A great thing happened today. Mrs. Jackson told me to stay behind when the rest of the class was going to lunch. At first, I thought this was the opposite of great. Like she had noticed me chewing gum at recess or accidentally-on-purpose taking all the tops off Elena’s Magic Markers and she was going to tell me off for it.
Instead, she had noticed that I’m a fantastic speller. F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C. Fantastic.
She pulled out all of my spelling quizzes and showed me how I had never gotten a word wrong. Then she looked me right in the eye and said, “Our classroom spelling bee is in two weeks. You should win it pretty easily. So, I’m thinking we should start getting you ready for the school bee in January.”
I must have looked pretty dumbfounded, because my mouth just hung open and I couldn’t say a thing.
“Are you all right, Avalon?” she asked.
All right? I was doing somersaults inside. The school bee! In January! Hooray!
I had a profound realization. Everyone had been wrong about Mrs. Jackson. She was not the worst teacher in the fifth grade. She was the greatest teacher there had ever been in the entire history of the world.
“You really think I can win?” I finally asked.
“Here in the class, yes. I don’t think you have a chance to win the school bee. Harinder Singh is a formidable speller. I expect he will win again this year. But the second-place finalist will go with him to the regional bee in April.” She smiled and all her wrinkles crinkled up. “I think you have a chance at that.”
Hari Singh. The regional bee. It was like a dream coming true. Could it be possible that my Infinity Year power was about spelling after all?
“And you’re just in fifth grade, Avalon. In a couple of years, you might be as good a speller as he.”
I smiled. I was starting my professional life as a speller. And Mrs. Jackson was going to help.
She gave me a hall pass to go to the lunchroom by myself. I walked through the hall feeling completely happy and free. I couldn’t help but think of my dad.
My dad is the reason I can spell like I do. He used to say that I came by it honestly, that I was a chip off the old block. We used to play spelling games and he was so proud when I got words like shambolic and pomegranate right.
Right now, my dad is neither happy nor free. He’s the third reason I’m somewhat famous at my school. Because my dad is in prison. Has been for nearly a year. That’s why he’s never around. That’s why I never talk about him. That’s why last year was the worst year of my life.
Dad worked at the car dealership in town. He was the manager there and I used to go down on Saturday afternoons and hang out with him in his office and watch all the excitement of people coming in to buy cars. When it was really busy, I’d go help Vidal and Roberto in the detail department. I’d clean the inside windows of the just-sold cars so they wouldn’t have to.
It was fun being there. My dad was important and everybody was nice to me.
Nobody knew that my dad was stealing.
My mom never told me all the details, but I read about it in the local paper. Something about cars being sold to people they shouldn’t have sold them to. My dad and two of his salesmen went to prison last fall.
My dad wasn’t a thief. At least, I didn’t think so. Some days I wake up, and for a second, I don’t remember what’s happened. Then it all rushes back. My dad would have grounded me for stealing so much as a pack of gum. He would have made me take it back and apologize in person. That’s just the kind of guy he was. I thought. But it turns out, he wasn’t. How could he have done this?
The year before had been so different. My dad had been really happy. The dealership was selling more cars than ever, and it was all because of him. My dad was making plans. He wanted to buy us a bigger house. He wanted to take me to see the ocean.
Then he went to the owner, Mrs. Prescott, and asked for a raise. After that, he didn’t seem very happy anymore. I remember thinking how he seemed kind of mad all the time.
During the trial, I went to live with my Grandma Grace in Tennessee. My mom said it would be better for me.
It was so not better for me. I didn’t know anyone there. School was a nightmare and I really missed Atticus.
I was gone for sixty-one days. I counted each of them off on my Cats of the World calendar. I missed two very important things:
1. Seeing my dad before he went off to state prison for the next four years.
2. The fourth-grade classroom spelling bee.
We haven’t visited my dad once in prison, so that means it’s over a year since I’ve seen him. I’ve spoken to him on the phone two times. He called last Christmas and on my mother’s birthday. Mom gave me the phone both times. She had stopped talking to him before I was shipped off to Tennessee, before the trial. On the phone with him, I tried to sound like everything was normal but it wasn’t. He didn’t sound like himself. And I guess I didn’t sound like me, either.
