“Seamus, you’re up,” Mr. Yorkey said. “Ruth, on deck.”
Ruth stood awkwardly next to Maia, not sure if she should say something like I hope you’re feeling better now. But she didn’t know how without it coming out sounding like Ruth was lording over her the fact that she had rung the bell and Maia hadn’t, and pride was a sin, so instead, she just tugged at the bottom of her shorts and scuffed her sneaker on the squeaky polyurethaned floor. It sounded like a chipmunk.
Maia pushed the button on the stopwatch to get it ready. Ruth put her toe on the red starting line, as close to the inside edge as she could, without cheating.
“On your mark,” Mr. Yorkey called out.
“Hey, Ruth?” Maia said quietly.
“Get set…”
Ruth twisted her neck.
“You’re gonna ace this,” Maia said, smiling. “Just run like the KKK is chasing you.”
“Go!” Mr. Yorkey shouted.
–
Last year Granny’s best friend in the world had died of cancer. She and Miz Lonnie had come up north from Mississippi when they were seventeen and had gotten jobs in a factory together and got married a year apart. Miz Lonnie was the sister she’d never had, and at her funeral, Granny wept so hard that she had to be helped out of the church.
She took to her bed, drinking the medicinal whiskey. An hour later Ruth cracked the door open to make sure she was all right, because it was scary to see someone you were used to envisioning as the very definition of solid break into pieces before your eyes. Granny was sitting on the bed, still in her black lace dress, a shoe box in her lap. Spread all around her were photographs so old that they had wavy edges, with handwritten ink on the back that had turned brown with age. “Baby girl, you come sit with me,” Granny said, and Ruth crawled onto the mattress and tucked herself tight underneath the old woman’s arm.
Ruth pointed to one scalloped photo. “Is that you, Granny?”
The picture was of a woman younger than Mama, even, with hair pulled back into a bun and a crisp white shirt tucked into her skirt. She was pointing at the camera and laughing.
“That’s me,” Granny said. “And look, in the background here, that’s your great-granny.” Ruth looked closer and saw a woman with a pinched mouth standing on the porch in the background, her arms crossed. “She was mad because Lonnie and me, we were always foolin’ around.”
“Where’s Miz Lonnie?” Ruth asked.
“On the other side of the camera,” Granny explained. “She had just got it that day, and she said I could be her model.”
Ruth snuggled closer. Granny smelled of talcum powder and rosewater and Maker’s Mark. “What about this one?” she said, holding up a picture of four austere youths-two young men stiffly holding the elbows of Granny and Miz Lonnie, who wore flower corsages that had been bleached white by the exposure process.
“Well, that was a church social. Lonnie, she was wild for that boy, but she wasn’t allowed to go on her own, so he brought along a friend as my date. Go figure, I fell hard for him.”
“That’s Granddaddy?” Ruth asked.
“No, his name was Jerald. He was the first boy I loved. Granddaddy was the last.”
They sat on the bed sifting through the entire shoe box, each photograph a memory. Granny talked about creeks she used to swim in with Miz Lonnie and the coonhound her family had that used to attack porcupines. She pointed to a gold cross Ruth’s great-granny wore in one picture, which was the same gold cross Granny had around her neck at that very moment. There was a photo of her and Miz Lonnie in Times Square with old-time cars that Ruth had seen only in movies, and one of Granny pregnant with Mama, holding Miz Lonnie’s toddler son, Abraham, like he was a practice run. Then Ruth found a picture that had gotten wedged in the cardboard at the side. This one, though, wasn’t from Miz Lonnie’s camera. It was a newspaper clipping of a hanged man. “What happened to him?” Ruth asked.
“The KKK happened to him,” Granny said. She reached for her bottle of whiskey and took another shot. “White men, with their pointy hoods, burning their crosses.” She breathed fire at Ruth, who closed her eyes and held her nose. “They killed him. Lonnie and me, we saw it on the way to school. And I near passed out, but Lonnie, she caught me and she told me we had to get away. We were gonna leave town and go somewhere things like this never happened-”
Just then, Mama came into the bedroom. “What on earth is going on here?” she demanded, as Ruth slipped the newspaper clipping under her leg. Mama sniffed the air and frowned, taking the whiskey bottle and the shot glass off Granny’s nightstand. “What kind of example you setting?” she chided, and to Ruth she said, “That’s enough. You leave Granny to get some rest.” As Ruth curled the newspaper clipping into her hand, Mama pulled back the covers and took off Granny’s shoes, helping her get to bed. “Why you telling Ruth about all that?” Mama said. “She’s a baby!”
By now Granny was slurring her words. “Them crackas wasn’t shit,” she muttered. “We left town and didn’t look back. We left before Jerald even got buried.”
Ruth hid the newspaper clipping underneath her mattress. Sometimes she would take it out and look at it, but the image was grainy and she couldn’t connect that poor man with the one in a suit and tie who had stood for a formal photo holding Granny’s arm like it was made of fine china. She couldn’t imagine the man twisting on that rope picking out carnations and baby’s breath for a pretty corsage.
Sometimes at night, Ruth would wonder: If not for the KKK, would Granny have stayed in Mississippi and married Jerald? If not for the KKK, would Ruth even be here?
–
“Go!” Mr. Yorkey shouted, and Ruth did.
She pivoted on her foot, and instead of running the mile to get a gold certificate of presidential fitness, she threw herself at Maia, yanking at her glossy ponytail, rolling with her on the floor until Ruth had her pinned down, one forearm across Maia’s collarbones while the other hand drew back in a fist.
“Go ahead,” Maia dared. “Punch me.”
Ruth was so surprised, she hesitated.
“Because then you’ll just wind up cleaning toilets like your mother.”
Ruth could feel her heart beating so hard, it was practically external. She was sweating, her hair coming out of its elastic to curl natural around her face. It was like Cinderella all over again, turning back into her rags with her pumpkin.
She let go of Maia abruptly and walked away from her, her back to the rest of the class, which had gone absolutely silent watching the show.
Mr. Yorkey grasped her arm firmly. “Ruth,” he said, “would you like to go sit down and control your emotions?”
She faced the gym teacher. “No,” Ruth said honestly, because what she really wanted to do was smack Maia. What she really wanted to do was go back in time ten minutes to the moment before Maia had said anything. Or maybe further-say, two months-before she had ever set foot in this school.
“Go to the program director’s office,” Mr. Yorkey said tightly. “Now.”
–
The director of First Program at Dalton was a very thin woman named Mrs. Grau-Lerner, who smelled of mothballs and peppermint. Ruth, who had never been sent to the principal’s office in her life, was shivering.
“Do you know what you did wrong, Ruth?” Mrs. Grau-Lerner asked.
Ruth shook her head. She hadn’t hit Maia, although she had wanted to, so why was she being punished?
“Not only were you involved in an altercation…you also were rude to Mr. Yorkey.”
Ruth looked up at her. She thought Mr. Yorkey had been asking her a question. She didn’t realize it was actually a test.
If Mr. Yorkey had wanted her to sit down and cool off, he should have told her so. Had it been Mama, for example, she would have said, Do your homework. No wiggle room there, just a direct order. Instead, Mr. Yorkey had given Ruth a choice, and now she was being disciplined for taking it.