is there a problem?" Miss Pointy asked
from the back of the room. “Please stop turning
around and get to work. You, too, Paris.”
Paris’s smile makes me think I am going to go
crazy.
We were supposed to write about architecture
where we live. I stared at my blank page. Finally I
wrote,

Do teachers have secrets?

That’s all I wrote. Certainly not enough to

earn a sticker. Suddenly, I realized I couldn’t
hand this journal back up to Miss Pointy, not with
the star on the inside cover. So I peeled it off. It
ripped a little, and curled into a coil. What should
I do with it? I wondered. I didn’t know, so I
dropped it on the floor. From the corner o f my
eye, I saw Paris dip down to get it. Time went
slowly.
Finally, Miss Pointy started collecting the

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 The Way Things Are Built

journals. Paris half-stood, reaching over my desk.

“Here, Luz!” she called.
Luz took it, but she did not look happy. “Eees
dirty. There’s dirt all over eet,” she remarked. “W hy
you take eet, Paris?”
Paris looked shocked. “Me!”
“I thought we were friends,” she said to Paris.
“I didn’t take it” said Paris.
“Then who deed?” Luz raised her hand. Paris
seemed frozen, searching for her breath. Finally,
she glared at me, set back down and crossed her
arms.
“Yes, Luz?” Miss Pointy turned. I braced
myself.
“I need some escotch tape” said Luz. “One of
my esteekers ees loose.”
Miss Pointy frowned, and got some clear Con-
Tact paper. She showed Luz how to cover her
whole book with the film. “Now, none of them
will come off)’ she explained. Luz looked up grate­
fully. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it sooner.”
Me, too, I thought.
At recess, Paris marched up to me.

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

“You gonna take care of your business or not?”

I couldn’t even look at Paris in the eye.
“Cordelia told me you were bad, but I
didn’t believe her. I told her I like to make up my
own mind. I thought we could be friends. Thanks,
Sahara.” She clucked her tongue, disgusted. I saw
her feet turn and walk away.
I watched Paris and Luz make careful circles as
they played, not crossing each other’s paths. I
leaned against the chain-link fence with Rachel,
who said nothing, as usual. I had a conversation
with myself, instead. More of a lecture. About how
I read all those books, wishing life could be
like what I read, wishing there would be such
things as heroes and adventures. But a hero is the
one who does what’s hard, like Paris, taking the
blame and losing a friend. Or Luz, saying words in
another language, a language her own mother
doesn’t speak. Could I do what she does, take a risk
with every word? The answer made my cheeks feel
hot.
I looked at Kiarre, overgrown and pushy,
trying so hard to be the policewoman instead of

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 The Way Things Are Built

the criminal. Raphael, with his big mouth, want­

ing to laugh even if it’s at himself. I thought about
Ernie, hiding from the gangs in the library after
school, and being called a chicken. Sakiah, telling
on everyone and talking too much, tagging along
like everybody’s little sister. Even Darrell, beaten
in front of the whole class, held back, mean and
slow but present, every day; is school still better
than home? He was a hero, too. They told me you
were bad, Darrell, but I didn’t believe them. I like to make
up m y own mind. I thought we could be friends----
I looked at my classmates, sprawled across the
playground, their noise swirling all around me. I
like my class, I thought, surprised. Aside from
Cordelia, the rest of them were decent, not one of
them had yet mentioned how I was held back, not
one of them called me stupid or slow. They could
have, couldn’t they? What do they see, us girls
against the chain-link fence? Is Rachel a shy girl,
or a snob? Am I a mysterious girl, a secret-keeper,
or just a thief, a girl who steals other people’s
rewards, telling herself she could earn them her­
self if she really wanted? If she really wanted! I

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

turned away, my back to everyone, and closed my

eyes tight.
Rachel noticed. “Are you okay?” I shook my
head violently. I thought of saying, Let’s play with
everyone else. Let’s not stand here, by ourselves. But I
couldn’t, not today. I knew I was standing where I
belonged.
Before we entered the classroom, I whispered
to Miss Pointy, “I need the trouble basket.” She
motioned to me with her finger, and pulled it out
from under her desk. She held it low, by her knees,
so it was private. I pretended to put my troubles in
it. I put and I put and I put, while she watched
silently, holding the handle with both hands. Then
I looked at her and nodded that I was through.
I went back to my seat. My stomach had
started to hurt. I put my head down and hid in the
dark of my own arms. Miss Pointy didn’t call on
me for the rest of the day.

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 9

Miss Pointy G e t s Me
W her e I Live

% Rachel’s brother, Freddie, was to blame for our

stomach flu. Rachel and I were taking turns holding
him, cuddling him, kissing him. He’s so chubby, like
a baby doll, we couldn’t resist. Until he started throw­
ing up. Then we handed him back to my aunt. Two
days later, Rachel and I were throwing up, too.
We were lying with our feet sticking in each
other’s faces on the sofa in my living room. Rachel’s
momma couldn’t take off any more work, so my
mom took a sick day to take care of us. The hours
passed slowly. The drone of cartoons had become
wearisome, and the flickering of the screen began
to nauseate us. Freddie drooled in his playpen, not
knowing or caring what he had done to us with his
evil, germy cuteness.

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

We tried entertaining ourselves by drawing

pictures of each other. I stared at Rachel. Her hair
looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. Her eyes
had half-moons of green underneath, and the cor­
ners o f her mouth had little fans of spittle. I didn’t
mention this. I imagined I looked the same. We
showed each other our unimpressive work.
“Now what do you want to do?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.” Rachel shrugged.
We lay there, weak and staring at each other,
thinking the word that Miss Pointy had trained us
not to dare to say aloud. B-o-r-i-n-g.
“Let’s eat toast” I suggested. We ate our toast,
crust first, then middle.
“Ooogh” said Rachel.
“Mom!” I called.
Mom came running in. She put her arms
around Rachel, and walked her to the bathroom.
Strange, painful, wet cries drifted down the hall­
way. Pungent smells, and then the sound of teeth
being brushed, the toilet being flushed, Lysol being
sprayed. Rachel was walked back after a time, look­
ing like Kiarre had given her the once-over.

96
 Miss Pointy Ge t s Me Where I Live

“Oooogh” said Rachel.

“Now what do you want to do?” I asked.
“Sahara! Leave her be,” Mom said, pulling over
a pail within puke-shot. “Do you need one of these,
too?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I feel okay.
Except when I look at her.”
Rachel smiled from the other end of the sofa,
her eyes closed. Then she frowned, and leaned
over the pail. She made some noises, but nothing
came out.
“Don’t excite her. Read a book. Read to her. Do
something quietly.”
“Her toes are about two million degrees,” I
complained. “I think I’m getting blisters where
her toes are touching my leg.”
My mother felt Rachel’s head. “Oh, honey!’ she
said, and got some Tylenol. Rachel swallowed the
pills, and took noisy, experimental sips from a
glass of water. Mom and I watched with interest.
Nothing came up. “Try to sleep, boo-boo." Then she
turned to me. “You let her sleep!’ she warned.
After Mom left the room, Rachel lay there

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

with a cool rag on her forehead, moaning

exotically. “Let’s pretend you’re sick” I suggested.
“I am sick,” she reminded me.
“No, really sick. We’re sisters, lost in the desert.”
“Nnnngghhh. Too hot.”
“All right, the tundra. I’m nursing you back to
health on seal blubber and fish.”
Rachel leaned over the pail.
“Sahara!” My mother’s voice scolded from the
kitchen.
I whispered. “It seems like you’re close to the
end, but don’t go on that ice drift, Rachel-Quiet-
River-Flowing. Your betrothed, Darrell-Whose-
Mother-Pounds, will be heartbroken.” Rachel eyed
me from over the pail.
“Make it Dominique,” she croaked, leaning
back into the pillows.
I waited for her to ask me who I liked. The
question never came.
“I am your older sister. I have to get married
first” I explained. “Who will it be?"
Rachel snored delicately at the other end of
the sofa. Freddie shifted in the playpen, sucking

98
 Miss Pointy G e ts Me Where I Live

on the paw o f his worn-out teddy bear. I sighed,

and picked up Julie of the Wolves. Time moved more
quickly with my book friends than my real
friends, I noticed, a little sadly.
The doorbell rang. I heard my mother say,
“Who is it?” into the intercom.
“Madame Poitier” said the voice. “Miss Pointy.”
“Miss Pointy?” My mom couldn’t hide her sur­
prise. She buzzed her in. I buried myself under the
blanket and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand to see
Miss Pointy, not after stealing Luz’s sticker, even if
she didn’t know it was me. And then getting sick!
And missing school! It was too embarrassing, too
weak. I flopped my arm over the side of the sofa.
“Sahara?” Mom came in. I tried to breathe
evenly. Mom clucked her tongue, believing I was
asleep. She went to the door.
“Ms. Jones?” I heard Miss Pointy’s voice at the
door. “Is Sahara here? I brought her homework.”
“That was nice of you” said Mom. “Especially
since she doesn’t do it, does she?”
“Well, it’s still hers, to do or not do.”
“I guess so” said Mom. “She and Rachel are

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sleeping. Won’t you come in? Or are you on your

way somewhere? Special?” I supposed Mom had
just noticed her wardrobe. Miss Pointy must have
been wearing one of her party dresses. Or maybe
her sparkling tiara. Or her ankle-length leopard-skin
coat? I opened one eye, but couldn’t see anything.
“I just came from somewhere special,” said
Miss Pointy.
“I thought you were coming from school.”
“I am.”
“Oh,” said Mom.
“I’m sorry to intrude. I just wanted to drop
this off. I know you weren’t expecting me----”
“That’s fine. I’ve been home with three sick
kids all day, I’m so bored.” I cringed at the B-word.
“Come in for just a few minutes. I have marble
cake” said Mom.
I wondered if Mom had her by the arm. The
door closed, and I heard the footsteps into the
kitchen, the next room over. I heard the kettle
bang on the burner. I heard the women sitting
together, Mom taking drags on her cigarette.
“Smoke?”

