Double Dutch (6 page)

“It must be rough when he's on the road. How long does he stay gone?” Delia asked as they walked to their lockers.

“Oh, usually not more than two or three days. Sometimes, if he gets a special haul, like California, he might be gone for a week, but he tries not to do that. But he always leaves me food and money, and he calls me every night. We got it worked out.”

“I admire you,” Delia said shyly. “I'd be scared to be at home alone.”

“What's to be scared of? Besides, I got my attack cat to protect me,” Randy said, laughing. “Home is safe. It's school I'm scared of. Those Tollivers are some scary dudes!”

“You got that right.” Delia shivered in spite of the warmth of the overheated halls.

“I meant what I said the other night, Delia.” Randy was looking directly at her. “I'll protect you.”

Delia had to look away. She was trembling once more, but not from the cold, and not from fear. Randy's voice made her shiver. She smiled at him. “Thanks, Randy. I'll see you in English.” He grinned and disappeared up the steps to his next class. Delia glanced at herself in her locker mirror just before she closed the door. She was still smiling.

During her first-bell math class, Delia listened to the buzz of whispers about the Tollivers and their television appearance. The twins arrived late to her math class, with a tardy slip from the office. They said nothing as they tossed the green slip of paper on Mr. Bernaldi's desk. He glanced at them and continued his discussion of polynomials. Another teacher knocked on the door a few minutes later, and the two of them spoke in voices too low for the students to hear, but Delia could see Mr. Bernaldi glancing back at the Tolliver boys. The rest of the students took this brief respite from class to make their own whispered comments.

“I heard they tried to suspend them, but they couldn't.”

“I heard the twins are really mad and are gonna get somebody.”

Delia said nothing, but she peeked back at Tabu and Titan. They were looking out of the window, seeming to ignore the turmoil, but Delia had a feeling they were enjoying it.

Mr. Bernaldi closed the door and returned to the front of the class. “Let's get back to work, now. Delia, can you tell me the answer to number three?”

Delia glanced at the problem. She thought for the hundredth time how easy math was for her, and wondered why reading was so impossible. “Seventeen,” she said with assurance.

“Good job, Delia,” Mr. Bernaldi said, smiling. He turned to the twins, a look of challenge and determination on his face. “Tabu, can you tell me the answer to number four?”
Mr. Bernaldi is not about to be intimidated,
Delia thought, turning around in her seat to see what would happen.

“Two forty-nine point five,” Tabu replied defiantly, as if answering the challenge. He had barely glanced at his book.

Mr. Bernaldi looked down at his notes to double-check the answer. “You're correct, Tabu,” he said quietly. “Good job.”

Even though the twins rarely participated in class activities, Delia noticed they made good grades. They were smarter than they let on to be. When teachers passed back papers in grade order from highest to lowest, a practice Delia hated, she noticed that the Tolliver twins usually had papers in the top of the stack and she usually had papers in the bottom.
Maybe if I had a twin,
Delia thought,
I'd get better grades. Two brains have got to be better than one.

Before Delia's social studies class, the next bell, the students huddled together in small groups, whispering and
spreading the little information they knew. Titan and Tabu were not in this class. Then the bell rang, and Mrs. Parks, a tall, powerful African-American woman who wore a colorful African garment to class each day, tossed aside her textbook and said, “Okay, you need to talk, so let's talk. This is what social studies is all about—people and problems. I know you all saw the TV show last week—it always amazes me what you watch when you get home—and I know you are concerned. Without making accusations or false statements, let's discuss what's going on. Melissa? You look worried.”

Melissa, a skinny, quiet girl with braces and stringy blond hair, said softly, “I'm afraid of them—the twins.”

“Have they ever done anything to make you feel that way?” asked Mrs. Parks.

“No,” Melissa admitted, “but one day they passed me in the hall, and they, and they—”

“Go on,” Mrs. Parks said gently. “What happened?”

“They growled at me,” Melissa said quickly, as if she was embarrassed.

