Gypsy

 

 Bridget McGowan

            Cheryl Leigh entered her street as if in a trance, undisturbed by the noise and racing of the other children; she retraced her steps, running her fingers along Mrs. Kaiser’s white picket fence and across the top of Frasier’s hedge. For her, the doors of life shut when the bus door opened at the corner of Park and Summit Avenues.

            “Hi, Cher. How was school?” her mother asked when the girl entered the house.

            “Okay,” Cheryl answered.

            She turned on the cartoons and sat on the sofa, pulling an afghan over her legs even though it was September and warm outside.

           “When is dinner?” Cheryl asked as her mother put the finishing touches on a paper Mache gypsy she was making in the middle of the living room rug.

            “What do you mean, when’s dinner? What am I around here, the hired help?”

           The girl looked at her mother as an adult would who was trying though exasperated, to be patient with a slow child.

            “Mom –” she whined.

            “Mom –” her mother imitated. “Get me this, go here, take me there, make me dinner.”

            “Never mind.”

            “Oh, a thousand humble pardons I beg of you, oh precious daughter,” her mother said, bowing on the floor and crawling toward the sofa.

            “Mom, cut it out,” Cheryl said.

           “What? Am I embarrassing you? Who’s here to see what a horrible witch your mother is being?”

            “I’m trying to watch television.”

            “Oh. Bugs Bunny is more important than mom.”

            Cheryl sighed.

            “Mr. Fredericks, my teacher, is going to call tonight.”

            “Why?” her mother asked, sitting up. Cheryl shrugged.

            “That’s all he told me to tell you.”

            “Well, I haven’t had a man call me in ages,” Mrs. Schofter said, pretending sensuous delight.

            She sat on the floor thinking about the prospect for a while, then looked at her little girl for a few minutes.

            “Hey, Cherie, I have to show you what I bought today.”

            “What?” Cheryl asked without taking her eyes off the TV.

            “Now you just wait.”

            Mrs. Schofter dashed up the stairs excitedly while her daughter stared at the cartoons.

            “Hey, Cherie, you want to come into the casaba with me?” Mrs. Schofter asked, striking a pose at the bottom of the stairs.

            Cheryl saw her mother standing in a red wig, wearing a black sequined gown that was slit up one side to the thigh, and a strap across the opposite shoulder as its only means of support. Cheryl crinkled her nose as though a skunk had died nearby.

            “Are you going to wear that?”

            “Of course I’m going to wear it.”

            “Out?”

            “No, to scrub the kitchen floor. Yes, out. Why?”

            Cheryl shrugged and returned her attention to Yogi Bear.

            “What’s the matter with it?” Mrs. Schafer asked, straightening.

            “I don’t know. Do you think it looks – you know, kind of – silly?”

            “Oh, you’re an old stick-in-the-mud!”

            Mrs. Schofter danced around the living room as though with the paper Mache gypsy, trying to make the most of the highlights of the dress.

           “You know what your trouble is, Cheryl? You have no sense of style. If you had your way, everyone would wear uniforms the way they do in that school of yours.”

            She stopped dancing and looked at the girl.

          “By the way, since when do they have men teachers in elementary school? I thought seventh graders were supposed to have nuns.”

            Cheryl got off the sofa, turned off the television and went to her room.

            “Cher?”

            “I have to do my homework.”

           “You’re too conscientious,” her mother said, pouting. “You’re a square. How do you expect to get a boyfriend?”

            “I don’t want one,” Cheryl called down from her room before she closed the door.

            The phone rang. Cheryl was adept enough not to be heard as she picked up the extension in her mother’s room.

            “Mrs. Schafter, this is Mr. Fredericks, Cheryl Leigh’s teacher.”

          “It’s Schofter. Schofter with an O, not an A. Blame it on my husband. I didn’t make up the name.”

            “I see. Mrs. Schofter –”

            “You can call me Lenora. I mean now that name really is mine.”

