To Come and Go Like Magic Read Free Page B

the back room of Brock’s store the men play dominoes every day. Ralph Becker, Benny Moss, Will Epperson, and sometimes Little Clyde Cummings. Little Clyde is six feet tall, but he’s Little Clyde because his pop is Big Clyde, even though Big Clyde is short and fat. The men laugh and slap their legs and ask Mrs. Brock to bring this or that, Juicy Fruit gum or chewing tobacco or a baloney sandwich, and she runs here and there at top speed like one of those little cars you push until the wheels are spinning so fast it can go all the way across the room without stopping.
    After jump-rope practice we stop at Brock’s and buy Bazooka gum and a Hershey bar to split three ways for Ginny, Priscilla, and me. In the back room the men holler for cold Dr Peppers, and Mrs. Brock rushes with our change and gives us back four quarters instead of four nickels and slams the cash-register drawer before we can say anything. Ginny says we could buy another Hershey bar and get four extra sections each. Or we could leave Mrs. Brock a tip. Priscilla puts the quarters on the counter beside the meat slicer where only Mrs. Brock is likely to see them, and we run as fast as we can out the door and down Persimmon Tree Road.

B irds and Boys …
    Twice a week, Monday and Thursday, I go to Miss Matlock’s house after school and we travel to places in her books—the mountains of Mexico, the Nile River, the sandy beaches of Indonesia. I tell Myra and Uncle Lucius I’m going to the library. If they knew I was at the old woman’s house, they’d tell Pop and he’d say I couldn’t go back. Even though she’s my teacher, some people think Miss Matlock’s crazy and others just don’t like her. It has something to do with her running away when she was young.
    Ginny and Priscilla agree with the grown-ups. Ginny says that anybody who hates a place enough to run away automatically becomes an outsider. So I don’t dare tell them about going to Miss Matlock’s house or about my own thoughts of leaving Mercy Hill.
    So what if people roll their eyes and shake theirheads at Miss Matlock? I don’t think she cares one bit. She has other stuff to care about, like her books of the world and her pictures and stories of the places she’s seen. And she cares about keeping her bushes trimmed properly and talking to Ivan the Terrible.
    Ivan says
Chili, Chili, Chili
—always three times when I come in the door and again when I get up to leave. Miss Matlock says it only took a week to teach him my name. He’s a smart bird and not terrible at all.
    “Perhaps I’ll bring Ivan to class one day,” Miss Matlock says. “If I can trust Mr. Mayfield to not annoy him.”
    “Zeno annoys everybody,” I say. “He lives to annoy people.”
    Miss Matlock smiles. “We must find a way to make this boy a bit more palatable,” she says.
    “What’s that mean?”
    She presses her finger to her lips and studies on this for a while. “More appetizing,” she says. “Like adding chocolate icing to a plain cake.”
    Palatable
goes in my red notebook, but I sure wouldn’t put Zeno Mayfield in the same category as chocolate icing.

M iss Hart, Queen of Homeroom …
    “Do NOT smudge your paper,” she says, tapping my fingers with the ruler. “The machine cannot read the test if you’re messy.”
    Miss Hart, queen of homeroom. That’s what Zeno calls her. She’s in charge of spring testing in the cafeteria for grades six, seven, and eight. We’re all bunched together under the fluorescent lights, half of them blinking and trying to go out, so it’s hard to concentrate.
    “People in other places make really good scores,” she says. “We cannot let them beat us.”
    The page is a dance of words.
Treacherous. Prudery. Gesticulate
. If I could write them in my red notebook, I could collect a million from this test alone. We don’t talk like this, so how can they expect us to answer the questions? How can we beat the people in other places?
    At the next table Ginny winds