During the whole time, he’s sent me only four letters. The first one was pretty long and told me how he would beat this thing and come home soon. The second one was shorter and talked about how the prison food was so bad. The third one, well, the third one just sounded sad. He wrote that he wanted me to come visit but by the end of the letter said it was probably a bad idea. The last letter wasn’t really a letter but a birthday card with a stupid store-bought message inside. At the bottom of the card he wrote only four words—Love you kid, Dad.
I send him a letter every week. I think he must feel bad, so I hope my letters cheer him up. I get the stamps from Mrs. White and I always mail the letters from the mailbox at the top of our street. My mom doesn’t know I’m writing him. Mom is still really mad at my dad. If she found out I was writing him, I bet she’d be really mad at me, too.
The only person I ever talk to about this is Atticus. He never asks me about it, though. He knows it’s something I don’t want to talk about unless I want to talk about it.
The thing about the school spelling bee is this: The spellers invite their families to come and watch. They sit in the audience and cheer. My dad would have loved to see me up there. He would have yelled louder than anyone.
But since he’s not here and my mom will probably have to work, there won’t be much of a cheering section for me.
That’s the thing.
At lunch, I told Atticus what Mrs. Jackson said about my spelling and how she thought I might have a chance to make it to the regional bee.
“That’s awesome,” he said, leaning over from his table. “Can I have a french fry?”
I passed my tray to him at the Ms. Smith table so Atticus could grab some fries. His mom didn’t let him buy lunch on french fry days.
“Me and M will help you study,” he said through a mouthful of potatoes.
I laughed. Atticus and M were about as good as each other at spelling. It was the one thing that I could do way better than him.
“We need to talk about our magical powers, too,” he whispered, leaning between the tables so nobody else could hear. “Any news?”
“Not yet,” I said. Atticus asked me about this daily. It was always on his mind. I wondered what he would do if I got mine first. It might drive him crazy!
Across the room, I saw Hari Singh laughing with some of his friends at one of the seventh-grade tables. It would be cool if my Infinity Year power made me a great speller like him. Or it would be great if it saved me from Elena’s evil plans. But deep down inside, I really wanted one thing. Even though he had done something really bad, I wanted my Infinity power for my father. I wanted him to write me a letter. Or give me a call. I wanted my mom not to be mad at him anymore. I wanted us to be a family again.
In the afternoon, our classroom went to the art room to work on our Family Tree Project. Mae and I sat on the floor in one corner of the room with all of our supplies around us. We had to make three posters. One about my family, one about her family, and one about things both our families had in common. We had to include diagrams and drawings and pictures. The diagrams were supposed to trace back all the way to our great-great-grandparents.
Mae is very good at drawing and I am very good at gluing so we are perfectly matched. We had to make our presentation to the class right before Thanksgiving.
So far, we had been doing research trying to figure out who all our relatives were. We’d just started making copies of the pictures we’d found and began gluing them on our poster board.
The week before, I called Grandma Grace, who told me all kinds of things on the phone. Like how her father fought in World War II and how her great-grandmother marched in parades to get women the vote. Grandma Grace is good at stories and history. She is the editor in chief of her town’s weekly newspaper in Tennessee called the Sanford Telegraph. She sent me all kinds of pictures she copied from my mother’s side of the family.
“Who is that again?” Mae asked, pointing at one of my black-and-white pictures.
“I think that’s my great-great-grandfather,” I said, and turned over the photo. Grandma Grace had written everyone’s name and how they related to me on the back of each picture. Thank goodness. And this was, in fact, Great-great-granddad. “His name was Talmadge Guest,” I said, and held up the photo so Mae could see it better. “Do we know any Talmadges?”