100
 Miss Pointy Ge t s Me Where I Live

“No, thanks.”
“Did you quit?”
“I never quit anything,” Miss Pointy said. “I
just finish.”
“I wish I could finish smoking,” said Mom.
“Finish what you start,” said Miss Pointy. Good
grief, I thought, how do teachers ever have friends out­
side of school, if they always talk like teachers? Mom
just laughed.
“You’re a real teacher, aren’t you,” she said.
“Having any luck with Sahara this year?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, considering her history. You read her
records, didn’t you?”
“No,” said Miss Pointy. “I hate reading records.
I never do it, until the end of the year. Then it’s
fun. You can see if other people think you’re right
or wrong.” Mom must have been giving her a
strange look, because she kept explaining. “If a kid
is wild, or slow, or can’t read, it’ll show in good
time. I have eyes. I don’t need those records.”
“Seems the records would save time, though.”
“Not if they’re wrong."

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

The kettle sang. “So you haven’t seen Sahara’s

file, huh,” said Mom.
“Nope. I just see Sahara.”
“Well. What do you see?” I knew Mom was
holding her breath a little bit. So was I.
“She is going to be a writer” said Miss Pointy. I
felt myself blow up suddenly, like a balloon that
just had been attached to a helium tank.
“Is she?” Mom finally breathed. “What else?”
“Sorry,” said Miss Pointy. “That’s all I know
about her right now. She doesn’t show me a lot.”
“Does she write for you?”
“No, not reallyj’ said Miss Pointy. “This is good
tea.”
“Then why do you say she’s a writer?”
“I didn’t say she was a writer. I said she’s going
to be a writer. A writer writes. When she starts
writing, she’ll be a writer” Miss Pointy explained.
“Oh.” Mom sounded annoyed. “Well, maybe
when she starts practicing rocket science, she’ll be
a rocket scientist.”
“Maybe” agreed Miss Pointy in a muffled
voice. It sounded like her mouth was full of cake.

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 Miss Pointy G e t s Me Where I Live

“Except I don’t think she’s going to be a rocket sci­

entist. I think she’s going to be a writer.”
“Well, what should I do with this great
talent?”
“Read to her. Even though she’s a big girl.
Leave a lot of pens and paper around the house.
Give her a lot of books to read to herself. Probably
stuff you’ve been doing all along."
“You really haven’t read the file, have you?”
Mom marveled. I thought I heard a little relief in
her voice. “You know, she’s been held back.”
“It’ll be great material” said Miss Pointy, her
mouth full again. “Great artists suffer. She keeps a
journal at school, you know.”
“She does?” said Mom. “Can I read it?”
“I lent her the money for the journal. She
owes me two bucks!’ Miss Pointy said abruptly.
“Can you advance her?”
“Now?”
“Now’s good.”
I wondered what Mom’s face looked like,
fetching the money from her purse.
“Can I read it?” Mom repeated.

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“Sorry. Her debt’s paid. It’s her journal now.

You’ve got to ask her” said Miss Pointy.
“I bought her a notebook too, you know”
Mom told her, lowering her voice. “She keeps it in
between her mattresses. I sneak to look at it. It’s
just blank pages and pages ripped out.”
Mom!
“Tsk, tsk. Maybe she knows you’re snooping.
Don’t be embarrassed. I like snooping, too,” Miss
Pointy confessed. Me, too, I thought. “But either
way, she wouldn’t rip out blank pages, would she?
She’s probably writing something on them.”
“Like letters” said Mom. I felt a pang.
“Sure. Or stories” said Miss Pointy. “Could be
anything, really.”
“She does love stories. Reads all the time, here
at home,” Mom tattled. “She’d rather read than play
outside. She’d rather read than go anywhere.” Well,
that’s not true. W hy do you think I read? To go every­
where. “She’s got a great vocabulary, too. She could
talk to the queen of England.”
“You don’t have to sell me, Ms. Jones,” said
Miss Pointy. “I believe you. That’s great.”

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 Miss Pointy Ge t s Me Where I Live

The women sipped their tea. “Are you going to

fail her?” Mom asked finally.
“Oh, I’ve never failed a child," said Miss Pointy
cheerfully. “She, on the other hand, might fail her­
self.”
“Maybe I failed her,” Mom said quietly. I bit
my lip, hearing Mom’s voice tremble. “She’s a good
girl, she’s just a little freaked out. Sometimes she
still comes in my room, in the middle of the night.
Is that normal, at her age?”
Mom! Do you have to tell her everything?
“I guess, if she’s freaked out? said Miss Pointy.
Mom didn’t seem to be listening. “Stuck in the
apartment all day, you know how it is in the city.
Maybe I could have made a better home, worked
things out with her father.. . .”
“Excuse me” Miss Pointy broke in. “May I be
perfectly honest? You’re a class act, Ms. Jones, and
you have nothing to feel bad about. I’ll put it in
your permanent record, if you like. Good mother.
Serves tea and cake without prompting. Just a little
freaked out. See Sahara Jones for further details.”
My mom laughed, but it crackled, like it

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

might have been a choice between that and cry­

ing. “I see why the children like you,” said Mom.
“Compliments make me break out in a rash”
said Miss Pointy. “Please tell Sahara to get well
soon. Rachel, too.”
After Miss Pointy left, Mom came in and
dropped the homework on the coffee table and
went back into the kitchen. I could hear her
singing along with the radio.
I tried to go to sleep for real, not because I felt
tired, but because I felt sad. Failing other people, I
could just say “Sorry,” but it hadn’t occurred to me
that I was failing myself. I didn’t want to fail
myself. I wouldn’t know how to apologize for it. I
sat up. Hidden in the pile of homework was my
journal. I decided to do the assignment Miss
Pointy had given us the day I stole Luz’s sticker.

Where I Live
I live in the city. I WonAer what it's like, to
live in th e suburbs or th e country. I imagine if
you live in a house, it's easier because you
have a yard or a bike and when your mam

106
 Miss Pointy G e ts Me Where I Live

sends you on on errand, she doesn’t store out

the window till you g et bock and you don’t
have to run- I Wonder what i t ’s like, not to
hear sirens and yelling, not to hear your
neighbors- When Mr. Martinez who lives’ b e l oW

us comes home from the factory in the

middle of the night, he gives h im s e lf a Wei-

com e-hom e party by putting on his Cuban

music so loud, his music is fu ll of trumpets and
drums and the Word corazón, corazón all the
time, fiis music shakes like a bad Woman- HiS
music is a bigger Woman than his Wife, who is
Small baned, who I im agine is fraW ning in her
housedress because he’s sitting on the sofa
drinking With his favorite Woman-I think this
as I Watch the crystals on the aid light fixture
quiver from the throb of his corazón- W'\S
earning home is really something.
I t ’s Something to me, too. I t ’s Someone

earning hom e. I listen fa r my m other, in th e

o th e r room . Is she sleeping? Or is she W aiting ,

to o ? Som etim es I ga to h e r room , b u ts^ e

usually sends m e b a ck . She says h e r bed’s to o

Small. She Says, P u t a pretty p ic tu re in y o u r

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

mind's eye; you'll fa ll asleep, you Wont be

Scared. You d o n t need me.
So I go b a c k and lie doWn and listen to tArs.

Rosen, in th e a p a rtm e n t ab ove us- Shuffle,

shuffle, thum p. Shuffle, shuffle, thum p. The

thu m p is h e r cane. I h e a r h e r m ove to th e

.
k itc h e n The c h a ir scrapes a g a in s tth e

linoleum . W h a t is she doing in th e kitchen, in

th e m idd le o f th e n ig h t? She's nice, she smiles

a t m e on th e street, she gave m e a b u tte r­

s c o tc h can d y o u t o f h e r handbag w ith th e

little gold clasp . When she gave it to me, I

looked a t h e r hands, Wrinkled With m ore lines

th a n a road map, speckled With lakes o f broWn.

W h a t is it like to be old, I Wonder, to haste rkin

With liner fo r estery noile you've Walked, fo r

estery trip around th e sun? When I W atch TV, I

never W ant to be old, th e y laugh a t oldness on

TV. ?>ut in th e dark, I hold my hands up stra ig h t

above m e in th e a ir like tw o stars and I Wish fo r

lines t h a t prove I h ave been here. I Wonder

a b o u t tArs* Rosen a t th e k itch e n table, looking

a t t h e lines in h e r hands in th e m idd le o f th e

night. W ho is she Waiting fo r ?

108
 Miss Pointy Ge t s Me Where I Live

I im agine i f you live inth e c o u n t y you

ca n look o u t y o u r w in d ow and see th e Wilky

W ay. A n y tim e I W ant I ca n lo o k o u t my Win-
doW and see a th o u sa n d o th e r windows, h a lf -

shaded o r blaringyellaWaW ake. I d o n t p iay

o u tsid e m u ch. I can*t swim on c o n c re te . [Ay

ears ca n h a rd ly m a ke o u t th e ra ttlin g o f th e

Rajen Says, life is With

cic a d a s. 3 u t M rs. peo­

ple. So m ay beI can getalang w ith o u t

c ic a d a s •

I looked up and saw Rachel leaning back on her

pillow and staring at me. Without blinking, she put
out her hand to see what I wrote. I handed it to her,
and she read it, her mouth in a line, her eyes mov­
ing right, then left. She didn’t smile, but when she
looked up at me, into my eyes, I knew she saw past
the brick, to what is sparkling and moving like Lake
Michigan. Good things, exciting things.

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 IO

Orphans

v2/ « v) iss Pointy likes poetry. No, she loves

poetry. She gives us copies of poems by famous
poets, one every couple of days, but she doesn’t
quiz us about them, so most of the kids throw
them in the garbage can about two minutes after
she passes them out. Miss Pointy gets mad, but she
doesn’t make the kids take them out o f the garbage
can. She says that’s our bad choice, all she can do is
give them to us, she can’t make us take them.
Darrell doesn’t even look at them, he just crunches
them in a ball and pretends the garbage can is a
hoop, and uses the poem for a slam dunk or some­
times a three-pointer.
I never throw away the poems she gives to me.
I keep them, I memorize some o f them. My

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 Orphans

favorite is “Autobiographia Literaria” by Frank

O’Hara.

When I was a c h i l d
I p la y e d by m y s e lf in a
co rn e r o f th e sch o olyard
a l l alo n e.

I h a te d d o lls and I
h a t e d games, a n i m a l s w ere
no t f r i e n d l y a n d b i r d s
f l e w aw ay.

I f an y o n e was l o o k i n g
f o r me I h i d b e h i n d a
t r e e a n d c r i e d o u t "I am
an orphan,"

And h e r e I am, t h e
cen ter o f a l l beautyl
w r i t i n g t h e s e poems!
Im ag in e!

