Told by Pouya
The read-to-a-duck club was Shady’s psychiatrist’s idea. I heard his mom talking on the phone about it. It was supposed to trick Shady into talking, somehow. That was never going to work, but it gave us something to do at recess—which meant we didn’t have to go out in the cold—and an activity to do now that we’d dropped out of Environment Club. (Because, really, what’s the point of saving an environment that’s going to explode in twenty days?) Plus, Svenrietta had great taste in books.
The scary ones about true-life events were her favorites: haunted hotels, abandoned schools where you could still hear the footsteps of old students, waterfalls where someone had died tragically and now hikers see their ghostly reflection. You could tell she was listening to every word.
Sometimes, when kids were reading, Svenrietta sat on Shady’s lap. Sometimes she sat with me. Sometimes she sat with the kid who was reading, and other times—especially when the book was boring—she wandered around getting feathers all over the carpet. Today was a wandering day. Tamille had picked a book about sea otters, and Svenri just wasn’t into it.
“Adult sea otters type-eye-sally…” Tamille squinted at the page. “Type-ee-sally,” she tried again. “Type-e-kally. Oh, typically.” Svenrietta, who had been busy pecking at Shady’s shoelace, glanced up approvingly. “Typically we-eye-gh…” Tamille pressed on.
“Weigh!” Pearl Summers was suddenly standing over us with an armload of books. “It says weigh. And can you guys please move? I need to shelve these.”
Like I said, the best part was getting to stay indoors for recess, but I haven’t mentioned the worst part: Pearl Summers. She and her friends Rebecca and Monica help Mrs. Patton reshelve books at recess, and ever since the Sock Ball, when Svenrietta won the tablet, Pearl totally had it out for me—even though I’d had nothing to do with it.
I had a good guess who did though. Every time I asked him if he wrote those ballots, Shady just smiled into his chest and shrugged, but when he showed up at school with a note from his mom saying that Svenrietta wanted to donate the tablet to the library so kids could sign it out and everyone could share it, I knew for sure.
“Move!” Pearl said again.
Tamille shifted over obediently, and so did Shady, but I stood my ground.
“This is the Duck Tales area.” I motioned to the space around us. “We’re doing important work here.” Svenrietta ruffled her feathers as if agreeing. “You’ll have to come back later.”
Pearl glared at me. “Well, the Duck Tales area”—she said that part like it was some kind of toxic waste dump—“happens to be right in front of Graphic Novels A–J, and that was there first. So, move! Before I go and tell Mrs. Patton this duck is being disruptive again.”
I would have ignored Pearl. I mean, let her try! Other than the fact that Svenri was nibbling Shady’s shoelace, she wasn’t bothering anyone.
But Shady tugged at my sleeve, telling me to shift over. He had a point. Svenrietta was still officially “on probation” when it came to being allowed at school.
Mrs. Mackie said Svenri had already been disruptive once—and, okay, she had caused chaos when she got freaked out by the janitor’s mop, broke off her leash, and ran into a kindergarten classroom quacking like a maniac and making a bunch of kids cry.
It meant Svenrietta only had two strikes left in Mrs. Mackie’s “three strikes and you’re out” system. I could understand why Shady didn’t want to risk it.
I bum scooched forward to let Pearl in behind me, but I made sure to stick my tongue out at her while I was doing it.
“Oh my God!” Pearl exclaimed before Tamille could get back to reading about sea otters. She wasn’t talking to us. Just talking loudly! In the library! In case you want an example of being disruptive!
“The new Champions Club book is in.” She held it up to show Rebecca, who was shelving on the other side of the library.
Tamille looked up from her sea-otter book with wide eyes. “I want to read that so much,” she said. “I love horses.”
“Yeah, well. Sorry.” Pearl hugged it to her chest. “I’m checking it out today. Then Rebecca probably wants it.”
“Definitely,” Rebecca said. “I’ve got second dibs.”
“That’s not fair,” I pointed out. “Just because you shelve books?”
“It’s one of the perks.” Pearl shrugged. “Anyway, Tamille can barely get through a baby book.” She wrinkled her nose in the direction of Learning to Read, Series 1: Sea Otters! “She wouldn’t understand Champions Club number seven. No offense, Tamille,” Pearl added.
That was when I saw Shady’s feet tensing up inside his sneakers. Feet aren’t something most people notice, but it’s something I’ve gotten good at, being Shady’s friend. When he’s nervous or upset and he’s sitting, his toes tap-tap-tap at the air. If he’s standing, his heels grind into the ground like they’re trying to dig a hole. Happy feet bounce. And mad feet are tight with the toes pointed forward or tilted back. I’d seen his feet a lot of ways, but never quite so angry before.
“I can read anything I want in Croatian. Anyway, I like looking at the pictures,” Tamille answered in a small voice. “And I can read English. Just not the really hard words yet.”
While Tamille was talking, Shady slowly reached into his pocket. I wouldn’t have noticed it except that Svenrietta snapped to attention. Ducks have excellent sideways vision because their eyes are on the sides of their heads. They also have good hearing—especially for food noises.
“I’m not saying you can’t borrow it.” Pearl was lecturing Tamille. “I’m just saying you have to wait your turn. It’s because—” But before she could say why she deserved the book more, Shady tossed a handful of cracked corn near her feet.
Svenrietta started quacking. She flapped her wings frantically, trying to get the food, and her body lifted off the ground, but only a little. She isn’t much of a flyer.
“Oh my God! Get it away!” Pearl shrieked. She started kicking, but that only made Svenrietta more flustered and flappy. She does not like people getting in the way of her cracked corn. Then Pearl went and made it even worse by dropping her pile of books. One of them landed right on Svenrietta’s back. Thankfully, it was a paperback, but it still freaked her out pretty badly.
