Counting by 7s(13)

Mr. Dell Duke didn’t want me to wait a week for our next meeting.

He thought that I should come again during his first open hour the next day.

He told me that he would bring a surprise to the meeting. I have never been big on surprises, but I didn’t tell him.

I was planning on assessing the acidity of the soil in my garden for the rest of the week.

I worked hard to keep it at a pH of 6.5, but I agreed to return because he seemed to be very excited about the aptitude tests and I thought that he might be depressed.

It was possible that he was making some progress in his mental health condition by seeing me.



The next afternoon I was five minutes early and right away I knew that something was different.

The door to the trailer office was open, but not wide like usual. It was open only a slice.

So I looked inside and I didn’t see Dell Duke. I saw two bodies.

But not dead bodies.

Alive.

I stepped back, but one of the two, the teenage girl, had seen me.

And she said:

“It’s okay. You can come in.”

I didn’t know if I should do this.

The room was cramped and even though there was an extra chair, I felt like I was intruding.

But then the girl got up and pushed the door open all the way and said:

“We’re almost out of here.”

I could now see that an older boy was hunched over a coloring book and he was very intently filling in the spaces.

I’ve never understood coloring books.

Either draw a picture, or don’t. But why waste your time coloring in someone else’s work?

I knew that Dell Duke saw other students from the school district, but the sight of the two older kids made me uncomfortable.

The girl suddenly said:

“My brother won’t leave until he finishes his assignment. Sorry. His session was over ten minutes ago.”

The boy shot the girl a hostile look, but returned to his feverish coloring. The girl then continued:

“Mr. Duke went to get a soda. At least that’s what he said he was going to do. But he’s been gone a long time, so I don’t believe him.”

I nodded, but didn’t speak.

I admired the suspicion in the girl’s statement and I now hoped that Dell Duke didn’t walk through the door holding a Diet Pepsi.

I made a note to myself to talk to him about soft drinks.

Those beverages are not healthy.



I was tired from dodging the volleyball in gym class, and so I took the only other seat in Dell’s office.

I didn’t want to stare, but the teenage girl now at my side was visually very interesting.

Like me, she was someone impossible to easily peg in terms of ethnic background.

At first glance, she might have been African American. Her skin was dark; her hair was shiny black, and a bed of curls.

I kept my head facing forward and completely still, but moved my eyes into their corners to get a better look.

With this closer, peripheral examination, I suddenly wondered if the girl was a Native American.

I took great interest in the cultures of indigenous people.

What if this girl was a member of the Cahuilla tribe?

The Cahuilla lived in Southern California and once thrived in Bakersfield.

It was possible.

But not probable.

Suddenly I couldn’t control myself. I turned to the girl next to me and asked:

“Do you speak Takic?”





Chapter 9


mai & quang-ha

A leader gets everyone to shoot in the same direction.




Nguyen Thi Mai was fourteen years old and a freshman at Condon High School, which was on the other side of Bakersfield from where Willow Chance lived.

She had a brother named Nguyen Quang-ha who was a year older.

Quang-ha was a troublemaker.

Mai was not.

She was determined and deliberate in everything she did, and that quality attracted people to her.

Mai had true confidence. Or as she liked to see herself, she was born strong-willed, while a lot of the world was wishy-washy.

Adults didn’t intimidate her, and neither did strangers of any age.

Because Mai, as her mother reminded people, was born in the year of the dragon; and that meant nobility and power and strength.



Starting the second week of class, on Thursday afternoons, the teenage kids caught a bus to the school district main offices for Quang-ha’s appointment in Dell Duke’s windowless mobile unit.

Mai had the bus fare, a bottle of water, and two snacks. Even though she was a year younger than her brother, she had long been his keeper.

Mai waited for Quang-ha to have his counseling session, and when he was finished, they went together to Happy Polish Nails.

This was the salon that their mother operated.



Mai knew, of course, that she and her brother stood out in Bakersfield.

Her mother had been born in Vietnam from a father who was a black American soldier. Because of this, Mai’s mother, who was named Dung, had been an outcast.

When the U.S. government gave teenage Dung a chance, she had left home and gone halfway around the world to California. In the next ten years, she had two children with a man originally from Mexico (who had left soon after Mai was born to see his sick brother, and had never come back).