Frank O ’Hara called his poem “Auto­

biographia Literaria” which means, his life story.
He told it in just a few words, not like me having
to write page after page like this! I whisper these
words I learned from Miss Pointy’s inky ditto to

i l l
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

keep myself company when Mom is late coming

home from work. The rhythm is sweet, it reminds
me of church. The Lord is m y shepherd, I shall not
want. When I ivas a child I played by myself. I know
it is bad to say they feel the same, but I can’t help it,
it’s true. When I’m alone opening a can of corn in
the kitchen with dirty dishes piled high, I imagine
coming out from behind a tree and being the cen­
ter of all beauty, which doesn’t seem likely, but
Frank O’Hara said it happened. All he had to do
was come out from behind a tree, and he was
Somewhere Else. I say his words over and over
again, like a spell, if I say it maybe a thousand
times it will come true for me, too. Maybe the
poems are a test, like Cinderella’s slipper. Maybe if
you can make them fit, you can be queen. That
would be useful. But not everybody finds poems
useful. Not everybody trusts poets, or Miss Pointy.
“Poetry is for punks,” said Darrell.
“I’d like to know who isn’t a punk, according to
you” said Miss Pointy.
Darrell had the answer right away. “People
with money.”

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 Orphans

“Then you should love poets, because they

know the value of a word the way a banker knows
the value of a dollar. A poem is a small economy of
words. Each word is worth its weight in gold.”
“Yeah, take a poem to the store, see what it
buys you,” sneered Darrell.
“If you spend a poem wisely, you’ll get love
back in return, not breakfast cereal or coffee. We’re
not talking food stamps here.”
Raphael snorted, but it was a clumsy snort,
because having a teacher talk about love is so gross
you can hardly snort. Still, I wrote out my favorite
poem in my best handwriting and I folded it into
a little square. I didn’t sign it. I tried to think who
to give it to.
The door opened. It was Peaches, the Special
Needs teacher. I couldn’t help slinking down in
my seat. She waved to me. I waved back, miser­
ably.
“I’m here for Darrell,” she said to Miss Pointy,
who was writing on the chalkboard. Darrell started
to get up.
“Sit down, Darrell. I didn’t say you could leave

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your seat” said Miss Pointy. “Where are you taking

him?”
Peaches looked surprised. “Services,” she said
in a lowered voice.
“What services?” said Miss Pointy, not in a
lowered voice. “Religious services? I wouldn’t have
guessed he was Jewish. He doesn’t speak any
Yiddish and his Hebrew is entirely illegible. But
that’s okay. He’s a little slow” Miss Pointy rasped
from behind her hand.
Peaches laughed. I recognized that laugh, an
oh-I-heard-about-you laugh. “We don’t like the
word slow” said Peaches.
“We don’t?” said Miss Pointy. “Then what do we
do about snails and turtles and broken watches?”
Peaches straightened. “Miss Poitier, Darrell
Sikes need special help. He has been identified as
having impulse control issues,” she said, even lower
than before. “He acts out.”
“Who doesn’t?” Miss Pointy asked.
“No, I mean . . . haven’t you checked the
records?”
“Oh, wait! The records! The records! Oh, yes!
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 O rphans

Darrell Sikes! You’ll have to excuse me, I’m new!

Ha-ha! Now let me see! I got a note about his serv­
ices . . . just recently . . . there has been a change,
now where did I put that note? Oh, I am so disor­
ganized! Didn’t you get a copy? The first week of
school? About the change in Darrell’s services?
Hm m m .. . .”
Watching her, I realized I had a front-row seat
to some serious and amazing lying. She wasn’t
looking for anything at all, she was just touching
everything on her desk. First she lifted the flower
vase, and then she opened a drawer; then she ran
her hand over some files, and then she started
rifling through a pile of papers. Then she made
clicking sounds with her tongue and opened
another drawer and swished her hand on the
inside so you could hear all the scissors and paper
clips and stapler removers clattering around. “Oh,
where is it!”
I told myself not to jump to conclusions, but
even Darrell Sikes was making a constipation face
to keep from smiling. Why, why, u/hy? W hy would
a teacher want Darrell Sikes in class, let alone lie to

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keep Darrell Sikes in class? Especially after all the

trouble his psycho mother had stirred up.
Especially after George Washington and his
cherry tree. What happened to honesty and
accountability? W hy would she lie to help a crazy
bad boy like Darrell Sikes? Darrell Sikes! It was a
mystery to me.
Finally, Miss Pointy turned to Peaches and
said, very decisively, “You must have it.”
“Me! I don’t remember getting any note,” said
Peaches. “What did it say?”
“It said, Darrell’s mother has refused services
this year. No pullout.”
Peaches touched her lip. “You’re kidding.” The
she lifted her arm and pointed straight at Darrell,
who was pretending to be very interested in the
wall. “The note said he is not going to be receiving
services? Him?" She looked kind of excited, like
she had been told she had won the lottery but she
still couldn’t quite believe it.
“Isn’t it a shame?” Miss Pointy made her eyes
wide. “You can call his mother. Maybe she’d be
willing to talk.” She smiled innocently. “Or go to

lie
 Orphans

the principal and tell him you lost the note. But
I’m sure that’s what the note said.”
“I guess we could try it.” Peaches looked wor­
ried. “I hope, though, you will come to me if you
need, you know, support”
“That’s very kind” said Miss Pointy. “I’m grate­
ful for the offer.”
Peaches brightened. “And Sahara?”
“Yes?”
“How is she . . . doing?”
“Gee, I don’t know” said Miss Pointy. “Sahara!
How are you doing?”
“Fine” I said in a small voice.
“Good” said Miss Pointy. “She’s just fine, thanks
for asking. And how is ... your mother?”
“Fine” said Peaches. “Fine.”
“Oh, that’s excellent. Everybody seems to be
fine.”
“All right,” said Peaches. “Then I’ll be going.”
“Fine” said Miss Pointy. “Thank you! Bye
now!” She walked Peaches to the door.
Miss Pointy sat down at her desk, which she
hardly ever does, and smiled behind her fingers.

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

She and Darrell were staring at each other. “She’s a

nice ladyj’ said Miss Pointy.
“Yes, she is,” said Darrell sternly. “And yet you
behaved very badly”
“Uugghh” she grunted, holding her stomach.
“I think I have impulse control issues.” They both
burst out laughing. I don’t think I had ever heard
Darrell laugh before. Oh, it was nice, rattling and
light like a tambourine at church!
I dropped “Autobiographia Literaria” on
Darrell’s chair as we were heading out to recess.
“Sahara, may I see you?” Miss Pointy caught
me at the classroom door. “Please stay behind. I
need to speak with you for just a minute.”
Speak to me about what?
She left me alone in the room while she
walked the rest of the class to the exit.
I saw the pile of journals on her desk. I had
been doing the journal assignments every day
since I had been sick. That couldn’t be it. Luz’s
journal was on top, stickers sparkling. I swallowed
hard. I couldn’t even think about if she knew how
bad I was.

1 18
 Orphans

Did she see me drop the poem on Darrell’s

desk? I didn’t mean anything big by it. Sometimes
people just need a poem sometimes, didn’t she say
so? Was she going to talk to me about boys, in
which case I would truly have to die? Maybe she
knew I was snooping in Darrell’s journal. Just once
in a while, and just Darrell’s, it’s easy to find in the
pile because it’s all beat up and anyway you can
hardly read it, the spelling is so bad. I don’t even
know why I would read it, it’s just he is kind o f
surprising, it’s not like he’ll just come out and talk
to you like a regular old boy. She said she liked
snooping herself, didn’t she? But I can’t tell her I
know that, because I was kind of snooping then,
too, by pretending I was asleep and listening.
But what if it wasn’t about Darrell at all?
Oh well, here it comes, I thought. “Wouldn’t life be
easier i f . .. ?” She’ll talk to me like I’m special. Maybe
I’ll have to sit out in the hall again. Maybe she read
my file. Maybe ...
Miss Pointy swept back in. “Sorry,” she said.
“Miss Pointy, sometimes I look in Darrell’s
journal!” I exploded.

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She froze for a second, and gave me a funny

look. Then she unfroze. “Well, don’t get caught”
she said. She went right for the pile of journals,
but Luz’s journal was flung to the side, and so was
Darrell’s. She dug sloppily until she pulled out my
own journal, with my name written in my tight
little handwriting on the cover.
“This.” She held it in the air and shook it like a
lawyer on TV “This.”
I stood in front of Miss Pointy, but she didn’t
say anything more for a moment, just stood there
shaking my journal. “Y . . . yes?” I squeaked.
“You’ll excuse me, but I need to ask some
things about this.” Miss Pointy glared suspiciously
down her pointy nose. “You’re not involved in any
time-travel debacle, are you? Like, you didn’t go a
few years into the future, write this, and come
back?” She leaned forward and squinted at me in
an accusing way.
“N . . . no, ma’am” I said. “I don’t think so.”
She took out a pair of glasses from her desk.
X-ray specs, with spirals covering the lenses.
“Hold still,” she demanded. “Nothing personal.

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 Or phans

Just doing my job." I nodded as though I under­

stood. She stared into my face, hard, I think as
hard as anyone has ever looked at me besides my
own mother. I couldn’t see her eyes, but her eye­
brows were going up and down like she was trying
to crack a safe or defuse a bomb. “Extraordinary!"
she whispered. “It’s all there!”
“What is?" I asked.
“Words," she said. “Your talent.” Then she pulled
something out of her tight sleeve. A gold star, with
a rainbow streaming behind it, just like the one I
had taken from Luz. “Well, that’s all I needed to
know,” she said. “Run along.”
I burst onto the playground. Rachel and
Cordelia were waiting for me. “What did Miss
Pointy do to you?” asked Cordelia, but I ignored
her and rushed past, across the playground. To
Paris.
“What?" asked Paris. I took her hand and
slipped the sticker inside, secret-like. She looked
at her palm, and then at me. She didn’t smile, and
she narrowed her eyes. But she closed her hand
around it, nodded and ran off. To Luz.

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I felt myself breathe again.

