Chapter 15. The Playground
Samantha endures a difficult punishment
Dear CCCNRRFs:
I will soon return to publishing monthly essays, many focusing on fiction featuring activists, which I feel is a key front of struggle against the othering and repression of activists.
Meanwhile, Rainwood House Sings is an example of this category of story, which strives to represent activists as fully rounded, non-stereotyped humans who inspire connection and empathy. Yes, the fact that fascism expressly attacks empathy shows how important it is! Which is why we need much more fiction that makes activism as human, accessible, and joyful as it really is.
Samantha sits on the Punishment Wall watching kids run around having fun. She’s stuck there for fifteen whole minutes, all because of a fight she didn’t start.
Well, she did blow up at Anahí. But that was Anahí’s fault for calling Samantha names when Samantha was trying to be helpful. Kathrin’s fault, too, for being jealous and taking Anahí’s side.
Samantha blows out a sigh. Their teacher, Mr. Wite, is even more to blame. And the big blame behind it all is school and capitalism and the world full of meanness. She tugs at one of her hair tails as she thinks about all that.
Anahí entered Mr. Wite’s 4th grade classroom a few weeks late, just when Samantha was coming out of a rocky start to her own school year. Samantha’s habit of drawing during class bothered her teacher. By the second week he’d gotten so irritated that one day he snatched a drawing she was making right out from under her pencil and tore it up in front of everybody. Samantha felt like he’d thrown a pitcher of ice water over her. She told her Abue about it, and the next afternoon her Abue stormed into the principal’s office to protest, making Samantha feel proud and embarrassed all at the same time.
After a talk where everybody said they were sorry several times and shook hands, things calmed down with Mr. Wite. They even began going well. Since then, Samantha only draws pictures after finishing her work or when he isn't looking. She does her homework most days, too, even though both she and her Abue think homework is stupid. “You just do it, like a job,” said her Abue when they discussed this, and Samantha said, “Okay.”
Things improved so much that when Anahí arrived in September fresh from El Salvador, Mr. Wite assigned Samantha to be her Language Buddy. That meant Samantha helped her understand what was going on and find her way around the mysteries of school.
“Because you know Spanish and English and are a fine reader, you’re the right person for this job,” Mr. Wite told her, his blue eyes twinkling jovially.
Samantha had been proud. She made sure Anahí understood everything happening in class. Some kids, even those who had been new to the country only last year, made fun of children who were just starting to speak English. Armed with her official Language Buddy title, Samantha scolded her classmates when they mocked Anahí. Anahí had been grateful.
But Kathrin, Samantha’s best friend since kindergarten, got jealous. “I’m bilingual, too!” Kathrin argued. Her parents were both from Mexico, she said, which made her more Latina than Samantha, whose father plus one whole set of grandparents were Anglo.
“He only chose me ‘cause I live closer to Anahí,” Samantha told Kathrin. This was true (by a couple of blocks), though she rather thought Mr. Wite hadn’t known this fact when he made his choice. But it would be easier for Kathrin to think the teacher’s reasons were geographical, and not because Samantha was a better reader.
Kathrin accepted the situation, it seemed, and the three of them had been friends, playing together at recess and chatting at lunch (except when the mean monitor made them all shut up) until around the end of October, when everything had gone downhill fast. Kathrin began making fun of Samantha, calling her ‘clown head’ because she enjoys putting different things in her hair. Or ‘clown feet’ because she often wears unmatched socks. Samantha calls them Sarah socks, because her Abue has a friend who died, named Sarah, who wore unmatched socks. To be honest, Samantha never can find their mates, but it’s better to think she’s honoring a dead friend.
After accepting these habits for years, Kathrin now can’t stop teasing Samantha about them. And she was horrible about Samantha’s Halloween costume, a green-slime, bulbous-nosed monster. Monsters are supposed to be ugly, Samantha argued, but Kathrin wouldn’t shut up about how gross it was.
Then Anahí started being mean to Samantha, too. A small buzzy voice like a gnat’s at the back of Samantha’s mind says this is partly Samantha’s own fault. Anahí is learning more English and school customs, but somehow Samantha can’t stop doing the Language Buddy things, like telling Anahí how to do the homework, what pages to read in her books, how to use the library–even though Anahí already knows those things.
And now Anahí has started calling her names in Spanish. “¡Mula! ¡Puerca!” Anahí squawked at her yesterday as they lined up to walk to the lunchroom. Even though Samantha likes mules and pigs, being called those names in that tone by Anahí is a big insult. The teacher doesn’t understand the Spanish name-calling, but half her classmates do. Samantha heard several sniggers and felt her face burn.
This morning before reading groups, Samantha didn’t do anything to Anahí, only reminded her not to forget her folder. Anahí turned and hissed at her in a hateful voice, “Diablo!”
