you ever read it?”
“Yes, long ago. I did a report on it at school once.” I paused, then giggled. “To be truthful, I didn’t read it. I was about your age and my sole goal in life in those days was to figure out how to short-circuit the work and still get the grades. I was a world-class skimmer. I don’t think I actually read a whole book cover to cover until I was about twenty-two.”
“Torey!” she said, absolutely appalled.
I turned and grinned.
“God, and I thought you were so perfect,” Sheila said.
A pause.
“So, you don’t know what’s in it either?” she asked.
“Well, not other than it’s about Antony and Cleopatra. You know who Cleopatra is, don’t you?”
“Vaguely. A queen in Egypt a long time ago, but that’s about all,” Sheila replied. “I can’t imagine why Jeff thinks I’ll want to read this. Holy shit, Shakespeare.”
“I guess you’ll have to read it and find out.”
I was coming to the roadwork again, so I slowed the car down.
“I remember that other book,” Sheila said. “From your class. The Little Prince. Do you remember reading that to me? It was my best book in the whole world for the longest time. I just couldn’t get enough of it.”
“Yes, I remember it very well,” I said.
“I can still quote all my favorite parts.” She smiled over at me. “You know who I liked best in the book?”
“The prince?” I ventured.
She shook her head.
“The fox?”
“No, the rose. I loved that rose. It was so conceited, so full of itself and yet … Remember how it had those thorns, four thorns, and thought itself so brave? Remember that one bit? The rose said to the little prince, ‘Let the tigers come with their claws!’” Sheila boomed out in a deep, fierce voice. “And the prince said, ‘There are no tigers on my planet, and besides, tigers don’t eat weeds.’ ‘I am not a weed!’” Again, the dramatic rendering. Sheila’s voice squeaked over the word “weed.” “She was so put out. And then she just kept going on, ‘Let the tigers come! I am not at all afraid of tigers!’” Sheila smiled. “I can just imagine that brave little rose.”
“I can see why you liked her,” I said. “You were a bit of a little rose yourself in those days.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh God, I wasn’t, Torey. God. That’s no compliment. A flower? No, it’s the tigers I identified with. Rrrowrr!” she said and struck playfully out at me with fingers arched as claws. “I was the tigers’ kid.”
Over the Fourth of July weekend, I asked Sheila if she would like to come with me for a brief visit to Marysville, where she had been in my class all those years previously. It was a two-hundred-mile journey and I thought it would fit well into the four days we had until the clinic summer school-program resumed.
Sheila accepted enthusiastically. She had been back on only one previous occasion five years before, when her foster family had taken her to visit her father at the penitentiary. It had been almost as long since I’d been there. I’d passed through on one or two occasions since but I hadn’t stopped. With the exception of Chad, all the people I had been closest to were now gone.
The plan was that I would pick her up early on Thursday morning and we would work our way across the state to Marysville at a leisurely pace. Friday and Saturday we would spend looking around. Chad and his family had invited us to celebrate the Fourth of July with them on Saturday evening, and then on Sunday we’d return.
Sheila was waiting outside on the front steps of the duplex when I pulled up. It was very early, only just after six, and the sun was not high enough to dispel all the shadows. Even so, I squinted hard at the figure by the door. Sheila?
“I’ve done this just for you,” she said emphatically, as she flung her duffel bag into the backseat and got in beside me. She buckled the seat belt. “I hope you appreciate it.”
What could I say? The orange hair was gone, replaced by bright-yellow hair that stood up all over her head, as if it had a life of its own. Sort of Marilyn Monroe meets Bride of Frankenstein.
“You said I looked better blond,” she replied to my stunned silence. “I thought, well, just for you, since you’re taking me someplace nice.”
I set off in a high mood. I love to drive, and it was a super time for driving, on an early summer morning. Although we had been in the midst of a string of quite hot days, the air was still cool and the humidity was low, making the far horizon sharp.
“I wonder what we’re going to find,” Sheila said. “Can we go to the school?”
“It’ll be closed, but we could look at the playground.”
While I negotiated the last of the freeway interchanges necessary to get us out of the city, Sheila amused herself trying to tune in a rock station, but my radio wasn’t very good and she finally gave up.
“After you left my class, where all did you go?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Lots of places. I was in, like, three foster homes. Four? I can’t remember now. See, we were in Marysville and then we moved to Broadview and my dad got in trouble, like really soon after we moved. So, I went in this one foster home and then I got in another one and another. Then I got sent to a children’s home for a while.”
“How come?” I asked.
Another shrug. “Just the way the system works.”
“What made you move from Marysville in the first place?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Don’t remember.”
“Do you remember being in Sandra McGuire’s class the year after my class?” I asked. “When you were seven?”
“Sort of.” She paused pensively. “Actually, I have exactly one memory. I was sitting at a table and we were getting assigned lockers. We had to share and so I got assigned to share with the girl sitting across the table from me. I remember her, this girl. She was the smartest kid in the whole class, you know, the one that always got the best grades, and I was excited to think I was going to have a reason to talk to her now and she was going to have to talk to me; but then, I was also sort of scared because I knew she didn’t like me very well.”
“You were the smartest kid in the whole class, Sheil.”
“No, I wasn’t. She got the best grades. I tried, but she got them.”
“You were the smartest kid, regardless of who got the grades.”
“Yeah, I read about what you said my IQ was in your book. I read it and thought, God, you faked that one. That’s not me,” she replied.
“It is.”
“It isn’t.”
“Has no one ever told you in all this time that you were gifted?”
Sheila shook her head.
Shocked, I looked over. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not gifted, Torey. I know I’m not.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, just ’cause. I mean, I’m me. I know. And I’m not smart. I’m stupid.”
“You’re not!”
She didn’t respond, but I could