School of Charm Page 5

  I looked at Mama, waiting for her to step between us and tell me that she once had a white dress that was covered from top to bottom in grass and that she scrubbed for two days to get it out. But she got it out.

  Instead Mama frowned and yanked the dress over Ruthie’s head. She started inspecting the stains and closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I’m used to you being a tomboy, Brenda, but don’t pull Ruthie into your shenanigans. Go put on some new clothes, Ruthie. And you heard your grandmother, Brenda. Get changed.”

  Ruthie scampered up the stairs. I stared at Mama in disbelief. She’d never cared what I wore before. But I followed Ruthie up and threw open my closet. I hadn’t noticed the three stupid, ugly dresses hanging in there before. One of them was dotted with red cherries, like I was supposed to be some kind of sundae. The next one was purple with a tiny rainbow across the chest. The one I picked to put on was the ugliest of all, just to show Grandma how dumb this dress-up-for-dinner idea was. The dress was brown, like dirt, with yellow ducks holding umbrellas. Was this Grandma’s way of telling me she didn’t like me? Guess Mama hadn’t made Grandma promise to get along with me.

  I came back down and Grandma nodded for me to sit.

  “You look very nice, Chip,” Mama said. “Aren’t you going to thank your grandmother?”

  “Thank you, Grandma.” For making me look like the biggest dummy in all the United States of America.

  “Yes, that’s real, real nice, Chip. Just perfect for you,” Charlene said, the corner of her mouth twitching. “And what a nice bracelet. Where’d you get that? Your boyfriend back home?”

  I gripped my wrist. “He’s not my boyfriend. I found it,” I said quickly. “Out in the woods when I was exploring.”

  Charlene pushed her salad around with her fork. “Exploring.” She rolled her eyes. “Listen, I know you’re different from us, Chip, but don’t try to make Ruthie be like you. She’s one of us. She doesn’t get dirty. She likes pretty things.”

  Her words hit me in the stomach. Charlene had never said anything like that to me before.

  Mama’s fingers rubbed her temples and she let out a deep breath.

  Grandma started humming again. “Charlene’s right. The tomboy thing isn’t going to work down here, Brenda.”

  “Chip’s not like regular girls, Grandma. She can’t help it. Her best friend was a boy. She plays in the mud.” Charlene pointed her fork at me and let the silence hang for a moment. “Now, Ruthie’s pageant material. Chip doesn’t even have a talent. I’ve been singing and dancing since I was Ruthie’s age. And we should get her started on lessons too.”

  I opened my mouth to tell them about Miss Vernie’s school, but clamped it shut. I wasn’t going back there to join a stupid pageant; I was going because Miss Vernie’s woods were nice and she was, too, and because I couldn’t stand to be in this house longer than I had to, especially if I was supposed to be getting along with Grandma while she was busy buying me ugly dresses.

  “You know, girls, the Miss Dogwood Festival actually has three divisions: the Miss division, the Junior Miss division, and the Little Miss.” Grandma slapped her hands on the table. “We should enter Ruthie! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. There’s still time; the deadline to enter is in two days.”

  “Ruthie, you want to join a pageant like Char-Char?” Charlene leaned across the table and tickled Ruthie’s cheek.

  Ruthie giggled and nodded her big head of curls like it was on a spring. Even though she was five, she usually acted like she was two. Smart girl. Ruthie had no problems fitting in as long as she acted like a baby. Everyone loves babies.

  “Excellent.” Grandma clapped then rested a hand on Mama’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll pay for Ruthie’s dress.” She squeezed her hands together. “Oh, you two are beauty queens for sure. Just like your mama and me.”

  I sat slumped at the table and stabbed the potato on my plate again and again and again. If Daddy were here, I wouldn’t have cared at all what they were saying. But there was nothing else to listen to but their stupid blabber. Was this Daddy’s way of telling me, Forget that wish, kid, you’ll never belong here? Grandma had come right out and said it—I wouldn’t fit in down here if I was a tomboy, and that’s who I was.

  I slipped a handful of collard greens into my pocket and quietly slid from the table. I went to my room and crouched in the closet next to Earl. “You hate it here, don’t you?” I asked him, sprinkling in the green bits of leaf. He didn’t open his eyes. “It’s because you don’t belong here, you know. It’s not your fault you ended up here like this. And it’s not your fault that Grandma doesn’t like you.”