The rest of the class started to laugh, but one look from Mrs. Parks silenced them. “That frightened you?” Mrs. Parks asked quietly. Melissa nodded, head down.

“They pushed me against the lockers when they passed me in the hall,” Delia offered next. “I don't like feeling scared and I don't like people who are rude.”

“You bring up an important point, Delia,” Mrs. Parks said. “Rather than talk about any specific people, let's talk about fear and aggression and what it does to us. If you look at events in our history book, you'll see that wars have sometimes started simply because of some folks who were
too aggressive and others who were too fearful. Look at what Hitler did,” she offered.

“So we gonna have a war here at school?” asked Aziz, the tallest boy in the eighth grade.

“Of course not,” Mrs. Parks assured the class. “But if we understand what causes problems, perhaps we can work to fix them before the situation gets out of hand.”

“So what do we do?” Delia asked.

“Has anybody ever talked to the Tollivers, tried to make friends with them?” asked Jesse, who had transferred to the school shortly after the twins.

“No way, man!” Aziz told him. “You want to get iced?”

“Wait. Jesse has a good point,” Mrs. Parks insisted. “Sometimes the best way to destroy an enemy is by making friends with him. It's probably very hard to transfer into a school when the school year has already started.”

“You got that right!” said Jesse. “But everyone was really straight-up with me, helped me find my way around school, told me what teachers were stupid and which were cool—they told me you were one of the cool ones, Mrs. Parks,” he added with a grin. Mrs. Parks rolled her eyes and called on Aziz again, who was waving his hand wildly.

“Yeah, but Jesse came in here without an attitude. Nobody was scared of him from day one,” Aziz reminded the class.

“We keep going back to the idea of fear,” Mrs. Parks commented. “From what I can see, all of you are excited about being afraid. It's like it's the cool thing to do. I've known people to be frightened of me when they see me in an elevator!” The class chuckled.

“If I hadn't done my homework and I saw you in an elevator,
I guess I'd be scared too!” joked Quinn, a boy who rarely did his homework on time.

Mrs. Parks laughed and told him, “Anytime YOU see me, Quinn, you'd better be afraid, because one of these days I'm going to show up at your house, right around dinnertime, and ask your mother why you can't remember your homework!”

Quinn jumped from his seat and fell on his knees. “Oh, please! Not the visit-your-mama-at-dinner torture! Anything but that! I promise I'll be good!”

“Get up, Quinn,” Mrs. Parks said, laughing, “which reminds me—class, get out your homework.”

Everybody groaned as they dug for their papers, but it seemed to Delia that everyone felt better because Mrs. Parks had loosened a bit of the tension they all felt. Quinn, of course, didn't have his homework, but Delia was glad that the attention was on him. She had not done her homework either. It was a reading assignment on Egyptian culture, along with several questions to answer. Delia figured that she could learn as much as she needed by listening in class, and would make up for the missed homework grade by offering to do an extra project—maybe a model of a pyramid or a mummy. But most of the class period had been taken up with the discussion of the Tolliver problem. Mrs. Parks had time only for a brief discussion of Egypt before the bell rang. The homework was to read the next chapter. She might never get the class help she needed to fake it on the test. Delia sighed as she walked down the steps to English, where she saw Yolanda just closing her locker.

“You ready for English?” Yolanda asked her as they pushed their way slowly through the crowded hall.

“Yeah, I guess. Hey, Yo Yo, are
you
scared of the Tollivers? You make a joke out of everything.” They were standing outside of the classroom door.

“Not really,” Yolanda replied. “I think this whole thing will blow over. I remember when me and my parents were living in Africa and a roving band of tigers had us cornered and all we had were the pencils from the mission school to fight them with.”

“Yolanda!” Delia interrupted with a laugh. “Tigers come from Asia, not Africa, and you never were there, anyway!”

“It might have been a dream,” Yolanda replied with a grin, “but it seemed very real. It's not a lie if you really believe it, is it?”

“Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the truth and a lie,” Delia mused. “And it doesn't really matter who believes it.”