            “Okay, Lenora. There seems to be a small problem with Cheryl Leigh.”

            “What problem? She couldn’t be talking in class. She’s quiet as a mouse. And she always does her homework right after school, even though I think she should be out with her friends then. In fact, I think you give out too much homework.”

            “Mrs. Schofter –”

“So, what’s the problem?”
            “You.”

          “What do you mean, me? I’m not a problem, I’m a human being. And I am Cheryl’s mother. Little girls love their mothers.”

            “Mrs. Schofter, I understand you’re divorced?”

           “That’s none of your God-damned business. You said Cheryl was having problems. So let’s keep it to Cheryl’s problems and keep your nose out of my business.”

            Mrs. Schofter, I think that is part of Cheryl Leigh’s problem. Your personality is quite different from hers, and I think she has problems communicating with you.”

          “What? Communicating with me? We communicate fine. And you listen here, Fredericks, or whatever your name is, you are a teacher. Your job is to teach school lessons to Cheryl. I’m her mother, and I’ll raise her any way I see fit.”

           “Mrs. Schofter, she is not two beings, one for school and one for home. She is one whole person. She reacts in school according to the way she’s expected to act at home, and I don’t think her home life is very healthy.”

            “Look, I don’t think it’s healthy to have seventh grade girls taught by a man. So don’t you give me any trouble or I’ll do my best to get you thrown out of that school.”

            “You don’t scare me, Mrs. Schofter.”

            “Don’t play that game with me. You mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.”

            If he said any more, she didn’t hear it. She slammed down the phone so hard it almost cracked.

            “I’ll take her out of that school if they don’t shape up. Cher, come down here.”

            The girl obeyed.

           “I presume you heard the conversation?” Cheryl nodded. “Didn’t let him push me around, did I?”

            “Mom, why did you do it?” the girl cried. “You didn’t even listen to him.”

            “Of course I listened to him. He’s trying to lay all the blame on me. I suppose next he would’ve said the divorce was my fault. Vietnam, Korea, World War II and anything else he could think of would have been my fault, too. Who knows, maybe I’m responsible for creation, too!”

            “Mom,” Cheryl said, “he didn’t say that. You weren’t even listening.” She wiped tears from her face.

            “Okay, kid if you have problems, how come I don’t know about them? What are they? Come on, out with it.”

            “You wouldn’t listen.”

            “I’m all ears. What?”

            “Well, you do – crazy things.”

            “Oh, I’m crazy. I suppose that teacher of yours that you have such a crush on put that idea into your head.”

            “You’re not listening,” Cheryl said, turning toward the stairs.

            “What? If I do these crazy things, would you mind telling me what they are?”

            “Like that wig,” Cheryl said, looking at the costume her mother was wearing.

            “You don’t like it? Okay, I won’t wear it.”

          She pulled off the red hair and her bleach blonde hair with an inch of black roots showing tumbled out around her ears and forehead.

            “And that dress.”

           “This dress?” Lenora said, modeling again. “It’s the latest. I saw it on a model in one of those fashion magazines.”

            “But you’re too old to wear something like that.”

            “Baby, when you’re old they put you in a box and nail it shut. I’m not old.” She folded her arms. “What do you want me to wear, a potato sack or a burlap bag?”

            “Mother –”

            “I embarrass you. Is that it? I am not the model mother that the nuns tell you about. Well, listen, kid, I never said I was the Virgin Mary!”

            “Mom!”

            “Look. You have your personality. I have mine. I don’t want to be like you and I don’t want you to be like me. Now if we understand that, we should get along just fine. Okay?”

            “Yeah,” Cheryl said, resigning from a hopeless cause.

            She was on her way upstairs when her mother stopped her with a proposition.

            “You know what you need? A change of scenery.”

           Cheryl stopped expectantly, waiting for the next line, “You should stay with your father for a few months.”

            Instead, her mother said, “Why don’t we just take off for the woods tomorrow?”