I could hear feet clumsily drumming toward
me as Cordelia and Rachel raced to catch up. “You
in trouble?” huffed Rachel.
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

But I was wrong. When we came back in the class­

room, I thought Darrell would sit on the poem I
left for him and that would be that, but he saw it
even though I folded it so small. He opened it, and
opened it, and opened it, he didn’t even sit down.
Then he read it, and then his face turned a pur­
plish color and he looked mad. He looked so mad
I got scared and slunk down low in my chair.
He yelled a swear word that I know I shouldn’t
write, and the whole class looked at him. Then he
roared, “Who put this on my chair!” as deep and
loud as an angry giant. I thought about climbing
into my desk, but I figured I wouldn’t fit. “I ain’t no
orphan!” He nearly screamed. “Somebody’s calling
me an orphan!”
“Nobody’s calling you an orphan.” Miss Pointy
was looking so exactly the other way of me that I

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 Or phans

knew she was thinking about me. How does she

know everything? I hoped Darrell wouldn’t notice.
His chest heaved up and down and he looked at all
of us with red, wet eyes.
I could have cried from feeling scared, and I
could have cried for being so terrible, for nearly
making the meanest, most special boy in school
explode.
But all I could think of was how it would be at
least a week before I had the chance to snoop in
his journal again. And how Miss Pointy was right.
Poetry is not for punks.

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 11

W hy Teachers G e t App le s

4
(D 7 1 had rained, and the fallen leaves made the
sidewalk look like the floor of the kindergarten,
spattered with red and yellow and green paint. Miss
Pointy was telling us another story. It was about a
teacher. We listened as we pressed leaves into our
leaf identification books. Miss Pointy wore a crown
of red maple leaves that she had stapled to some con­
struction paper. It looked pretty against her green
hair.
“She was very old.”
“How old?”
“Old enough for gray hair. Old enough for a
small hump in her back. Old enough for a squint
in her eye.” Miss Pointy squinted. “She walked to
school. She got up early in the morning, so early in

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

the morning that the dew was still on the grass.”

Raphael burst out laughing. “Did she step in
the dew?”
Miss Pointy’s eyes slid, warning him. “As a
matter of fact, she did, since the dew was droplets
of water, Raphael. As she walked, the toes of her
shoes grew wet from the dew and made little wet
half-moons at the tips of her shoes.
“She lived out in the country, and every day
she took the same route, down the brown path
through the woods, across the clearing, past the
play yard and to the school.”
“Why didn’t she drive her car?”
“It was before cars.”
“My grandma’s old, and she drives a car. A
Buick LeSabre.”
A few kids called out the makes of cars their
grandmas drove. “I can wait” said Miss Pointy. And
she did. “Anyway, if you ever lived in the country,
youU know why she didn’t drive her car. She wanted
to see the part of the day when the sun and the
moon are both in the sky at the same time, on
opposite ends.”

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“I seen that,” nodded Angelina knowingly.

“Uh-huh. That pretty.”
“I like it, too. It reminds me of two children at
opposite ends of the playground, two girls who
haven’t met, who are too shy to come together.” I
looked at Rachel and smiled. She smiled back. I
felt Paris looking at me and turned around. “In the
country, the air smells like snapped green beans,
and the crickets are playing their legs. Be-deep! Be-
deep!” sang Miss Pointy.
“And every time you take a step, a mess
of them jump out of nowhere, uh-huh!” Angelina
was getting excited. “That how it was at my grand­
ma’s house this summer. Miss Pointy telling it
true.”
Miss Pointy looked at Angelina while she spoke.
“And isrit there something about being alone when you
walk in the country, early in the morning, listening to
the leaves as they whisper and twist like a hundred thou­
sand tongues of silver-green, straining to tell a secret only
to you?” We all looked up from our projects, expecting
her to turn into a tree from the way her voice went soft,
like a breeze. “A tree has its own language. If you knew

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

how to listen, a tree could tell you a story for every ring
in its trunk A story about the storm whose lightning
struck it in the spot where children used to climb, or
about the bad-tempered squirrel who decorated its drey
with diamonds that fell out of a burglar's sack, or about
how the tree mourns for the old owl who was so swift
and quiet, he could catch shooting stars in his claws!’
“Maybe the tree was just trying to say ‘Good
morning! ” said Luz.
“MaybeJ’ agreed Miss Pointy.
“Or nothing at all,” said Rachel.
“Or nothing at all,” repeated Miss Pointy. “Or
maybe just humming. Or going over tree times
tables.” We groaned.
“Maybe tattling,” said Janine. “Do trees
tattle?”
“I expect so. Most everyone tattles at least
once.”
“Sakiah more than once!” Dominique called
out. Everyone laughed.
“Miss Pointy! Dominique is making fun of
me!” Sakiah whined.
“This is stupid. Trees don’t talk or tattle or

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none of that baby imagination stuff. Trees is just

trees,” Darrell reminded us.
“That’s the spirit, Darrell. And teachers are just
teachers. So this one teacher walked to school
every day, past the trees, magical like Angelina’s
trees.. . .”
“Uh-huh!” nodded Angelina.
“Or not magical, like Darrell’s trees, we
really don’t know!’ Miss Pointy confessed. “But the
teacher sometimes thought they might be magic,
because sometimes their knots looked like eyes
and mouths and their branches looked like noses
and arms, but that also could have been more baby
imagination.” Darrell looked smug. “She walked
past these trees, into the clearing where she saw
the big black crows sewing their bodies through
the sky. Then, as she walked along further, she saw
the farmer’s horse cantering along the edge of the
clearing.”
I scratched cantering lightly onto the cover of
my notebook.
“Finally she saw the schoolyard full of chil­
dren.”

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

“Sounds like a nice walk,” said Janine.

Miss Pointy wrote the word idyllic on the board.
“It was so nice and gentle and full of country charm,
it was idyllic. But after twenty-five years of this
walk, she started to get a little jealous of the things
she encountered, or came across.” I wrote these
words down, too.
“What you mean, ‘jealous’?”
“She would see the birds and think, ‘W hy can’t
I fly?’ She would see the horse and think, ‘W hy
can’t I run?’ She would see the children and think,
‘W hy can’t I play?”’
“That’s goofy” Larry remarked.
“To make matters worse, there was a boy in
her class—”
“Was his name Raphael?” asked Raphael.
“Was it Dominique?" asked Dominique.
“Was it Ernie?” asked, guess who, Ernie.
“Oh, no, I can’t remember his name” said Miss
Pointy, with her mint-in-the-mouth smile. “I just
remember he was a bad boy”
“Was his name Darrell?” asked Veronica. We
laughed.

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“Shut up! If he bad, that mean his teacher bad,”

snarled Darrell.
“You’re right, Darrell!” Miss Pointy pounced.
“You’re exactly right! This boy was bad, but he was
the same bad as his teacher, for different reasons.
At home, he was beaten. He was poor. When he
walked to school, the trees didn’t talk to him.
When he came to school, the children didn’t talk
to him. After some time, he started feeling jealous,
too. W h y can’t I read? W hy can’t I write? W hy
can’t I have friends?”’ We became quiet.
“He couldn’t act angry at his father, or he
would beat him,” Paris suggested.
“He couldn’t act angry at his classmates, or
they’d beat him ” Kiarre added confidently, like
she’d be first in line.
“So, who was left? Every day, he’d be
angry at his teacher. It was old times. She could
have beaten him. Those were the days!” Miss
Pointy sighed. “But in twenty-five years, she hadn’t
beaten a child. She didn’t want to beat him.”
“She had to love him," said Rashonda.
“Teachers are paid to love children.”

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

“Teachers aren’t paid much, so they don’t love

us much,” said Larry. Miss Pointy stared at Larry,
surprised. “Most don’t love us much,” he corrected
himself.
“That’s silly, Larry. Teachers aren’t paid to love
children. You can’t legally pay someone to love
you,” Miss Pointy explained. “Loving children is
what teachers do for extra credit. It’s not the main
assignment.”
“Seems to me that the extra credit is more
important than the main assignment,” observed
Cordelia.
“You’re right, smart Cordelia,” said Miss Pointy,
taking out the Happy Box. Cordelia looked sur­
prised, and took a long time to choose a star. “Extra
credit is done of your own free will. Work and love
given out of free will is always more joyous, better-
quality stuff.”
Raphael gagged. “Quit talking about love! Get
back to the boy who got beat.”
“Okay. So there’s this boy and this teacher,
neither of them working for extra credit. The
boy being as mad and mean as he can to the

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teacher. Puts a tack in her seat, chalk in her

eraser.”
“Old-fashion mess” grumbled Darrell.
“And the worst part is, he talks back. Talks
back like crazy. He won’t do a thing the teacher
says. He stands up on his desk and beats his chest
and shouts.”
“Like King Kong!” breathed Ernie.
Darrell stood on his chair and demonstrated.
“Thank you, Darrell. Like that. Well. The
teacher doesn’t know what to do. Every morning
she walks to school, she thinks so hard about this
bad boy, she doesn’t see the moon or the sun or
hear the trees talking. Her mind is so full of the
hard day ahead.”
“Girlfriend needs the trouble basket,”
observed Kiarre.
“Uh-huh.” Janine and Kiarre slapped hands.
“She sees the birds and the horse and the chil­
dren, and her heart starts to crack. Things that
made her happy as a younger person were the very
things that made her sad as the days wore on.
“Every day, the boy wouldn’t do his work.

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

Every day she felt the lashes of the boy’s words, like
a whip against all her years of service.”
“She should beat his ass!” Rashonda exploded.
“School language,” reminded Miss Pointy.
“Rashonda, do you think that would really work?”
“Nah. But she’d feel better."
“Yeah! Make her beat his ass in the story!”
urged Raphael, also forgetting school language.
“Yeah, he beating her, you said so! ‘Words like
a whip!”’
“Make her whip him back!”
“Let’s vote! Who says, ‘Whip his ass?”’
“We are not voting," said Miss Pointy, her arms
crossed like she does when she’s waiting. “Stories
are not a democracy. Thank God.” Finally, we qui­
eted down.
“I’m disappointed in you” she said finally. “She
didn’t beat him. I told you. She hadn’t beaten any­
one in twenty-five years, and she wasn’t going to
give this boy the satisfaction of breaking her
record.”
“You go, girl!” whispered Kiarre.
“One day, she gave the children an

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assignment. ‘What I wish.’ They had to write in

their journals.”
“They had journals back then?”
“She was ahead of her time. After she gave the
assignment, she realized she gave it because she
wished someone would give it to her.” Like when I
ask Rachel a question, I thought. “The teacher took
out a blank piece of paper. The teacher wrote sim­
ply, ‘I wish I were a bird. I wish I were a horse. I
wish I were a child.’”
“Three wishes. She greedy” said Leon.
“She should of wished that boy out of her
school” grunted Tanaeja.
“Well, at that very same time, the boy wrote
his wish down. He wrote, simply, 1 wish she was
not a teacher at this school.’”
“Why he write that? He could have written
anything. He could have wished for a million dol­
lars.”
“He wrote that because he knew his teacher
would read it. He knew it would hurt her. He
wanted to hurt somebody, because it felt like
somebody was always hurting him.