Samantha felt a shock in her stomach. Being called “devil” was worse than anything so far. A roar burst out of her throat as if it were someone else’s voice. She grabbed Anahí’s shirt with one hand and raised her other fist. Kathrin, who was right beside Anahí, yelled, “Stop it, Samantha!” and pulled Anahí out of Samantha’s reach.
The teacher rushed over. From his face, Samantha knew he’d already decided what happened and whose fault it was. Samantha tried to say how things got messed up with Anahí and Kathrin, but only mumbles came out of her tight throat. And tears out of her stinging eyes.
Mr. Wite said, “Samantha, since you didn’t actually hit Anahí, thanks to Kathrin, and since this is the first time you’ve engaged in violent behavior, you’ll just get fifteen minutes on the Wall.” Samantha felt so confused and sad and bad and mad that she stood there, frozen, until Suresh gave her a little push to move her back to her seat.
Fifteen minutes is more than half of recess. Sometimes she has to stay in from recess to finish her homework. That’s a consequence. But this is a punishment. “Time out,” the teachers sometimes call it. Out of what? Samantha experiments with flapping her hands up and down, just to do something, but it feels stupid so she lets them fall in her lap.
Near the beginning of the school year, during the bad time with her teacher, Samantha happened upon the word “wite” in the huge ancient unabridged dictionary that sits on the orange bookshelf in her Rainwood House kitchen. In its tiny print, the dictionary explained that “wite” means “payment,” “punishment,” “blame,” “protect,” and “go away.” Samantha’s first impulse was to write these definitions on a page, with pictures, to give to Mr. Wite. But she didn’t, not wanting him to think she was: a) wasting her time drawing instead of doing homework, b) sucking up to him, or c) making fun of him, especially if the pictures turned out funny, as hers often did. Instead, in her mind, she calls him one or another of his definitions. Right now: “Punishment man.” Or even: “Torture man.” That’s another meaning of “wite.”
She lets out another heavy sigh. Watching the kids play is too painful. And she has nothing to read because the teacher said no books when on the Wall. The only solution is to distract herself. “Detective Drunella,” Samantha whispers into the air. But Drunella isn’t there. She’s shy around other kids and prefers staying home at Rainwood House. Being invisible, nobody makes her go to school.
But maybe she is a tiny bit there, since Samantha almost hears her say, “Think of something you like.” “Okay,” Samantha replies out loud, not caring who hears her; anyway, nobody does.
She enjoys measuring; maybe she can try to measure the fifteen minutes as they pass by. But time is way more invisible than Detective Drunella. And, unlike inches, which are always the same, Samantha has noticed that minutes can go by in a snap or drag on forever. She recalls seeing something about this in the history of time book in the bathroom reading basket, where the time scientist is sitting in front of the stars in his wheelchair. She sometimes opens the book randomly and reads bits out of it, though it’s as hard to understand as the Mayan Codex, which also sits in the bathroom reading basket, along with a jumble of old magazines—Ranger Rick, The Nation, Folcklor Latinoamericano, Color Lines, Proceso, and a songbook of Violeta Parra, the music person Samantha’s Mami Vivi is named after.
Einstein is mixed up with time, too, Samantha recalls. She likes Einstein because he used to have trouble in school, and has messy hair. Plus, he was Jewish, like Samantha’s dad. Einstein discovered something important about time, but she can’t remember what it is.
She wonders how memories leak out of her head. Or maybe they trickle down into sinkholes in her brain, which she pictures as a soft gray sponge. Maybe she could dig out the lost memories, like when she wipes up her colored sand and then tries to dig the grains out of the sponge holes with a pencil point. But poking into the brain with a pencil would be painful, and her mind already hurts enough.
Samantha drops her head into her hands. It’s heavy as a pumpkin, and she has to put her elbows on her knees to support it. After as much time as she can stand, she lets it go and makes a megaphone with her hands. “Ms. Jordon! Is it time yet?” Ms. Jordon is the mean monitor, but the nice monitor is too far away, and Samantha can’t stand not asking for even a second longer.
The stocky woman with her black hair pasted to her head looks over at Samantha and glances down at her watch. She holds up a hand with all five fingers spread out, closes them in a quick fist, and pokes up two fingers. Then she turns away.
Seven minutes to go! All that thinking, and Samantha has only used up eight minutes? Maybe it’s like the Narnia or Magic Tree House books, where the children go off to other worlds or historical times and have adventures, but when they get back no time has gone by and nobody notices they’ve been gone.
Suddenly, the image of Duke Cole appears in her mind, and she feels a blip of excitement. Having a boarding house and a collective mate is an adventure! Duke Cole is nice, and not even that old. Though old is good, too, as her Abue always points out. And he is mysterious, though a bit plump, which mysterious people usually aren’t. Nor are they usually friendly and funny like he is. But there is an enigma about him, she is sure. Maybe he has amnesia. Last night she noticed that he hesitated a teeny bit on some of the questions she and her Abue asked him, even easy ones like where he was from.