        She would have said, “You’re kidding,” but knew her mother wasn’t. Instead, Cheryl’s jaw dropped in horror.

            “Mother, you wouldn’t!”

            “You need to get away from those blandy people at school. See the world. Just you and me. We’ll be gypsies living off the land.”

            “I have to go to school.”

            “You’ll never learn anything in that place. Geez, most kids would jump at the chance to take off. I have to have a stick-in-the-mud.”

            “But we can’t!”

            “Stop trying to be practical. That’s my department. And we’re going.”

           

            At six a.m. the next day Cheryl discovered that she hadn’t been having a nightmare; her mother had the car packed with tent, sleeping bags, backpacks and ice chest full of food.

            “Come on, are you ready?” her mother asked as Cheryl came down for breakfast. “Here, I made you a sandwich.”

            Cheryl checked it over: ham and cheese with pickles on a Kaiser roll wasn’t the sort of breakfast she’d hoped for.

            “What about school?”

            “You won’t miss much. Let’s go.”

            Cheryl didn’t see anything as they went even though she stared out the window the whole way. Her mother chattered for a while, and Cheryl had the general impression that they were going to New England. She didn’t hear anything else. For all she knew or cared, she was dead.

            They stopped at a campground, and slept in the car when it rained. By the end of the first week of gypsy life, Cheryl had a cold, but Lenora showed no signs of giving up her nomadic freedom.

            “You’ve got to learn to rough it and enjoy it,” Lenora said.

            “We’re going to get into trouble when we get home,” Cheryl said.

            “Who says we’re going home? If we like it, we might just stay away until the car breaks down.”

            “And who’s going to pay for gas?”

          “Credit cards. I’ve got  enough of them. When they won’t accept one, we’ll use another. Your dad will take care of the bills.”

          “Dad, the universal bill payer,” Cheryl thought . She didn’t pursue the matter, and only spoke when absolutely necessary.

          She should have felt closer to her mother; Cheryl felt isolated from everyone and everything. Here in the fresh air in the open wilderness she felt grimy. Her hair and clothes smelled of smoke from cooking over a fire.

 

         They passed through northern New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, stopping occasionally to look over historical monuments. Cheryl took little interest in anything, no matter how educational.

           “I don’t understand you,” Lenora said as they motored toward Maine. “I have tried and you don’t want to camp. We’ll stay in motels, then. What kind of gypsy are you?”

            “I don’t want to be a gypsy.”

            “Don’t you want to see the world?”

            “No.”

            “What do you want?”

            “I want to go back to school.”

            “You know something, kid? You’re weird.”

 

            After another week, Cheryl asked, “When can we go home?”

         “That’s what’s wrong with you, kid. All you want to do is sit home and watch the boob tube. Didn’t you used to have fun when  your dad and I took you camping?”

            “Yeah,” Cheryl said slowly, “when Daddy was here.”

            She hadn’t meant to say that; it hit her mother like a bomb.

          “That’s it, isn’t it? You wish you were with your father. Your mother’s too crazy for you. Isn’t that it?”

            “No. I didn’t mean it.”

            “Oh, yes, you did. You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t mean it.”

            “Mom couldn’t we just go home?”

            “Oh no. Not until we get this settled.”

            “I don’t want to take sides. You always make me take sides.”

            “You’ve got to be for one of us or the other.”

            “Why? Why can’t I be for both of you?”

            “Because, silly, Daddy and I are against each other.”

            “That’s your problem,” Cheryl said, walking away. “I didn’t have a fight with either of you.”

            “Well, you’re about to have one with me.”

            “Good,” Cheryl said, turning around, an angry look on her face. “Then I’ll go live with Daddy. Maybe then I’ll be able to go back to school, and I won’t have to live in the woods like some stupid gypsy. I never wanted to come out here in the first place!”

            Her mother couldn’t have looked more pained. She stared through tears at her little girl and saw, instead, her husband’s thirteen-year-old daughter looking at her with so much hate she almost didn’t recognize the girl.

