Page 5 of Right Side of Paradise

I Got You

I hated this class. Ms. Drew had taught my mother and all my older cousins. She’d been teaching for longer than my mother was alive. And she still chose to come to school every day instead of retiring like my granny had last year.

She was clearly bored.

That had to be why she called on Harlow every Friday during reading class when she knew she would get the same result.

I frowned hard at her while she watched the girl beside me roll the top of the page between her shaky fingers. Over and over again.

Harlow’s other hand was under her desk, rubbing up and down her corduroy pant leg.

All around us, the third-grade classroom was silent, waiting for whatever came next.

Across the room, Rico sucked his teeth and mumbled something that made Ms. Drew pinch her wrinkly lips and squint her eyes in his direction.

We all used to sit together. Me, Soul, Rico and Harlow. But she separated us before Christmas break because she said we talked too much.

Now it was just me and Harlow at this table with three other students.

Rico was the only boy at his table closest to Ms. Drew’s desk and Soul was on the other side of the classroom, twirling his pencil between his fingers.

“Ms. Westbrook, are you gonna dog-ear that page into oblivion or are you going to read your paragraph?”

“Can you come back to me?” Harlow’s soft voice was shaky and small.

She was shy. That’s what Rico told us the day she became his sister. But she could read. There was nothing wrong with her.

But just because we knew that didn’t mean everyone else did. Some of our classmates laughed at her and Rico had fought every single one of them at lunch or after school. And man, Ms. Drew really loved writing him up for that.

“I saved you for last, please read your paragraph, Harlow. We don’t have all day.”

For the first time, Harlow stopped making intense eye contact with the words in front of her and peeked up at the teacher.

“I’m s-sorry, I don’t know what it says.”

Ms. Drew sighed, loud and dramatic, before shaking her head. “Is there anybody else that can read the passage?”

A hand near the front shot into the air while Harlow shoved her hand under her chin beside me.

I probably wasn’t supposed to see the tear that hit the page a minute later, but I did and my hatred for Ms. Drew grew.

“What did she say?”

We all closed in on Harlow when she walked out of the classroom ten minutes after we had for the day.

It should be a crime to make a student stay late on Friday, but our teacher was the devil so nothing she did surprised me anymore.

Harlow’s eyes widened before she found her voice. She was the type of person you had to be looking at to know she was talking. Everything that came out of her mouth sounded like a whisper.

She sniffed and wiped over the tear tracks on her cheek. “She said she’s going to write on my progress report that I need reading intervention until my grade comes up. She said she’s going to meet with my mom to get permission to keep me inside during recess.”

Harlow was a tiny little thing and watching her shoulders shake when she began to cry changed something in my nine-year-old brain. I hated seeing her like that. Never wanted to see her like that again.

“That’s BS,” Soul groaned. He never did tell us what BS meant, but he made it sound like something awful. I was convinced he’d heard his older brother say it and hadn’t turned back.

Silently, Rico slung an arm around her shoulders as we began the walk home. On Fridays we went to Soul’s house, so I hiked my backpack higher on my shoulder and prepared for the longer walk across the Cove.

Soul instinctively took Harlow’s backpack off her back and carried it by the top loop as we all fell in stride together.

“But you can read,” Soul pointed out. “Just because you don’t want to read out loud during class shouldn’t mess up your grade.”

I had to strain to hear her reply.

“I told her that!” She raised her voice, but it just sounded like everyone else’s speaking voice. “Then she said something about participation points. Rico, I don’t want to fail third grade!”

She hid her face in his armpit and cried some more.

Rico stopped walking and my steps stuttered so I wouldn’t pass them.

He looked helpless holding his sister’s face in his hand. “Hey, stop crying.”

“B-but everybody thinks I’m not smart.”

“Who cares?” Soul hissed, tugging one of her pigtails. “We’re the only ones who matter. You’re the smartest person out of all of us.”

Harlow wiped her tears with the back of her hand and looked at Soul like she didn’t believe him.

He tugged her hair again. “Come on, my mom said we can all have a slice of the chocolate cake she made for our afterschool snack!”

He started running up the street and turned around with a huge smile on his face while we jogged to catch up.

Once we were at his house, his mom Gina herded us to the kitchen sink and watched us wash our hands before she pulled the chocolate cake out of the fridge.

I sat silently at the kitchen table until an idea popped into my head.

“I have an idea,” I announced between bites.

Three sets of eyes turned to look at me.

“She can read to stuffed animals. Just to get some practice doing it out loud.” I set my fork on the edge of my plate. “We don’t have to listen to her, and she still gets practice reading.”

Just then, Ms. Gina came into the kitchen. “That’s not a bad idea, Christian.” She swept her eyes across the table to look at Harlow. “What do you think, sweetie?”

“I can try,” Harlow said with a shy smile.

As soon as I heard that, I pushed back from the table and went to get my bear out of my book bag. I carried it with me some days when I missed my parents. Just knowing it was near helped.

Soul collected a few of his favorite stuffed Power Rangers and sat them up against the back of his desk with my teddy.

Then we left Harlow in the room with a book and told her to come get us when she was done reading it.

She looked at us with trust in her eyes and nodded.

But when we were in the hall, none of us left the door. Trying not to make noise, we pressed our ears to the door and waited to hear her reading.

“Ow!” Mia’s mom stubbed her toe…

Her sweet voice carried through the small crack in the door and a proud smile took over my face.

We listened until we heard her turn the first page then tiptoed down the hallway.

“You wanna throw the football until she’s done?” Soul questioned, his eyebrows wiggling. “Then we can watch a movie with Harley.”

Rico nodded but let Soul walk into the backyard first before putting me in a playful headlock.

“How’d you think of that?”

“I don’t know.” The truth was it wasn’t hard to solve a problem when you loved someone. And I loved all three of them. When one of us was sad, it made me sad until I could figure out a way to fix it.

They were my best friends; they would do anything for me the same way I’d do anything for them.

If I had to give Harlow every new teddy bear my parents got me that was okay.

She held my hand when we sneaked to watch scary movies at Soul’s house because she knew I was too nervous to tell everyone I was scared.

This was the same thing; I was holding her hand until she wasn’t scared anymore.