Me and Mr. Bell by Philip Roy Page A

you?”
    â€œNowhere.”
    â€œYou were gone a long time.”
    â€œI know. I like to take long walks.”
    â€œWalking can’t be that interesting.”
    â€œIt is to me.”
    â€œYou should read more.”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œI don’t know, I just will.”
    In my room, I sat on my bed, opened up the paper Helen Keller had given me and started to study it. There were fifteen words on the page. The last one was tough , and it was messier than the others because she had written it on her lap, standing up. I wondered if she had included it as a kind of joke, because learning was tough for both of us. She was definitely somebody who liked to joke and laugh and have fun. But she also probably worked harder than anybody else in the world. She was tough.
    I stared at the words. They looked blurry to me, like the ridges of bark on an old chestnut tree. They were just shapes, like that. But when I stared longer and looked more closely, I saw the g and h in each of them. Since I knew that the last word was tough, I decided to learn it first. Now I saw that, strangely, there was no f in it. I said it out loud. Yes, there was definitely an f sound. Did she make a mistake?
    I got up, went down the hall and poked my head into my sister’s room. She didn’t raise her head out of her book. “What do you want?”
    â€œHow do you spell tough ?”
    â€œ T- o-u - g-h .” She spelled it and didn’t even have to stop reading.
    â€œIsn’t there an f in it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œBecause they didn’t put one in.”
    â€œThen why do we say it that way?”
    â€œBecause that’s how it sounds.”
    That didn’t make any sense. I sighed. “Okay. Thank you.”
    â€œYou’re welcome.”
    I went back to my room and wrote out tough ten times. Then I looked for fight . I wanted to see if it had an f . Because it sounded like it did. Yes, it did. But the g and h in fight sounded different than they did in tough . In fact, they didn’t sound at all. Maybe that was an exception to the rule. But what was the rule?
    I went back to my sister’s room.
    â€œWhat now?”
    â€œIs tough an exception to the rule?”
    â€œWhat rule?”
    â€œI don’t know. Is it an exception to any rule?”
    â€œNo.”
    Now I was completely confused.
    â€œWhy are you still standing there?”
    I took a deep breath. “Do you know why fight has an f and tough doesn’t?”
    She lifted her head out of her book, thought about it for a second then dropped her head again. “Nope.”
    â€œThen how are you supposed to remember?”
    â€œI don’t know. You just do. Do you remember how old you are?”
    â€œYes. But I can remember numbers. It’s spelling I can’t remember.”
    My sister looked at me, made a shrug with her face then dropped her head back into her book again. I returned to my room.
    How were you supposed to remember how to spell words if there were no rules that you could trust or if there were exceptions to every rule, like Mr. Bell said? And how could you remember which one was the rule and which one was the exception? Wouldn’t it be like trying to remember what every single leaf looked like on a tree? I wished somebody would agree with me that that was impossible. But nobody else seemed to care about it. Everybody else could spell.
    I opened up my scribbler, wrote out the word tough ten more times, then fight ten times. I didn’t know why fight wasn’t just spelled f-i-t . Wouldn’t that make more sense? If this were math, it would make more sense. That’s what I liked about math. There were rules and no exceptions to the rules. I turned and stared at the window. If you had to learn to spell every single word by itself, then I was in big trouble, because I could never do that. And I didn’t know how anybody else