She Spoke

I was in 4th grade - when most kids are 9 or 10 years old.  Not yet to the semi-adulthood of the teenage years, and not just "little kids" anymore, either.  You might do a little cursing, acting in front of your friends, you may care about the clothes you have for school, you're getting some sense of drama, if it's these most modern times you're a whiz on a smart phone, a video game, a computer.

You know about wrong and right, social status, and messing with other people. Kids can be so cruel. Even saying it outright like that, it's an understatement.  One object of sometime torment in our class was a girl named Odessa.  She was tall, possibly early puberty - there are those years where girls may be the tallest in class - and she had trouble reading. She could do it, but it was slow and halting, a struggle, rough for her. 

One day we were studying a story in class, going around the room, kids reading a paragraph at a time.  It was voluntary - you raised your hand if you wanted to read.  We'd been at it for a while, and got to the point where no hands were raised.  "Anybody else want to read, that hasn't, yet?" the teacher asked.

Ronald, from the other side of the room, gave a loud whisper, "Odessa." He was a class clown, like me, but really a pretty darn good guy - it was little surprising that he would get so aggressive, propose exposing her to shame.  Hurriedly, the teacher said, "Okay, let's finish the story."  She looked the class over, was going to start picking people to finish the reading; her eyes landed on me. "Doug." She gave a little nod of her head - my signal to go.

There shouldn't have been any real surprise, then - if there are true evil aspects that ten year olds can have, I was a holder. "Odessa hasn't read," I declared, brightly, sickening with calculation, my tone suggesting I was both helping the teacher and Odessa, concerned with fairness and equitability: every dear child should have their chance.

The teacher gave me a withering stare, no doubt thinking, "Oh you little so-and-so..." - and she was right. Her voice came then, loud and cutting, leaving no open course but to comply, "Douglas, READ." I inclined my head, my good deed done for the day, and launched into a smooth rendition.

A few weeks later, we wrote stories about somebody in our family that we looked up to, and the following day the teacher read a few of the ones she felt were the best. One was by Odessa, about her older brother.  It really was good - and afterwards the teacher asked her if her brother still lived at home.

"No, he's dead."

She said it in a special way, not blurting it out but still hurried, a little bit of voice waver on the "dead," a ghost of a sob concealed, the whole thing slightly breathy.  Special in that even though she was shy, awkwardly tall, and the subject of jokes, the instant was true - and she gave it to us, raw and real.

Silence. Nobody said a thing, we class clowns keeping shut too.  Just a little, my life was changing. She got through an explanation that her brother had been working on his car; that the car fell off the jacks and crushed him.

Since then, 6 billion people have been born on earth, and almost 3 billion have died.  A part of me is still in that moment, not a bad thing.

She was a girl

who lost her brother

whom she loved dearly


I never did anything mean to her again.

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