To Come and Go Like Magic (28 page)

“Don’t worry,” the professor says, “we’ll take good care of him.” Every head around Myra’s bed turns and alights on this man in his ring-toed sandals.

It’s just Pop and me. A nurse sent the boys home earlier, saying there were too many people in the room. Momma’s staying now to help Myra with the baby. The professor’s staying to help Momma with Myra. And Aunt Rose is staying to make sure nobody does anything she wouldn’t do. It’s just Pop and me to walk out the door of the hospital smiling to ourselves. Today everybody smiles.

T
imes Change …

Times change. But you still love what you always loved—books and people and songs and pets.

Momma calls the baby Dumpling because he’s pudgy and soft. Sam Dumpling has red curly hair and blue eyes, but Momma says all babies start out with blue eyes. Myra’s eyes are brown and so are Jerry Wilson’s, but Professor Drew Montgomery’s eyes are that same hot-flame blue and he has red curly hair, too, just like baby Sam. But I don’t say anything.

Ginny and Priscilla have a group of new friends. They’re all cheerleaders and they don’t give the rest of us the time of day, but I don’t care. That’s how it goes.
I have things to do and places to go and people to meet. Well, someday, anyway.

Zeno Mayfield hung on to me like a leech the first week of school, saying he only wished that I was a cheerleader. It’s hard for a boy like him to imagine being attached to some girl who is not now, and never will be, a cheerleader. I let him know, finally, that it was just a few kisses anyway, not even one quarter of a football game.

Every morning I cross my fingers and make a wish for Lenny. Next week he’s trying out for
The Music Man
at school. If he gets a part and has all those other people to dance with, he won’t need me for practice anymore, but that’s okay. We all have our own ways to go—Lenny, Jack, and me.

The coach told Pop that Jack’s on his way to a football scholarship, so Pop’s really happy. He won’t have to worry about college money for Jack. College is a big deal to Pop now, especially with a professor practically in the family. College was a dream for us before, Pop says, but who knows. Since Lenny doesn’t play sports, he’s counting on getting a scholarship for all the hard courses he’s taking and the good grades he plans to make. That’s the way to do it, he says. He can’t imagine getting real money for dancing. But maybe someday.

For my thirteenth birthday I got a chocolate cake and an envelope. That’s it. Nothing wrapped, no pretty ribbons. My heart sank. And then I opened the envelope and found
a card that everybody had signed and a membership to the Five-for-Five Book Club. The first five books cost only one dollar each and then I have to buy one book a month at the regular price for a year. That’s why everybody signed the card and that’s why I got only one present. Each book costs between five and ten dollars, so they’re all chipping in—even Uncle Lu. Pop says I can order anything I want. He doesn’t even have to see the list. It’s amazing what can happen between ages twelve and thirteen.

A few days ago a new family moved into Miss Matlock’s house and they’ve already cut down the boxwood hedge and clipped the moonflower vines and made a brick sidewalk across the front yard. At night they have every light burning. Willie Bright says it looks like a hotel.

I don’t see Willie much these days. He quit riding the bus after the first three days of school. At first I wondered if he’d dropped out like some of the other welfares do when they get to the upper grades, but then I saw him one day in the cafeteria. He told me the VISTA woman who’d helped his momma stop taking fits was giving him a ride. She tutors him in the library every morning, he said. Some days I see him across the schoolyard, rushing to get to class. If he sees me, he waves.

Times change. The people and the days swirl around me, and it seems like everybody has a direction and a plan but me.

S
eptember Light …

Late September light is dimmer, yellow-white, the sky full of puffy clouds. The mornings are cool.

I walk out of general science and into the counselor’s office. My heart races.

“I want to change my schedule,” I say. “Switch to the hardest courses I can take.”

“You’ll have to do catch-up,” she tells me. “It’ll be a challenge.”

There are papers to sign and a green slip to get me into the white house where the advanced classes are taught and where, my counselor says, I will embark on a new journey. I make a note to add
embark
to my word list and decide it’s time.

The old white house sits at the corner of the school property. It has five rooms upstairs and five down, with plain wood floors and a separate little kitchen where you can eat if you bring your lunch. Students from two other schools in the district are bussed here to take classes.
Most of them will be strangers. I’ll have no one to eat with or do projects with or call about homework.

My first class is pre-biology, Room 3, on the bottom floor of the white house. I wipe my sweaty hands on my sweater, leave the big red building behind, and follow a beaten path across the grass. Outside the classroom door I stop and take one last free breath.

The room is already full of students, five minutes early, in their seats and quiet. The teacher, another hippie-looking transplant from the North, looks up from her desk and motions for me to come in. My eyes wander around the room, passing over all the new faces.

Suddenly there’s … Lily Lou Harris? The girl who took up for me that day we were jumping rope now looks up and grins. The next row over is Surry Nan Honeycutt in her faded dress and stringy hair and drooping eyes. Surry who sings must be smart, too.

The old house doesn’t have lockers. Just a wall painted bright blue in the back of the room. In front of the blue wall where the lockers would normally be is the last row of seats. The last row where … It can’t be!

Willie Bright with his bouncing eyes and bushy hair waves to me like I’m on the other side of the schoolyard.

So
that’s
why he’s getting tutored by that VISTA woman, that’s why he had his nose in books all summer. Willie Bright’s a sly fox, all right.

I follow the new teacher’s flowing skirt to the empty seat behind Lily. After my knees stop shaking, I take out the slick new biology text and green composition book and smile to myself, but not so anyone can see. With this room full of brains I’m about to embark on a long struggle to make Cs. But, somehow, it feels like I’m right where I’m supposed to be, like I’ve already left Mercy Hill a little bit.

Lenny says that when he leaves he’s going to take his Polaroid picture book so he can remember this place. Maybe Lenny needs pictures because he’s not been here too long. But I’ve been here all my life. I can close my eyes and taste the watermelon split open on the picnic table or smell the sweet greenness of the cornfield after a summer rain. I don’t need pictures.

I can leave Mercy Hill, but Mercy Hill won’t ever leave me. Momma was right: these mountains will always be my true home.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to the following people: Allison Wortche, assistant editor at Knopf and Crown Books for Young Readers, for her belief in my work, continued support, and editorial expertise; a few special teachers who brought the outside world to the mountains and encouraged us to dream—Nannie McCormick, Edna Evans, and Irene Hughes; and to my extended family everywhere and the caring people of Appalachia who help keep tradition alive and my roots intact.

About the Author

Katie Pickard Fawcett grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky and spent two years as a social worker in Appalachia. She has counseled and tutored students in the Washington, D.C., area, written ads for the Peace Corps and VISTA, and worked for the World Bank, writing about development projects in Third World countries. Her personal essays have been published in several magazines, and her favorite diversion is travel and the different cultural experiences it brings. Ms. Fawcett lives with her husband and son in McLean, Virginia.
To Come and Go Like Magic
is her first novel.