Short Story #27 -- Nine-Year-Old, Reimagined

Yesterday when I sat down to work on a Writing Club story (for the club composed of my best friend, Cathy, and me) I was surprised to see that it had been over two years since I'd written the last one, The Killer Whale and the Meadowlark. Cathy suggested the topic for this one -- an opportunity to look back at some event that impacted our younger selves and to respond to it differently.

One of the defining moments of my life was when I was nine years old, and my parents moved our family from small-town Saskatchewan to Alberta's capital city so that they could take over a church supplies store. It was a big adjustment for a little prairie girl. I knew so little about the big wide world, and how was a nine-year-old supposed to handle racism?

One day, helping at my parents' store, I picked up the first badge mentioned in the story below, and when I wore it to school and the kids asked its meaning, they started to call me “Holy-holy.” My nickname didn’t bother me as much as some of the other girls’ nastier nicknames bothered them, but we were all bothered, no question. Here’s that life event reimagined, as my affirmation for anyone who was ever teased or bullied by other kids.

Nine-Year-Old, Reimagined

MCWC #27

November 17, 2020

There was no way around it, these kids were strange.

And loud, and rude, and mean.

Not all of them. But more than I was used to, including the gossipy girls and Tom S and Tommy W. Maybe being a city slicker made you that way. But Diane wasn’t a city slicker in my old hometown, and she had seemed loud and rude and mean sometimes, like these kids. Especially when she swore, and when she tried to make my baby sister eat a mud, leaves and sticks pie. And now it seemed like I was going to a school with lots of Dianes.

Moving from a Saskatchewan hamlet of three hundred to a city of 450,000 was a shock to the system. So was going from a quiet class of 17 to a noisy group of 22. I liked Mrs. Collins, but some of the kids, not so much.

Laurel was paired up with me as soon as I walked into the classroom. She was allowed to pull her desk next to mine so she could help me find my way through the textbooks and activities that the other Grade Fours had already been working through for two months. At first it seemed like she was really excited to show the new girl around, like I was her prize, not to be shared with the other girls. But then at recess two days later, she got into a fight with Tommy W, and I was shocked by the way her fists flew. She seemed to expect me to jump in and help her, but I didn’t understand that until after, when she told me I was useless. After the fight, I overheard her and some of her usual friends whispering about me. The words “small town nobody” filtered into my consciousness, and Laurel abandoned me.

Joan, Karen, and Patricia told me to ignore the mean girls, who were mean to them, too. The unlikely trio who adopted me were quieter than Laurel and her friends, but they were also made fun of by the mean girls, and were picked on relentlessly by Tommy W and Tom S. Patricia’s dad was from the West Indies and her mom was from Holland, so she wasn’t quite as white as the rest of us. She was a small but feisty target for the class bullies’ entertainment, able to shout them down sometimes, backed up by Karen, the tallest kid in our class, and Joan, who invoked her big brother’s name whenever she deemed it necessary to strike real fear into the school bullies’ hearts. They all seemed to know about John, and backed off when she threatened his intervention.

Even so, no one could stop Tom S and Tommy W from chanting at Patricia from a distance, “Paki! Paki! Your dad is a Paki and so are you!” until she was in tears and they ran off laughing.

What on earth was a Paki?

I had no idea or explanation, but Joan, Karen and Patricia would sometimes launch themselves after the Grade Four bully boys and chase them all the way across the school yard, and pull their hair or kick their shins. These chases made me really uncomfortable because I didn’t want to fight like Laurel had. I could see that the boys’ nastiness came out of boredom. It was always a relief when they were busy playing soccer with the Italian kids at recess because they forgot to bother us. But when the Italians got fed up with Tom S and Tommy W’s cheating and kicked the two bullies out of the game, look out! They took it out on Patricia.

