Come a Stranger by Cynthia Voigt

Author:Cynthia Voigt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

CHAPTER 15

Mina didn’t know what Mr. Shipp thought of her, except that he approved. She knew he was a married man, and he loved his wife, and he had a family, and she was years too young for him. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t love him. But sometimes she wished she’d never met him, or he hadn’t been the one to come pick her up that day in Wilmington. Sometimes she envied Kat the way she moved from crush to crush, with no boy ever really mattering to her for himself. Kat was having a good time growing up.

Sometimes, Mina just daydreamed about Tamer Shipp. Some of her daydreams were goopier than others. Often, he was there in her night dreams, and now she knew why. She wondered if she was ever in his dreams, although she doubted it. She wondered what he’d think of her and how she was doing in school. She thought he’d approve. Half the reason she was working like she was was for Tamer Shipp.

She paid attention in classes, not surprised that she knew any answer the teachers asked for. She did her homework, and then some. She did a lot of reading on the side and a lot of that was the books her sixth grade teacher had recommended to her, books about blacks and books by blacks. Math, Science, Literature, Language Arts, the perfect papers just kept rolling back to her. It didn’t surprise Mina that it was so easy for her.

She also made sure that everybody in the class knew who she was, Mina Smiths, knew that Mina Smiths wasn’t going to come in second to anybody, knew that Mina Smiths was someone to be reckoned with, t-rou-ble. They thought she had to be who they wanted her to be, but they didn’t know anything about her.

Mr. Shipp knew something about her, she thought.

She wondered what he would make of Mr. Bryce and the Social Studies class. The course was the history of Maryland, with Fridays given over to current events, when everybody had to report on a newspaper article. She knew what she made of Mr. Bryce, who ran a military-strict classroom where everything had to be done exactly his way, even the place where the date went on your papers and the way the date was written, first the number, then the month, then the year. There was only one particular set of words that made an answer right. Social Studies met at the end of the day. Mr. Bryce came in expecting them to behave badly, seventh graders at the end of the school day, and he sat on anything he thought might be trouble before it could even begin.

Mr. Bryce was an overweight middle-aged man whose hair was thinning and who had the big belly of a man whose once athletic body hadn’t been exercised for a long time. At first, he’d call on Mina, but after a couple of days he dismissed her questions, without seeming to hear them even though he was looking right at her.

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