A roof covered the sidewalk that stretched around the seven classrooms making up Hunter Hill Elementary, so normally you didn’t have to worry about getting wet going from one place to the next. But today it was pouring so hard you had to walk right up against the wall to keep from getting splashed.
“You didn’t have to try to act so funny when I tried to look and see where we was,” Ludell said to Bobbi Jean as they single-filed along the wall.
“When?” she asked, continuing to walk without looking back at Ludell.
“Girl don’ try ta play dumb wit me,” Ludell shouted, stepping beside her in spite of the rain. “You know what I’m talking bout!” she said. “When I was trying to see the place, you pulled yo book up like this!” she shouted, demonstrating for her. “And I’m gon fix you for that!”
“Oh—you talking about then?” went Bobbi Jean. “I—I wasn’t trying to keep you from seeing; my arm was getting tired from laying flat and I was just lifting it up to rest it,” she said, looking all pitiful.
Ludell just shook her head and left her alone because she could tell how scared Bobbi Jean was already. Besides, they were at Mis Stevanson’s room now.
Mis Stevanson had one of the seventh grade girls at the drink and ice cream boxes and was selling the cookies herself as usual. She had all the cookies lined up on the floor along with her money jar. In her lap was her big bowl of food, and she was just selling and chopping away!
As Mis Stevanson leaned over to pick out a piece of chicken skin she’d dropped into one of the cookie boxes, Ludell frowned disgustedly. She was relieved to discover that it hadn’t been the two-for-a-pennies into which the greasy skin had fallen. “I ’on see why she got ta eat ’n sell at the same time,” she thought staring. “Look so nasty!”
“Speak up! Speak up!” Mis Stevanson shouted to a nervous-looking Bobbi Jean, who was reading off the list.
Everybody was scared of Mis Stevanson! Besides teaching seventh grade, she also was principal. Plus she sold everything. Sometimes she would holler at the other teachers, and at Mr. Carswell, the janitor, like they were pupils too! Word was that once she’d screamed so loud at a substitute teacher that the lady started crying. Every summer someone would put out that Mis Stevanson was retiring because she was getting too old, but come the next September she’d still be sitting there.
She was a strange-looking woman, over six feet, and very broad backed. She wore black platform shoes that laced and tied at the sides, and all dark dresses made out of a shaky jersey-type material that wiggled when she walked. Her skin was rough and wrinkled like over-cooked hog maws; her hair always slick and shining in a page boy that she pressed daily.
As she directed them to the back for the rest of their order, Ludell gazed into her wrinkled face and tried to imagine what she might have looked like young; and as was the case with mama, or other old people, she just couldn’t for the life of her picture a young Mis Stevanson.
When she and Bobbi Jean got back with everything, most of the children with lunch from home had started eating. Bobbi Jean opened hers and offered Ludell some potato chips, trying to get back in friends, but Ludell refused. She wanted them, but wasn’t about to let Bobbi Jean slide back in friends that easily.
Mis Rivers had some kind of sandwich and was eating it fast, her head practically buried in the wax paper. She looked up long enough to check that everyone got what they ordered, then went back to downing her food. So she wouldn’t spoil her appetite by watching Mis Rivers, who looked right doggish, Ludell turned sideways in her seat, only to discover Ruthie Mae, her next door neighbor and best friend, staring at her. Just as she was about to say something to her, she dropped a cookie. “Dog!” Ludell said to herself as she reached down to pick it up. “That Ruthie Mae done stared my food clean out my hand!”
“You didn’t have no money to buy nothing today, Ruthie Mae?” she asked, knowing obviously that she hadn’t.
“I aine hungry,” Ruthie Mae replied.
“Well I aine hungry that much myself, so you can have part of these cookies,” Ludell said, passing some back. She felt that Ruthie Mae might have been thinking she gave her the one she’d dropped, so she got up right away and let her see her putting that one in the wastebasket, even though in her estimation it was still eatable.
Finishing off the remains of what she had, Ludell tried not to notice the people without lunches. Some of them could look so hungry that it made it hard for her to swallow. She could hear Ruthie Mae behind her briskly brushing her hands, as though finishing a big lunch instead of four cookies. “Pore-ro Ruthie Mae,” she thought, wondering which hurt most—the shame of not having a lunch or just the plain being hungry. Her mind wandered to that day when it was raining and Johnnie Higgins had brought this piece of upside-down cake. He had opened it and the smell of the cake just took over the room! She had bit into her cookies just pretending all the while that her teeth were sinking into that juicy caramel iceling. Like today, Ruthie Mae had been without lunch and was staring ever so longingly at the boy’s cake. Gradually her eyes had become watery. Just before the tears were about to roll down her cheeks, she had leaned over to Ludell, rubbed her eyes, stretched both lids, and went, “Ludell, you see anything in my eyes?”
“Seem like I do,” Ludell had answered pathetically. Then she blew into them as though she saw something. “Now, is that better?” she asked when done.
Ruthie Mae blinked both eyes, rubbed them a little more, and said, “Yeah, much better—I think it’s all gone.”
And thank goodness, so was Johnnie Higgins’s cake. . .
Kids were playing tic-tac-toe, trying to draw paper dolls, planes, trains, or were playing hand games. That was about all you could do on the inside. Everybody had read about a thousand times the three or four books Mis Rivers kept on the shelf and had looked up and giggled over the one sex word listed in the big red Webster’s. That dictionary had been messed with so much that the instant you opened it, it automatically fell to the Is.
“Guess she pretty hungry,” Ludell thought as Ruthie Mae’s stomach growled out ferociously on their way from the rest room. “I’d hate to have to come to school with nothing. I feel like I’d starve clean to death!”
As the bell rang ending recess, Mis Rivers was finishing up what appeared to be a piece of sweet bread. “Long as it took her to finish,” Ludell thought, “she must have had enough lunch to share with everybody who didn’t have nothing! Cause she sho wasn’t eating slow!” She kept staring at Mis Rivers, thinking, “Look at her! Just chopping like somebody mad! If I was a teacher and had so many children in my class who didn’t have no lunch, I’d buy a big loaf of light bread everyday and keep a big thing of peanut butter in the room! It couldn’t cost that much! I ’on see how she can sit there and enjoy . . . maybe that’s it! Maybe that’s why she always eat like she do—fast ’n face down.”
IT SEEMED THAT the rain would never stop, but it finally did just before time to leave school. The minute Mis Rivers said “dismissed,” Ludell took off, hoping to get a leadway on Willie Johnson and the other boys in the sixth grade, who lately were running all the fifth grade girls home.
She was lucky today; they weren’t out of their room yet and man was she flying! When she got to the corner, she could tell they were coming from Ruthie Mae’s screams. A safe distance away, she stopped to look back and saw them catching Ruthie Mae.
“I told her to be ready to take off when the bell rang, but she had to keep messing roun,” Ludell thought, smiling triumphantly. “Maybe she’ll follow my advice tomorrow.” She laughed watching Ruthie Mae struggle. “Better her than me, cause they aine gon do much to