Joan, Karen and Patricia seemed kind of strange compared to friends back in my old hometown. They didn’t want to play games at recess. Mostly, they stood around talking about cable TV shows and pretending they were Pinky and the Tuscaderos. They liked to gossip about David Cassidy, Donnie Osmond, or whoever was the flavour of the day on the cover of the latest teen magazine that Joan’s big sisters subscribed to.

And they had so many ‘clubs.’ At recess, I never knew whether it would be The Six Million Dollar Man, Tiger Beat, Fleetwood Mac or any number of other fan clubs from one day to the next. It baffled me, but I tried to seem interested, though I had little idea what they were talking about because my house didn’t have cable TV yet.

After three weeks in Grade Four, Mrs. Collins pulled me aside one recess and asked me how I liked my new school. “It’s okay, I guess,” I said, “and the work is pretty easy so far.”

“Well, Maria, how would you like a bit more of a challenge? The tests Mrs. Hilderink gave you in the Resource Room say that you’re reading way above Grade Four Level, so I was wondering if you would like to go for Grade 5 Language Arts with Sylvia and Simon? This afternoon, Sylvia will take you with her to Mr. Wozny’s room, and help you figure things out.”

Sylvia was one of Laurel’s friends, but I soon discovered that, away from Laurel and the rest of the mean girls, she was okay. I didn’t like Mr. Wozny very much, but he was pleased with my reading and writing, and I kept up just fine. Plus I got to know a few of the Grade Five girls, who seemed nice, if a bit aloof.

Mr. Wozny put me in a desk right behind Anna. She and her older sister were the only Chinese Canadian students in the entire school. She was smart and pretty, I thought, and nicer than Sylvia. She had a quiet smile and a sharp sense of humour, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that she was always having to use it to deflect nasty comments from some of the other Grade Fives, who seemed to be jealous of her.

One Friday morning recess when Joan and Patricia were pretending to be Police Women and had commandeered Francis and Karl to be bad guys, I noticed Anna walking along the edge of the school fence all by herself. I ran over to her, and saw that she was crying.

“Anna, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing you should bother with.”

“No, I want to know.”

She sniffed and used her mittens to dry her eyes. “Michael, Scott, and Greg were just calling me a Chink, like they always do. This time, they tripped me and ran away before the supervision teacher saw it.”

The boys were off in the distance, pointing at us. I frowned and found a crumpled Kleenex in my pocket to give to her. “Is Chink anything like Paki?” I asked.

She gave me a funny look, then laughed out loud. “I guess so. But my family is Chinese, not Pakistani.”

“Neither is Patricia’s family.”

“No, the bullies don’t care what they call people, they just want to pick on someone for being different.”

“But we’re all different.”

“No, you’re white.”

“I know. But they treat me different because I don’t know how to be a city kid. And because my parents run a church supplies store and I’m learning lots about church stuff.”

“That’s not like being Chinese.”

“I guess not, but I think you’re so smart and pretty and funny, and they just need to see it.”

“I don’t think they can,” she sighed. “They just think what they think, and it’s like they all think the same.”

“Well, they need to think different,” I said. “Maybe there's something we can do. In the meantime, can I hang out with you? Karen’s not here today, and I don’t really like being part of the “Police Woman Club.”

“Sure.” Anna smiled a small smile. “I’m not an Angie Dickinson fan either.”

“Who’s she?”

“What else don’t you know, country girl?”

I took a chance and asked Anna a lot of the questions that I had been afraid to ask the other kids in my class since arriving in the city. She told me that Pakistan was closer to China than the West Indies, and that the bullies probably were confusing Patricia with the Pakistanis who were immigrating to Edmonton to get English educations. Anna’s own family had emigrated because things had been difficult for them in China. And Anna knew way more about cable TV shows than I did.

When the recess bell rang, we started back to the school, but Michael, Greg, Scott, Tommy W and Tom S were waiting for us mid-schoolyard.

“Chink, Chink, Chinky-Chink!” Michael, Greg and Scott screamed. “You eat cow stomachs for lunch!”

