I was in the fifth grade, so my day was divided into periods, with different teachers and classrooms for each. For the first period, I had West Virginia history. History was one of my favorite subjects. I was coiled and ready to raise my hand as soon as the teacher asked a question I could answer, but he stood at the front of the room next to a map of West Virginia, with all fifty-five counties outlined, and spent the entire class pointing to counties and asking students to identify them. In my second period, we passed the hour watching a film of the football game that Welch High had played several days earlier. Neither of those teachers introduced me to the class; they seemed as uncertain as the kids about how to act around a stranger.
My next class was English for students with learning disabilities. Miss Caparossi started out by informing the class that it might surprise them to learn some people in this world thought they were better than other people. “They’re convinced they’re so special that they don’t need to follow the rules other people have to follow,” she said. “like presenting their school records when they enroll in a new school.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “Who thinks that’s not fair?” she asked the class.
All the kids except me raised their hands.
“I see our new student doesn’t agree,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to explain yourself?”
I was sitting in the second-to-last row. The students in front of me swiveled their heads around to stare. I decided to dazzle them with the answer from the Ergo Game.
“Insufficient information to draw a conclusion,” I said.
“Oh, really?” Miss Caparossi asked. “Is that what they say in a big city like Phoenix?” She pronounced it. “Feeeeenix.” Then she turned to the class and said in a high, mocking voice. “Insufficient information to draw a conclusion.”
The class laughed violently.
I felt something sharp and painful between my shoulder blades and turned around. The tall black girl with the almond eyes was sitting at the desk behind me. Holding up the sharp pencil she had jabbed into my back, she smiled the same malicious smile I’d seen in the playground. I looked for Brian in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but fourth-graders were on a different schedule, so I sat by myself and bit into the sandwich Erma had made for me that morning. It was tasteless and greasy. I pulled apart the two slices of Wonder bread. Inside was a thin smear of lard. That was it. No meat, no cheese, not even a slice of pickle. Even so, I chewed slowly, staring intently at my bite marks in the bread to delay as long as possible the moment I would have to leave the cafeteria and go out to the playground. When I was the last student left in the cafeteria, the janitor, who was putting the chairs on the tabletops so the floor could be mopped, told me it was time to go.
Outside, a thin mist hung in the still air. I pulled the sides of my lamb’s wool coat together. Three black girls, led by the one with the almond eyes, started moving toward me as soon as they saw me. A half-dozen other girls followed. Within moments, I was surrounded.
“You think you better than us?” the tall girl asked.
“No,” I said. “I think we’re all equal.”
“You think you as good as me?” She punched at me. When, instead of raising my hands in defense, I kept clutching my coat closed, she realized it had no buttons. “This girl ain’t got no buttons on her coat!” she shouted. That seemed to give her the license she needed. She pushed me in the chest, and I fell backward. I tried to get up, but all three girls started kicking me. I rolled away into a puddle, shouting for them to quit and hitting back at the feet coming at me from all sides. The other girls had closed in a circle around us and none of the teachers could see what was going on. There was no stopping those girls until they’d had their fill.
WHEN WE ALL GOT home that afternoon, Mom and Dad were eager to hear about our first day.
“It was good,” I said. I didn’t want to tell Mom the truth. I was in no mood to hear one of her lectures about the power of positive thinking.
“See?” she said. “I told you you’d fit right in.”
Brian shrugged off Mom and Dad’s questions, and Lori didn’t want to talk about her day at all.
“How were the other kids?” I asked her later.
“Okay,” she said, but she turned away, and that was the end of the conversation. The bullying continued every day for weeks. The tall girl, whose name was Dinitia Hewitt, watched me with her smile while we all waited on the asphalt playground for classes to start. At lunch, I ate my lard sandwiches with paralytic slowness, but sooner or later, the janitor started putting the chairs up on the tables. I walked outside trying to hold my head high, and Dinitia and her gang surrounded me and it began.
As we fought, they called me poor and ugly and dirty, and it was hard to argue the point. I had three dresses to my name, all hand-me-downs or from a thrift store, which meant each week I had to wear two of them twice. They were so worn from countless washings that the threads were beginning to separate. We were also always dirty. Not dry-dirty like we’d been in the desert, but grimy-dirty and smudged with oily dust from the coal-burning stove. Erma allowed us only one bath a week in four inches of water that had been heated on the kitchen stove and that all of us kids had to share.
I thought of discussing the fighting with Dad, but I didn’t want to sound like a whiner. Also, he’d rarely been sober since we had arrived in Welch, and I was afraid that if I told him, he’d show up at school snockered and make things even worse.
I did try to talk to Mom. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the beatings, fearing that if I did, she’d try to butt in and she’d also only make things worse. I did say that these three black girls were giving me a hard time because we were so poor. Mom told me I should tell them there was nothing wrong with being poor, that Abraham Lincoln, the greatest president this country had ever seen, came from a dirt-poor family. She also said I should tell them Martin Luther King, Jr., would be ashamed of their behavior. Even though I knew these high-minded arguments would get me nowhere, I tried them anyway — Martin Luther King would be ashamed! — and they made the three girls shriek with laughter as they pushed me to the ground.
Lying in Stanley’s bed at night with Lori, Brian, and Maureen, I concocted revenge scenarios. I imagined myself like Dad in his air force days, whupping the entire lot of them. After school, I’d go out to the woodpile next to the basement and practice karate chops and dropkicks on the kindling while laying down some pretty wicked curse words. But I also kept thinking about Dinitia, trying to make sense of her. I hoped for a while to befriend her. I’d seen Dinitia smile a few times with genuine warmth, and it transformed her face. With a smile like that, she had to have some good in her, but I couldn’t figure out how to get her to shine it my way. About a month after I’d started school, I was walking up some steps to a park at the top of the hill when I heard a low, furious barking coming from the other side of the World War I memorial. I ran up the stairs and saw a big, lathered-up mongrel cornering a little black kid of about five or six against the monument. The kid kept giving kicks at the dog as it barked and lunged at him. The kid was looking over at the tree line on the far side of the park, and I could tell he was calculating the chances of making it over there.