Kate would have been perfectly happy to go home in the afternoon and keep reading about interesting people in faraway places. The problem was that they got home from school just as Mom was leaving for work, and Kate’s first chore was to help Chip with his homework. Justin could have done it, but he got too impatient. Sometimes Kate couldn’t explain things either, at least not in a way her little brother could understand. Chip had the most trouble with arithmetic, which wasn’t Kate’s best subject. One day she had an idea. Chip and Luther were in the same class. Mrs. Wilson or Ruby was probably helping Luther. Maybe they could help Chip, too.
“Come on, Chip,” Kate said. “Let’s go down and see how Luther’s doing with his homework.”
When they came up onto the Wilsons’ porch they saw Luther through the screen door. He was sitting at the desk under the big U.S. map. Ruby was standing beside him.
When Kate knocked, Ruby looked up and said sharply, “Luther can’t play. He’s got homework.”
“So does Chip,” Kate said through the screen. “I explained borrowing about ten times and he’s still getting it wrong. I was wondering if you—”
“Hey, Chip,” Luther interrupted. “Did you get number three?”
Chip pushed open the screen door. Kate grabbed at the tail of his T-shirt to stop him from walking right in, but he pulled away from her and went straight over to the desk. He looked at Luther’s paper and said, “Three was easy. It’s number five, with all the zeros.”
“Oh, I can show you zeros,” Luther said. He slid out of his chair. “Let’s go in on the kitchen table.”
Luther led Chip out of the room and Kate followed them. Behind her, she heard Ruby sigh.
“Grandma,” said Luther, “will you help us?”
“Reckon I can cook and do arithmetic at the same time,” Mrs. Wilson said. All the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes crinkled into a smile. She looked at Kate over the boys’ heads. “I could when Ruby was a little girl.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Wilson.” Kate gave Mrs. Wilson a grateful smile. “I think I’ll wait in the living room if that’s okay.”
“You do that, honey. The boys and me will do just fine.”
Chip and Luther put their books on the kitchen table. Kate slipped back into the living room and stood there waiting for Ruby to say, “Have a seat.” But Ruby didn’t say anything.
Kate stood next to the desk, feeling awkward. There was an electric typewriter on the desk. Kate touched it. “Wish I could type,” she said.
“What for?” asked Ruby. “That’s old technology.”
“I know. But Miss Lynn said that people who know how to touch type get their work done way faster, even when they’re using the computer,” Kate said. She hesitated and added, “I like knowing how to do things. It makes me feel like I’m smarter than folks think I am.”
Kate could have explained to Ruby that when you’re pretty or have cute clothes it doesn’t matter if you’re smart because people notice you no matter what. But when you’re just an ordinary-looking person you have to be smart or else they treat you like you’re invisible, and only notice you if they’re feeling mean and need somebody to pick on. But Kate didn’t try to explain this because she figured it wasn’t the sort of thing Ruby would understand. She just stood there with her fingers on the typewriter keys, wishing she could do something that would make Ruby notice her.
Ruby flopped down on the couch and started flipping through a magazine. Suddenly she lowered the magazine and looked at Kate’s hands. “I never saw such filthy fingernails! What have you been doing?”
Kate had never paid much attention to her own fingernails. She looked down at them now and pulled them away from the typewriter keys. “Uh, I don’t know,” she said, curling them into the palms of her hands.
Ruby got up and went down the hall. A minute later she came back with a manicure set. “Sit,” she said, pointing to a chair.
Kate perched on the chair. Ruby sat on the couch across from her. She took one of Kate’s hands into her lap and started cleaning the dirt out from under the fingernails. Kate felt uneasy having Ruby work on her nails. She could tell Ruby was only doing it because she was bored, or maybe because she thought Kate wasn’t well-groomed enough to be hanging around their house. Kate couldn’t stop thinking about Ruby’s remark about “white trash.” She tried to think of something to say that would interest Ruby and get her mind on something besides all the dirt under her fingernails.
“Can I ask you a question?” Kate asked.
“Ask away,” Ruby said.
“What I wonder,” Kate said, “is why, at school, white kids and black kids and Latinos and Asians hang out mostly with other kids like them. Not all the time, of course, but most of the time, like in the lunchroom, or after school.” Kate waited a moment, then asked the rest of her question. “You think it’s because everybody’s prejudiced against everybody else?”
Ruby kept working on Kate’s fingernails. Instead of answering, she asked, “Who do you hang out with, Kate?”
Kate felt her face turning red. “Nobody, really. I had a good friend in fifth grade, but she moved away.”
Ruby started filing the rough edges off Kate’s nails. “But if you had a choice, who would it be? Somebody just like you, right?”
