American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [49]
My arm shot up. I could not have stopped it if I had tried. Multiply! My hand was banner high, triumphant. When I looked around, it was the only one there.
The boy beside me exploded into raucous laughter.
“Now, Guillermo,” said the teacher. “Now, now. How do you know our young friend here doesn’t know her multiplication tables?” She was bouncing her ruler against her palm. “Cómo lo sabes, ah?”
Her red mouth spread into a smile, and she pulled her green sweater over her wide hips like a duck ready to waddle into water. “Come here, gorda. Come up here and show Guillermo your bright little engineer’s brain.”
I pushed myself out of my chair and looked over at George. His lips were frozen in a perfect O, his eyebrows suspended in the air. Staggering forward, I followed the señorita to the chalkboard, like a rogue to the gallows. She picked up a piece of chalk, rested it against her chin for a moment, then scratched two numbers onto the blackboard with a flourish of her elbow: 4, and then 5. Last, she punched an X between them with such fury that my knees began to give.
“Here,” she said, and thrust the chalk toward my paunch. “Tómala.” Take it.
I stood there paralyzed, the chalk poised between my fingers like a bloated caterpillar, fat and white and venomous.
“You ready, my little ingeniera?” she said.
I shook my head no. A tittering came from the class.
“What, you can’t remember your multiplication tables, princesa?”
I shook my cretin head again. The snickers grew louder.
“Or maybe you never knew?” The red mouth broke into an ominous leer, an army of teeth perched behind.
I lowered my chin into my chest as my classmates slapped their desks and chortled with glee.
“She’s a liar!” roared Guillermo. “A fat, ugly liar!”
It was too much for George. He stood up and threw a mean punch into Guillermo’s abdomen. It folded my critic in half.
But Guillermo came up like a barracuda, grabbed George by the hair, and pulled him down, chairs and desks falling over in a clatter. The boys slugged and huffed, twisting every which way on the floor. The lame girl winced. The candy eater gawked. The doll face pressed her fingers to her temples. Finally, Señorita’s long green arm yanked George out by the collar, and her big voice bellowed, “Enough! Ya! Basta!”
“Guillermo! You sit down,” she said. “The rest of you, too. And you,” she snarled at George, “I’ll show you what happens to troublemakers. Everyone take note! Fíjense what happens to this uppity boy!”
She trotted George—still dangling from her hand—over to the closet, opened the door, and thrust him in. She turned the lock with a click and whirled around. “Go to your seat, chica,” she snapped, waving disdainfully at my chair.
I sat down and silently vowed not to move, not to open my mouth, not to bring any more attention to myself. To be as small as I could be.
The señorita was having us copy words into our notebooks, booming them out syllabically and then printing them on the board. I hunched into that work with intensity, laboring to copy the shapes she was forming.
But through the sounds of scribbling and coughing and shifting in chairs, I thought I heard something else. I listened closely. It was a muffled whimper, and it was coming from the closet.
All of a sudden, a wave of despair washed over me. George was in there weeping, and I was out here thinking of nothing more than my wretched self. My belly started to jump: up and down, bounce, bounce. Suddenly the skin on my face was spreading out, pulling tight. I threw back my head, gulping down air. What happened next, I cannot say, except that a sound like my father’s factory whistle came out of the deepest pit of my gut, long and piercing and full of alarm.
There was a sharp pull at my elbow. As I sniffled and blinked, I could see that the teacher was pushing me toward the left side of the room. She opened the closet, shoved me in, and slammed the door behind me. Click.
“Cállense!” she shouted. Quiet! “And