Samantha frowns in thought. Maybe he’s looking for his long-lost sister or father. Why he would look in Rainwood House isn’t clear, but this is always the case at the beginning of a mystery. You only find out the reasons toward the end, and they’re usually things you could never have guessed.
Maybe he’s on a mysterious plant philosophy quest? Somebody wants to steal his valuable orchid, which he carries in a special case hidden deep in his lumpy duffel bag?
Could he be a shady kind of stranger? She frowns, then shakes her head. He likes being silly, and no shady stranger is silly, Samantha is sure of that. Perhaps he’s escaping from international pursuers. She has no idea what these are, but she knows you have to escape from them. Will they look for him at her Rainwood House? That would be almost too much of an adventure.
She recalls some of her favorite American Girl History Mysteries. What if Cole is on a secret mission, like against the Nazis, or on the Underground Railroad? But they don’t have Nazis any more, or slavery, either. Except she heard on the radio that they still did, but more hidden. Maybe he’s trying to stop the KKK, like the girl in Circle of Fire who saved the Highlander Center from being bombed when Eleanor Roosevelt visited. That was an exciting adventure, though scary. The girl used bear traps, Samantha recalls. Maybe it would be good to get some bear traps, just in case.
But no. She shakes her head at herself. Those kinds of adventures happened a long time ago. Or else never, like Wizard of Oz or The Pink Motel. Which was a motel, not a boarding house. Samantha feels her thoughts muddling up again.
Anahí and Kathrin streak across the playground, laughing. Samantha watches them, pretending not to, then imagines herself drawing a picture of them, with sharp faces and sneering noses. She pictures her hand as it writes the caption underneath, “Friends are funny, and I don’t mean funny haha!” Her Abue sings about people being strange when you’re a stranger. Maybe so, Samantha thinks, but they’re also strange when you’re friends.
Samantha tilts back her head to stare up at the sky. It’s a flat, perfect blue like the huge egg-smooth plate on the dining room buffet at her grandfather Blake’s house in California.
Some leaves swirl into view, dancing on air, which looks fun. Except dead things can’t have fun.
She heaves a sigh so big her chest inflates like a balloon, then the air whooshes out in a big collapse. Seven minutes. It has to be less by now. What if the monitor forgets to tell her when the time is up? Or says it isn’t when it really is? Samantha doesn’t like to think about it, but she has seen that grownups don’t always tell the truth. For instance, they sometimes say they’ll do things, good or bad, and then they don't.
Samantha glances at the playground monitor, who looks glum and cold, with her hands stuffed in the pockets of her puffy orange jacket. The other monitor loves children. Kids go to her with fights and skinned knees, and show her how they can do the monkey bars. But this one is just here, filling time.
Across the field, Kathrin and Anahí are doing a clapping game, but Samantha can’t hear what rhyme they’re saying. They haven’t even looked at Samantha. Or maybe they’re sneaking glances when Samantha isn’t looking. If Anahí got stuck on the wall, Samantha would go over and say something, like “Sorry you were punished even though I was mean, too.”
At least, Samantha hopes she would do that. Sometimes you get pulled a certain way, whether you want to or not. Like the time before she became Language Buddy when Anahí said “shit” instead of “shirt.” Kids laughed at her and made that sing-song sound that slides upwards: “Awwww!” Samantha hadn’t wanted to laugh at Anahí or make that annoying sound, but she had done it anyway. Laughing with her classmates felt good, at least on top, though an underneath part of it felt bad. But telling them not to laugh at Anahí would have been like telling an ocean wave to go backwards. Until the title of Language Buddy made her feel strong. That’s why she can’t let it go.
“Okay, Samantha, your minutes are up!”
The monitor was paying attention after all! Samantha pops up off the Wall and runs towards Kathrin and Anahí. “Hey, I’m free! Yay!”
“Yay!” echoes Anahí, smiling, running towards her along with the others.
Samantha feels a balloon of happiness inflate in her chest. Anahí likes her again! Kathrin is smiling, too. Maybe they can all be friends!
“Let’s play freeze tag,” Samantha shouts. “I’m It!” She runs toward Anahí and touches her. “Freeze, you’re frozen!”
Anahí freezes in a comic pose. Samantha remembers it was hard to teach her freeze tag at first. When Samantha told her “Freeze!” meant “Congélate,” Anahí had hugged herself and pretended to shiver. El Salvador was a warm place, so Anahí hadn’t guessed that ‘freeze’ meant turn into a block of ice. But now she understands lots of things. Which Samantha is glad about, of course.
She tags Kathrin, then the others. The hardest to catch is Kevin, a super fast runner. She backs him into the corner of the fence. But when she turns around, triumphant, there’s Kathrin, running again, untagging Anahí, Suresh, and everyone else.
