The Different Girl by Gordon Dahlquist

Author:Gordon Dahlquist
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Published: 2013-02-21T08:00:00+00:00

7.

It was three days until I could visit Caroline’s spot in the dune grass. The days in between went almost like always, with smocks and breakfast, and walks and class and naps and more class and dinner and the porch and finally sleep. The difference was May, whether she was at breakfast or still sleeping, whether she sat with us on the porch, or whether she went walking alone to the woods. Most of all, the four of us felt May’s presence from Robbert and Irene.

They would go in the other room or walk outside and close the door, but sometimes the words came without warning, unexpected even to them. Irene would give Robbert a look and he would snap, just like he’d burned his finger on a wire.

“Look, I haven’t heard anything.”

“But what does that mean?”

“Irene—it could still be the storm. It could be their receiver—”

“You’re sure about ours.” All four of us remembered where Robbert had been with the tools.

“I am.”

“And what if it’s something else?”

And that was when Irene’s gaze went through the window to the classroom where May lay still asleep.

We spent that morning talking about words and how May’s words didn’t sound like Robbert’s or Irene’s, or ours. It wasn’t anything we had noticed, because we’d been able to understand her perfectly well, but today Irene focused on all the variations. One example was how May didn’t pronounce the g in words that had “ing” at the end. Another was how her letter s was spoken with an invisible t in front of it, so “sad” became “tsad.” Irene explained where May’s tongue was placed inside her mouth to make each sound, and showed us with her own mouth how it happened. Robbert’s questions were about how our hearing turned a wrong sound into a right one. He made up sentences as if May were saying them to test our making sense.

Irene explained that ways of speaking came from different places, and that each way was like a sign announcing who a person was and what their life was mostly like and what they were most likely to believe. Isobel asked what May’s way said about May, but before Irene could answer, Eleanor asked what Irene’s way said about Irene, and then Caroline asked why, if there was an agreed upon best way—the way we spoke, for example—anyone spoke a different way at all?

Irene held up her hand, which she did when we asked too many things at once. “May’s life has been different. She hasn’t been to the same kind of school.”

“Why not?” asked Isobel.

“Because she lived on a boat. She wasn’t in one place.”

“Why didn’t her uncle Will teach her?” asked Caroline. “Or his friend Cat?”

“I’m sure they did,” Irene replied. “But they had their own work. And our school here is special. You all know more than May does. Just because she’s lived in places you haven’t, it doesn’t mean that what she thinks about things is right.”

“What does she think that isn’t?” I asked, very much wanting to know.

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