  “Maybe he hates it here because he’s living in a plastic bowl,” Charlene said, leaning on the doorway.

  I jumped. “Get out! Give me some privacy!”

  She rolled her eyes. “Get a life, loser.” She laughed and left my room.

  I slammed the door and crawled into bed. I watched the sun slip away, waiting for Mama to tuck me in. But she didn’t come. Mama always tucked me in. Maybe she forgot. Or maybe she was angry at me for making Grandma mad at dinner. For not keeping my promise to get along.

  I glared at the owl on my night table. “What are you looking at?” He just kept staring at me, probably wondering what a girl like me was doing in a house full of beauty queens.

  chapter seven

  “WHAT HAVE WE HERE?” MISS VERNIE PEEKED IN MY bowl.

  “That’s my turtle. Is it okay I brought him? I have to take care of him.” I’d stayed awake most of the night, worried that Grandma would set him loose—or worse. Bringing him to Miss Vernie’s seemed like the best solution, even though it’d been hard walking up the street without all the water sloshing out of the bowl. Miss Vernie set her hand on my shoulder. It felt nice. Grandma hadn’t so much as shaken my hand since I’d been at her house. “Of course,” Miss Vernie said, looking down at the bowl on the deck. “I wonder what he’ll learn in charm school?” She clapped her hands together and laughed. “Leave him up here while you girls work, Brenda.”

  Dana and Karen flashed each other a look. “Miss Vernie, she likes to be called Chip. It’s her nickname,” Karen said with a serious nod.

  “It’s not really a proper pageant name, though, is it?” Dana asked.

  “I’m not joining the pageant,” I said, hooking my thumbs in the pockets of my shorts.

  “It’s a wonderful name,” Miss Vernie said. “A girl is most beautiful when she’s herself. We’ll call you Chip.” She looked at me for a moment and her voice got softer. “Just so you know, tomorrow is the deadline for joining the pageant. If you change your mind.”

  “Well, I won’t. I don’t do that kind of stuff.” I shrugged. “So, what’s up for today, Miss Vernie?”

  Her eyes brightened. “We’re cleaning out my pond.”

  “You have a pond?” Dana asked.

  “Out back. Follow me, girls.” She took dainty steps down the stairs and headed for one of her paths. A group of hummingbirds flitted past us.

  Karen grabbed my arm. “Why don’t you let your turtle go in the pond?”

  I sucked in a breath. The solution had found me after all. He could go to Miss Vernie’s pond, and not the toilet or the animal stuffer’s or the soup kettle. But I shook my head. “He needs special care.” Turtles might live in ponds, but this was a New York turtle born much too early. I couldn’t let him go here in a totally different state. He’d probably die. I left him on the deck like Miss Vernie said.

  We went to her shed and got shovels, then followed Miss Vernie down one of her shady paths into a clearing. The pond waited like a pot of liquid gold, sunk into the earth. It was rimmed with cattails. Two dragonflies darted after each other, skimming the surface. The pond was smaller than the one we had back home, but just looking at it made my heart squeeze tight. Billy would have jumped right in.

  “Girls, I’m hoping you can remove these cattails.” Miss Vernie waved her hand toward the water. “Sometime
s a thing just grows and grows until it takes over. I know it looks like a huge project, but I’m certain you can do it. Just pile ’em up off to the side.” She smiled and walked away.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Dana said, staring at the pond and shaking her head. The sun highlighted red glints in her puffy Afro. She stood with her arms crossed for a while and then shrugged. “Maybe they’ll pop out of the water real easy.” I liked how Dana was always ready to tackle Miss Vernie’s jobs.

  We glared at the thick growth circling the pond. “Sure are a lot of them,” I said. “But how hard could it be?” I tugged on one and got my answer: hard. I reached into the muck and grabbed the roots. The cattails were linked together in a big web. “We’re going to have to use the shovels to dig them out.” My arms were already covered in mud up to my elbows.

  “You mean we’re going to have to step in that gunk?” Karen backed away from the pond. “I don’t like getting dirty. My mom doesn’t like me getting dirty either. I’m not getting in there.”