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“That afternoon, at the end of the day, the

teacher collected the papers, took her bag o f books
and left the school, walking back past the school-
yard, the clearing, and into the woods.
“The next day, when the boy came to school,
his teacher wasn’t there. There was a substitute. He
felt a little scared.”
“What for?” asked Cordelia. “It was just a
wish.”
“Then he felt so sorry and wished her back
and they lived happily ever after, and all the trees
sang and danced, tra-la” said Darrell.
“If you think you’ve got a better ending than I
have . . .” Miss Pointy said, sighing.
“Be quiet, Darrell” warned Dominique.
“The replacement was mean. He beat the chil­
dren, he beat the boy, too, first time he opened his
mouth. This new teacher would have none of that.
The children didn’t defend the boy, they were tired
of the way he acted in class and were glad he was
being controlled. The new teacher saw the boy
couldn’t do much, and he didn’t call on him. It was
nice at first, but then the boy started to feel invisible

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and empty. He worried that it was his wish that

made this happen. But he had nobody to ask about
it, no one to assure him that his fears were silly.
“One morning he was walking along the path,
and he heard something that he had never heard
before. It seemed to him that the trees were talk­
ing, in a language he had heard all his life yet never
had come to understand. He stood still, between
the school and home. Frightened, he ran off the
path, and when he stopped running, he saw an
apple tree. This cheered him up, and he forgot his
fear. He pulled some fruit from the tree, and ate on
the way to school, the hungry knot in his stomach
unwinding slowly.
“When he arrived at school he was so satisfied
that he skewered his last apple on the fence post.
“Out the window, he could see the apple being
visited through the day by a little bird. He
watched as the bird flew in wide circles, around
and around the school, alighting now and then on
the apple to eat and sing. The boy felt another knot
unwind within him.
“Time passed. Every day, he picked apples

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

from the tree and stuck one on the post for the
bird. One day, he decided to see if there were any
other trees in the woods. That’s when he found his
old teacher’s bag, sprawled on the ground, and
under his teacher’s damp books was the last
assignment he had done for her. Reminded of his
terrible wish, he wondered if wishing it had made
it so. But he only wondered for a moment, because
he was older.”
“Had more sense," said Larry.
“Did he? Well, he took the books and dried
them out. Every day after school, he studied them
on his own.”
“W hy’d he do that?” Raphael laughed.
“It beat going home,” said Darrell. I looked at
him, maybe everybody did. Miss Pointy, too.
“Now a horse started visiting the post where
the boy put his apple. He’d gnaw it off in a bite or
two, and then gallop around the clearing. Can you
imagine how nice it was for the boy, watching that
beautiful, free creature?
“More time passed. Do you know what hap­
pens when time passes?”

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

“People get old,” said Sakiah.

“People die,” said Rachel.
“Both those things happened. The boy got
older. His father died, and the mean teacher
retired and moved away. So the superintendent
came in, the boss of the schools. He drilled the
class with review problems. The boy who had
been so bad shone like a star. The superintendent
asked if he would like to teach at the little school
when he graduated that spring. He said yes.
“When the leaves began to fall,” Miss Pointy
said, picking up some dried leaves from her desk
and letting them somersault on to the floor, “the
doors of the schoolhouse were open, and behind
the desk sat a young man with the start of a beard
and a mind full of knowledge. No one could have
guessed that he was once a hungry little boy who
stood on his chair and thumped his chest and was
beaten with a strap by his father, no one could
have guessed that he had wished his teacher away,
or that for all that evilness and sadness, he still
remembered to stab an apple on the post every day
for his bird and his horse.

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

“He stood at the door and rang the bell, and

the children who were playing in the yard came
running to the door and filed inside. In came a lit­
tle girl with brown hair pulled tight, and freckles
and sunburn and a smile so wide you would think
her pigtails were stretching her face.”
“The third wish!” gasped Angelina.
Miss Pointy smiled. “The little girl had in her
hand a big red apple. She handed it to the man.
‘“What’s this for?’ he asked the girl.
‘“This is for all the days when I was a bird, and
all the days I was a horse. You gave me an apple
every day, and now I will give an apple to you.’”
Miss Pointy took the apple off of her own desk and
put it on Darrell’s desk. Darrell just watched her
face, and pretended not to notice the apple.
“Every day the little girl gave her teacher an
apple, paying back the small favors of his boyhood.
The other children saw this and thought she was
trying to be the favorite, and they started giving
the teacher apples, too. But in his heart, the little
girl who had once been his teacher was indeed
his favorite. And as the days wore on, there was no

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little girl happier to be a little girl and no grown­

up happier to be a grown-up than the two at
that school, and their satisfaction was such that
there was never a need for another wish. The end.”
“What kind of story is that?” asked Darrell.
“I made it up” said Miss Pointy. “From a dream
I had. You like it?”
“It’s not a real story if you just made it up, is it?”
wondered Leon.
Yes, it is, I thought. It will be real as soon as I write
it down. It will be a real story about a girl who wished
it were real.
“I like it” said Sakiah.
“You would,” said Darrell.
“It’s a fairy tale” said Angelina.
“Ain’t no fairies, or royalty? said Veronica.
“It’s a pourquoi tale,” said Paris. We had learned
that pourquoi means “why” in French, and pourquoi
tales explain why things happen. “It tells why
teachers get apples.”
“Maybe you’re both right? said Miss Pointy.
“Maybe they’re both wrong,” said Sakiah.
“Sounds to me like a fable.”

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

“A fable’s got to have a moral at the end” Ernie

reminded her. Sakiah wrinkled her nose and stuck
out her tongue.
“So if this is a fable, what’s the moral? The les­
son?” asked Miss Pointy.
We were quiet, thinking, and watching other
kids think.
“What goes around comes around,” blurted
Larry.
“Tit for tat,” snorted Raphael. Dominique
snorted, too.
Miss Pointy ignored them. “Hmmm, I don’t
know, Larry. Try to put the moral into your own
words, not a cliché, something people have said
before.”
We thought some more. “Wishes come true,”
said Luz.
“Good try? said Miss Pointy, “but I don’t know
if that’s a lesson that is always so. What else can we
come up with?”
“Wishes are powerful,” said Dominique.
“Good? said Miss Pointy.
‘Things change. They don’t always stay the

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S A N A R A S P E C I A L

same” said Cordelia. “Like, you don’t have to stay a

kid.”
“That’s a good one, too. Anyone else?”
“School is a powerful place where things
change and wishes come true” Paris said slowly.
“It’s a place where you can grow up, if you let your­
self” It sounded like a kiss-up answer. It also
sounded right.
Miss Pointy took out her Happy Box. We all
looked on jealously as Paris chose a sticker.
“Anyone else?” We all looked at each other. Paris’s
answer seemed good enough; it got the Happy
Box, didn’t it? “What’s the lesson?" Miss Pointy
insisted. We were all quiet. My wrist twitched, and
I started to raise my hand.
The bell rang.
“Oh-oh,” said Miss Pointy. “Put away your leaf
books and let’s go.”
“You spent all that time telling us a story”
accused Cordelia.
“Do you want me to apologize?” asked Miss
Pointy. “Fine. I’m sorry we didn’t have time for our
journals today. Write in them tonight, if you like.

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 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

What you would wish for” We stood up and gath­

ered our things. I imagined what everyone would
write:

1 wan-\ a ca^sAle o f <sV\aker^>

a e c ia l ^sAlc-ker ro o r> ^ no^
a hundred roon^5 all filled w\Ah
^>4ic-ker <S> and a real Oniaorn
AhaA 1 c-ould ride . . .

I Wish I Wo* invisible so I

c o u ld W alk h o m e Without anybody
bothering m e . . .

1 wish I didn't have, to vuatcA the,

baby aftejr school y I never g e t to go
out

I 'wish for a Toioi that looks jv.fi

like me vAo ivovl<f take my l ef t s . . .

I wish I was a superstar in the WNBA...

My file, I thought.

143
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

I w is h f o r t h e l e t t e r s in my file.

Miss Pointy yelled over the scraping and

clonking sound of us turning chairs upside down,
putting them on our desks, and the noise seemed
to wake me up from my daydream. That’s a silly
wish, I thought. O f all the wishes! Wish for a mil­
lion dollars. Wish to look in Miss Pointy’s closet
and get to choose any dress I want. Wish Daddy
would come home. Wish for something silly like
that__
Quick, I wrote a P with a line through it over
what I had scribbled.
Miss Pointy stood at the door and said good­
bye to each o f us. Rachel stayed behind and
started making her watery stripes across the board
with the sponge.
Miss Pointy grabbed me by my jacket hood. I
hung behind. “I saw your hand. So what do you
think that story was about?”
“Paris said it.”
“Really?” Miss Pointy leaned against the

144
 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

threshold and crossed her arms. “Stories mean dif­

ferent things to different people.”
Should I tell her? I looked at the floor. She
waited. I waited, too, hut I wanted to tell her. “People
thought that boy was one way, but . . . inside
each person, I think there’s a secret person” I
said.
“Huh” she said. “That’s interesting. Do you
have a secret person inside of you?”
“N o ..
“Yes she does” announced Rachel, from across
the room, not looking up from her chore.
“Yes," I corrected myself. I could not look at
Miss Pointy. “But only you know my secret. You
and Rachel.” Rachel kept on wiping the board, but
she had that same mint-in-the-mouth expression
that Miss Pointy wears.
And there was Miss Pointy, wearing it too. “I
don’t know if that’s true” she said. “Secret people are
hard to keep inside. Especially if they are wonder­
ful. You, for instance, are leaking.” I looked up,
feeling shy. She was smiling, but her eyes were
serious.

