The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [1]
But after a meeting with my first grade teacher, they had to sit me down and ask a few things.
“Saffron, how did you know so much about the second world war?”
“I guess I saw it on the TV,” I answered, trying not to sound coy.
My father frowned. “You couldn’t have seen it on the TV. They don’t say that much on the TV.”
“Must have read it in a book, then.”
“Sweetie, we don’t have any books like that. Did you read it somewhere else?” my mother cooed.
“I must have.”
“Hmmm.”
“Saffron, we know you’re a very clever girl, but do you think there’s a way you could stop showing off in class? Mrs. Zeiber is concerned that you’re making the other children feel bad,” she said.
“Then why don’t they put me in a higher grade?” I didn’t like Mrs. Zeiber, but now I had reason to like her even less. I pictured myself liberating her eyeball from its socket and tossing it onto the merry-go-round in the first grade recess area.
“But we thought you liked being in Mrs. Zeiber’s class.”
“I do, but I’m pretty bored. I’m sick of counting to a hundred,” I whined.
They looked at me, and shrugged at each other. Two weeks later, after winter break, I was enrolled in the district’s gifted program—the ultimate place for showing off knowledge that no other first grader could have. I blabbered about everything—the goings-on in the Truman White House, the main tenets of Hinduism, the political complications of Central Africa. My peers envied me, even the teachers envied me. I was like a miracle kid or something, and people started to talk.
The next year, I realized that life as Saffron Adams would have to be far more inconspicuous. I couldn’t go around claiming to be a genius, and I couldn’t go telling stories from history that I shouldn’t know yet. I guess I realized that the more I said, the more chance I had of ruining everything I was working toward.
It was then, in 1980, the year I turned eight years old, that I forged my plan to return to the Caribbean Sea. Most of the other kids in my class were toying with being rock stars or President of the United States, but I had something much more appealing in mind. Finally done with my one hundred lives as a dog, I would one day reclaim my jewels and gold, hold them close to my heart, and live happily ever after.
So from that day forward, in order to seem my age when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered accordingly.
“I want to be a pirate,” I would say. And they would smile and think, “Isn’t she sweet?”
Growing up where I did, it was kind of funny for a kid to want to be a pirate, I guess. There wasn’t a spot of water for miles. Three hundred miles, to be exact, to the New Jersey shoreline. My mother liked it that way. When we took our week-long vacation in the summer, we always went west or north or south, but never east.
“I’ve spent enough time near the sea for this life,” she would say. But still, all my sister’s friends spent their vacations walking the boardwalk eating ice cream and saltwater taffy, while we took historical outings. Sometimes, if we would whine too much about the mosquitoes or the boring Civil War battlefields of Virginia, she would scare us with lies: “Children your age go missing every summer on the boardwalk,” or “I won’t have you running around half naked in front of old perverts.” She would turn her eye to my teenaged sister and whisper, “Especially you, Patricia.”
It wasn’t until I got older that I learned what she had against the sea.
Once Patricia had moved out and Darren was packed for college, my mother began to need me more. I used to talk to her on the rare nights when, feeling lonely, she would sit at the kitchen table with a bottle of Irish whiskey. On a night in 1985, she told me what happened to her family back in the 1950s. I was thirteen.
Her brother Jim had called from Ireland that night, which he often did since he’d found us six years earlier.