old.
But, she says, we don’t have to talk to him either.
He has a tattoo on his shoulder, a picture of a dancing naked lady with breasts like staring eyeballs, CARMEN written underneath in blurring blue letters. Mrs. Rowley’s name is Becky. She’s very thin, and she wears eyeglasses with a gold chain that loops down on each side of her face. She is not a very nice person. I don’t have to see her so much, except when she is walking their poodle, Jackie O, and then she does not say hello but just stands there, watching me like she is a frog and I am a fly and if I get too close to her, that’s it. She will not let me pet Jackie O because she says Jackie has a nervous condition that I will only aggravate. But I think Mrs. Rowley is the one with the nervous condition. She leans her head over their balcony sometimes and says, “Please don’t jump rope on the pavement because I can hear the skip skip skip, and it’s very annoying.” I tell my mother when Mrs. Rowley was little, someone must have told her if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, only she got confused, got it backwards. Only talk if you are going to say something mean.
My mother says oh well, Mrs. Rowley has problems of her own.
My mother also says it’s unfortunate the way Mr. Rowley acts toward women, not just because he’s married but because he’s the father of two growing boys, and you can already see where that’s going. Kevin Rowley is in eighth grade and already he tries to whistle at her the way his father does. One time when he did it my mother said, “What a good little parrot. Want a cracker?”
But the younger one, Travis, doesn’t ever whistle. Every time I see him, he’s biting his bottom lip like he’s either mad or trying not to say what he’s thinking. He’s in fifth grade, one grade above me. We ride the same bus, but he has only talked to me one time. Last year there was a contest at school to see who could do multiplication and division tables the fastest. Each teacher picked the best math person out of their class by playing Around the World, which means whoever is sitting in one of the corners in the front row stands up next to the person behind them, and the teacher asks something like “Twelve times eight?” Whoever answers first wins and gets to go on to the next person, and if you beat everybody in the room, one by one, then you’ve gone Around the World and you’re the winner. I won out of my class, but I also got in trouble and Ms. Ferro said I would be disqualified if I kept getting excited and yelling out the answers so loud it hurt her ears. Calm down, Evelyn, she said. It’s math. The right answer is the right answer, whether you yell it or not.
After lunch, I got to go down to the library to do Around the World against all the people who won out of their homerooms, and Travis Rowley was there. I was thinking it wasn’t very fair that I had to go against fourth and fifth graders, but they weren’t as fast as you would think. I got in trouble for yelling again, but I went almost all the way Around the World again until I got to Travis, who you wouldn’t think would be very smart, only reading comic books and throwing knives around with his brother. But he was. We kept tying. He did not yell out the answers the way I did, but he said them very quickly, somehow pushing the right answers out of his mouth while still biting his bottom lip. He kept his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans and looked down at his shoes the whole time, and I could hear him like a softer echo of my own voice, his voice muffled, hard to hear.
“Sixty-three.”
“One hundred and forty-four.”
“Six.”
“Thirty-two.”
“Seven.”
“Forty-nine.”
After a while, Mr. Leland, the principal, stopped looking down at his cards and just asked us whatever came into his head, his eyes shifting between Travis’s mouth and mine. “Six times twelve. Fifty-four divided by six. Eighty-four divided by twelve. Six times seven. Three times eleven.”
And we just kept going and going and going. Mr. Leland told me that I