145
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

When I left the room, the hall was empty, but

Paris and Luz were leaning against some lockers.
They looked up when they saw me. They cast long
shadows in the afternoon light that came through
the exit. They’re going to beat me up, I thought.
They’re skinny, but there’s two of them. If they’re wear­
ing rings, I’m done for. I walked and could hear my
footsteps clicking.
“H i” I said as bravely as I could.
“Hi,” said Paris. She looked nervously at
Luz, who looked nervously back at her and stuck
her thumbs in the straps of her backpack. Well,
this is a very polite way to start a fight, I thought. Oh,
my God. I’m going to get beat up by the nicest girls in
school.
“W e were wondering,” Paris said. “We’re think­
ing of starting a club.”
Oh?
“For people who like books” she went on.
“And esteekers,” added Luz. “Do you like
esteekers?”
I looked at Paris, who pursed her lips. “I guess,”
I said.

146
 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

“And I know you like books. So we were won­

dering if youd like to be in it,” said Paris.
“Who else is in it?”
“Just us,” said Luz.
“For now,” said Paris, then added quickly, “but
anyone who wants to join can, though, right Luz?
We don’t like to leave people out.” Luz seemed to
both nod her head yes and shake her head no at
the same time, in total agreement. It was conta­
gious. I shook like a bobble-head.
“When’s the first meeting?” I asked.
“I don’t know” said Paris. “Let’s talk about it
while we walk home. We go your way. Can you be
at the library this Saturday?”
“Sure,” I said. “You know what? My mom
works at a restaurant, and after the meeting we
can go there and eat all the pancakes we want for
free.”
“Wow!” they said.
Yeah, wow! I thought, as we walked out the
door together.

147
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

fWy w\sU by *ParrgLL S\Vces

© V: o \ c I aw a orfV\J X w\sU* 4 o r
a 4r\end.

a. y o u are nob a n orphan ,

your 'mother a n d

6 . y o u atready ha've a fr ie n d .

5, yoMt *\o+ su p o s +o uooNc wen X wn+e

p a+ *tl>e to p and
b . dont ^\mme +Uya+ +eecb>er mess

<z. 5 onnebinneS J Snoop a n d .

6 . Jf'on nob your f r ie n d , /V t your

ally, * *

S' fay moms no+ my ^rend sU*es my mom

and

b . X dont L>ave antb\'n t o wrYte ^ o r u e + -

+er b

Ve a fr ie n d in bhiS

148
 Why Teachers G e t Appl es

ctassroonn rig h t now a n d you

don *t e v e n kn o w it. W hy don ’b
you keep your eyes p eeted?

6. J atso don *b h a ve a n y th in g to
w rite fo r te tte r b.

c. W a it , J g u s t thought of a 6. See
m e, J n eed to hetp you w ith your
p u n ctu a tio n .

H ow %
\s Yt Xm p o se d +o Y:eep my e ye s
peeued
Mo *\d never be abue +o p e e u my e ye s
and uoo\c ^ b r a 4rend oU> no no no cant be
l^euped so w ood y o u m\ne peeu\n^ my e ye s
^■or me s\ns y o u a re \c\y\e e n u ^ +o sl^ow
consern u\ +U*a+ ra^ard

HA HA

149
 12

Name-calling

4
Q / think I’ve told you enough stories to choke
a horse,” Miss Pointy said, surprising us the next
afternoon. “I’m in the mood to do some listening.
Remember I suggested a while back that you
could write stories in your journal about how you
got your name? I was thinking that maybe some of
you wouldn’t mind reading those aloud.”
This was very exciting, because, of course, we
were not allowed to read other people’s journals
without their permission (even though I had
snuck again and read Darrell’s the other after­
noon). Miss Pointy passed them out. Several kids
waved their hands in the air. “Pick me!" “Pick me!”
In my imagination, I raised my hand, but then in
my imagination, she called on me and I had to
read it, and kids yawned and threw paper at me. So

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 Name- cal l i ng

instead of raising my hand, I slunk down in my

seat and smiled at my classmates. I was eager to
hear what they had written. ^
“Ernie? You have your hand raised so quietly.”
Boys who weren’t called on groaned. “Come, stand
in front of my desk so we all can hear you.”
“My full name is Ernest Meija the Second,” he
read, “and I was named after Ernest Meija the First,
my mother’s brother. He is a fireman with the
Chicago Fire Department. He was the first child
born in this country from my family. He helps my
family a lot. He has never been killed on the job,
but he had a friend who was. He told me when he
is fighting fires he always tries to save the family
pet if he can. I think he is very brave and I am
proud to be named after my brave uncle Ernie.”
He looked up, finished.
“Comments?” asked Miss Pointy.
“Your uncle Ernie sounds cute,” said Mariah.
“Yeah,” agreed Janine and Cordelia.
“How old is your uncle Ernie, Ernie?” asked
Miss Pointy.
“He’s around thirty, I think.”

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“Too old for you, girls,” said Miss Pointy. “And

hundreds of years too young for me.”
“How old are you?” asked Sakiah.
“In human years, or teacher years?” Miss
Pointy answered, and then quickly called on some­
one else.
“That’s nice, he saves cats)’ said Larry.
“Ees good,” said Boris, who hardly ever talks.
He was smiling openly at Ernie, his friend. He
looked like a proud poppa. Ernie blushed.
Miss Pointy looked pleased. “Well done,
Ernie!” Some thin applause. “Who else here has
been named after a family member?” Many hands
went up. “It’s nice to have a family name with some
history. Paris? Your name has some history, too.
Why don’t you step right up.”
Paris cleared her throat.
‘“My NameJ by Paris McCray. My mother and
father named me after the capital of France, the
city of love and romance. For instance, in France
they love pancakes called crêpes. I know how to
make them, my mom showed me. They love
poodles so much that they let them eat in the

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 Name- cal l i ng

restaurants like people. There is an Eiffel Tower

there, and many great churches, and many artists
went to live there, including but not limited to the
great Josephine Baker, who danced naked before it
was in style to do so."
“Woo!” said Raphael. “I see London, I see
France!”
“It is all very exotic,” Paris continued, “and fur­
thermore people speak French all the time, for
example. I do not know how to speak French, but I
hope to learn in high school. My mom and dad
never went to France. They were going to go, but
then my mom got pregnant. It was a surprise
because my parents already had four kids. They
needed the money more than the trip, so my mom
said if we can’t go to Paris, then Paris will come to
us. Someday I will go to Paris and wave from the
top of the Eiffel Tower to my parents who will be
eating crepes down below. The end.”
“That was good” said Veronica.
Cordelia disagreed, and showed it by gagging.
“Naked people! Dogs in restaurants! Paris sounds
like a filth hole!”

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

“Oh, Cordelia, be quiet” said Tanaeja. “You

don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Cordelia jutted out her chin. “Excuse me! I
have been to France, and speak fluent French!”
This was, o f course, the wrong thing to say in
front o f someone named Poitier. “Est-ce que c’est
vrai? As-tu mangé un croque-monsieur quand tu as vis­
ite? Moi, f adore les croques-monsieurs, presque plus que
les crepes!'
“Fm sorry.” Cordelia sniffed. “I’m afraid I only
speak northern French.”
“Naturellement," Miss Pointy said innocently. “I
was merely wondering how you found the grilled
cheeses over there.”
“I found them extremely filthy?’ said Cordelia.
“Really! I found them delicious. I also found
your paragraph delicious, Paris. Very romantic.
Vive la France!” W e applauded especially loudly,
just to spite Cordelia.
“Vive la Paris McCrepe!” cheered Dominique.
Paris bowed elegantly.
“I wish I had me a plane ticket to France,” said
Kiarre.

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 Name- cal l i ng

“Would you like to go, too, Kiarre?” asked Miss

Pointy.
“No. I’d just love to send Cordelia and get her
lying self out o f this classroom."
We laughed. “Now, now,” said Miss Pointy, “kind
words in the classroom." She didn’t say Cordelia
wasn’t a liar. And Kiarre said sorry, but she said it
more to Miss Pointy than to Cordelia. I felt a little
sorry for Cordelia. Just a little.
“Paris wasn’t the only one who was named
after a place. Sahara? Would you read what you
wrote?”
Me? I hadn’t been up in front of a class in at
least a year. Or two years. Didn’t she know that
about me? Suddenly, I wished she were the kind of
teacher who looked at records.
“Sahara?"
There it was again, she was calling my name. I
tried to feel my legs. They felt like two Popside
sticks with all the Popsicle melted off. I shook my
head, no.
“Oh, come on, Sahara” said Miss Pointy.
“Please?” coaxed Paris.

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

I looked at Rachel. She smiled, and nodded

her head, excited.
“I’ll go, then,” Cordelia sighed, like she was
being inconvenienced. ‘“ Cordelia Carbuncle:
Ruby of the Seven Seas’”
“Sahara, just get up and read your damn
thing!” Kiarre barked. I teetered forward.
I stared down at my journal entry. I felt all
eyes on me, I felt the room tilt just slightly. “I
didn’t check the spelling,” I confessed.
Miss Pointy shrugged. “Neither here nor
there.”
“It’s personal,” I whispered hoarsely.
“All good writing is personal,” she whispered
hoarsely back. “Pretend you’re reading somebody
else’s writing, you’ll get through it.”
“It’s weird,” I pleaded. “It’s long.”
“Not as weird and long as waiting for you to
do this,” said Miss Pointy, not whispering.
Embarrassed, I turned to face the class. “Take a
deep breath,” she suggested, behind me. I did.
‘“My Name,’ by Sahara Jones,” I began.
“Louder” she ordered.

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 Name- cal l i ng

‘“My Name! by Sahara JonesJ’ I said again.

“Louder, and with expression!”
I swallowed. ‘“MY NAAAAME,’ by SaHAra
JONES!” I yelled. The class laughed.
“Good,” said Miss Pointy. “Go on.”

I can see how my daddy thought my name was a

good idea at the time I was bom. He must have thought
that naming me after the biggest part of Africa would
make me special. But special wears off. At least, it did for
my daddy. He left me and m y mom when I was in the
third grade. We’re not sure where he is.
When he left, Mom changed our last name back to
Jones, which was her name before she got married. “You
can change your first name, too, if you want,’’ she told
me. “We don’t need nothing that man gave us.”

That last line wasn’t so hard to write. W hy was

it so hard to read? I swallowed again.
“Go on” said Miss Pointy. “You’re doing great.”