WAK! WAK! WAK!
Mrs. Patton came running over, and Pearl didn’t waste a second before going into tattletale mode.
“Mrs. Patton!” she wailed over the quacking. “Shady threw duck food near me, and then his duck started going crazy. We need to report this to Mrs. Mackie.”
Shady picked up Svenrietta. The second he had her in his arms, she settled right down.
“Shady, is that true?” Mrs. Patton asked.
Shady had been doing pretty great with yes and no answers lately, but now he went right back to the way he was before and couldn’t answer. I could tell from the way he looked down at the floor and how his shoulders tightened up that he was upset. Even just the idea of getting in trouble at school upsets Shady.
“Shady would never bring food into the library,” I said. At least, he’d never bring people food into the library.
I pointed to the floor, where the evidence was clearly in our favor. There wasn’t a single piece of cracked corn on the carpet (ducks are food vacuums), but there were graphic novels all over the place.
“She was quacking because Pearl dropped a book on her,” I said.
“Pearl,” Mrs. Patton said. “That could have hurt the duck. Try to be more careful, okay?” Mrs. Patton bent down and started picking up books. She placed them in a stack on the table for Pearl to finish shelving—which Pearl did, with a murderous look in her eye, shoving them in any which way.
Tamille went back to reading aloud to Svenrietta, but she’d only made it through another page or so when the bell rang.
“Hey!” Pearl shouted. She was down to just two books left to shelve. She held them both up. One had fairies on the front, and the other seemed to be about space. “Where’s Champions Club number seven?”
Nobody answered.
“It was here a minute ago. Who stole it?”
“Don’t look at me,” I said.
“Tamille!” Pearl accused. But Tamille held up her empty hands. She didn’t have a backpack with her either. Unless she ate it, she didn’t have the book.
“You probably put it on the shelf by accident,” I said.
Shady handed me the leash that he kept in Svenri’s diaper bag, and I reattached it to her harness while he went to put the sea-otter book in the returns bin.
“You want me to help you get to the sensory room?” I asked when he came back.
We were going to be playing jai alai in gym class that day. It’s a game where you bounce a ball against the wall with a scoop thing. Svenrietta hates the echoey noises of the balls slamming against the walls, and Shady can’t handle it either—so they were going to do a yoga video in the special needs room instead. But wherever Svenri went, Shady had to take all her stuff. Not just the diaper bag, but also her food and water.
Shady nodded, so we both headed to the sensory room with me carrying the food bag.
“All good?” I asked, once we’d set everything down on the foam mats beside the beanbag chairs. It was all stuff that Jackson Eriks’s grandparents fundraised for with an autism-awareness walk last year.
Shady nodded before plopping down into the hammock swing in the corner with Svenri in his lap. He twirled his feet lazily to twist the swing up in a knot. That was when I saw that he was grinning big-time.
“What?” I asked.
He lifted his feet and let the swing start to spin in circles, and as it twirled, he laughed…out loud. It was the funniest sound. Not because he laughed funny or anything—it wasn’t especially low or high or donkey-like. It was your average ha-ha-ha. I’d just never heard him do it before, so it sounded weird.
“What is it?” I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, too, even though I didn’t know what we were laughing about yet.
Shady stopped the swing with his feet, then leaned down, still smiling wide. He reached into Svenri’s diaper bag and pulled something out.
Champions Club #7.
“You stole it?”
Shady shook his head vigorously. He took out the due-date slip and pointed to his name on it. Fair point. You can’t steal a library book. They’re for everyone.
“Well, why’d you take it out? You don’t seriously want to read that, do you?”
I don’t have anything against horses, but Champions Club books are all about girls who are obsessed with gossiping about each other and winning trophies.
Shady stuck out his tongue like bleh so I knew he felt the same way. Then he bit his lip, seeming frustrated. There was more he wanted to tell me, but he couldn’t. He looked around the room, then held up one finger, like wait. I watched while he rooted through a bin of school supplies on the table and pulled out a pad of sticky notes. He handed me Svenri, who was getting heavy enough that it took two arms to hold her, then walked over to a big laminated poster on the wall. He started to sticky it up—which took a while—but, thankfully, the teacher supervisor who was supposed to watch him was running late.
This integrated education resource is brought to you by K.Y. Autism Awareness.
I stared at it, amazed. Taking charge of makin’ a safe place for the underducks. Not only was it cool that he’d found the words he needed in the poster, but I was pretty sure I understood now, and I liked the idea.
“You’re going to give the book to Tamille, right?”
He nodded.
“Because underducks are like underdogs!” I went on.
I’d learned that word not long ago. It meant someone who was never going to win because the odds were against them. Like Tamille, because she has to catch up to fifth-grade reading level in a whole other language, or me and Aisha, because our families can’t afford to buy forty pairs of socks for homeless people.
Actually, now that I thought of it, there were lots of underducks at Carleton Elementary—from the kids who lived in the big, rent-controlled apartment buildings in Summerside, like my family and Aisha’s; to the special-ed kids, like Shady because of his not-talking thing and Jackson Eriks and Aaron Somers-Thanning, who have autism; to boys like DuShawn Henry, who gets teased because he wears his hair long and likes dresses; to the ones who’ve just moved here from another place and don’t know the rules yet; to the ones whose families are a little different because they’ve got grandparents instead of parents, or two moms, or no mom at all—and we were all overdue for some better odds.
Taking charge of making a safe place for the underducks. Not only did it sound kind of fun—it was exactly the kind of mission that was worthy of our last three weeks on Earth.
“Killer move, Captain!” I held up my hand for a high five. Shady didn’t leave me hanging. Then he passed me the book hopefully.
“I’ll get it to Tamille,” I promised.