Akeelah and the Bee - James W. Ellison [5]
“You ever heard of these words, Daddy?”
She smiled at his image. “Yeah, you probably did.” She stared into her father’s eyes and then, against her will, remembered the scene from three years earlier that recurred again and again, both in her dreams and when awake. A game of Scrabble was in progress. Her father was hunched over the board, thinking. Akeelah was waiting for him to line up his word. Her father had taught her Scrabble the year before and she had immediately fallen in love with forming words and combinations of words. He smiled up at her before making his word. During the game he went out to the corner deli for a pack of cigarettes. Half an hour later, when he hadn’t returned, Tanya began pacing the living room nervously. She knew the neighborhood and feared it.
Akeelah’s smile faded as she remembered. It could have been yesterday, the scene was so vivid—the sound of gunshots from the street, the wail of police sirens growing louder. Those sounds haunted her mind now. And those memories triggered another: the sound of pounding on the front door, a somber-looking police officer on the front porch, her mother with a piercing cry knocking over a lamp that smashed to the floor.
Akeelah jerked suddenly in her seat. Returning to the present, her breathing ragged, she stared at her father’s photograph. Her eyes filled with tears. “God, I miss you,” she whispered. “You left us and we couldn’t let you go. We still can’t let you go. You’re in every corner of the house. Your voice—your spirit—they’re everywhere, Daddy. You understood… you understood everything.”
She removed her glasses, damp from her tears, and wiped them absently on the sleeve of her blouse. Then she went to the window and slammed it shut, muffling the sounds of the neighborhood. She grabbed her word list and started methodically spelling words out loud. “‘Anachronism.’ A-n-a-c-h-r-o-n-i-s-m. ‘Assiduous.’ A-s-s-i-d-u-o-u-s….” The spelling, as it always did, had a calming effect on her. She was safely tucked in a world of her own, with her nonthreatening friends—letters and words that never bullied or belittled her. Bad images of the past evaporated. Her mind was at rest.
Three
The following morning when Akeelah arrived at Crenshaw Middle School, the exterior walkway was clogged with students. When the bell rang the students began slowly drifting to class, except for a few habitual truants, mostly male. Akeelah didn’t hurry, either. She leisurely strolled up to a water fountain. Two of the toughest girls in her class, Myrna and Elaine, walked up behind her.
“Hey, freak,” said Myrna, who was built like a football lineman. As Akeelah turned to find Myrna towering over her, the girl gave her a shove.
“How’s the genius today?”
“I’m fine,” Akeelah said. “And I ain’t no genius.”
“Oh yes, you are. Everybody know you are.”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Me and Elaine, we want for you to take care of our English homework. Everybody call you a brainiac.”
Akeelah shook her head emphatically. “Well, everybody is wrong. I ain’t no brainiac.”
“Like hell you ain’t,” Elaine said menacingly.
“Don’t be tryin’ to fool us,” Myrna said. “You’re always pullin’ down A’s.”
Akeelah tried to twist away from the girls, but they grabbed her and started punching her face and shoulders. Coming down the hall at that moment, as Akeelah fought the bigger girls with all the fury in her tiny body, was the school principal, Mr. Welch. Conservatively dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, grave and sanctimonious in manner, he was deep in conversation with a tall, somber African American in his mid-forties. With his tweed jacket and black turtleneck, he was the perfect model of a professor. All he lacked was a pipe.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming here today, Josh,” Mr. Welch was saying. “The district’s been breathing down my neck. Test scores dropped again last semester.”
Dr. Joshua Larabee nodded, his lips pressed together. “Well, I appreciate your dilemma, but I don’t think there’s much I can offer.”
“I just think if you see the kids