The Light Pirate(35)
Chapter 36
On Monday, the school assembly is solemn. The principal, a balding man the students call Mr. Gorgich, makes announcements about things that have changed since Valerie: PE is canceled for the foreseeable future, due to the live oak that fell through the gymnasium’s roof. Outdoor sports are canceled, obviously, given the flooded fields. And the sixth grade teacher has “decided not to return,” which means that the fifth and sixth grade classes will merge. Mr. Gorgich has more to say, but by then the room is awash with murmurs about the missing teacher. He soldiers through a brief list of remaining after-school programs. No one listens. Finally, he bangs his fist on the podium to regain their attention and asks for a moment of silence to commemorate the anniversary of Rudder’s most devastating disaster on record. The most lives lost in a single day. He doesn’t say Hurricane Wanda outright, but he doesn’t need to. Wanda can feel the eyes burning into her. She can hear the scattered whispers. It’s like this every year.
Afterward, her classroom is full of newcomers. The sixth graders crowd in and the fifth graders shrink to accommodate them. Ms. Landers, the young teacher with pink gums and a wide smile that is often genuine but today is fake, looks overwhelmed. “I wasn’t expecting to…um, merge the grades, so you’ll have to bear with me. I think we’ll do two curriculums still, and just try and…share. Somehow. We’ll figure it out.” Her students, new and old, are all thinking the same thing: It’s only a matter of time before she leaves them, too. Ms. Landers instructs the fifth graders to quietly read a chapter in their history books about the Seminole Wars while she holds whisper-conferences with the sixth graders, trying to figure out where they left off before Valerie.
Initially, Wanda is relieved by this assignment—she likes it when they all read quietly at their desks—but today she is having a hard time concentrating and this chapter confuses her. Phyllis has already started teaching her about the Seminoles, and tribes who might have lived in Rudder even farther back. The Jeaga, or possibly the Tequesta. Or maybe, with Gulf Coast territories ranging all the way to the Atlantic in some places, the Calusa people. And even farther back than that—so many thousands of years ago no one remembers what they called themselves.
Wanda turns a page to find a painting of white men in crisp blue uniforms valiantly fighting and tragically dying, while a menacing horde of Seminoles bears down on them in the distance. Examining it, she has questions, but she’ll save them for Phyllis. Over the top of her book, she watches Amanda and Brie and Corey wait their turn to talk to Ms. Landers. Mick is absent—he’s been gone for a few days now. Hopefully for good. This is how her peers slip away to new lives; they just disappear. When her lone friend, Jules, left last year, the two of them had a few days to say goodbye, but that was all. When people decide to go, they go. The homes here are so worthless the banks don’t even bother foreclosing. Once the decision is made, all that’s left is to pack up their cars and drive away. There is a contagious panic running through the town lately, a fear that if they don’t get out now, they never will. Wanda feels it—how could she not—but she also knows she’s not going anywhere.
From this vantage point, her three remaining tormentors from the Edge look smaller than she remembers. They seem almost vulnerable up there at the front of the room. Corey’s hair is uneven, as if he cut it himself, and he can’t stop fidgeting, putting his hands in his pockets and then taking them out, again and again. Amanda wears an old pair of pink jelly shoes with glitter sprinkled in the plastic and she keeps bending down to scratch bug bites between the straps. Her shorts are frayed and too big in the waist, a hand-me-down. They look anxious, exposed up there at the front of the room. Brie, at the end of the line, is…different somehow. She has the same underfed, overtired shadow on her face, like many of the children here, but she wears it with some kind of grace. She is liquid, poured into her body, her clothes, this room. None of the ill-fitting awkwardness applies to her. Everything fits her perfectly, even her tangled ponytail and the deep red of her sunburned shoulders and her raggedy cutoffs and her once-white sneakers, now brownish-gray. She catches Wanda looking and Wanda’s eyes dart away, back to her textbook. She has never been comfortable in this room, but when the sixth graders arrive, whatever ease she has managed to eke out through the passage of time leaves and does not return.
As the weeks go by, biking to Phyllis’s house after school becomes a celebrated part of Wanda’s routine. It gives her something to look forward to, a way to shake off the anxiety that permeates her school days even more now that the sixth graders are a permanent fixture in her classroom. It is pure terror to be so close to Corey every day. She can still feel his hand on her scalp, holding her under the waves. She tends to her fear in small ways: sitting in the back of the room so there is no one behind her; keeping her questions to herself; eating her lunch alone in the mildewing library, where the windows smashed during Valerie are covered in plastic and all the books are beginning to rot.
Being so close to his twin sister, Brie, is a different feeling, one she can’t quite place—not terror exactly, but…not safety, either. The rest of her peers blur together, a mass of familiar faces: bullies at worst and complicit at best. She keeps her head down and gets through it as quietly as she can. But after the last bell rings, when she hops on her bicycle and glides out of the parking lot, her day begins in earnest.