  I picked up one of the shovels. “Unless you’ve got some other idea, you’ll have to get in.” I set the blade between the reeds and jumped on the shovel. It sunk into the mud and I felt the roots beneath me split. I tried to pull them out, but they wouldn’t give up until I dug underneath. Sloshing out of the water, I lugged the hunk of cattails to the shore. I fell back, panting and looking at the puffy clouds gliding by. Tiny rocks on the ground pricked my elbows. “Okay. This is hard.”

  “How are we ever going to do all this?” Karen whined.

  A cicada buzzed in a nearby tree as we sat and sized up all those weeds. I stared so long my eyes started crossing, and I imagined huge eyes were staring back at me. I shook myself out of my daze.

  Dana pushed herself up from the ground. “It’s not going to get done just sittin’ here.” She waded into the water and winced as she sunk into the cold muck. She tugged at the plants, probably testing them to make sure I wasn’t a weakling. She trudged back out, stirring up the mud. The pond was no longer shimmering. It was cloudy and dark. Dana grabbed a shovel and copied my move, straining the muscles in her arms as she heaved the clump of cattails. Her dark, wet skin glistened in the sun.

  I couldn’t help noticing how drops of water nestled in her puffy dark hair like jewels.

  She stopped working and narrowed her eyes at me. “You just gonna watch me do all the work?”

  “No,” I said quickly. I grabbed a shovel and joined her, and we each worked on our second bunch. Karen stood on shore with her arms crossed over her belly.

  “Aren’t you going to help?” Dana asked her.

  “That’s gross.”

  “How do you know? You’re not even in here!” Dana splashed water at her. I had a feeling Dana would have fun exploring the woods with me if we ever became friends.

  I pulled up a handful of the dark gray mud and mashed it between my hands. It felt like clay. “It’s not so bad. It’s squishy.”

  Dana copied me. “Cool. Feel it!” She tossed a blob of it at Karen. It splattered at her feet.

  Karen wrinkled her nose. “Quit it!”

  “Don’t be a stick in the mud—get it?” Dana threw another handful at her and Karen jumped to the side. I scooped up some, throwing it so it wouldn’t actually hit Karen. But Dana nailed her in the leg.

  “Now you’ve gotta get in and wash off,” I said.

  Karen stomped into the water. She made sure to splash us as she cleaned up. We splashed back and shook off like dogs and slapped the water to make a big spray. Soon the three of us were giggling and pushing each other. We fell on our butts and settled in the muck. We stopped laughing and started relaxing under the hot sun, our clothes and hair soaked.

  “This mud is actually nice and cool,” Karen said. “But I don’t get why Miss Vernie has us doing this.” She sculpted a little bowl out of the clay and set it on the shore to dry.

  I copied her and made a small turtle friend for Earl.

  Dana scooped up some and streaked it across her cheeks. “Maybe this is for a beauty mask, and Miss Vernie was hoping we’d find it.”

  This got Karen’s interest. She brought up a handful and poked through it, probably checking for critters or stones. She shrugged and smeared it across her face, tilting her face to the sun. “I’m going to let mine dry before I rinse it off. That’s what my mom does with her blue beauty mask. She waits until it’s all crumbly. I don’t think it works, though. She still has wrinkles.”

  “It doesn’t get rid of wrinkles; it’s supposed to make you glow,” Dana said. She rubbed a handful across her forehead and down her nose.

  I did it too. The cool mud spread easily across my skin.

  “What do I look like?” Karen asked.

  “Like the creature from the black lagoon,” I said, laughing.

  We bent over to peer at our reflections in the water. We were quiet, staring at our faces: all dark gray, all the same color. My eyes flicked over to Dana. She looked lighter than her normal skin color; I looked darker, and you couldn’t see my birthmark. The three of us all seemed exactly alike, standing there huddled over the silvery surface of the pond. It was like I wasn’t even looking at myself but at someone else instead.

  Too bad I couldn’t bring some mud home to smear on Grandma and Mama and my sisters. Then we could all be the same too. The thing was, all of them were already alike. I was the only one who didn’t fit, like Charlene said. At Grandma’s, I felt like a thistle in a vase of soft, pretty flowers.

