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Show Moon - 38 across the street, silly. Watch for the lights. Look both ways." I never got over the worry that I'd miss my stop or forget where the school was. I sat near the front of the bus and kept asking the driver if we were coming to Queen's Boulevard yet. My mother came to pick me up at noon. She said once she thought I'd loved kindergarten because I smiled when she came for me. What she couldn't know was that I smiled in great relief that she'd finally come, for I seemed unable to grasp what kindergarten was all about. I was puzzled by the other children, for they weren't kind like my tree-climbing cousin Tommy. I didn't know what they wanted from me or how to talk to them so they wouldn't laugh or be mean. My mother told me I needed to fight back sometimes. There was a boy with blue eyes and long black lashes. One day he asked me to come with him to a narrow strip of grass at the edge of the cement playground The grass grew sparsely on clumps of mud and scatterings of small jagged rocks. He gathered up some mud in his hands and made a pile of little balls. Then he bent down and flung a ball at me, catching me squarely on the cheek. It stung, and he stood there smiling, waiting for me to cry. I remembered what my mother had said about fighting back, so I stooped and pressed some mud into a ball as best I could, threw it at him hard, the force of all my anger behind it. For one brief moment I was tall and strong. I would be one of them. But the mudball came apart and fell in little chunks in front of him, none of it even touching him. He looked down at the fallen clumps of mud. Then he looked up, his face dark with anger. He kneeled quickly and picked up a rock, threw it at me with all his might, his lips pressed into a hard, straight line. It caught me just above the eye. The blood frightened him and he ran away, leaving me there crying and smearing blood all over my hands. The teacher |