“I don’t think so,” Mae said, and smiled. As she searched through her photos, I looked at Talmadge Guest again. His thin lips drew a straight line across his wrinkled face. Obviously never heard of sunscreen. Maybe never heard of a smile. If he lived in this century, I thought he’d be at home with the phrase Hey kid, get off my lawn.
“Look at this one.” Mae held up one of her black-and-white photos of a man who looked even scarier than Talmadge Guest. He had a long gray beard and round glasses that sat on the end of his nose.
“Yikes!” I said. “Who’s he?”
She looked down at her notebook to double-check his name. “This is Adam Wasserman. He came from Poland in … 1904.” She read from the notes she had made with her mom. “He and his wife, Freda, landed at Ellis Island and started a new life in Brooklyn, New York.”
I looked at Adam Wasserman more closely. He had even more wrinkles than Talmadge Guest did. It must have been even harder to live in Poland than in Tennessee.
“These are my great-grandparents from my mother’s side of the family,” Mae said, showing me another old picture. The man and woman in this photo were old like the other ones. They both had gray hair and glasses. But these ancestors looked nice. They had kind faces. They were even smiling. “Mom says they could have been killed. It was a miracle that they survived. Mom says if they hadn’t escaped, we never would have existed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, we’re Jewish, and they lived in Nazi Germany. That was before World War II,” she said as she studied the photo. “They had to sneak out of their house in the middle of the night with just a couple of suitcases and some forged passports. Mom said it took them three months to make it all the way to America.”
Wow. We had studied Nazi Germany in class this year. About how Jewish people were killed by the Nazis in concentration camps. When we learned about it, it seemed really bad but somehow, being part of history, it also seemed kind of distant. Now, hearing a story like this directly from Mae’s lips, it seemed not only really bad but really real.
“Did your mom know them?” I asked.
“She said she met them when she was little but doesn’t remember them much. Just knows about them through stories.” She arranged the photo on one of the poster boards and then looked over at what I was working on.
“Do you have any old pictures from your dad’s family tree?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said quietly.
I’d got everything I needed about my mom’s family, but my dad’s family was a problem. I wrote him to ask about his ancestors but he hasn’t written back. His parents live way out in California and we don’t talk to them much, especially now. So, I don’t know what to do. Maybe I’ll make up names and stick them to old pictures I find on the Internet. An imaginary family. One with a dad who didn’t go to—
“That’s going to be embarrassing to explain.” The voice came from above. I looked up and saw Elena staring down at my poster board. She was pointing right at the spot where my father’s picture would be.
“Maybe everybody doesn’t know about your dad,” she said. “Does Mae even know?”
She looked at Mae. I was sure Mae knew my dad was in prison. Everybody knew. We just hadn’t talked about it yet.
Mae didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Elena’s face. After my dad went to prison, Elena had been extra mean to me. She even took a picture of my dad from the newspaper and drew prison bars across his face and posted it on the fourth-grade bulletin board. That had been the last straw. The next week I took that picture of her and her American flag underwear.
“If I were Mae, I’d be embarrassed to even be your partner,” Elena snarled.
I looked down. “Shut up, Elena,” I said quietly. Mae still didn’t say a word. Maybe she was embarrassed to be working with me. Maybe Elena was right.
“I wouldn’t blame her one bit,” Elena taunted.
It’s bad enough when Elena says things about me. When she says stuff about my family, it’s worse. I felt my face start to burn. I wanted to jump up and push her away. This was a moment when I really wished for Atticus. He’d know how to stop me. But he wasn’t there.
I dropped my marker and began to rise, like one of the erupting volcanoes at the back of Ms. Smith’s class. I suddenly didn’t care about anything Elena had planned for me. I was ready to end this thing now.
“Elena!” Mrs. Jackson suddenly called out from across the room. “Back to your work, please,” she said. Elena narrowed her eyes at me before turning to go. As she walked away, I saw Mrs. Jackson looking at me. She gave me a little smile before she went back to helping Eva Chang and Marcus with their project.
