| OCR Text |
Show chosen for dodge ball unless my friend Kate, whose contact lenses, loss of braces, and a home permanent all in one summer launched her from the sidelines into the throbbing center of eighth grade, was team captain. No one would ask me to dance. I would never own the right music or get my hair to feather. For the school play, I would be cast as a runner, the student who notified each of the different grades when it was time for them to perform. I would never make the spelling bee or the talent show. I remember once in second grade, on our first tour in Virginia, I walked to the end of the street to catch the school bus. Because of where we lived, I was the last to be picked up and the first to be dropped off. That morning, I stood on Nutley and waited for Grandma. Usually the bus would pick me up on the two-lane divided highway and then turn around, going back on the other side of the concrete divider. This morning, though, I must have been late, for the next thing I saw was the bus already heading back to school, having passed my stop. Grandma saw me, in fact waved, and all the children started hooting out the windows. She turned the bus around and came back to get me. I was mortified. Every morning for the rest of the year, I would walk down to the bus stop and hide behind a holly bush until I was sure the bus had not already passed the stop. All those children yelling out the half-opened windows. An entire bus turning around for me. I knew my inadequacies intimately, didn't need a bus load of children telling me. My father reminded me constantly in the way he rarely let me finish washing the dishes, trim bushes, or make a display board for the sixth grade science fair before he stepped in, letting me know I was too slow, too fast, too hard, not hard enough. I knew it in my inability to shine flashlights, read a level, cut straight; I knew it when Mrs. Kaup put me 141 |