Kate heard the suspicious tone in Ruby’s voice and understood what she was getting at. She answered carefully. “I don’t think people have to be the exact same to like each other. Do you?”
Ruby shrugged. “Well, it’s a fact that people go a lot on looks. They figure that people who look like them are going to be the same, and people who look different are going to be different. From there it’s pretty easy to jump to the conclusion that their difference isn’t as good as your difference.”
“Would you think that?” Kate asked, remembering perfectly well how Ruby had made up her mind right off that they were “white trash” just because they came that first day dressed in old clothes and not washed up or anything.
Ruby pushed Kate’s left hand aside and reached for the right one. For a while she worked on the nails without saying anything. Just when Kate had given up on getting an answer, Ruby said, “When I first moved to New York, there was this Jewish girl who lived in the next apartment. I thought she was real strange. Like, she never went out on Friday nights. Her parents always came over. One hot Friday night I walked past and her apartment door was open. They were having supper together and doing this kind of ritual with candles and prayers and stuff. After that, when I passed her in the hall, it seemed like she was looking at me funny out of the corners of her eyes. I felt like telling her, ‘Honey, you may think I’m weird, but I think you’re pretty weird, too!’
“About a month later, we happened to ride up on the same elevator. She was looking at me out of the corners of her eyes again, and I was just about to blurt out something rude when she said, ‘You know, you’ve got the most beautiful hair. I’d just love to learn how to do mine like that.’”
Ruby finished filing the nails on Kate’s right hand and started buffing them. “I don’t know that I thought I was better than her. But I did figure that because she never went out on Friday nights, and because the prayers at her supper table weren’t like the ones Papa says at ours, we couldn’t possibly have anything in common. But when I got to know her, turned out we read the same books and liked the same music and always wanted to see the same movies. We even had the same problems with our parents, who hadn’t wanted us to move out on our own. So yeah, maybe I was a little prejudiced at first. At least, I prejudged her, which is more or less the same thing.”
Kate frowned. “There’s Jewish kids in our school. And kids from Latin America and the Caribbean, and way more Yankees than there used to be.”
Ruby must have seen the frown, because she narrowed her eyes and asked, “Does that bother you?”
“Doesn’t bother me that they’re there,” Kate said, flinching a little as Ruby dug under a fingernail again to get out a piece of dirt she’d missed. “It’s how everybody gangs up against everybody else.”
“You mean whites against blacks?” Ruby asked.
“Not only that,” Kate told her. “The Latino kids from Puerto Rico fight with the Latinos from Cuba, and the American black kids make fun of black kids from Haiti, and white kids whose parents have regular jobs say terrible things about white kids on welfare. One day all the Baptist girls, black and white ones both, beat up a black girl who just moved here from Harlem when she said she was a Muslim and didn’t believe in Jesus.”
Ruby sighed. “That’s exactly how I remember junior high. All cliques and us-against-them, even in this small town. And my parents couldn’t understand why I hated school.”
“I hate school, too,” said Kate. Then she added, “But I like that story about you and your friend in New York. I think it’s fun getting to know different kinds of people.”
What Kate wanted to say, but didn’t, was that the trouble wasn’t her liking other people, it was getting other people to like her.
At school the next day, when Kate looked at her manicured nails so smooth and clean and round, they made her feel good. The good feeling lasted all day long, right up till she climbed on the bus to go home. As she put her foot up on the first high step, she heard the sound of her too-tight jeans ripping. She reached back and felt the hole, and through it, her underpants.
She managed to get on the bus and into a seat without anybody noticing, and whispered to Chip to walk close behind her when she got off. As far as she could tell, nobody saw her underwear through the torn place. At least no one teased her about it.
Kate looked at the jeans when she got home to see if she could patch them, but the fabric was so worn she didn’t think it would hold a patch. Not that she wanted a patch in the dead center of one cheek of a pair of too-tight jeans! Maybe Mom could think of something. Or else—Kate didn’t know what. She could barely get her other jeans zipped anymore.
But Mom didn’t come home at supper time. Instead, she called.
“Go ahead and eat without me,” she told them. “We’ve got a cow down. Looks like a breech birth—you know, the calf’s bottom is coming out first instead of its head. George has gone to town to see if he can find a vet. I’ve got to stay with the cow. It might be late when I get home.”
Kate fell asleep with her book in her hand around midnight. It must have been really late when Mom got in. When Kate woke up the next morning, Mom was gone again, as usual, to do the morning milking. Kate rummaged through her clothes again, but couldn’t find one thing to wear to school. Not church dresses; nobody ever wore dresses to school. Neither of her skirts would do either, nor any of the jeans. Two had broken zippers and two she couldn’t zip at all.