Tommy W and Tom S circled around me, vying for the older boys’ approval, saying, “Why are you hanging out with the Chink, Small Town Nobody?” Tom S pounded my back with his fist for good measure, watching for the Grade Fives' grins, catching me by surprise. Angry tears jumped to my eyes, but I just stood there, staring them all down.

“Huh,” Tom said. “She doesn’t hit back.”

“Don’t you know that Jesus said to turn the other cheek?” I said quietly. “Leave us alone.”

“Chinky-chink and Holy-holy,” Michael yelled, as Anna and I moved closer together and glared at them. The boys all took up the chant as they ran for the school.

“Are you okay?” Anna asked.

“Yeah, just mad. And I’m thinking about what to do about it.”

When I walked into the Grade Four classroom, Karen was telling Mrs. Collins that she came late because her dad forgot to wake her up. She was eating a cereal bar, and it looked like she had just climbed out of bed and put on her clothes about a minute before. Her socks didn't match and her hair was sticking out all over the place.

“Rooster Tail, Rooster Tail!” Tommy W and Tom S started another chant, and for a few seconds, I was glad they weren’t chanting Holy-holy anymore. But Karen was livid. “Don’t call me that!” she said loudly, her face turning bright red.

Mrs. Collins silenced the boys with a look, and started a Social Studies lesson. But whenever the teacher was distracted by other kids, Tom and Tommy were quietly rude and mean, goading Karen with her new nickname, which they had shortened to Rooster. By the end of the day, she was in tears, too.

When I got home from school, Mom told me that the evening’s plan was to rearrange and reorganize another corner of the new store. When Dad came home, we all had a quick supper and drove back downtown as a family. My sisters went straight to the kids’ corner to look at the picture books and read to each other, but I wandered around aimlessly, thinking about Anna and Karen and the bullies.

“Maria,” Mom called, “would you mind sorting out this box for me? All of these pins have gotten mixed up, so they need to be separated back into their proper compartments.”

There were doves, crosses, rainbows, happy faces, lambs, peace symbols, more different pins than I had ever imagined. I dumped the whole mess out onto a countertop and it took me a good half-hour to sort everything. When I was finished, I had about two dozen pins that didn’t fit into the box with the others, including ten round badges of different fluorescent colours that bore the cryptic message, PBPGINTWMY.

Mom checked on my organizational efforts. “Thank you, Maria, that’s much better.”

“You’re welcome, Mom. There are a few single ones that don't match any of the others. And what do these fluorescent ones mean?”

“I’m not sure. Is there a sticker on the back?”

“Just the company name.”

Mom went to the order desk and pulled out a catalogue. “Let’s see if we can find out. She flipped through the pages until she found it. “Hmm, it seems to be shorthand for ‘Please Be Patient. God Is Not Through With Me Yet.’ But if you have to ask, maybe no one else will know what it means either. Do you want these things?”

“Sure. They give me an idea.”

Monday at school, I gave out my own reinvented fluorescent badges to Anna, Patricia, Karen, Joan and a few other quieter girls on the playground who were picked on by the bully boys, or who the mean girls gossiped about. My badges said IASAKAFABANOWSOKWTTA.

“I-a-sak-a-fab-a what?” Joan tried to pronounce it.

“What does it mean?” everyone asked.

When I told my new friends that it was a new club to protect them from the nasty kids, and what the letters meant, they laughed, but they nodded when I said, “You don’t have to tell the nasty kids what it means. You’re the one who knows who you are. Just point to your badge, walk away, and find other friends with badges. We’re a club, remember?”

The loud, rude and mean kids were flummoxed. “What language is that supposed to be? And what does it mean? What does it mean?”

“That’s for us to know and you to find out,” we replied, and I’m not sure even one of us ever revealed our badges’ secret super powers, probably because it was hard to get the saying right. Even I got it mixed up, but it translated as

I
Am
Smart
And
Kind
And
Funny
And
Beautiful
And
No
One
Who
Says
Otherwise
Knows
What
They’re
Talking
About.