            “So, that’s it?”

            “What do you want?”

            “ I want to know. Is that how you feel? You really don’t want to live here any more? You want to go live with your dad?”

            She wouldn’t back out. She felt nothing but pity for her mother. Cheryl knew she’d be happier with her father. But she felt sure her mother was a mental case, that she needed looking after.  She couldn’t do that.

            It wasn’t Cheryl’s business to be a nurse to her own mother. She’d end up worse if she stayed with her.

            “Is that what you want?” her mother asked again.

            “You heard what I said,” Cheryl answered.

           

            When they arrived home, Mr. Schofter waited with his lawyer and the police.

            “Dad!” Cheryl said, and ran to him. She looked happy.

            “I have a court order, and I’ll take her by force if need be,” he told Lenora as she approached. “She’s missed two weeks of school, and no one knew what happened to either of you.”

            “Your vice squad won’t be necessary,” Lenora said. “She hates me and wants to go with you. As soon as I get all of her things packed, you can take her wherever you want. I won’t make any demands on either of you anymore.”

            She looked blankly at Cheryl, who was tempted to back down and hug Lenora.

            Within the hour Cheryl’s things were packed in her father’s car. Lenora watched from the front porch. Cheryl said something to her father and raced up to the porch. She stopped awkwardly on the top step as though she were no longer allowed to walk on her mother’s porch.

            “Goodbye?” Lenora suggested, extending her hand.

            “Goodbye, Mom,” Cheryl said, then stepped onto the porch and kissed her mother on the cheek.

            Before Lenora could recover Cheryl and her father were in the car and waving as they drove down the road.

 

When I’m From

 

 

When I was in elementary school in the 1960s, there was no such thing as a learning disability – at least not at my school. Children didn’t have things like dyslexia, ADHD or any of a myriad of other challenges. If you got things right away and excelled, you were smart. If you took a long time to learn things, you were slow, and if you took a very long time to learn things, you often repeated a grade. If you were considered the “R” word (I use that because that was the word used at the time), a designation given by a doctor, you went somewhere else, and often didn’t live with your family.

Sometimes families fought against having a child institutionalized, and tried, with varying levels of success, to have their child educated in a regular school. I knew a few people like that from my neighborhood.

They repeated grades and eventually learned enough to move on until they reached 16 – usually by eighth grade because the school didn’t want them repeating a grade more than once – and they were legally allowed to leave school. Then, if they were able to get jobs, it was at a basic level, and they stayed in the same job for the rest of their lives.

But those with learning disabilities, rather than the R word, were given different designations, mainly because teachers often didn’t have knowledge of disabilities, and didn’t know how to teach students how to overcome such obstacles. 

Some were called lazy because they could do the work but had difficulty paying attention, or because they could learn but somehow couldn’t make sense of the textbooks they read. Some were considered troublemakers or attention seekers because they called out in class or couldn’t stay in their seats.

And if you happened to be left handed, anything you did incorrectly was blamed on that. Whether you were punished for being left-handed in my school depended on whether you were a boy or a girl, and whether or not you had the misfortune of having a teacher who had it out for your gender.

I was in the left-handed category, blissfully unaware that any of the other “nonexistent” challenges applied to me.

When people learn that I attended Catholic school and still managed to grow up to be a left-handed adult, they are generally stunned.  In fact, other than one of the safeties who patrolled the aisles in our overcrowded first-grade class to help the teacher during handwriting class, no one ever bothered me about being left-handed.

But the same could not be said of the left-handed boys in my class. One told me years later how he was repeatedly hit with a ruler by the nun. It was fairly well recognized that she didn’t like boys.

Being left-handed, I tended to start writing my letters backwards from the wrong side of the paper. My mother, early on, corrected this tendency, but she was never satisfied with my handwriting ability. She considered my best to be nothing short of lazy and sloppy, and my homework was frequently torn up. I would then have to do it over. But on the bright side, because writing spelling words was an every night assignment, I became an excellent speller simply because I had to write my words so many times.

