The only Ben she knew of was Ben Ekhart, one of the boys who made burping noises and threw things at the backs of the other kids’ heads. Could it possibly be this Ben her sister had written about?
On Monday morning, Figgrotten stood on the side of the road and made drawings in the snow with her feet. Only when the bus pulled up did Christinia charge out of the house and run across the yard. She pushed Figgrotten aside and climbed on in front of her, marching to the back and plopping down hard in her seat. Then she went into her slumped position, staring out the window.
The snow had been cleared off the roads and was piled up high on the sides. The world looked stunned and brilliant under the clean layer. Little bones of snow lay on top of each branch, and when they drove past the Tierneys’ dairy farm, the big cornfields were pristine oceans of whiteness. Figgrotten couldn’t imagine living in a place where there weren’t seasons like there were in Preston. Seasons, she thought happily, changed the world so dramatically. Life would get so dull without tangly hot green summers, then cold snowy winters.
She glanced up and looked at Alvin in his rearview mirror. She had a perfect view of his face under his black Greek fisherman’s hat, and she stared at it lovingly for a minute before he glanced up and caught her eye.
“What’s going through that mind of yours, young lady?” Alvin said.
Figgrotten slid forward on her seat and raised her voice. “Alvin, do you like to be alone or do you like to be around people?”
“Both. Everyone needs both. Solitude and friendship.”
Figgrotten sat back in her seat and looked out the window. She kind of wished he’d just said “Alone.”
Then she leaned forward again and said, “Alvin, have you ever heard of Mahatma Gandhi?”
“Yes, oh, certainly.”
“I think you look like him a little.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Figgrotten pushed herself back into the seat and clamped down on her lips. She knew she could potentially drive Alvin insane with all her thoughts and questions, so she always held herself back a little with him. But after another minute she slid forward again and said, “I really like him. He wasn’t a fighter.”
Alvin nodded and smiled. “Oh, Miss Pauley, there you are wrong, he was indeed a fighter. But he fought very gently and without violence of any kind. And that always is more powerful than using weapons.”
Figgrotten nodded. Alvin knew everything there was to know.
He slowed the bus, as there was James Barren, standing behind a huge snowbank. Figgrotten craned her neck to see him through the windshield. His mom wasn’t with him this time. Figgrotten was sure glad she’d never had to start at a new school. People wouldn’t know what to make of her, and when kids were faced with something different, she knew, sometimes they lashed out in response.
Alvin opened the door and James struggled through the knee-deep snow in his sneakers.
“Good morning,” Alvin said as he climbed on. James said a very quiet hello, then looked down the aisle. He stood still for a second, then threw his knapsack into the seat behind Figgrotten’s and sat down. She didn’t turn to look at him as the bus roared forward, but if she looked out the window at things and sort of turned her head to follow them, she could see James out of the corner of her eye. He was slouched down in his seat reading a book, his head down and his hair hanging around his face. She wanted to know what he was reading, but there was no way she was talking to him or turning around to look.
Of course, she wished he hadn’t sat there, because now she found herself not wanting to talk to Alvin about Gandhi. So she slid back in her seat and watched the snowy town go by.
When they pulled into the school, Figgrotten did her usual scan of the teachers’ lot for Mr. Stanley’s car, and she gave a tiny sigh of relief at the sight of the minuscule thing, pulled at an angle at the farthest corner. It was the smallest car Figgrotten had ever seen. In fact, when she’d first laid eyes on the vehicle a year back, she couldn’t quite figure out if it was even a whole car. It seemed to be half of one.
“It uses only one gallon of gas for every sixty miles of driving,” Mr. Stanley had told the class when it had come up in conversation. Though, clearly, no one seemed to care about such things. Figgrotten was far more concerned about how tiny the car was. It could barely fit one other passenger, let alone a dog and a kid. What it was, Figgrotten surmised, was a car for one person with no plans to be more than one person. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this, but it made her think Mr. Stanley was different. And she realized this being different was one of the things she liked about him.