  I looked back and really examined my reflection. Something welled up in my heart. Something about standing there with Dana and Karen, all of us looking like each other, made me grin so hard it hurt. The three of us belonged together in that pond and I didn’t want to get out. This was the kind of feeling I wanted to have with my family.

  “Let’s get back to work,” Dana said, breaking our silence. We climbed out of the pond and hacked away at the cattails again, then cleaned our faces once the mud turned crispy on our cheeks.

  “Lunch, girls!” Miss Vernie shouted from the top of the path.

  We had cleared at least twenty feet of the cattails. But the pond was huge. “Let’s walk around it and figure out how many feet we have left,” Dana said.

  We walked slowly, placing our toes directly in front of our heels, walking in a wobbly line until we worked our way around the rim.

  Dana frowned. “About eight hundred and twenty-four feet. We’re never gonna get this finished.”

  “Maybe it’ll get easier,” I suggested.

  “Even if we get fifty feet done each day, we’re talking sixteen days.” Dana shook her head.

  “Let’s just go eat,” said Karen.

  OUR MOUTHS WERE STUFFED WITH CHICKEN SALAD when Miss Vernie surprised us with the big news. “I see you’ve all learned something today. Look at your bracelets, girls.”

  We dropped our forks and felt for our charms. The links of my chain were packed with mud, but she was right: My mirror was missing. Karen and Dana were both missing the same charm.

  “That’s strange,” Miss Vernie said. “Usually my students lose different charms at different times. Must’ve been a lot going on out there in that pond.” She looked at us one at a time.

  We stayed quiet and I shifted in my seat, my shorts still damp from the water.

  Miss Vernie raised her eyebrows. “What do you think you learned today?” She pressed her fingers together in front of her like a little steeple.

  “You’re the one who sent us out there,” Dana said. “Didn’t you have something in mind?”

  Miss Vernie folded her hands in her lap. “There’s a lesson to be learned in everything. And it was your lesson to be learned. You’d know better than me what it was.”

  The three of us swapped confused looks. We learned how hard it was to pull out a cattail. That wasn’t it, though. I waited for Miss Vernie to fill the silence, but she just watched us, waiting.

  Finally Karen spoke. “I guess I learne
d I’m not just a girlie girl. It was neat goofing around in the mud. I’ve never done that before.” She still had faint streaks of gray on her neck. “It was really fun!” Big dimples grooved her chubby cheeks as she grinned.

  “What have you been doing the past twelve years—sitting on the couch in a dress?” Dana asked. “Never got muddy before … ,” she mumbled.

  Karen stuck out her tongue. “What was your lesson?”

  Dana poked at a mandarin orange in her ambrosia salad. “I thought those cattails would be easy to pull out of the mud. But they were hard.”

  “That was your big charm lesson?” Karen grabbed another roll.

  “I think it’s a lovely lesson. Some things are very different from the way they appear—hard when they look easy, soft when they look hard. People too,” Miss Vernie said to Dana, who was nodding slowly.

  My turn was up next. My heart was pounding and the thick scent of gardenias blooming next to the porch crept down my throat. What had I learned? I got muddy all the time; that was nothing new. Maybe my charm had come off by mistake. I wiped my hands on my shorts, trying to think. But I did feel like I’d learned something. A little bubble had been growing inside me since we’d been working together in the pond. I looked at the girls, who were waiting for my answer.

  Then I thought about the mud. How we all looked the same for a moment. How the pond was like a mirror showing three girls, so different but so similar, who all belonged there together. I had such a nice warm feeling just remembering it.

  “Chip, what about you?” Miss Vernie asked, sipping her tea.

  I took a big bite of salad. Dana and Karen watched me as I looked down and traced a finger over my bracelet. When I first came to the school, I didn’t think it was the right place for someone like me. But that feeling had changed. I swallowed. “I guess I learned that you can see yourself in a different way you never imagined.”

  Different. The word jumped right out like a snake hiding under a log you’d just rolled over. Different. I mouthed the word silently. I was the different one in my family. Me—not Grandma or Mama or my sisters. They were all the same. They weren’t going to change. No way would they be joining me in a muddy pond. But could I change?