What they did not know about me at the time was that I am mildly dyslexic. I had a bit of difficulty when we first began learning to read because I didn’t understand some of the rules we were given. We were told that words that ended with tails – a term my teacher used for silent e on the end of a word, although I missed that part – had a long vowel sound. To me, a tail was the loopy bit that went below the line. My mother didn’t understand why I pronounced every word that ended with p, y, or g with a long vowel sound.

It wasn’t until I explained about tails that my mother realized that I was too concrete a thinker to understand what my teacher was telling us, and she then explained that the teacher only meant an e. After that, my reading pronunciation and comprehension picked up so much that I went from the second reading group to the first in under a month.

I must have some subgroup type of dyslexia. While I do have difficulty at times going from one line to the next while reading – bookmarks aren’t just for closed books – and sometimes important words jump out of one sentence and into another, making a jumble of the page, my major problem is with textbooks.

I can read novels, and even biographies without difficulty. But textbooks and technical manuals are somewhat beyond me. I can’t retain the information by simply reading. I need to either hear it or write it. And even then, I’ll never be able to find the facts I’m looking for again in the textbook.

I didn’t learn until college that outlining chapters was a lifesaver. As I read my assignments, I outlined what I read. That way, even though after reading it I couldn’t tell you what I’d read, I had notes to refer to, and I learned from those.

I managed to breeze through elementary school – often on the honor roll – without ever doing my textbook reading homework. If I heard it in class, I could reproduce it on a test.

When I didn’t do quite as well as my parents and teachers thought I should, they agreed that I was lazy, and if I weren’t so lazy, I would do better.

The proof of this to them was that, other than handwriting and art, my two worst subjects in school were history and geography. Those two subjects mainly only require one to be able to read. But it was a textbook that had to be read. And often, not everything we had to know was discussed in class. They knew I could read quite well. But I didn’t do well in those subjects. 1492, 1942, 1249 ans 1294 are pretty much the same number to me, as the numbers dance around and show off.

Phone numbers are a nighmare. If you say the number aloud, I can copy it correctly. If I am copying from a page, I frequently transpose numbers, and I have to very slowly, digit by digit check to make sure I've copied it correctly.

I did do really well in history and geography one year. In history, we were studying the Middle Ages, an era I’ve always loved, and in geography we were studying Europe. We started off with the UK and Ireland, and I did a fantastic job, since my ancestors were from Ireland and Scotland, and the Beatles were from England (and I loved The Beatles).

As we progressed through Western Europe, my grasp of the subject slipped until, by the time we reached Spain and Portugal, my grades were as bad as when we studied US geography (So many states and capitals!).

That year convinced my parents it was sheer laziness when I didn’t do well in history and geography. They didn’t understand how difficult it was to stay focused on a textbook.

Every year I vowed to do a much better job academically, do all of my homework – even the reading part – and be at the top of my class. And every year, that lasted about a week.

I really tried. I was one of the top 10 or so students in my class, but I just couldn’t hold onto the elusive textbook knowledge.

What I also didn’t know until I was an adult was that I also have ADD – unfortunately, I didn’t have the hyperactivity, which I could have used a bit of. I’m sure the ADD played a role in my lack of focus.

Because I was a very good reader – and loved an audience – my teachers rarely called on me to read. Instead, they called on those who had very little ability to read aloud. I had to pretend I wasn’t paying attention to be called on – they loved to embarrass children back then. Once I demonstrated I did, indeed, know where we were, and had read a sentence or two, someone else was called on to struggle through two or three paragraphs.

When it came to independent work, I was either hyper focused or off in that land I go to where my invisible friends all know me.

When the teacher was teaching a new concept, like expanding numbers, Roman Numerals or points of grammar, I understood the technicalities very quickly and was ready to move on to something else. Unfortunately, that never happened, so I’d zone out for the next few days while she retaught the same thing.