School felt a bit crazy for the first hour that day. All because of the snow and the things kids came to school wearing. The voluminous snowsuits seemed to take up the entire hallway. Snow boots had been flung left and right. No one cared a hoot about classwork; the whole day was focused on heading out the door for recess. Figgrotten was no exception. She normally found the classroom overheated and stuffy, but today it felt twice so. As Mr. Stanley began the morning, talking about the date of the science fair and how no one was allowed to chew gum in the classroom, Figgrotten stared out the window at the blindingly white snow. It shone in the sun, and each bird that flew across it was a splash of color and movement. She longed to dive into its coldness.
Then Mr. Stanley clapped his hands together, which made Figgrotten sit up. “Today we’re going to talk about one big word,” he said, and walked up to the chalkboard and wrote CIVILIZATION in huge letters across it. Then he stood back and put his hands on his hips and looked around the classroom.
“Okay, folks, I would bet we all sort of think we know what this word means. But go ahead, give it a crack. Anyone?”
Figgrotten glanced around the room and saw, as always, a lot of blank faces. But then a hand went up in the front.
“Yes, James?”
“It means when a group of people act civilized or, like, not completely…I don’t know, crazy?” James said.
Figgrotten suddenly felt a jolt of something unpleasant go through her.
“Aha! Yes. But what does being civilized mean?”
Her hand went up. But before Mr. Stanley could call on her, James said, “It means people not fighting with each other?” And Mr. Stanley nodded and turned and wrote CIVILIZED = NOT FIGHTING on the chalkboard while Figgrotten’s hand sank down.
“Can anyone add to this?” Mr. Stanley asked.
James’s hand went back up, and Figgrotten put her hand up again, but then so did Marshall Wolff. He never put his hand up, so of course Mr. Stanley called on him.
“Does it have to do with, like, not being cavemen?”
“Oh, wonderful, that’s right, Marshall,” Mr. Stanley said, and went back to the board and wrote, BEING A CIVILIAN = NOT BEING A CAVEMAN. Then he said, “However, what part about being civilized is not like being a caveman?”
Figgrotten raised her hand and so did a few other kids, but James just blurted out, “Following rules or laws.”
Figgrotten felt herself slide down in her seat and at the same time felt her face scrunch up like she smelled something bad. James had answered too many questions. She glanced around and, sure enough, her classmates also were slumping now.
“That’s right, James. Very good. A civilization is when a society is advanced in a way where people can live together under certain rules. Were the Native Americans a civilization?”
Clearly Mr. Stanley was so excited by how smart James was that he didn’t notice he wasn’t always following the rule about raising your hand to speak.
So now Figgrotten didn’t even put up her hand.
“Definitely,” James said, just blurting out again.
Mr. Stanley then walked back to Figgrotten’s desk. “Did you have something you’d like to add, Frances?”
Figgrotten sat up now and shrugged a little. She wanted to say something about Gandhi suddenly. She was pretty sure he might be a good example of someone who acted in a civilized way. “Well, I guess, being civilized is like waiting your turn to be called on. Stuff like that. Following rules.”
Mr. Stanley smiled at her. “Yes,” he said. “Those are examples.” She wasn’t quite sure if he got her hint about James or not.
When recess finally did come, Figgrotten had to fight her way through the mad chaos to get to her locker and get her snow pants and boots on. There was barely anything civilized about any of it. By the time she got outside, much of the perfect snow had been trampled on, but she found a nice clean patch out by the fence, away from the mounds of screaming kids, and she lay down and made a snow angel and stared up at the sky. She lay there until she could feel the cold coming through her clothes, which took away the hot closed-in feel of the classroom and gave her a tiny bit of a wonderful feeling. Freedom. She closed her eyes and listened as kids raced by and screamed and laughed. She was happy enough being by herself, but she felt aware of it now more than she used to. She’d think, I’m alone, which is fine. Whereas before, she was just alone and didn’t think about it.
She closed her eyes and lay still, feeling the winter sun on her face. She wished the eighth graders had recess at the same time as her, because then maybe she could quietly observe and figure out what was going on with her sister. She knew of only one other Ben in the school, and he was in fourth grade and was about three feet tall. So he couldn’t be the Ben Christinia liked. Which left only the bad one from the bus. Ben Ekhart.
