Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia Read Free Book Online Page B

Leteeseeya.” Not “Sit here and honk like a goose.” The Haitians in the class are all tuned in to the show. They’re all cracking up and speaking Creole, which makes Madame LeCoeur call out, “Silence, s’il vous plaît !”
    If the sophomore band can play “What a Wonderful World” with the clarinets squeaking and the trumpets blasting out of tune, why can’t I get through these vowels the best way I know how? Why do I have to be singled out, all eyes on Leticia? Why must French be so hard?
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    It’s not my fault Spanish is overcrowded and Señora Roberts doesn’t want one more face to look at. It’s not myfault I didn’t fix my schedule when I got it in the mail. By the time I opened it, the deadline for changes had passed and there was nothing I could do. Honestly I thought it was the usual “Here’s your class schedule, Leticia. Good to go” letter. How was I supposed to know it said, “Look here, Miss Leticia Moore. If you want Spanish, you better speak up. And by the way, you know you have to repeat geometry, right? You know you failed, right? You know you got to get here forty-five minutes early while everyone else squeezes the last five minutes out the snooze alarm. You know you gotta sit with Miss Palenka and the rest of the repeaters.”
    Well, I have a solution to this entire situation. Take the Puerto Rican kids, the Dominicans, the Mexicans, the Colombians, and the Ecuadorians out of Spanish and give them two periods of English as their foreign language. They don’t need more Spanish. They hablan con mucho gusto already.
    I took Spanish I and II. I can conjugate the ar and the er verbs. I can answer in the positive and in the negative, in the present and past tenses. I can roll the double r ’s and halfway work that tilde. I can break out what they saying at the corner bodega when I pass by. Fat ass sounds the same in every language. It’s how they say it. Since they like that fat ass, I know they’re saying it in a good way. Ihave a shot at not only passing Spanish, but of getting an 80 or higher as long as it doesn’t get too tricky.
    Let’s face it. French isn’t anything but a trick. Not one word is said the way it’s spelled, or you have to dig way back into your throat or your nose to say it. That’s why the French were afraid of the Germans. They knew the Germans were coming to change their language. Have you heard German? Achtung , baby. Sounds rough, right? Not that I’d want to take German, but I can see why Germany was through with France. France thought she was cute with all her invisible consonants and invisible lines, and Germany was trying to keep things real.

12
Write Naked
TRINA
    I LIKE THIS CLASS .
    I like Ms. Bauer.
    I like how we usually start with journal entries before we open The Grapes of Wrath .
    This morning I’m not liking this class so much. For the first time, I draw a blank. Blank page. Blank me. It doesn’t happen often. In fact, it happens never, so I don’t know how to be. Silent. Still. Waiting. Nada. Blank. Damn.
    It is strictly hot-pink ink for the journal entries. My pen is used to rolling across the sheet, right, back to left, right, back to left, moving so fast the tip stays kissing the paper with no letup, no liftoff while I race to the clinker. The closer. The winner. Whatever they call the last line that’s so good it makes the room holler “ Oh, shnikies ”when you want to say “Oh, shit,” or makes you say “ Deep ” for “double damn.” No curses in Ms. Bauer’s class. She says, “There’s too many words to only use the same lazy three.” Ms. Bauer keeps a bar of soap for dirty mouths in her desk— what? —that’s for real.
    I always speed-write, rolling along the lines, breathing fast, smiling to myself because my journals are funny and the class is dying to hear me read.