How High the Moon Read Free

papers in one hand while she knocked with the other, even though the door was already open.
    She rapped three times but still Mrs. Carlton didn’t look up, so I told her that Miss Simon was there. “Oh, I’m sorry, Debra,” she said. “I heard tapping, but thought it was…” She glanced over at me, then looked back at Miss Simon, who gave her an understanding smile. “Anyway, do come in.”
    Miss Simon didn’t look surprised to see me sitting there, but then she wouldn’t have been. When I was in her room, I spent a lot of time inside during recess, too.
    They talked in hushed voices as Mrs. Carlton looked over the paper Miss Simon handed her, and I stopped singing so I could catch a word here and there. “What an ingenious program, Debra,” she said in an excited voice.
    “Mrs. Gaylor suggested it to our girls’ club as this year’s summer community project,” Miss Simon explained. “She’s going to help us with it.”
    “Well, it’s a wonderful idea,” Mrs. Carlton said. “I can think of a few girls who could benefit from this program.” They both looked at me and dropped their voices to whispers.
    After Miss Simon left, Mrs. Carlton slipped all of the papers—except one—into her wire basket. She brought that one over to my desk and handed it to me. It had the words SUNSHINE SISTERS drawn across the top of the mimeographed page like it was supposed to be Bible-fancy. “What’s this?” I asked.
    “It’s a new summer program, one I’m hoping you’ll be interested in. I think you’d get a lot out of it.”
    I skimmed the page, then looked up and tried not to get distracted by her skinny stretched-out earthworm lips, lipsticked out of the lines to make them look fat. I wondered when she started painting them like that.
    “Oh. I get it,” I said after I skimmed the paper some more. “It’s a program where older
good
girls try to help younger
bad
girls learn to act like respectable young ladies.”
    Mrs. Carlton leaned her butt against the desk across the aisle from me. “I wouldn’t exactly say that, but it does sound like a wonderful program. They match a grade school student with a high school girl with similar interests, and you spend time together.”
    I sat the paper down. “To do what? Schoolwork? Because if that’s it, then I’m not much interested.” The way my hands fell when I folded my arms over the desk, my right hand ended up cupping my left elbow, where the skin was gray and dry and scratchy. I poked my elbow out toward her. “See this, Mrs. Carlton? How my elbows are cracked and gray like little volcanoes? Teddy harped on me all winter about these things, saying that no respectable young lady would run around with elbows that look like this.
    “Teddy said this as if there is one thing respectable about me in the first place. Or him, for that matter. We’re poor white trash,Mrs. Carlton, both of us. And like I once overheard Mrs. Gaylor say at the post office: There’s nothing short of reincarnation that can change poor white trash into something respectable.
    “I don’t think Teddy believes there’s such a thing as a hopeless case, though, because he still tries to make me better. Always telling me to wash up good before school, because hand-me-down dresses or not, I should have enough pride in myself to scrub the gray scales from my elbows, put my messy curls back in barrettes so people can see my eyes, and look like a little lady. He harps on me to curb my temper, because little ladies shouldn’t fight like barroom drunks, and he reminds me to stop singing at ‘inappropriate’ times. His harping about that doesn’t do much good, either, because I can’t help singing and humming. Even when I’m sitting on the toilet. You ever hear of anyone doing that, Mrs. Carlton?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. This singing all the time is like an affliction, or something.”
    “You call your father Teddy?” Mrs. Carlton asked.
    “Oh, Teddy’s not my dad,” I