Akeelah and the Bee - James W. Ellison [1]
She said with a shrug, “I didn’t study for it.”
The teacher looked at her with surprise, an eyebrow lifted. “You didn’t?”
“No, ma’am.” She looked bored and uninterested, a pose she had developed in the past year as protective covering. Being smart was dangerous. She had learned that lesson the hard way, having accumulated in the past year a collection of bruises and bloody noses.
Ms. Cross slapped the test facedown on her desk.
“See me after class,” she said.
Akeelah reached for the test and then pulled her hand away. “Why? I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
“There’s some things I have to discuss with you.”
Akeelah turned to Georgia and giggled. The moment Ms. Cross walked away and the eyes of her classmates were no longer on her, Akeelah casually lifted up a corner of her test. 100 percent. Thirty words and thirty perfect spellings. When Georgia tried to sneak a look, Akeelah covered the test with her hand.
When the bell rang there was a stampede for the door to see who could escape first. Akeelah sat at her desk until the room was completely emptied out and then slowly approached Ms. Cross’s desk. Through the small window in the door, Georgia tried to get her attention, but Akeelah ignored her.
The teacher looked up and studied her solemnly. “You’re not telling the truth.”
Akeelah went into an indignant hip-locked stance. “What do you mean?”
“You did study for the test, didn’t you?”
“It don’t make no difference if I did or not. It’s just…I wish you wouldn’t ask me stuff in front of the others.”
Ms. Cross regarded her for a moment, slowly nodding her head. “You don’t like to call attention to yourself, do you, Akeelah?”
She looked away and pressed her lips together in silence.
“You know,” she said, “you could be one of my very best students—probably the best. But I keep asking myself, Why aren’t you? What’s holding you back? You don’t turn in half your homework, and sometimes you don’t even show up for class. So what’s going on?”
Akeelah shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I have a feeling you do know.”
“Maybe I’m not as smart as you think I am.”
“But you are. Does the work bore you?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of boring.”
“Would you like it if I gave you advanced assignments ?”
“I don’t know.”
She spotted Georgia staring through the window making faces at her and started to giggle.
“Please,” Ms. Cross said, clearly frustrated. “Try to pay attention.”
Reluctantly Akeelah turned back to her. “Sorry.”
The teacher cleared her throat, swiveled a pen around between her thumb and first finger. Finally she said, “Akeelah—do you know about next week’s spelling bee?”
“No.”
“It’s been posted on the bulletin board for weeks.”
“I don’t pay no attention to the bulletin board.”
“Well, I think you should sign up for it.”
She handed her a flyer for Crenshaw’s Inaugural Spelling Bee. Akeelah’s eyes swept over the flyer, then she let out an annoyed breath.
“I’m not interested.”
“But why? You have a real talent for spelling. Some of the words on the test I gave you were very, very difficult—‘picnicking,’ for instance.” She smiled. “I misspelled that in college.”
“‘Picnicking’ wasn’t hard, Ms. Cross,” she said. “None of the words were really hard.”
“Which is why you should be in the spelling bee.”
Akeelah gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.
“Can I go now?” she said.
A very disappointed Ms. Cross stared after her as she slung her book bag over her slender shoulder and left the classroom.
Akeelah and Georgia, both of whom had seen the movie Hustle & Flow the week before, walked home from school singing “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” laughing and snapping their fingers. The South Los Angeles neighborhood was grim but they were hardly aware of the boarded-up storefronts, the walls crawling with gang graffiti, the broken