I didn’t mind my name, and I didn’t exactly agree

with m y mom, but I didn’t let on. It’s not every day that

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S A H A R A S P E C I A L

your mother gives you permission to change your name.

“Okayf I said. “Call me Shaquana.”
“Shaquana!” M y mom wrinkled her nose.

I heard the class laugh. It startled me. I found

my place again and kept reading.

“Jennifer?”
“Girl, I know you’re joking,”Mom said. “Put a little
more thought into it than that. A name’s got to last a
long time.”
I ran through lots of names in m y mind for
a few days. Aisha. Candace. Saundra. Camille.
Shalonda. Dolores. Denise. It made m y head spin.
One day we had a substitute, and during science
she showed us a video about the great African desert,
the Sahara. A few kids laughed and pointed out that
I was named after a desert, but once that was said,
nobody seemed very interested in the video. Except for
me. I was finally going to see what m y father named me
after.
The sand had ripples all through it, like it was
remembering water. A sun dipped down at the edge of

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 Name- cal l i ng

the horizon. It shook in the waves of heat like a great

orange fist. The desert beneath spread flat and dry,
knowing that under its sands lived scorpions that are
especially venomous, snakes that can smell the taste of
you, tortoises that know no time. The desert is mystery.
To cross it, you have to be a camel. You have to use what
you have for yourself, keep what you need inside your­
self, in a big sagging hump. A camel only spares enough
to spit. This is the way to survive the desert, I thought, as
they showed the darkness of night leaning over the
dunes.
As the video played I could hear the winds picking
up as the desert night grew colder and colder. I felt my
own teeth chatter, and I couldn’t stop them. I wasn’t
Sahara, the girl, anymore. I was Sahara, the desert,
filled with secret scorpions. And even though I know
that deserts are very dry places, I started to cry and cry
and cry.
I guess somebody told the teacher, because the next
thing I knew, she was kneeling next to m y desk saying,
“What’s the matter, honey?’’
And I told her, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
She looked back at me like maybe she was going to

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have one, too. She made me open my mouth and say

“Ahhh," like you can tell if someone is having a heart
attack by looking down her throat. She pulled me out of
my seat and dragged me down the hall to the office. But
as soon as I was out of that classroom and away from
that movie, I felt better right away.
“My name is Sahara,”I said to my mom, first thing
when I came through the door. “Sahara Jones.”
She looked at me in such a way, I wondered if she
was swallowing a pill.
Finally, she said, “Wish l ’d-a thought of it first.”
But m y name has changed since m y daddy left. I
didn’t change it, and neither did m y mom. Last year
when I was in Special Needs, some kids started calling
me Sahara Special. I know they were saying it to be
mean, but now I like it anyway. My names are given to
me, but they are also names that I choose to take. And
the choosing makes all the difference.

“I stopped writing there because the bell

started ringing. Plus, I was finished anyway” I said.
There was silence. “So, the end.” There was still
silence.

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 Name- cal l i ng

My leg was shaking so hard, I felt like I

wanted to hold on to it with both hands. My
palms were sweating, and my heart was pounding.
I could not bring myself to lift my eyes from
my journal. There was no noise. Were they still in
the room? Were they all asleep? Were they still
alive?
“Comments?” said Miss Pointy.
Still nothing. Out of the comer o f my eye, I saw
Darrell give me a funny look.
“Come on,” urged Miss Pointy. “Let’s give her
some feedback.”
“Well, what you want us to say?” Angelina
finally said.
“Actually, I have some notes here,” Cordelia
cleared her throat. “I think she meant to say, ‘I was
finally going to see that after which I was named;
not ‘I was finally going to see what I was named
after.’”
Michael’s voice even rolled its eyes. “What’s
the difference?"
“The difference is English,” said Cordelia.
“She speaks English. There’s plenty big words”

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S A M A R A S P E C I A L

said Janine. “Howd she know all those words like

. . . whatd you say?”
“Darkness o f night leaning over the duuuuu-
unnnnessss” hummed Angelina. “Tortoisessssss that
know no tiiiiimmmmmmme.”
“Yeah, like that! Howd she know all those
words like that!”
“Yeah, she writes like a grown-up!” said
Raphael. “All that ‘he said, she said.’”
“I read a lot” I mumbled. See, they hated it!
They thought it was weird! They thought I was
weird! I was weird! I blinked; I would not cry in
front o f them.
“Maybe she copied it from somewhere,” said
Leon.
“No, she didn’t” came Rachel’s voice. I was sur­
prised to hear it. “She told me this summer that
she was going to be a writer, and she is going to
write a book.”
“A real book? In the library?” Ernie was
impressed.
“Uh-huh" I said. Luz leaned over and whis­
pered something to Paris, and they both looked at

182
 Name- cal l i ng

me, excited. I bet they were planning the next

meeting of our club, for people who like reading
and writing. And . . . uh . . . esteekers.
“What’s it going to be about?” asked Sakiah.
“No, no, no!” Miss Pointy stood up. “Don’t ask
writers what they’re writing about. If it comes out
of their mouths, it won’t come out of their pens.”
“At first, I thought it was funny. Then it wasn’t
funny at all,” said Ameer.
“It was great!” yelled Paris. I looked up.
“You got a good imagination” said Rashonda.
“Girl-I-di-int-know-that-you-could-write-like-
that!” rapped Tanaeja. “Sahara-how-your-journal-
get-down-like-that!”
The class laughed. I would have laughed, too,
if I hadn’t been so terrified.
“Sorry I said you copied,” Leon said. “I
just. . . it was good, Sahara.”
“Yeah, Sahara” said Sakiah. “Wow."
“I theenk Sahara should get an esteeker” said
Luz.
“She did,” said Miss Pointy. “It’s on her journal.”
“I thought it was long” said Raphael. Everyone

103
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

ignored him, except forTanaeja. “Course you did" she

cooed, and patted his hand. He snarled at her and
pulled his hand away.
“Well, what’s the point o f Sahara’s story?”
Everyone settled down and looked at one another.
“Ernie? You’re good at morals. What do you think
the moral of the story is?” Ernie shook his head.
“Anyone?”
“Don’t judge book by its cover!’ came a voice.
“Who said that?" Miss Pointy looked around.
“Darrell! I’m so proud of you!” She grinned so that all
her teeth showed, and Darrell smiled back the same
way, mimicking her.
“Yay, Darrell!" said Raphael.
“Don’t make a stink about it," said Darrell.
“Yay, Sahara Special, then!” said Mariah.
“Yeah, yay, Sahara!” saidTanaeja and Kiarre.
I looked red-faced to Rachel, who was nod­
ding and back to her quiet self. . . but this time I
didn’t mind, not one bit.
The whole class cheered. They cheered so loudly,
I couldn’t hear my heart breaking. But I could feel
it. I guess Miss Pointy could see it. “And for such

164
 Name- cal l i ng

inspirational writing, Sahara can be messenger and

deliver this note for me. And Cordelia, you waited
so patiently. It’s your turn.”
The class groaned, more jealous about
my messenger job than they were about my
writing. “As I was saying,” Cordelia started
up. ‘“Cordelia Carbuncle: Ruby of the Seven Seas’”
I took the envelope and stepped quickly out in
the hall. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and leaned
against the wall. Then I looked down at the enve­
lope, expecting to see o ffic e , or a room number. It
said S a h a r a .
I opened it.
The note said, Turn left. So I turned left.
The note said, Walk three paces. So I took three
steps.
The note said, Turn left again. So I did, and I
was facing an old locker.
We weren’t allowed to keep things in lockers
because the upper-grade kids kept stealing lunches
from them. So the lockers were used as storage for
old textbooks. The note said, Open. So I opened the
locker.

105
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

There was a small cactus in a pot, with a beau­

tiful red flower in bloom at the top.
And behind it, a brown folder with my name
on it.
M y file.
The classroom door opened. Out stepped
Darrell, holding the boys’ pass. He closed the door,
and faced me straight on, head bent, eyebrows
bent, frowning.
“What?” I squirmed.
“You sent me that dumb poem, didn’t you.” I
was too embarrassed to deny it. “I am not an
orphan,” he said.
“I know.” I squirmed some more.
“And” he said, “neither are you.”
He walked away, whistling, toward the boys’
room. I reached behind the cactus and pulled out
my file. I clutched it to my chest with both arms.

1 00
 13

A u t o b i o g ra phi a L i t e r a r i a

4
Qy ran into my room at home and closed the
door. I couldn’t wait.
I spilled the envelope out on to my bed. On
the top was a page ripped out of my
journal that I had forgotten about.

Do teachers haMe secrets?

J o r instance,, / tike, bo g iv e
k id s p resen ts SonnetinneS on th e sty if
J k n ow w h a t th ey r e a tty w a n t. That ’s
a good secret. Teachers ’ Bad secrets,
tik e g ettin g caught Snnoking on the cus­
todian *s office or Being fresh to the
prin cipat or h avin g Boyfriends th a t ride
motorcyctes, are kept in a d re a d fu t fite

107
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

Somewhere . Jb *s h ard bo geb bo a

beacher’s fete. Bub sbudenb H ies are, so
easy bo geb your h an ds on.

Next in the pile was a letter from my mom. “I

request my daughter be removed from the special
education program.” I smiled and turned the letter
over.
And then, there were the letters I had written.

Dear DaAAy, I m\sS you. . . .

Dear DaAAy, When ore you conning
Inonne. . . .
Dear DaAAy, Winy A\Antyou take me
With you. . . .
Dear DaAAy, ItWaS nny birthAay, I
Wished it on my canA\es th a t you Would
call, and you AlAnt. . . .
Dear DaAAy; [Aom Says you A o n t help
With anything anymore but I don;t care, I
knoWyou;ll come back and help
us----
Dear DaAAy, Theres a hole inmy
heart. . . .

168
 Aut obi ogr aphi a Literaria

I turned them over, one by one, like cards in a

fortune-teller’s deck. But these weren’t telling me
the future, these were telling me the past. It was
sad to see them, but it was funny, too, that they had
kept them. Even though as I leafed through them
I realized they all said the same thing, they all told
the same story.
Miss Pointy says, the main character is the one
who changes.
I held one of the letters I had written in third
grade up to the light from the window. I couldn’t
help smiling at my round, careful cursive. Dear
Daddy, Can’t you see from my handwriting what kind of
girl I am, will that make it enough for you to come home
to me?
The clouds outside were high and generous big,
moving fast. I opened the window. I closed my eyes
and held out the piece of paper, let it flutter in my
open palms. When I opened my eyes, I saw it flap­
ping in the sky like a bird, flying away.
I tossed out the next letter, and the next,
making birds, until the last one. As I watched them
tumble past the brown brick of the buildings, east,

169
S A M A R A S P E C I A L

east to the lake, I wrote one last letter in my mind’s

eye.

