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“Yeah,” said Gilly, patting his shoulder. “You sure do.” He looked up into her face, his squinty little eyes full of pure pleasure.
“Thank you,” said Trotter softly.
For a moment Gilly looked at her, then quickly turned away as a person turns from bright sunlight. “Want me to walk Mr. Randolph home?” she asked.
“Thank you, Miss Gilly. I would appreciate that so much.”
She took his elbow and guided him carefully down the stairs, taking care not to look back over her shoulder because the look on Trotter’s face was the one Gilly had, in some deep part of her, longed to see all her life, but not from someone like Trotter. That was not part of the plan.
HARASSING MISS HARRIS
By the third week in October, Gilly had caught up with her class and gone on ahead. She tried to tell herself that she had forced Miss Harris into a corner from which the woman could give her nothing but A’s. Surely, it must kill old priss face to have to put rave notices—“Excellent” “Good, clear thinking” “Nice Work”—on the papers of someone who so obviously disliked her.
But Miss Harris was a cool customer. If she knew that Gilly despised her, she never let on. So at this point Gilly was not ready to pull her time-honored trick of stopping work just when the teacher had become convinced that she had a bloody genius on her hands. That had worked so beautifully at Hollywood Gardens—the whole staff had gone totally ape when suddenly one day she began turning in blank sheets of paper. It was the day after Gilly had overheard the principal telling her teacher that Gilly had made the highest score in the entire school’s history on her national aptitude tests, but, of course, no one knew that she knew, so an army of school psychologists had been called in to try to figure her out. Since no one at school would take the blame for Gilly’s sudden refusal to achieve, they decided to blame her foster parents, which made Mrs. Nevins so furious that she demanded that Miss Ellis remove Gilly at once instead of waiting out the year—the year Mrs. Nevins had reluctantly agreed to, after her first complaints about Gilly’s sassy and underhanded ways.
But something warned Gilly that Miss Harris was not likely to crumble at the sight of a blank sheet of paper. She was more likely simply to ignore it. She was different from the other teachers Gilly had known. She did not appear to be dependent on her students. There was no evidence that they fed either her anxieties or her satisfactions. In Gilly’s social-studies book there was a picture of a Muslim woman of Saudi Arabia, with her body totally covered except for her eyes. It reminded Gilly somehow of Miss Harris, who had wrapped herself up in invisible robes. Once or twice a flash in the eyes seemed to reveal something to Gilly of the person underneath the protective garments, but such flashes were so rare that Gilly hesitated to say even to herself what they might mean.
Some days it didn’t matter to Gilly what Miss Harris was thinking or not thinking. It was rather comfortable to go to school with no one yelling or cajoling—to know that your work was judged on its merits and was not affected by the teacher’s personal opinion of the person doing the work. It was a little like throwing a basketball. If you aimed right, you got it through the hoop; it was absolutely just and absolutely impersonal.
But other days, Miss Harris’s indifference grated on Gilly. She was not used to being treated like everyone else. Ever since the first grade, she had forced her teachers to make a special case of her. She had been in charge of her own education. She had learned what and when it pleased her. Teachers had courted her and cursed her, but no one before had simply melted her into the mass.
As long as she had been behind the mass, she tolerated this failure to treat her in a special manner, but now, even the good-morning smile seemed to echo the math computer’s “Hello, Gilly number 58706, today we will continue our study of fractions.” Crossing threshold of classroom causes auto-teacher to light up and say “Good morning.” For three thousand dollars additional, get the personalized electric-eye model that calls each student by name.
For several days she concentrated on the vision of a computer-activated Miss Harris. It seemed to fit. Brilliant, cold, totally, absolutely, and maddeningly fair, all her inner workings shinily encased and hidden from view. Not a Muslim but a flawless tamperproof machine.
The more Gilly thought about it, the madder she got. No one had a right to cut herself off from other people like that. Just once, before she left this dump, she’d like to pull a wire inside that machine. Just once she’d like to see Harris-6 scream in anger—fall apart—break down.
But Miss Harris wasn’t like Trotter. You didn’t have to be around Trotter five minutes before you knew the direct route to her insides—William Ernest Teague. Miss Harris wasn’t hooked up to other people. It was like old Mission Impossible reruns on TV: Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to get inside this computerized robot,
discover how it operates, and neutralize its effectiveness. The self-destructing tape never told the mission-impossible team how to complete their impossible mission, but the team always seemed to know. Gilly, on the other hand, hadn’t a clue.
It was TV that gave her the clue. She hadn’t been thinking about Miss Harris at all. She’d been thinking, actually, of how to get the rest of Mr. Randolph’s money and hadn’t been listening to the news broadcast. Then somehow it began sending a message into her brain. A high government official had told a joke on an airplane that had gotten him fired. Not just any joke, mind you. A dirty joke. But that wasn’t what got him fired. The dirty joke had been somehow insulting to blacks. Apparently all the black people in the country and even some whites were jumping up and down with rage. Unfortunately the commentator didn’t repeat the joke. She could have used it. But at least she knew now something that might be a key to Harris-6.
She borrowed some money from Trotter for “school supplies,” and bought a pack of heavy white construction paper and magic markers. Behind the closed door of her bedroom she began to make a greeting card, fashioning it as closely as she could to the tall, thin, “comic” cards on the special whirl-around stand in the drugstore.
At first she tried to draw a picture on the front, wasting five or six precious sheets of paper in the attempt. Cursing her incompetence, she stole one of Trotter’s magazines and cut from it a picture of a tall, beautiful black woman in an Afro. Her skin was a little darker than Miss Harris’s, but it was close enough.
Above the picture of the woman she lettered these words carefully (She could print well, even if her drawing stank):
THEY’RE SAYING “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL!”
Then below the picture:
BUT THE BEST THAT I CAN FIGGER
IS EVERYONE WHO’S SAYING SO
LOOKS MIGHTY LIKE A
And inside in tiny letters:
PERSON WITH A VESTED INTEREST IN
MAINTAINING THIS POINT OF VIEW.
She had to admit it. It was about the funniest card she’d ever seen in her life. Gifted Gilly—a funny female of the first rank. If her bedroom had been large enough, she’d have rolled on the floor. As it was, she lay on the bed hugging herself and laughing until she was practically hysterical. Her only regret was that the card was to be anonymous. She would have enjoyed taking credit for this masterpiece.
She got to school very early the next morning and sneaked up the smelly stairs to Harris-6 before the janitor had even turned on the hall lights. For a moment she feared that the door might be locked, but it opened easily under her hand. She slipped the card into the math book that lay in the middle of Miss Harris’s otherwise absolutely neat desk. She wanted to be sure that no one else would discover it and ruin everything.
