Because of Mr. Terupt Read Free

little better when she reassures me that I’ll thin out as I grow. She also tells me that there must be a reason I’m having to deal with this. “It’s making you a better person,” she says, “and someday this experience will help you.” That’s all great, but I wish I could grow into my body now.
    We live on a farm. My mom grew up here. My grandma and grandpa live in their own house next to ours. They help us run the farm. So my grandma’s around a lot, and she wanted to know what was wrong with me—why I was crying.
    Any time I mentioned Lexie she’d get all mad: “I’m goin’ into that school and fix that girl,” she’d say.
    “No, Grandma.”
    “Why are you even still friends with her? She doesn’t know how to treat people well, specially a friend.”
    “It’s not her fault, Grandma. It’s this new girl’s fault,” I said, sticking up for Lexie the way I always do. “A new girl that I can’t stand.”
    “If you keep telling yourself that, it won’t ever get better,” Grandma said. She’s a tough woman.
    The only time I’ve got friends is when I’m in Lexie’s group. Nobody wants to be friends with the fat kid. I don’t know what to do.
    Grandma said a prayer with me that night. We knelt by my bed.
    “Dear God, please give Danielle the strength to stand up to these mean girls in school, or do what you can to teach Alexia a lesson. If you made her fat, that would be all right by me.”
    I elbowed Grandma. “Oh, okay,” she said.
“I just ask that you provide Danielle with some comfort and direction during these tough times. We pray for the good weather to hold up, and for the farm. Amen.”

anna
    I didn’t say much in school, and I never raised my hand. That would have been an easy way for people to notice me, and I didn’t want to be noticed. People can be real mean. That’s something Mom warned me about. And my mom knows, trust me. I didn’t have any close friends and I wasn’t looking for any. Mom was my best friend.
    Not getting noticed was never a problem for me before. I was always quiet and I behaved, so the teachers left me alone. I kept my head down and looked at the floor a lot. But I’m a good observer. Mrs. Williams, our principal, winks whenever there’s some big surprise coming. It’s something I noticed a few years ago. If you keep quiet, you have time to look and listen and take things in.
    At the beginning of the year, the first thing you pay attention to is the classroom. We had a nice room. A big one. There was a whole wall of windows opposite the door. Mr. Terupt’s desk was in the corner by those windows. The students’ desks were arranged in five tables of four. So right away I knew we had a teacher who was into teamwork and who probably didn’t mind a little talking—otherwise, we would have been in old-fashioned rows. The front of the room had the blackboard and the back wall had a whiteboard. The last side of the room had all our cabinets and a sink, plus a drinking fountain. Most of the room was carpeted, except for the side by the sink and fountain. Our door was next to the fountain.
    The other thing—the bigger thing you pay attention to, in the beginning—is your teacher, especially if he’s new like Mr. Terupt. Right away, I could tell that he was a reader, because there were books everywhere in our room. Mom liked that when I told her. Mom’s a library assistant in another school. It’s a good job. She has the same schedule I do, and it allows her to take some classes at night. She’s studying art, something she missed out on when she was younger. She’s really good at drawing and painting.
    Mr. Terupt was young and athletic-looking. He didn’t have any pictures around his desk, and he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Ms. Newberry, from across the hall, didn’t have a wedding ring, either. Neither did Mom.
    Mr. Terupt turned out to be different. He noticed me on the first day. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t raising my hand because he