Three Little Words Read Free Page B

didn’t do anything!” I screamed, which only got me a longer time-out in my room.
    Since I had been blamed for the mess, a few of the other children came to check on me as if I were a sideshow. I stuck my middle finger up—the way Dusty did when he was mad at someone. Some of the others copied me and went around the house showing everyone what I had just taught them.
    Mrs. Ortiz barreled into my room. “Why are you teaching the little ones to shoot birds?”
    “I did not!” I retorted.
    “Ashley, you are going to have to stop your lying,” she said, and marched off. I had never seen her so furious and did not understand why I was blamed for hurting birds when there had not been any in the house.
    I soon realized that if Mrs. Ortiz yelled at me, I could stare just above her head and she would still think that I was looking directly at her, hanging on her every word. I would purposely let my mind wander to take me far away from the current confrontation.
    “Chicken pox!” I overheard Mrs. Ortiz on the phone. “Yeah, three of them—two of them foster.” I wished I could tell my mother that I had a chicken disease that made me itch all over.
    Mrs. Ortiz put me in a bathtub with her daughter Trina and a blond foster girl. The spots bloomed on each of us.
    “Don’t scratch,” Mrs. Ortiz said. “This special soap will help you feel better.”
    She pushed my hand away from a cluster of pox. “If you don’t stop, you’ll have ugly marks forever.”
    I sulked. “I don’t want ugly marks!”
    “Of course not—you’re too pretty for that,” Mrs. Ortiz said kindly.
    Her older daughters took turns picking out outfits for me that looked good with my red hair. I loved my aqua shorts and matching socks with lace trim and a yellow dress with a flounced skirt. I came out and twirled around to show it off.
    “Here comes my prissy girl,” Mrs. Ortiz complimented.
    Every day when the older children went off to school, I asked to go as well.
    “You have to be five,” Mr. Ortiz said in his slight Cuban accent.
    “I am five!” I insisted, although I was just about to turn four.
    Mrs. Ortiz tilted her head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Ask my real mother!”
    “Ashley is smart enough to go to kindergarten,” Mr. Ortiz admitted.
    “It would do her good to be in school,” Mrs. Ortiz agreed. “She’s the brainiest kid I ever had.”
    DeSoto, the neighborhood primary school, had a pre-K program, so they enrolled me. I was so overjoyed to leave the house with the older kids that I raced to beat the others to the school on the edge of the bay.
    My teacher called Mrs. Ortiz and asked her to come in because she had concerns about my adjustment. She said, “Ashley is a good student, but she does five times as many papers as the others.”
    “What’s the problem?” Mrs. Ortiz threw up her hands and shrugged. “Give her more papers.”
    While I liked school, I thought church was boring. They liked to dress Trina and me in matching frilly dresses and hats—hers were usually white and mine were pink. As Mrs. Ortiz dropped us off at Sunday school, she would say, “Ashley, if you don’t mind the teacher, you can’t watch Alice in Wonderland or any of your other movies later.”
    Mrs. Ortiz often fostered infants, so she spent many hours bottle-feeding them. This was a good time to snuggle against her; and as long as the baby was sucking, she did not mind. When I was comfy, I would ask, “When can I see my mama?”
    Mrs. Ortiz dodged the question as best she could because she probably knew that a few weeks after I came to live with her, my mother had been charged with possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia as well as offering to commit prostitution.
    When Mr. Ortiz took me to a family visit, I asked, “Will Mama be there?”
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll see your daddy and your brother. Won’t that be nice?”
    “Are you sure my mother isn’t coming?” My birthday had been the previous week