The Great Gilly Hopkins

They paused before the door marked “Harris-6.” Mr. Evans knocked, and a tall tea-colored woman, crowned with a bush of black hair, opened the door. She smiled down on the three of them, because she was even taller than the principal.

Gilly shrank back, bumping into Trotter’s huge breast, which made her jump forward again quickly. God, on top of everything else, the teacher was black.

No one seemed to take notice of her reaction, unless you counted a flash of brightness in Miss Harris’s dark eyes.

Trotter patted Gilly’s arm, murmured something that ended in “honey,” and then she and the principal floated backward, closing Gilly into Harris-6. The teacher led her to an empty desk in the middle of the classroom, asked for Gilly’s jacket, which she handed over to another girl to hang on the coatrack at the back of the room. She directed Gilly to sit down, and then went up and settled herself at the large teacher’s desk to glance through the handful of papers Mr. Evans had given her.

In a moment she looked up, a warm smile lighting her face. “Galadriel Hopkins. What a beautiful name! From Tolkien, of course.”

“No,” muttered Gilly. “Hollywood Gardens.”

Miss Harris laughed a sort of golden laugh. “No, I mean your name—Galadriel. It’s the name of a great queen in a book by a man named Tolkien. But, of course, you know that.”

Hell. No one had ever told her that her name came from a book. Should she pretend she knew all about it or play dumb?

“I’d like to call you Galadriel, if you don’t mind. It’s such a lovely name.”

“No!” Everyone was looking at Gilly peculiarly. She must have yelled louder than she intended to. “I would prefer,” she said tightly, “to be called Gilly.”

“Yes”—Miss Harris’s voice was more steel than gold now—“Yes. Gilly, it is then. Well”—she turned her smile on the rest of the class—“Where were we?”

The clamor of their answers clashed in Gilly’s brain. She started to put her head down on the desk, but someone was shoving a book into her face.

It wasn’t fair—nothing was fair. She had once seen a picture in an old book of a red fox on a high rock surrounded by snarling dogs. It was like that. She was smarter than all of them, but they were too many. They had her surrounded, and in their stupid ways, they were determined to wear her down.

Miss Harris was leaning over her. Gilly pulled away as far as she could.

“Did you do division with fractions at Hollywood Gardens?”

Gilly shook her head. Inside she seethed. It was bad enough having to come to this broken-down old school but to be behind—to seem dumber than the rest of the kids—to have to appear a fool in front of…. Almost half the class was black. And she would look dumb to them. A bunch of—

“Why don’t you bring your chair up to my desk, and we’ll work on it?”

Gilly snatched up her chair and beat Miss Harris to the front of the room. She’d show them!

At recesstime Monica Bradley, one of the other white girls in the class, was supposed to look after her on the playground. But Monica was more interested in leaning against the building and talking with her friends, which she did, keeping her back toward Gilly as she giggled and gossiped with two other sixth-grade girls, one of whom was black with millions of tiny braids all over her head. Like some African bushwoman. Not that Gilly cared. Why should she? They could giggle their stupid lives away, and she’d never let it bother her. She turned her back on them. That would show them.

Just then a ball jerked loose from the basketball game nearby and rushed toward her. She grabbed it. Balls were friends. She hugged it and ran over to the basket and threw it up, but she had been in too much of a hurry. It kissed the rim but refused to go in for her. Angrily she jumped and caught it before it bounced. She was dimly aware of a protest from the players, but they were boys and mostly shorter than she, so not worthy of notice. She shot again, this time with care. It arched and sank cleanly. Sh

e pushed someone out of the way and grabbed it just below the net.

“Hey! Who you think you are?”

One of the boys, a black as tall as she, tried to pull the ball from her hands. She spun around, knocking him to the concrete, and shot again, banking the ball off the backboard neatly into the net. She grabbed it once more.

Now all the boys were after her. She began to run across the playground laughing and clutching the ball to her chest. She could hear the boys screaming behind her, but she was too fast for them. She ran in and out of hopscotch games and right through a jump rope, all the way back to the basketball post where she shot again, missing wildly in her glee.

The boys did not watch for the rebound. They leaped upon her. She was on her back, scratching and kicking for all she was worth. They were yelping like hurt puppies.

“Hey! Hey! What’s going on here?”

Miss Harris towered above them. The fighting evaporated under her glare. She marched all seven of them to the principal’s office. Gilly noted with satisfaction a long red line down the tall boy’s cheek. She’d actually drawn blood in the fracas. The boys looked a lot worse than she felt. Six to one—pretty good odds even for the great Gilly Hopkins.

Mr. Evans lectured the boys about fighting on the playground and then sent them back to their homerooms. He kept Gilly longer.

“Gilly.” He said her name as though it were a whole sentence by itself. Then he just sat back in his chair, his fingertips pressed together, and looked at her.

She smoothed her hair and waited, staring him in the eye. People hated that—you staring them down as though they were the ones who had been bad. They didn’t know how to deal with it. Sure enough. The principal looked away first.