Alvin, as always, was sitting behind the wheel reading his book when Figgrotten climbed back onto the bus that afternoon. He read with the page up close to his eyes, but he still greeted each person who came onto the bus. “Miss Pauley,” he said as Figgrotten climbed on. She sat in her seat, but then stood halfway up and looked over Alvin’s shoulder and read the title of the book, Black Elk Speaks, out loud.
Alvin nodded. “I read it a long time ago and it never left me. So here I am, reading it again.”
“Is that him? That’s Black Elk?” Figgrotten pointed at the picture of the Native American on the cover. He was wearing a fur hat and earrings and a really big necklace.
“Indeed it is,” Alvin said, nodding. “I think everyone should read it at some point in their lives. It’s not easy, though. It’s quite a sad book.”
“Oh. Okay.” Figgrotten sat back in her seat. She’d try to remember the title and write it in her journal later, though she wasn’t crazy about the idea of reading something that was sad.
Alvin nodded again slowly. Then he sighed and put the book down in his lap. “Now, Miss Pauley, on another subject, after talking with you this morning about Gandhi, I went to the library and wrote down a couple of famous things that Gandhi said that I thought you might like to have on hand.” He closed the book and then reopened it to the first page and pulled out a little piece of paper with his raggedy handwriting on it, and when he handed it back to her she noticed the paper was shaking. It was the first time she’d ever noticed Alvin’s hand shaking like that. She took the paper and looked down and read under her breath.
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”
“Now, those are just a couple of notions for you to ponder when you’re up in your rock world.”
Figgrotten sat looking down at the paper. The handwriting was so jaggedy that it suddenly made her feel sad. It was too jaggedy. “Thanks, I’ll try to figure out what they mean.”
“Yes, you do that.” Alvin leaned forward and started the bus. “Ah, the world is a wild and exciting place, but sometimes, so it doesn’t get too wild and exciting, people need to be reminded how to behave. Gandhi was quite good at that.”
As the bus pulled out onto the road, Figgrotten very much wanted to lean forward and tell Alvin about Mr. Stanley’s discussion about the word civilization, but once again James had sat down behind her and she didn’t want him interjecting.
But Alvin started talking anyway, so all she had to do was scooch forward in her seat and listen.
“Now, Miss Pauley, I read in the science section of the paper today that they may have discovered a whole other planet out there in our solar system. And when I read this, I just about lifted off my chair in the library. I mean, here we all are toodling along thinking we’ve figured it all out, and poof!…wrong…there’s a discovery like this.”
Alvin shook his head and let out his high cackling laugh. This laugh was music to Figgrotten’s ears, as it had never stopped being startling and funny.
“I always forget about stuff that’s not on Earth,” Figgrotten said to Alvin. “And then I look up at the sky and I—”
“Wait, let me tell you—your mind can’t fathom it!” Alvin said, lifting his two skinny hands off the steering wheel for a fraction of a second, then plunking them back down again. Then he let out another crazy laugh and Figgrotten sat back in her seat smiling.
“Yes, exactly,” she said, and looked out the window.
Just then she heard something in the back of the bus that made her turn around in her seat just in time to see Becky Moss get out of her seat and walk slowly, comically swinging her hips, to the back seat, where she plopped down right next to Ben Ekhart. The look on Becky’s face was the kind of look you’d get if you’d just won the prize for most popular kid on the planet. Or had managed to get the biggest slice of cake at a party. She looked that pleased with herself. Everyone was clapping and hooting and laughing. Figgrotten turned slowly back around in her seat, letting her eyes slide over the other kids until she caught sight of Christinia, who had now slipped so low in her seat it was hard to see her at first. But once Figgrotten caught sight of her, she recognized immediately the look on her sister’s face. Christinia was holding back from crying. Figgrotten froze, staring, which was the worst thing she could have done, because Christinia glanced up suddenly and their eyes met.
Oh boy, Figgrotten thought as she spun around, now I’m in for it.