True (. . . Sort Of)

Katherine Hannigan

TRUE
(. . . Sort of)

For the children who don't speak
And for those who hear them anyway,
and make a safe place

Contents

 

 

D
elly Pattison was tiny. Her hair curled tight to her head, like a copper halo. Her voice was raspy, as if a load of gravel lined her throat.

And Delly Pattison was trouBLE: little trouble on the way to BIG TROUBLE, and getting closer to it every day.

Delly's trouble wasn't mean. It always started with her thinking something would be fun and good. It always ended with somebody yelling, “Delaware Pattison, to your room!” or, “Welcome to detention, Ms. Pattison. Again.” And there Delly'd be, wondering how something that had seemed so right could go so, so wrong.

Truth is, trouble didn't find Delly till she was six years old. That was the summer the Pattisons went to the county fair.

Clarice Pattison'd said to Boomer, “Let's take the kids. They can look at the cows and go on a couple of rides.”

“Sounds good,” Boomer agreed.

So they piled all those children—Dallas, the oldest, then Tallahassee, Montana, Galveston, Delaware, and RB, the baby—into the van and headed out.

There were eight Pattisons in the parking lot. Boomer checked again when they entered the Poultry Pavilion. It wasn't till they got to the Cattle Corral that Clarice realized somebody'd gone missing. She counted heads, and then she shouted, “Delly!”

There was no reply.

The Pattisons scattered, searching under tractors and behind hay bales for her.

By then, though, Delly'd had ten minutes of solitude in the Poultry Pavilion.

Clayton Fitch saw it first: chickens of every sort, strutting out the front door of the building like they were going on vacation.

“The chickens are loose,” he squeaked. Then he ran in circles, squealing, “Great God A'mighty, the chickens are loose!”

Officer Verena Tibbetts was at the main gate, making sure nobody got in for free. She came tearing over, hollering, “Clayton, quit squawking and catch those chickens!” She charged into the Pavilion, searching for the cause of the chaos.

Halfway down the line of cages, she found it. There was Delly Pattison, standing on a crate. She had her hand in a coop, pushing a chicken's backside. “Go on now. You're free,” she rasped as it flapped to the floor.

Officer Tibbetts ran at her. She picked Delly up and held her so close they could smell each other. “It is bad to let the chickens out of their cages! BAD, BAD, BAD!” she roared. Then she braced herself for the bawling that was sure to follow.

But this is what Delly did instead: she smiled. The ends of her mouth went up, almost to her eyeballs. “You're funny.” She giggled.

At first Verena was so surprised, she just stared. Then she growled.

And that's how Clarice found them, one growling and the other grinning.

“Take this child home,” Officer Tibbetts told her. So she did.

It took ten people two hours to get those chickens back in their cages. When they were done, Delly was number one on Verena Tibbetts's list of The Worst Children in River Bluffs.

T
he trouble went on from there.

When she was seven, Delly grabbed a pan of brownies off Mabel Silcox's back porch.

“Where did these come from?” Clarice asked, when she found them half eaten in Delly's room.

“Ms. Silcox left me a surpresent
^*
,” Delly told her. Her smile was so big it squeezed her eyes shut.

“What's a surpresent?” Clarice inquired.

“It's a present that's a surprise. It's the best kind,” Delly explained.

Mabel Silcox had another word for it. “I've been robbed!” she hollered.

Clarice brought Delly in for questioning. “You still want to call those brownies a present?”

“A
surpresent
, Ma.” She corrected her.

“To your room,” Clarice commanded.

“But—” she argued.

“Go,” Clarice replied.

So she did.

“Sometimes Ma is a mysturiosity,” she told the empty brownie pan.

When she was eight, Delly decided it was too fine a day outside to spend it inside and at school. “A holiDelly,” she declared it.

Before she took off, though, she wrote a note that read, Please excuse Delly. She'll be back tomorrow. She signed it, and sent it into school with the Dettbarn twins. She didn't want anybody worrying.

So she did not fret, swinging and sliding at the park, when Officer Tibbetts pulled up in her cruiser. She was not worried when the police-woman ordered, “Delly, get in the car.” From the backseat, she waved at the people they passed, like she was in a holiDelly parade.

She was confused, though, when Clarice and Boomer told her, “You're grounded. For a week.”

“This is a mistaster,” she told them.

They did not disagree.

When she was nine, Delly found the canoe Clayton Fitch kept by the river, and took it for a ride. She wanted to see where she'd end up.

“We're going on a Dellyventure,” she told the boat, and it rocked and rolled down the river for her.

They came aground in Hickory Corners, two towns and ten miles away. The police called Clarice.

In the van going home, Clarice's lips were sealed tight with worry and fury.

So Delly filled the silence. “Ma, I saw turtles as big as boulders,” she said.

“That boat banged into rocks and went backwards, but I wasn't scared.” She went on.

“Ma, next time I'm going all the way to—”

Clarice pulled the van off the road. “Delly,” she yelled, “nobody knew where you were. You could have been killed!” Her whole body was shaking.

“But Ma,” she explained, like Clarice was a little kid, “I was wearing a life jacket.”

“Enough!” Clarice shouted, and they were moving again.

Back home, Delly did find out where she'd end up if she took a canoe down the river. “In your room, for two weeks,” Clarice told her.

She had to pay Clayton Fitch a rental fee, too. “Bad, badder, baddest,” he said as she set the money in his hand.

When she was ten, Delly invented the Nocussictionary.

