It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Like you did?” But I didn’t feel that mean. Instead, I gazed around at our small apartment. I didn’t have any real affection for where we were living. My room was a two-by-four and we had trouble with roaches all the time, but even a rat gets used to its hole, I thought, and for a moment or two when it was time to leave, I paused at the doorway as if I was saying good-bye to a real friend.
“You won’t regret this,” Daddy said, seeing my small hesitation.
I said nothing. I just followed him out and into the car. This time it felt like we were in a funeral procession all the way to Stone Mountain. When we arrived, Uncle Buster was at work, and Jake and Barbara Ann were at school. Aunt Mae Louise greeted us without a smile. I supposed that up until the last moment she was praying it wasn’t going to happen.
Daddy brought in my suitcase, looking like some exhausted road salesman making his last stop. Afterward, he stood in the doorway with a face so sorrowful it made me sick to my stomach.
“Good-bye, Daddy,” I said. He kissed me on the forehead and hurried back to his car, now looking as relieved as a mouse that had outrun a cat.
“Let’s get to it,” Aunt Mae Louise told me then, and followed me to my room so she could hover over me as I unpacked my things.
“Don’t think they’ll let you wear that to school,” she said, pointing at my abbreviated blouse with spaghetti straps. “I don’t know why you bothered packing such a thing and bringing it here. I won’t let you go out of this house in such rags. You got to remember that everything you do now reflects on your uncle Buster and me. Every time you have to decide on something, no matter how large or small, you think of that.”
I didn’t say anything. When I was finished, she said we were going to the school so I could be registered. I was surprised at how much she had done in preparation for my coming. She had given the school guidance counselor information about me, and he had contacted my school in Atlanta. The new school already had my records. We met with the guidance counselor, Mr. VanVleet, a tall, red-headed man who smiled as if he had been waiting anxiously for me to finally arrive, as anxiously as he awaited some exchange student from another country.
“We want you to succeed here, Phoebe,” he began. He tapped the folder on the desk. “I see you have had some difficulties at your previous school.”
Aunt Mae Louise grunted and said,“ ‘Difficulties’ is too nice a word.” She squirmed in her seat, but Mr. VanVleet kept his smile.
Maybe it’s a mask, I thought. Anyone would need a mask to keep smiling in Aunt Mae Louise’s presence.
“What we’d like you to do is get you at the proper reading level as quickly as possible. We have a class designed to do just that, and for a while, that’s where we want you to begin. Once you’re at the proper reading level, we’ll be able to schedule you into classes you should be in, but we don’t want to do that until we’re sure you’ll succeed. You understand that, don’t you?”
I shrugged. None of it mattered to me. I wasn’t going to be here long.
“Whatever,” I said.
“Well, look at it this way,” he continued, “you wouldn’t want a third-grade student put in an eleventh-grade class, now would you? How would he or she do? Not too well, right?”
“You saying I’m like a third grader?” I asked, not hiding my indignation.
His eyes shifted to Aunt Mae Louise for a second and then back to me.
“I’m afraid that’s about your reading level, but don’t you worry. We’ll fix that fast if you give it some effort.”
“You’re going to put me with third graders?”
I’d be sitting in a classroom with Barbara Ann!
“No,” he said, laughing. “But with other students who have some temporary reading difficulties. There are some who are older than you, in fact.”
I felt a little relieved about that, but still suspicious.
“She’ll do what she has to do to succeed,” Aunt Mae Louise promised him. “She knows how important it is now,” she added, stabbing me with her penetrating glare.
“That’s good,” he said. “Let me take Phoebe down the corridor to meet Mr. Cody, the remedial reading teacher. You’ll find him to be a very good teacher, Phoebe. He has had lots of success.”
“Go on,” Aunt Mae Louise ordered, and I stood up and followed Mr. VanVleet out.
“I know how hard it is to start somewhere new,” he said as we walked. “You don’t hesitate to come to me with any problems first, okay?”
Here’s my problem, I wanted to stop and say. My mother has run off with a cheap con man. My father is too weak to deal with anything and pawned me off on my ogre aunt and uncle. I feel like Cinderella without any hope of any prince and never a glass slipper. Do you have a pill or something that will make all that go away?
Instead, I was silent and walked along listening to him describe the school, some of its important rules and regulations, and why I could still turn my life around and be successful at something.
Teachers, I decided, live in a world of fantasy, a fantasy of their own making. If they blinked too hard, they would see their students for who and what they were and they would get so discouraged, they would run out the door. At least that was how I had seen the teachers in my school. Most of them looked defeated and taught to the one or two students who showed any promise at all. The rest were just a nagging reminder of how ineffective they were, and who wants to be reminded of failure?
But that was exactly what was happening to me at the moment. Failure was being rubbed in my face.