Egg-Drop Blues (3 page)

"No, ma'am." I couldn't believe I slipped and said "ma'am." I hadn't used that word in years. My father used to make us say "yes ma'am" and "yes, sir," but my mother hated it. She would tell us to stop saying it when they were still together, and she made an even bigger deal about it after he left. My father still says, "yes ma'am" to his mother.

"Sometimes when you have learning problems, questions just seem like they're trick questions."

Great. Now I had to deal with another person in the school thinking about me like I was some kind of mental cripple.

"What are we going to do?" she asked.

I glanced over at my brother. All I could see was the top of his head. He was scrunched down behind his book doing who knows what.

"Won't we get extra points for being in the
rally?" I don't know what made my mouth say the words, but after I heard them, I thought it was a pretty good idea.

"We who? I didn't know you were signed up."

"My brother was supposed to have signed up last week. Didn't he?"

We both looked over at Jury. One time he told me he had an angel on his shoulder. Sometimes I think he must because he actually appeared to be reading his book.

"Jury, will you come here please?"

I gave him the look. I know he caught it, but that didn't mean he'd be willing to cooperate.

"Jury, Judge tells me that the two of you plan to enter the Einstein Rally."

He's so cool. He didn't react, didn't even look at me.

"Is that a problem, Ms. Hennessey?" he asked. A long time ago he told me if I needed time to think about an answer I should ask a question.

"Well, no, not really, but the deadline was last Friday. I'll have to call your names in today. Which event?"

He glanced at me and I saw fire in his eyes.

"The question bowl?" she asked.

"No, the egg drop," he said.

"How many extra points will we get?" I asked, trying really hard not to look at him.

"Let's say I give you half of a letter grade for participating. That would turn a D-plus into a C-minus. If you place in the competition, I'll give you a whole letter."

"Won't the grades be in before then?"

I wasn't surprised that Jury knew that; he's good at remembering stuff. People don't think about asking him because they know he doesn't care.

"Actually, I'm supposed to turn in the grades the Friday before the rally, but I can hold yours until Monday."

"Aren't we lucky?"

Ms. Hennessey caught Jury's sarcasm, but she just smiled. I guess she was thinking she'd have the last laugh.

"Okay, Judge, you can sit down and I'll talk to your brother."

Take all the time you need, I said to myself. I sure didn't want to deal with him.

"I don't care why you did it, I don't care what you have to say to get us out of it, but you better make it happen and you better make it happen today."

He had me cornered against the wall facing the west field.

"Jury..."

"Jury nothing. I don't want to hear it. Just get me out of it."

"I'm going to fail without those extra points."

"You'll be dead before then."

He walked away. I tried to explain about the D-minus and the trick questions but he just started playing pom-pom tackle. He went into one of his pom-pom tackle trances and there was no talking to him.

By the end of the day, I still hadn't gotten us
out of it. I couldn't get us out of it. I needed the Einstein Rally.

If things weren't bad enough, my mother had a bright idea when I got home from school. Jury had stayed late to play a game of pom-pom tackle ... sometimes I think he'd rather play that game than eat. Mama was home already; she was still working the morning shift at the bookbinding plant where she's an inspector.

When I walked in the door, she was sitting at the dining room table with the telephone book, a notepad, and the cordless telephone. Sometimes she can get real hyped about something somebody else wouldn't care about. During these hyper times, she'll make a lot of phone calls and piles of notes on one of her memo pads. One time, she decided she wanted to make a storage cabinet out of an old-fashioned ice box. When I got home from school that day, she had a sketch of what she was going to make drawn on her pad and she was calling all over the country trying to find an ice box for sale. Whenever I see her sitting with all her stuff at the dining room table, I know something is up.

"Hi, baby. I'm so glad you're finally home. Where's your brother?"

"He stopped to play a quick game of pom-pom tackle."

"That boy and that stupid game! Anyway, you're the person I want to talk to."

