My Mother's Daughter by Perdita Felicien

Author:Perdita Felicien [Felicien, Perdita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

At Glengrove Public School, I was surrounded by more black and brown faces than I had ever seen in a classroom at once. Suddenly I wasn’t the only one. I was only eight and too young to recognize our town of sixty-eight thousand as diverse. But it meant that I played with little girls named Munira and Seema who wore colourful kurtis and whose long braided ponytails brushed the smalls of their backs like wayward whips as we chased boys with Trinidadian accents at lunchtime. In Mrs. Baker’s grade two class, I was seated with a girl named Davita, whose parents were from India, and her best friend Marsha, whose parents had immigrated from Jamaica. The two girls let me use their school supplies and even took me along to the jungle gym with them at recess. Davita got another kid to spin the three of us on the tire swing until everything was so blurry that I felt the contents of my breakfast pool sour in my mouth. But I dared not tell them to stop. What was a little queasiness with Davita and Marsha being so much fun?

My gym teacher was Mrs. Arthurs, and our class had to participate in Canada Fitness, a national standardized evaluation program completed at schools across the country. For endurance, we ran two full laps around our school, nearly 800 metres. When I had completed that distance, it felt like the screws that kept my knees sturdy had been loosened and the bones replaced with cooked spaghetti noodles. But in the 100 metres sprint, I beat everyone, including a boy named Tim who everyone thought was the fastest kid in our class. For a while after he had lost to me our classmates bugged him to have a rematch. I was willing, but he would just drop his head, his long bangs falling into his eyes, and say, “Nah, I don’t wanna.”

After we completed the fitness unit, our marks were sent off for analysis. Our results and prizes were mailed back to the school a few weeks later. The day we received our results, our class sat in short rows, one behind the other, on the gym floor. Mrs. Arthurs explained that there were four achievement levels: bronze, silver, gold, and excellence. After calling most of the students up one at a time to receive their awards, she said she had something very important to announce. There was only one student in our entire class to earn the highest level possible. All our ears perked up at that. Who was this magical person?

“Congratulations, Perdita!” Mrs. Arthurs said excitedly.

I sat there for a few seconds before it hit me that I was this special person. My face broke into the happiest of smiles.

“Come up here and get your prize, kiddo,” Mrs. Arthurs said, waving me up. My classmates erupted into applause, making me feel like I would burst. Mrs. Arthurs handed me a certificate with my name on it and a round red badge with shiny gold letters that said “Excellence.

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