Dear Daddy,
I love you. I miss you. I hope someday you’re
smart enough to be sorry, but if you’re not, that’s
okay. I’m smart enough not to keep all this in my
file.
Love, your daughter and secret writer,
Sahara Jones, now and forever

In my mind’s eye, I ripped it in half. In my

mind’s eye, I let the pieces loose, let them climb
the stairway of the wind past the buildings, past
the lake, past the moon and stars and sun, to
Somewhere Else, the place where my father now
lives.
And then, I pulled out my notebook and
wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Not about my Heart-
Wrenching Life Story, but all these pages about a
teacher and her Amazing Adventures with her class,
all about a teacher’s file and a teacher’s secrets. I
wrote about friends and tattletales, bravery and

170
 Aut obi ogr aphi a L iteraria

fear, but for the first time, it didn’t all have to be

straight true, I could write about all the exciting
things I wished were true. The words moved like
wheels across the paper. I didn’t count pages or
minutes. Mom tapped on my door, and only then
did I notice the sun had gone down and I was writ­
ing nearly in the dark. The whole apartment was
warm. The radiators clanged like music. I could
smell meat loaf in the oven. Mom had fried
potatoes with lots of onions and butter. She was
making my favorite meal for dinner. Where had I
been?
“You’ve been sitting in here forever.” My
mother flicked on the light switch and squinted at
me. Had I? It was like magic, like Rip Van Winkle,
who fell asleep and found himself a hundred years
older when he opened his eyes. I unfurled my fin­
gers, fossilized and aching around the pen.
“Dinner’s on.”
“Almost finished.”
“Whatcha writing now?” she asked.
“Sketching out some adventures,” I confessed.
“I’ve already finished my Autobiographia Literaria.” In

171
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

one second I was embarrassed that I was so eager.

Mom’s eyes were laughing at me.
“Who, now?”
“My life story. I have had a very interesting
life” I said, defending myself.
“Me, too.” Her eyes were glinting. “Fascinating.
And it’s over?”
I ignored her. “I’m starting something new.”
“Maybe you’ll show it to me sometime?”
“If you want,” I said. “It’ll be in the library.” I
felt her bristle. Did she think I was being fresh? I
turned in my chair to correct myself, to explain
that it was promised to the library, behind section
9 40 , to be found by someone in the future, some­
one whose life will be made more exciting just by
reading my Heart-Wrenching Life Story and Amazing
Adventures. But the doorway was already empty.
While we ate, I could hear the silverware
against the plates.
“It’s good, Mom” I complimented her and
smiled. She smiled back. She looked at me for a
long time. It made me nervous, so I looked at my
meat loaf.

172
 A u t o b i o g r a p h i a Li ter s ria

“So, what did you do at school?”

I shrugged. “Kids read aloud from their jour­
nals.”
“Lord, they sure waste your time at school,
don’t they?” said Mom. “Just writing and talking
about any old thing that pops into your head. Bet
them kids in the suburbs learning calculus by
now” She didn’t know what to say next, I could
tell. “You’re growing up,” is what she finally came
out with.
“How do you know?” I teased.
“You’re not talking to me.” She smiled sadly.
“I talk to you” I filled my mouth with pota­
toes.
“I guess I don’t know how to speak your lan­
guage.”
I laughed a little, like she had made a joke, like
we were talking about why firemen wear red sus­
penders or what time it is when an elephant sits
on a fence, and she laughed, too. We ate the rest of
the meal in thoughtful silence.
But that night, I climbed into bed with her,
and she didn’t say anything against it. She held me

173
S A H A R A S P E C I A L

firm with one arm around my shoulder, like she

didn’t want me to go anywhere. I stared at the ceil­
ing and felt uneasy and excited at once, like I was
destined to end up Somewhere Else anyway, no
matter how she held me.
“Sing to me,” she said, half-joking. “Tell
me a story. Tell me your autobiographia whatever.”
I took a breath. I thought about what poem to
spend. I spoke to her softly, like I was singing a
lullaby.

When I was a c h i l d
I p la y e d b y m y s e lf i n a
c o r n e r o f th e s c h o o ly a rd
a l l a lo n e .

I h a te d d o l l s an d I
h a te d gam es, a n im a ls w ere
n o t f r i e n d l y an d b i r d s
f le w aw ay.

I f an yo n e was lo o k in g
f o r me I h id b e h in d a
t r e e a n d c r i e d o u t "I am
a n o rp h a n /

And h e re I am, th e

174
 Aut obi ogr aphi a Li terari a

c e n te r o f a l l b e a u ty !
w r i t i n g th e s e poems!
Im ag in e!

Imagine, I thought.
She gently stroked my hair, making sure I was
there. It was comforting, but now, I didn’t need it.
It was extra credit.

175
ESMÉ RA J I C O D E L L
is an avid collector of sparkly stickers and a pretty
good roller skater. She is also the author o f
Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, which
won an Alex Award, given for the best adult books
for young adults. She has worked as a children’s
bookseller, teacher, and school librarian, and now
runs the popular children’s literature Web site
www.planetesme.com. Esmé lives in Chicago with
her husband and son.
Literature Circle Questions
Use these questions and the activities that follow to get more out of the experience
of reading Sahara Special by Esmé Raji Codell.

1. On the first day of school, Miss Pointy lists the class subjects on the board. What
are these subjects?

2. Sahara says that her cousin Rachel Wells is her best friend. What is Rachel like?
Describe Rachel and her friendship with Sahara.

3. Sahara has two files, one hidden in the library and one kept in the
principal’s office. What is in each of these files?

4. Why does Sahara cry the night before school starts? What kinds of things is she
thinking and feeling?

5. At the beginning of the school year, why doesn’t Sahara do any of her
assignments for Miss Pointy, even though she really likes her teacher?

6. Why do you think Sahara took Luz’s sticker? How does Sahara feel about this
afterwards?

7. Sahara is writing a secret book called Heart-Wrenching Life Story and Amazing
Adventures. Do you know people who keep journals? Can you think of
characters from other books you’ve read who have secret writings of their own?
What are some reasons people might have private writings that they don’t share
with others?

8. What do you think is the most important thing for Sahara to learn?

9. When Miss Pointy visits Sahara’s house, she says that she’s there to bring
homework. Why is she really there? And what is the effect of her visit on Sahara?

10. Why does Sahara think so much about Darrell Sikes? Why does she read his
journal? Besides the fact that they were both in special education, what do they
have in common? How are they different?

11. On the day she meets Miss Pointy, Sahara writes that her new teacher “looked
less like a teacher and more like one of those burnt-out punk-rocker teenagers who
hang out in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts.” Besides Miss Pointy’s appearance, what
is so unusual or surprising about her?
12. In the last chapter of the book, Sahara throws the letters to her father out the
window. Why is this so important? If her father did contact her in the future,
what do you think Sahara would say to him?

13. Do you think Miss Pointy should be allowed to dress, talk, and act like she does?
Should she be more “professional” in any way? Do schools have rules about how
teachers should dress and behave? Can you imagine a teacher like Miss Pointy
at your school?

14. What parts of this book did you find humorous? Which of the characters make
you laugh? Be prepared to talk about these parts of the book.

15. Sahara’s mother requests that her daughter be removed from the special ed
program, and Miss Pointy lies to keep Darrell Sikes from leaving class to receive
special ed services. Why are these characters so critical about the special educa
tion program? Do you agree that these programs might cause more harm than
good, or do you think that the services are valuable for students?

Note: These literature circle questions are keyed to Bloom’s Taxonomy: Knowledge: 1-3;
Comprehension: 4-6; Application: 7-8; Analysis: 9-10; Synthesis: 1T -12; Evaluation: 13-15.

Activities
1. Miss Pointy’s students are assigned to write about how they got their names.
What do you know about your name? How did you get it, and what does
it mean? Do you like your name? Does it fit you? If you could change it, what
would you choose, and why? Write about your name.

2. Choose one of the scenes from Miss Pointy’s classroom—a humorous or

important one—to make into a reader’s theater or skit. Condense the scene if you
want, assign roles, and practice reading your parts. Then perform your skit for the
class. Afterwards, explain why you chose the scene you did. What makes that
scene funny or significant? What did you learn about the characters from
reading their words aloud?

3. Using what you know from her story, imagine Sahara Jones twenty years in the
future. What is she like, and what is she doing? Write a newspaper or magazine
article about the grown-up Sahara Jones, giving us a glimpse into her adult life.
Illustrate your article with a newspaper-style “photo” of Sahara.

Other Books by this Author: Educating Esmé: Diary o f a Teachers First Year, and
How to Get Your Child to Love Reading (both published by Algonquin Books)

Author Website: www.planetesme.com/saharaspecial.html

 Praise for S A H A R A S P E C I A L
“Here is a sweet, smart, and sassy novel to rem ind kids
and teachers alike that w hat should happen in schools is
not a double-entry accounting o f knowledge, but the
blossom ing o f souls.
W ith a sharp ear, a big heart, and very smart w riting,
Esm é Raji C odell unfolds a touching tale o f classroom
redem ption. The story o f Sahara Jones, her classmates
(go, Darrell!), and their devoted and savvy teacher
— is a delight. Kids w ill love this book.”
-— ~ — A vi, author o f the 2003 Newbery Medal
winner, Crispin: The Cross of Lead •p
'■ “Esm é Raji Codell is a w riter o f great hum or and
sensitivity. Reading Sahara Special made m e want to
be a fifth grader in M iss Pointy’s class! ”
— A nn M . M abun , author of the 2003 Newbery
j— ' Honor Book A Comer ofthe Universe

nti
■si ISBN 0 - 4 3 ^ 5 3 7 0 - 3
Cover art copyright © 2003 by Giselle Potter
Cover design by Christine Kettner
and Eileen Gilshian

SCHOLASTIC
www.scholastic.com
7Ô0 43n b53701 This edition is only available for
distribution through the school market

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