Justin looked into Kate’s room and saw her sitting there in her underwear, the torn jeans in her lap. “Hey! You’re going to miss the bus.”
“Leave me alone,” Kate said, fighting to hold back tears.
Chip peeked in at her. “Come on, Kate,” he said.
Justin gave Chip a push. “You come on, brat. No need for you to miss the bus just because Kate wants to.”
Kate watched them walking up the driveway to Lost Goat Lane, and at the same time saw Luther and Ruby walking up the lane toward the bus stop out on the highway. Chip and Luther ran to meet each other. Ruby said something to Justin. He pointed to the house.
The bus stopped and the boys got on. Ruby started back down the lane, walking slowly. Then, instead of continuing toward her own house, she turned down the Martin driveway, picking her way carefully around mud puddles left from rain in the night. She didn’t come up on the porch, but walked over to the side of the house and spoke to Kate through the window.
“Hey girl. You missed the bus.”
“I know.”
“You sick?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“My pants tore,” Kate said.
“Guess you better pick out something else then,” Ruby said. She started to walk away.
“Like what?” Kate almost screamed, then started to cry.
Ruby stopped. For a minute she stood there, looking down the driveway. Probably laughing at me, Kate thought miserably. Probably thinking how white trashy we are because I don’t have twenty outfits like she probably has.
Ruby turned around. She wasn’t laughing. “You must have something. Or we can fix the rip. Want me to take a look?”
“If you want,” Kate mumbled.
Ruby came up on the porch. Kate stayed where she was, on the bed. She didn’t particularly want Ruby seeing her with nothing on but a T-shirt and underwear. But Ruby walked right in through the front door and came down the hall to Kate’s room. She stood in the doorway for a minute, looking around with a critical expression on her face. Anybody could tell from all the open dresser drawers and the way clothes were strewn about that Kate had been trying to find something to wear.
“How about shorts?”
“I don’t have the right kind.”
“What do you mean, ‘the right kind’?” Ruby asked.
“They can’t be cutoffs, and they’ve got to be down to your fingertips when you’ve got your arms straight down. All mine are shorter than that.”
Ruby gave a short, un-funny laugh. “What about this?” she asked, picking up a skirt.
“I can barely get it buttoned. When I do it’s so tight it hurts my stomach. But if I don’t do the button it wrecks the zippers. Like those jeans.” Kate jerked her head toward two pairs of jeans lying on the floor. Ruby picked them up and saw the broken zippers.
Ruby picked up a shirt missing two buttons and stared at it. “Does this ever take me back.”
Kate glanced up at her. She had no idea what Ruby was talking about.
Ruby gave Kate a crooked smile. “I’ll never forget the year I started popping buttons off everything. Booker teased me about being fat. The boys at school were always making jokes about my body. I’d sooner have gone to jail than to school that year. That’s one of the reasons why I ran away from home.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open. How could anybody have teased somebody as gorgeous as Ruby about the way she looked? And teased her so badly that she had actually run away from home instead of going to school!
Ruby tossed the shirts aside and took the torn jeans from Kate. “Looks like these are beyond repair,” she said, holding them up.
“That was my last pair,” Kate said sadly. “The only ones that still fit right.”
“Yeah, well.” Ruby stuck her hand through the hole in Kate’s pants and wiggled her fingers. She seemed to be thinking about something and couldn’t quite make up her mind. Finally she said, “Why don’t you come up to the house. Maybe I got a pair or two that would fit you.”
“You mean—?” Kate didn’t know what to say.
“I mean get your shorts on and let’s go,” Ruby said, flicking her long braids. “You don’t want your mom to catch you ditching, do you?”
Kate grabbed a pair of cutoffs and was about to slip them on when she caught sight of herself next to Ruby in the mirror. Seeing her own skinny body next to Ruby’s slender woman-curves made Kate feel hopeless. “But nothing’s going to fit, Ruby. You’re so … I’m so …”
“So what? You think it was breathing that ripped those pants? You’re just growing, girl.” Ruby slapped Kate lightly on the hip. “And in all the right places.”
Ruby didn’t say much on the walk to the Wilson house. A couple of times Kate glanced at her and wondered if Ruby was sorry she had gotten involved in what really wasn’t her problem—maybe thinking about how she didn’t want to give away any of her clothes after all. But when they got there Ruby cheered up. Kate cheered up, too. She was thankful that Mr. and Mrs. Wilson weren’t around so she didn’t have to explain to them why she wasn’t in school.
“Come on back here,” Ruby said, and headed down the hall.
“This your bedroom?” Kate asked shyly.