Most of my real difficulties in school were social. I didn’t get the subtleties of my classmates’ behavior. My so-called friends picked fights with me (arguments, not fist fights) for unfathomable reasons. I didn’t know how to fight with them or why they wanted to, so I just went off by myself. And they all grew up emotionally before I did (some say I still haven't), so my friend set kept getting younger.

How ADD mainly affected me was at home. My mother had a rule about how close you could sit in front of the TV. You had to be on the rug, and even then, I was often told to move back. It wasn’t because I was in anyone’s way. It was that early TV belief that the radiation from the TV would get you.

My problem was that if I sat on a chair or the sofa, there was too much space between the TV and me. Aside from it being more difficult to become one with the characters at that distance, even the airspace between the TV and me was a distraction.

This was so much of a thing with me that, to this day, I can recall what shows I watched as a small child, from Bertie the Bunyip and Captain Kangaroo to Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone, but I can’t recall a single episode – or in some cases, the characters themselves – unless I’ve seen the shows in syndication as an adult. I may have been facing the TV and wanting to watch, but if I weren’t right in front of the screen, I couldn’t maintain any attention to the show.

When people would tell me I was smart, I always felt like a fake. Of course I was lazy: my teachers and my parents said so. Every year, despite what my tests and report cards reflected, I was sure I was going to be left back to repeat the grade. Of course, I thought teachers could fail you if they didn’t like you, and I thought none of my teachers liked me. I doubt any of them remembered me once I was out of their class.

I once told my mother that school to me was like hanging outside a second-story window, holding onto the window sill, afraid someone would close the window on my fingers and I’d fall to my death.

That’s also how I’d still describe my social skills.

I like the idea of parties, but I don’t like being at them. I never know what to say, so I end up saying all the wrong things. People tend to avoid me, and when they don’t I’m just waiting for something terribly stupid to fall out of my mouth. Stage fright, to me, is going to a party where the only person I know is the one I came with.

But put me on a stage, and I’m in my element. I have never experienced stage fright on a stage. I’ll sing, I’ll act, I’ll play my guitar, and I’ll have the most fun a person can have because I don’t have to interact directly with the audience. There’s airspace separating us, and I’m not them.

One thing I did learn because of the stage is that I can’t memorize lines by reading them repeatedly. When I was in a play in community theatre, I knew everyone’s lines but mine. No matter how much I studied my lines, I didn’t hear them, so I had difficulty remembering them. Too late, I realized I should have read them on tape and listened to them. Ah well, next play. Someday.

Ironically, I write novels. I love playing with words. But it’s on my terms. It’s a conversation between me and my invisible friends (aka characters). And sometimes my invisible friends won’t talk to me, either.

Years ago, a group of my (visible) friends and I would get together every week. We all wrote stories, and we’d read them to one another and critique everyone’s work (kindly). At one point we discovered that out of seven or eight of us, only one wasn’t dyslexic.

So the question was asked: What one word did all of your teachers use to describe you?

And the answer was the same for every one of us.

Lazy.

Odd Moments in Summer

 

            "They've won the  ride of a lifetime," Kiera said to herself, as part of the game. She loaded two small dolls into the wicker half-circle basket tied to the back of her bicycle seat.

            Although the streets bubbled with the laughter, the shouts of other children in the neighborhood, Kiera had spent the entire day in her tree fort or under the hose, depending upon her mood, but alone, entirely alone. Her mother's conviction that a child who couldn't amuse himself couldn't be amusing to anyone else had helped to develop Kiera's somewhat overactive imagination, but did little to improve her social skills with other children.

            It annoyed Kiera that other children couldn't see trees or snow for what they were: something other than trees or snow. Or that the other children didn't think the way she thought, always pretending to be free thinking individuals rather than actors under her direction. She hated the way the other girls – she was forbidden to play with boys, although she sometimes did – wanted to bask in the sun when they went swimming. They expected her to do the same. She didn't like the heat without the water, and while they turned tan, she turned orange. Why would they want to be tan? They had great pools. Who would want to roast in the heat when they could swim? Why pretend she wanted to? Because she wouldn't play along, her unnaturally tan friends stopped inviting her to swim in their pools.