She made up words people could say instead of swearing, like
shikes
,
chizzle
, and
bawlgrammit
. She wrote them down; then she shared them with all the kids she knew. “Not cussing,” she told them. “Can't be trouble.”

There was something about the way the children said those words, though, so loud and with such delight, that made the grown-ups suspicious. They asked questions, and “The Nocussictionary” and “Delly” were the answers to all of them.

For three dinners, Delly had soap for dessert.

Bubbles floated out of her mouth as she complained, “But Ma, we weren't swearing.”

“That's not the point,” Clarice answered.

“What is?” she gurgled.

Clarice just shook her head.

There was more: big trouble, small trouble, Christmas and birthday trouble, too.

Still, eating soap or stuck in her room, Delly never quit believing that fun was just two steps and a “Bawlgrammit!” away. And she didn't stop smiling.

M
aybe it was because she was tiny, or because her hair curled too tightly to her head. Or maybe it was from being called “bad” so many times.

Whatever it was, when Delly was eleven, she took a turn. And it wasn't for the better.

At first it was small things: she quit doing homework, and started talking over people.

None of that was new, exactly. Delly'd always forget homework for some fun, and she wasn't much for manners.

But now, when her teacher, Lionel Terwilliger, told her, “Ms. Pattison, please wait. Someone else is speaking,” she didn't smile and say, “Sorry,” like before. She slumped down in her seat. When he said, “Your homework is late. You may bring it tomorrow, with a penalty,” instead of saying, “Okay, thanks,” she mumbled, “Just give me the zero.”

“I'm worried about Delly,” Clarice told Boomer.

He nodded. “The bad grades.”

“That's not it,” she said.

“The detentions?”

“No.”

“All those trips with Officer Tibbetts?”

“It's her smile.” Clarice's voice cracked. “It's gone.”

The smile that filled Delly's face had disappeared. In its place was a smirk. The smirk pinched her mouth crooked and just pretended happiness. It hurt Clarice's heart every time she saw it.

“She'll get it back,” Boomer assured her.

Clarice nodded, hoping that was true.

Delly did get something, but it wasn't her smile.

She got the fight, instead.

It happened on a Wednesday at recess. Alice Mae Gunderman kicked a ball up on the school roof, and Alice Mae cried.

Delly saw the whole thing. She knew what to do for Alice Mae and for fun.

She shimmied up the downspout and onto the roof. “Hey, Alice Mae,” she hollered, and kicked the ball back to her.

Delly knew she'd done good. The corners of her mouth started to curl.

Then Ms. Niederbaum, the recess monitor, spotted her. “Delly Pattison, get off that roof!” she shouted.

So she did.

There was a big map of the United States on the basketball court. Alaska was way off by itself. It was for time-outs.

“To Alaska,” Ms. Niederbaum commanded.

Delly looked at Alice Mae, smiling and playing again. “But—” she muttered.

“Go,” Ms. Niederbaum ordered.

And Delly didn't ask, Why? because she knew the answer: she was bad, she was wrong, she was trouble.

She trudged to the State of Solitary Confinement, hearing those words,
bad, wrong, trouble,
over and over, as if they were her name.

Danny Novello saw the whole thing, too. He was grinning.

He ran up beside Delly, bringing a crowd of kids with him. “She's small enough,” he told them. “And she climbs like one. Let's see if she can talk.”

“Can . . . you . . . speak?” he asked the side of her face.

The crowd giggled.

“Do . . . you . . . talk?” he shouted in her ear.

Now, any other day Delly would have hit him with a “Hey, Nobraino, talk to me when you get one,” and that would have shut him down. But the only words she could think of were
bad, wrong, trouble,
and they were about her. “Grrrr,” she growled.

“Can't talk. Must be a monkey!” Novello yelled.

The laughs buzzed around Delly, stinging her.

She slumped down on Alaska.
Bad, wrong, trouble
pounded her with every heartbeat. She could feel the tears pooling up behind her eyeballs.

But Delly Pattison didn't cry. So she said something mad, to stop the sad. “I'm sick of feeling bad,” she grumbled.

Right away her eyes quit watering.

“I'm sick of getting in trouble and not knowing why.” She slapped the state beneath her.

Her heart stopped hurting. The mad was taking over.

The feeling bad wasn't done with her, though. “So what are you going to do about it?” it sneered.

The mad didn't know.

Till Novello walked by, teasing, “Hey monkey, time to go back to the zoo.”

It took Delly nine seconds to catch Novello and fling him to the ground. There were six seconds of twisting his nose till he screamed, “I take it back! I take it back!”

It took Ms. Niederbaum just two seconds to yank Delly off him. She got nine-thousand seconds of sitting on Alaska for that.

But for those fifteen seconds of fight, Delly wasn't sad and she didn't feel bad. And for once she understood why she was in trouble. It was worth it.

After that, if somebody snickered behind her, Delly shoved him. If a child whispered anywhere near her, Delly took her down. She got into so many fights with so many kids only RB and the Dettbarn twins would come close. Every other friend deserted her.

One day, after two calls from school and a Special Dellylivery from Officer Tibbetts, Clarice had had enough. “What is going on with you, Delly?” she yelled. “What is wrong?”

So Delly told her, no smirk or smart stuff: “I'm horribadible, Ma.”

“What's horribadible?” Clarice asked.

“Horrible, terrible bad,” Delly told her, “like everybody says.”

“That's not true,” Clarice replied. “You're not bad.”

But Clarice hadn't changed Delly's mind about her badness. Not one bit.