In that moment, I realized if Mrs. Jackson caught Elena in the act, she would be on my side. Maybe I should tell her what I had heard in the bathroom at the open house. Maybe. But if I did, I knew Elena would just deny it. She would say I was the liar and then nothing would change.
I sat back down across from Mae and tried to act normal. We went back to organizing our photos like nothing happened.
By the time Atticus’s class got to recess, I was ready to boil over. He could tell something was wrong right away. We walked past the jungle gym and sat down on the swings.
I told him what happened and how mad I was at Elena.
“Don’t listen to her,” he said.
“But why does she do it, Atticus?”
He shrugged. “I know she started it but…”
I was glad he didn’t finish that sentence, but I knew what he meant. Elena might have started it but I never seemed to let it end.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she got dropped on her head when she was a baby.”
“And Mae didn’t say anything. Even afterward,” I said. “Do you think she doesn’t know about my dad?”
Atticus raised his eyebrow at me.
“Okay, she knows about him,” I said. “Of course she knows.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I dug my toe into the worn ground beneath the swing. “Atticus,” I said, and looked around to be sure nobody was listening. “I know you want a big Infinity Year power but really, I only want one thing.”
He looked over at me.
“I just want my dad to write me back,” I said. Tears welled up in my eyes and I quickly brushed them away.
“He’ll write,” Atticus said. “Your dad’s not a bad guy.”
I tried to smile. Of course, that’s what Atticus would think. He always thinks the best of everybody. My mom says that Atticus is guileless. I looked it up one time in the dictionary. It means someone who is innocent and naive. I don’t know if that’s true about Atticus but I have never heard him say a bad word about anyone.
Not about my dad.
Not even about Jasper Hightower.
That’s how we became best friends. It was first grade, and it changed the course of Avalon history. I knew Atticus. Everyone knew Atticus. His sister, Caroline, was the Queen of Eighth Grade, and his family lived up on Bunker Hill.
Jasper Hightower used to live down the street from me. He was the kind of boy who would set an ant on fire with a magnifying glass and laugh. My mom would walk me to school every day while Jasper walked with his older brothers.
I’d overhear things. Like how they were going to toilet paper somebody’s yard or how they were going to steal somebody’s lunch money or dunk somebody’s head in a toilet. I remember feeling sorry for Jasper because I knew his brothers were bad. And that didn’t leave much room for Jasper to be good.
I kept my distance until one day I heard them talking about Atticus. Jasper’s brothers hated the kids who lived up on Bunker Hill. They hated their nice houses and their nice lives. They decided that, for the fun of it, Jasper should play a trick on Atticus.
Atticus had seemed like a nice guy to me. So what if he lived on Bunker Hill? So what if his sister was the Queen of Eighth Grade?
One afternoon during recess, I was at the very top of the jungle gym. From my perch, I saw Atticus following Jasper back inside the school. That was weird. We weren’t supposed to do that.
So, I decided to follow them.
I jumped down and hurried inside just in time to see them going into the boys’ room at the end of the hall. Nobody saw this but me.
I was only in first grade. I didn’t have a hall pass. I knew I’d get in trouble if anybody caught me. But I couldn’t get the vision of Atticus getting his head dunked in the toilet out of my mind. So, like the six-year-old superhero that I was, I busted into the boys’ bathroom.
Whatever was about to happen hadn’t happened yet. But I could tell it was about to. I started jabbering on about how Mrs. Warneke was looking for them and she was really mad. That even got Jasper scared. Jasper suddenly ran out of the bathroom, leaving me and Atticus in there alone.
Atticus looked confused but glad to see me. “Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I said back.
We’ve had each other’s backs ever since.
Later I learned that Jasper had told Atticus that someone had left him a prize in the middle stall. I still can’t believe he fell for that one.
Luckily for Atticus, Jasper and his brothers moved away the very next year.
I wish I’d been so lucky with Elena.