“Has been, ever since I was born,” Ruby said. “Only thing that’s changed is the bed. When I came back with Luther, we took out the double bed and put in twins. When Booker’s not home, which is most of the time, Luther sleeps in his room. But when Booker comes for holidays, Luther sleeps there.” She motioned toward one of the twin beds.
While she talked, Ruby rummaged through drawers stuffed with clothes. “Here, try these,” she said, tossing Kate two pairs of jeans. “Up in New York, where I didn’t have my mama’s cooking to pig out on, I used to be a lot thinner than I am now, and I favored tight jeans. But I can’t fit into these anymore. Somebody might as well get some use out of them.”
Kate tried on both pairs of jeans, which were identical faded denim and just slightly flared at the bottom. They looked almost like her favorite jeans, the pair that had ripped.
Ruby leaned against the wall and looked at Kate critically. “A little long, but otherwise they fit okay.”
“They look good on me,” Kate said shyly.
“Yeah, well, looks are only half of it, and the little half at that. What really matters is how they feel. Because, honey, if you don’t feel good, you’re not going to look good, no matter what you’re wearing.”
That made sense to Kate; that’s why she’d liked the torn jeans so much. They felt the same shape as her body.
Ruby rummaged in another drawer and tossed Kate a plain white shirt, just like the one Schroder had pinned the note on the back of, except that it was a size bigger. “Now, I just popped a button on this one,” Ruby said. “But you haven’t filled out all that much yet. Here, try it.”
Kate buttoned it up and looked at herself in the mirror again.
“It’ll do,” Ruby decided. “But let me tell you something, Kate. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you want to see a girl looking back at you who’s got her head held high. Her hair’s shining clean—doesn’t matter how it’s fixed as long as it’s clean, brushed till it really shines. And you’re in what—seventh grade?”
Kate nodded.
“So there are girls in your class who smoke, right?” Before Kate could answer, Ruby said, “Just stay away from them when they’re puffing.”
“Why?” Kate actually thought the girls who smoked were kind of cool.
“Because they stink,” Ruby said. “Their hair, their clothes, everything. If you spend five minutes in the bathroom with somebody who’s smoking, you’ll stink same as they do. I’m not saying be rude to them. Just don’t hang around in air they’ve polluted.”
“Okay,” Kate promised. She figured she had enough problems without smelling bad, too.
“And don’t go around slumping down like your breasts are something to hide.” She gave Kate a jab between the shoulder blades that made Kate straighten up and stick out her chest. “There. See? You look okay. Not perfect—nobody’s that—but okay. When somebody starts in on you, you just give them a look like, ‘What are you, crazy? It’s me that decides how good I look. And I say I look okay.’”
Kate took the jeans Ruby gave her home, then walked to school. She went straight to her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Bell, and explained how she’d missed the bus because her pants tore. Kate didn’t lie, but she did tell it so it sounded like it happened at the last minute. Mrs. Bell wasn’t the world’s best teacher, because she was terrible at keeping order, but she was helpful if you had problems. Kate asked if she could do makeup work so as to not get marked absent for the two classes she’d missed, which would get her in trouble at home. Mrs. Bell said she’d speak to the other teachers, and Kate knew it was as good as done.
That very day Kate started using “the look,” and it helped. Later, when she had time to practice it in front of her mirror, she got better at it. She still got hassled some, especially about her shoes, but on the whole there wasn’t as much teasing as before.
But mostly what made it easier was that even though she still didn’t have any friends at school, at least she had Ruby. Kate could never figure out whether Ruby took the time to talk to her only because she was bored or if she was really starting to like her. All Kate knew was that Ruby was nicer than she used to be.
Kate never told Mom about the jeans. Mom wasn’t at home when Kate and her brothers left for school in the morning, and by the time the bus dropped them off in the afternoon, she was getting ready for work and usually in a rush. Kate either hung around outside until she was gone, or if Mom was outside, Kate waved and went straight to her room and took off the jeans Ruby had given her.
Only once did Mom seem to notice anything different. She frowned and said, “Katie, have you lost weight?”
Even though the jeans Ruby had given her were the same shape and faded blue as her own, they weren’t as tight. “No ma’am,” she said, and scooted into her bedroom.
Kate wasn’t sure why she didn’t want Mom to know that Ruby had given her clothes. Partly it was because she didn’t want Mom to get upset all over again about not having the money to buy them new school clothes this year. And partly it was because she didn’t know how to explain Ruby to Mom. How could she tell her that Ruby wasn’t a real friend, just almost a friend? And Kate was pretty sure that Mom wouldn’t like her taking clothes from neighbors she didn’t know all that well. So she just kept quiet about it.