“Hey!” Samantha stops, hands on hips. “I got everyone already! You, too, Kathrin.”
“No, a laser ray gun unfroze me! So I can unfreeze the others.”
Samantha feels a wave of anger wash over her. “That’s not fair!”
“Too bad, that’s the game!”
“You changed the rules!”
Danila, a big girl who likes to make peace when she can, comes over, saying, “How about a game of kickball? There’s hardly any time left in recess. Don’t waste it arguing.”
Kathrin says, “Okay!” But when Danila moves away, Kathrin sticks her tongue out at Samantha.
Samantha is so shocked she doesn’t even think about sticking hers out at Kathrin. She looks over at Anahí, who has seen the whole thing. Anahí meets Samantha’s gaze, and for a moment seems uncertain. But then she sticks her own tongue out at Samantha. “¡Diablo!” she calls out in a high, hard voice. “You live in a witch house!”
Kathrin says to Anahí, “You mean a haunted house.” And they run off.
Samantha stands still, feeling a lump of ice inside her no ray gun can melt. After all her torture on the wall, Anahí called her “devil” again, easy as pie. Then she insulted Samantha’s Rainwood House. And Kathrin, instead of telling Anahí not to hurt Samantha when she was trying to be friends again, only corrected her English, like she was Anahí’s Language Buddy of mean words!
Just before dismissal, the loudspeaker announces that Samantha Mendíval has to go down to the office. What now? thinks Samantha, descending the stairs.
In the office, the bossy secretary says Samantha’s grandmother called to say she would be late coming home from work, and that Samantha should go home with Kathrin. “Go back up and tell Kathrin right now, and after reading club you go with her straight to her house,” the secretary says, as if Samantha needs every little thing explained. Samantha turns and goes upstairs to get her book bag. She says nothing to Kathrin or to anyone else.
Samantha is stumped. She always loves going home with Kathrin, who has a silly little sausage dog, two younger sisters, and a baby brother. And a small house stuffed with aunts and cousins and furniture and toys and a big TV. And a dusty yard with a shed and an old car to hide in and a bunch of tricycles and other beat-up riding toys. And a grandmother who cooks things in big pots in the little kitchen and scolds the babies and slaps tortillas and reads the Bible out loud in Spanish.
But now things are different. She can’t imagine anything worse than being at Kathrin’s. Well, of course she can imagine worse things—green-snot flu, alien invaders, landmines—things like that. But in the daily life of now, Samantha would rather do anything else than go home with Kathrin.
When after-school reading club is dismissed, without glancing at Kathrin, Samantha slips into the thickest thicket of children pouring out of the building. She hunches her head low, so her backpack makes a big hump behind her head, and hurries close on the heels of one of the bulkiest sixth graders, making a sort of moving shield around herself. Soon, she’s past the corner and out of the eye of anyone who might know she is supposed to go home with Kathrin.
But where should she go? She has no idea how late her Abue is going to be. It must be more than a few minutes, because when her Abue is only slightly delayed Samantha is just supposed to wait on the porch until she arrives. Her Abue says that when Samantha is ten she’ll be old enough to have her own key and be alone in the house in the daytime, but that is months away. She could have gone to Suresh’s house, but didn’t think of it in time. His older sister picked him up many minutes ago. She doesn’t think she can find his house by herself. Anyway, he lives on the other side of Rhode Island Avenue, which she can’t cross alone because of the possible consequences of getting in humongous trouble, or getting run over, or both.
Maybe she can go back and ask to stay at aftercare this once. Samantha does an about-face and walks quickly back toward school. But when she gets as far as the parking lot, she pauses. What if the bossy secretary sees her and gets mad because she didn’t go home with Kathrin? Doing something different from what you were told to do at dismissal is considered very serious. The adults run around squawking on their cell phones. Everyone is really mad when they find you, even though you’re just trying to keep yourself off the streets.
Samantha kicks at some wood chips the rain has washed out of the playground. Her chest feels like it’s stuffed full of them. Samantha ponders whether to sit down by the three scraggly pine trees near the gate and cry. Her Abue says crying is good. It cleans out the system and unclogs the bad feelings.
She sits down, but feels self-conscious. Thinking about crying has bottled up the feelings inside her, so she leaves them in there for now. The after-school programs are still going on inside, so no one sees her go over to the play equipment.
Usually she climbs the chain ladder, or the spiral pole the kids called “the Toilet,” or the twisty red slide. But today she goes straight up the regular steps to the monkey rings, which hang like a store display of giants’ earrings on a curvy yellow rail that snakes across the entire length of the play equipment. Samantha grabs the rings and grimly lurches from one to the next, hand over hand, up the full length and back, up and back, up and back, until she can no longer feel her fingers.