Y
OLANDA BOUNDED INTO THE CLASSROOM, BUT
D
ELIA
hesitated a moment outside the door of her English class. The Tollivers, even though they said very little, seemed to dominate the spirit of every class she shared with them. Delia took a deep breath, walked in, and headed to the cluster of chairs where her group sat. The class had been divided for something Miss Benson called “cooperative learning groups.” Delia figured it was something her teacher had learned in a college education class, but Delia liked working in groups because it was easy to hide her problem. They had been allowed to pick their own group members this time, but sometimes Miss Benson assigned people so the kids wouldn't always work with their friends. Delia figured Miss Benson let them pick their own for this project so she wouldn't have to deal with the Tollivers. Nobody had chosen them to be in their group, which seemed to please everybody. They worked together in the back of the room, talking to each other with their books closed. They acted as if the rest of the class did not exist.

Miss Benson walked around to each group, offering suggestions and comments, sometimes making little jokes. When she got to the Tollivers, she simply said, “The group project reports are due next week.” They ignored her as if
she were an insect buzzing near them. She walked over to Delia's group, which included Randy, Yolanda, and Jesse. “How's it going here?” she asked cheerfully. “Any problems?”

Delia had watched the video of
Lord of the Flies
after she got home from Double Dutch practice, so she basically knew the story. But she also knew from experience that movie-makers often changed characters and even major events in a book just to make the movie more interesting. So she listened carefully to the other students in the group, comparing what she had heard about the first few chapters they had read with what she had seen in the video at home. So far, they seemed pretty similar.

“So you got a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island. How fake is that?” Randy was asking. “There's no such thing as a desert island anymore. There's people everywhere on this planet!”

“This book was written a long time ago,” Yolanda said. “Back then there were lots of available islands! My grandfather discovered the last desert island, you know. It was just before I was born, on one of his explorations of the Pacific Ocean.”

“Here she goes again, Miss Benson,” Randy complained with a laugh.

Miss Benson wisely chose not to deal with the tale of Yolanda's grandfather. Instead she asked, “Jesse, do you think that boys that age—nine, ten, eleven—could survive without adults?”

Jesse shifted in his seat. “I doubt it. I've got a little brother who's nine, and I think his brain cells are made out of oatmeal. He got lost in the mall last week. But then, if the
desert island had a food court and a McDonald's, maybe he'd survive. That's how he found his way out of the mall.”

“I don't think this island had food courts,” Randy said, laughing. “I read the whole book already. These kids were into more gruesome stuff, like killing and eating pigs.”

“What would you do if you were all alone, Randy?” Delia asked quietly.

The smile faded from Randy's face. “I'd do just fine,” he said quickly. “I know how to take care of myself.” He turned his attention to his book bag on the floor, and began rummaging through it.

“I'd be scared,” Delia admitted. “My mom gets on my nerves sometimes, but I need her.”

“All I need to survive is electricity for my hair curlers and television and stereo, and a bag of money, and I'd be just fine!” Yolanda asserted, while grinning at Jesse. “When we lived in London, I lived alone for six months while my parents worked as missionaries in the outback of Australia. I was the same age as the kids in this book.”

“For real?” asked Jesse, who was new enough not to know about Yolanda's history of colorful storytelling.

“Yeah, for real,” she replied with a look of innocence on her face. “And I did NOT become a savage like the kids in this story. Civilized folks don't do that.”

“Yolanda, you think ‘civilized' means hot tubs and helicopters. ‘Civilized' has something to do with how folks treat each other. Right, Miss Benson?” Randy asked.

Miss Benson smiled with relief that at least one student seemed to be getting the idea. “Good point, Randy,” she said with encouragement.

Randy nodded at the teacher, then turned back to
Yolanda to blast her. “Besides, Yo Yo, you've never even been to London! And you ain't got sense enough to live alone!” Yolanda ignored him and got her mirror and lipstick and brush out of her book bag. “You gotta watch Yo Yo,” he told Jesse. “Believe only half of what she says—maybe even less.” Jesse didn't seem to care, Delia thought. He was busy watching Yolanda brush her long black hair.