Prairie Evers by Ellen Airgood Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t like the way people constantly stared at me, like my pants were ripped, which they weren’t. I was wearing a pair of those new blue jeans and a new shirt and the new shoes too, and it felt like the corners of all those new things were poking at me.
    That first morning, I went to the room the principal had showed us when I was getting enrolled, which was the fifth-grade classroom, the grade I would be in just as if I’d gone to school right along. I stuck my hand out to the lady teacher who was standing at the door. She looked surprised but she took my hand and gave it a good firm shake.
    “You must be Prairie Evers,” she said.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “My name is Mrs. Hanson.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “So you can call me that.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She smiled, but not in a mean way. “Now, we have a few rules you’ll have to follow here. You can’t bring video games or your cell phone into the classroom with you. You have to leave them in your locker. All right?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
    “Do you have anything you want to go put back in your locker?”
    “No, ma’am.” I didn’t think it was necessary to say I didn’t own any of those things. My aunt Arla gave me a video game for Christmas one year, and it was fun for a little while, but then the batteries ran down and we didn’t get to town right away to get more. By the time I got back to it, the Perkins’s dog had got ahold of it and used it for a chew toy, and that was the end of that.
    Mrs. Hanson studied me real close, as if to decide if I was telling the truth. She seemed to decide I was. “All right, then. You’ll sit in the second row. We’re set up by alphabetical order.”
    I said, “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Hanson,” and hiked up my sack lunch and my notebook and pencil box full of sharp new pencils, and went and sat in row two, three chairs back, where there was an empty desk waiting.
    Not one of the kids in that room gave me a welcoming look. Some of them were making noises and laughing. I sat real still and looked straight ahead at the blackboard. I pretended tomyself I was a coyote, watching from the edge of the woods, making sure it was safe to move before I did. A coyote is smart; you can do worse than to follow a coyote’s way.
    On the blackboard Mrs. Hanson had written “Please welcome Prairie Evers.”
    That explained why some of those kids were making whooshing noises. Probably they meant to be wind blowing through prairie grass. Others of them made chuffing noises and stomped their feet, to be buffalo I guess. Some were hooting; they meant to be wild Indians I imagine.
    I am real dark. I have brown hair that is almost black, and brown eyes, and my skin turns brown in the sun faster than you can say spit. I’d been outside all summer, so I was about as brown as garden dirt. A coyote would not move a muscle in this situation, I thought to myself. A coyote would just bide his time. So that’s what I did.
    Mrs. Hanson said, “Class,” real sharp. It surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought she had such a sharp voice in her. It was like the slap of a leather strop against a table. “Class,” she said again, and after a minute those kids quieted down.
    One student didn’t hoot and holler and make prairie noises. She sat in the next aisle over, three chairs back, just like me. She had long blond hair and wore a faded blue T-shirt that looked comfortable. She looked quiet. I tried giving her a little smile. She didn’t smile back, but she didn’t frown either.
    Mrs. Hanson said, “Open your books to page twenty-three, please.”
    I looked over at the quiet girl to see what book Mrs. Hanson meant. The girl held up her book so I could see: it was the reading book. I pulled mine out and opened to page twenty-three.

NEW RULES
    I’d never been as tired as I was after sitting in school all day that first week. I barely had the energy to check for eggs when I got home, and it was all I could do to go outside in the morning