Something told me I wasn't going to share her hype. I put down my book bag and started for the kitchen.

"Just let me get a drink; I'm thirsty," I said over my shoulder.

"Hurry up."

When I came back with a soda, she didn't say anything about me drinking her sodas or my drinking "all over the house," like she usually does. Whatever she was waiting to tell me, it was really big. I hope she doesn't say Frank is back and they're going to get married, I prayed, sitting down next to her.

"Mrs. Norville called me at work. I'd asked her to check on something for me. I didn't get to talk to her—you know how my supervisor is about personal calls."

I nodded. She takes forever to tell something, but I knew from past experience there's no speeding her up.

"Shirley at the front desk gave me the message. I started to call her back during my lunch hour, but I remembered that she would—should anyway—still be at school when I got home from work, so I decided to wait."

At this point, Jury would be on the verge of screaming. He has no patience. I nodded again.

"When I finally returned her call, she told me about all the schools and programs in the area that have learning disabled classes or tutoring. Actually, I shouldn't say 'all,' because there was only one school in Plank and two programs with supplemental classes and tutoring. The other two schools are over in Gerber."

"So I'm going to take a class?"

"No. As it turns out, the classes are as expensive as the tuition."

"Tuition?"

"At Tully. Tully has a class of no more than ten kids, never more than ten, devoted to learning-disabled students."

"I'd have to go over there after school?"

"No, baby, not after school—
for
school. You'd finish up the year there. I figure the next five months is all you'd need. By the time you start junior high, you'll know what you need to do to keep up." She was grinning at me like she'd just given me the keys to a brand new car or something.

I heard Jury coming in the front door, so I waited until he was in earshot. This was something that could take his mind off killing me.

"You-want-to-send-me-to-Tully?" I asked.

"Both of you."

Jury looked first at Mama, then at me, then back at Mama.

"Both of us what?" he asked, but I know he heard.

"I found out that Tully has a program that will teach Judge how to deal with his dyslexia. I haven't talked to them yet, but I'm sure that between your father and grandparents we can afford to send you both for the rest of the year. Next September you can go on to middle school with the rest of your class."

Jury sat down suddenly, as if her words had pushed him into the chair. The look on his face was a new one for him; I couldn't read it. It was kind of like he wanted to ask her the question he's always asking me: "Are you crazy?"

"I must have missed something," he finally said.

"Okay. As I was telling Judge, Mrs. Norville called and gave me a list of schools and places that offer special classes for the learning-disabled. It turns out that I can send Judge to Tully for less than it would cost to send him to one of the after-school programs. The way I figure it, if he finishes out the year there—and
it might take summer school, too—he'll be ready for junior high."

"So this is about Judge?"

I couldn't believe he asked that. I glared at him and he scowled back. Was he actually saying he'd let me go off to Tully by myself?

"I wouldn't split you up; I'm sure I can put together the money for both of you."

I could almost see Jury's mind working. I hoped he'd come up with something because, as he would say, I was drawing a blank. How do you tell somebody that you don't want to be helped? And that wasn't true at all; I really did want to learn what I could to make schoolwork easier, but I didn't want to change schools to do it.

"Everybody calls Tully a racist school," Jury said.

That was a good thing for him to come up with. Surely our mother wouldn't want to send us somewhere awful. Angela and Faye were always talking about how the kids at Tully were so stuck-up.

"Now I've thought about that. Any black person who grew up in this town knows how John M. Tully the man was. They built that school to avoid court-ordered busing. But when the
residential boundaries were redrawn, each area ended up with maybe three or four black families in each school and apparently most of the racists could deal with that. The ones who couldn't went to Tully."

"And you'd want to pay good money to them?"

"Thirty years have passed, Jury. A lot of African-American and other minority kids go there now ... okay, maybe not a lot, but surely two or three families."

"But Angela says they're the kids of university people from up north. They think our southern schools aren't good enough for their kids."