            So, on sultry summer days she could lie in the grass and watch the heat rippling up from the streets, or climb into the tree fort and pretend to be Paul McCartney – her friends wanted to marry the Beatles, but she wanted to be one – or fly to Mars in her imagined spacecraft. Now, after dinner, she had played out the fort for the day. She needed excitement, a race down any hill she could find. This idea occurred after a game where the dolls were her audience, so she decided to take them with her. It was foolish, but she did it as part of the game. Once around the block would do for the dolls. They were getting to ride in the limo with the rock star.

            Of course, on her way around the block she had to pass Helen Broderick and Joan Rafferty, two on-again, off-again friends, both with pools presently off limits, both waiting, she thought, for a chance to ridicule her about something. She passed as quickly as she could, which wasn't fast, considering she traveled uphill. Too slow for them to miss seeing the dolls in her basket. How would she ever live it down? It was bad enough they laughed at her and called her movie star as a taunt because she had her sunglasses on, but the dolls –

            She reached her house as quickly as she could, and threw the dolls into their toy cribs in the playroom. It shouldn't work like this. She would have to ride back the way she came around the block to unravel the invisible string that determined the length of her life. (Her theory was that each person was born with a ball of invisible string. To go back the way one came allowed one to re-roll some of what was used, giving one a longer life. When the ball was completely gone, one's life ended. She wanted to out-live the girls who had been so cruel but didn’t know about the string.)

            As Kiera remounted her bike, she saw Joan pass on her bike. Joan said, "Are you taking your babies for a ride again?" To hide the disgrace she felt, and to show her contempt for Joan, she stuck her tongue out at her.

            "Joan the bone, dial tone," she said to herself in time with her pedaling as she whizzed past Helen. Helen made another remark about Kiera acting like a big shot, but Kiera swerved in time to avoid hitting her, and rode on. They simply wouldn't exist. Not Joan the clone or Helen, Helen watermelon. She'd show them all. She was the best bike-trick kid on the block, she thought, as she rested her feet over her handlebars. Losers, all of you. Big fat losers. Brown as a clown, and hair like straw. Who needs you and your swimming pools?  I can make up my own friends.

            She rode up one hill and down another, first one way, then back the way she came. She stopped once again at home to clothespin baseball cards against the wheels of her bike so that it would sound like a motorcycle. The other kids had already done it, and now she would, too.

            She rode up and around until she reached the top of the big hill on Park Avenue. She'd race down it. No, she decided, she'd turn at the first street and do the hills on Summit Avenue.

            She turned, and almost immediately changed her mind. Still at whizzing-down-the-hill speed, she made a U-turn and started back to the big hill. Without stopping, pedaling to pick up speed, she started around the corner. She rode too close to the gravel and skidded down, the bike falling on top of her. She fell, face-first onto the road.

            She screamed before she felt any real pain. Joan rode by as she did. She hesitated a moment, then stopped, but didn't help Kiera up. Instead, she said she'd get Kiera's father, then left the girl alone on the road, humiliated beyond her pain.

            It took a minute before anyone came to see if she was hurt. Amy, a girl Kiera knew vaguely as one of the bigger kids, and Amy's father crossed the street to where she lay.

            "I can't get up," Kiera managed to say.

            Amy’s father picked the bike up, then helped the ten-year-old Kiera. They walked Kiera to their car. While Amy walked the bike to her house, her father drove Kiera home.

            Kiera was calm, but her cheeks, knees and hands were embedded with cinders. Her mouth dripped blood, and for a moment, Kiera thought she'd faint, but she managed not to.

            "I lost my sunglasses," she said.

            "You broke your front teeth, too," Amy's father said.

            "Oh, no," Kiera said, looking out the window, and seeing her father walking toward the approaching car, "my mother's going to kill me."