Girlchild by Hassman Tupelo

Author:Hassman, Tupelo [Hassman, Tupelo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780374162573
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

slow learner

Halfway through fifth grade, Mr. Lombroso calls Mama to the school to talk to her again. Mama does her hair and wears a blouse and clean blue jeans and Mr. Lombroso wears his patient face and gives me his pen cup. It says I Heart Bingo and I want to steal his letter opener that has the twin roaring heads of the Lions Club on its handle. Instead, I sit on the brown, scratchy carpet and write the alphabet once with each of his pens while Mr. Lombroso shows Mama another piece of paper with a bar graph like the Reno skyline and my name at the top. I draw a line of O’s, blue-pink-black. He says how glad he is that I’m “feeling better since my sickness,” and Mama nods quickly at the lie we both told, all of us told, a story for why I went so quiet through most of third grade so well-crafted it’s still remembered almost two years later. Mr. Lombroso talks to her about my amazing percentiles, I connect my O’s and make an amazing centipede. The scores, he says, “are an indication of serious college potential.”

The only person we know going to college is Alex on Family Ties, but Mr. Lombroso sounds so happy that Mama tries to be happy too. That’s not how she looks, though, and at the end of all his talking she says, “But what do we do now?” He takes a deep breath and starts over again, using different words that don’t sound foreign on Calle soil, that don’t darken the room like a cloud of summer mosquitoes, leaving us slapping at air. Finally Mama catches one and holds on. The one that buzzes at the end of this sentence, stinger ready: the Washoe County Spelling Bee.

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