I knew that would bother her. She used to talk about the "stuck-up northern blacks" who came to the college and acted like they were too good to associate with the natives, or "townies."

"I've thought about all of this, okay? I'm willing to make the sacrifice for my kids."

Her mood was going bad fast. We'd brought up several unpleasant memories in one or two sentences.

"Mama, I talked to my science resource teacher today and she promised to give me a letter grade higher for participating in the Einstein Rally. And I believe Mrs. Norville talked to Miss Hoffer about me. You know how Miss Hoffer
is. By the end of the week she will have read everything ever written about dyslexia."

She had started to speak, but I could see that something I said was working.

"That is true. If there's anything a regular classroom teacher can do to help, Miss Hoffer is the one to do it. I hadn't really thought about us doing stuff here and in your regular classroom to help."

"Especially if you'd planned to let us go to regular middle school anyway. Judge might as well learn how to do whatever it is he has to do in the real world. There are no classes of ten over at La Salle Middle School," Jury said.

"You boys go play. I'm going to call Miss Hoffer."

"You have her home telephone number?" I asked.

"Actually, I do, but I was going to try her at school. I'm glad you guys are in the rally, but it's the long term I'm thinking about." She motioned for me to get out of her way and I couldn't imagine why. When I moved, I saw that she was looking at the kitchen wall clock.

"She said for us to go outside," Jury said, giving me a look that told me he wanted to talk.

I followed him outside. He sat down on the
top step and didn't say anything for what seemed like a long time.

"What, do you just get up in the morning and try to think up ways to ruin my life?" he finally asked. His expression was serious, like he wanted me to answer.

His question hit me like a punch. Did he really believe I deliberately tried to hurt him or that I had anything to do with our mother's bright idea? If it had been night and we were having one of our "after lights out" talks, I probably would have cried. But it wasn't night, so I took the porch steps in a single leap and walked over to Tommy's.

Just as I would've predicted, Miss Hoffer promised my mother that she would do everything she could to make sure that I got all the help she could provide. She told my mother that she took a class about learning problems last fall and all the information was still fresh in her mind. Mama said she kept apologizing for not recognizing the problem herself.

"Judge is such a hard worker. I had no idea it was such a struggle for him," Miss Hoffer told her.

"When I told her I would put off sending you to Tully until summer school, she actually sounded like she wanted to thank me for giving her the opportunity to use her fall semester class notes," my mother told us over dinner the next night. She likes Miss Hoffer; what parent wouldn't? I looked at Jury. He hadn't spoken to
me since my mother brought up this whole Tully thing. He looked away, as if to say, "So what; I'm still not talking to you."

"I was thinking you guys should use boiled eggs at first. I know the contest calls for raw eggs but we can wait for that."

In spite of his dislike for me, Jury looked at me for an explanation. I shrugged my shoulders. "What are you talking about?" I asked because I knew he wouldn't.

"The egg drop, silly. The way I figure it, if you use boiled eggs in the beginning, at least we can use them for egg salad and other things. There's not much we can do with raw eggs except maybe wash our hair with them."

"Ugh," both of us said.

"That is truly gross," Jury said, rolling his eyes at me like I had told him to wash his hair with a raw egg.

"Egg used to be the thing; you used to be able to buy shampoo with egg in it."

Jury and I just looked at each other. I think he was trying to lighten up. He really doesn't hold a grudge very long, not nearly as long as I can hold one, but it takes me longer to get angry.

"I picked up a copy of the rules today," Jury said.

My head jerked around. He hadn't said anything to me about getting the rules, but then again, he hadn't said anything to me about anything all day.

"Where are they?"

"In my book bag."

"Go get them."

"Now?"

"Yes, now!"

That kind of enthusiasm from her scared me. It always meant work for us.

Jury came back right away with his book bag, but it took him a while to find the booklet because his bag was jam-packed.