Ola Shakes It Up by Joanne Hyppolite Page A

were staring at me because I wasthe new kid and not because of anything else. Back at my old school, having everyone's full attention like this would have been the opportunity of a lifetime to do something or say something funny, but here I didn't think anybody would laugh at anything I had to say

    I stopped in front of Mrs. Woodstein's desk and handed her my schedule. I could tell she was a new teacher because she was pretty young and she didn't have either that tired, worn-out look or that hard-nosed, don't-mess-with-me look that experienced teachers have. She had long blond hair and she was wearing light blue eye shadow and a pink flowered dress. She was also smiling so hard it made me nervous.
    “Welcome, Ayeola,” she said, not even looking at my schedule, and pronouncing my name exactly right. Impressive.
    “Just Ola,” I corrected, nodding.
    Mrs. Woodstein stood up, still smiling. “Class, this is our new student, Ola Benson. Say hello.”
    Half the class said hi and the other half just continued looking. I wanted to stare at the floor, but I forced myself to look back. There's nothing worse than a new kid who looks scared.
    “Ola comes to us from … ?” Mrs. Woodstein waited for me to fill in the answer.
    “Roxbury,” I muttered at first, then I straightened up. I was proud of where I came from. “In Boston.”
    No one said anything. I noticed that the classroom was bigger than my old homeroom, but there were only half as many kids. Dad had boasted that one of the best things about the Walcott school system was that there was more individual attention. From a parent's point of view, I guess that's important, but for students it means it's easier for theteacher to keep an eye on what you're doing. It means you get picked more often to answer the homework questions. It means no sneaking off to the rest room for a long time with three of your friends without the teacher noticing. There couldn't have been more than twenty kids in the classroom. Now, I'm not a juvenile delinquent. I do all my homework and get decent grades. I even pay attention to the lessons most of the time. But school can get pretty boring, and you need something to shake it up every once in a while. I was always a shake-things-up kind of student. Things like letting the class pet out of its cage and putting signs on people's backs were my specialty. Harmless and anonymous stuff. But with only twenty people to a classroom, it was gonna be awfully hard to be anonymous. Being the only black kid in the class was gonna make it impossible. Suddenly, looking out at all those other students, I realized that my school pest career was probably over. I was gonna have to become like Aeisha and get perfect grades and be an upstanding student. I felt depressed.
    “Ola.” Mrs. Woodstein, who was standing next to me, put one hand on my shoulder softly. “Every new student has a buddy for their first day.”
    “A buddy?”
    “Someone who gives you a tour of the school, makes sure that you get to all your classes okay and introduces you to people that you should know.” Mrs. Woodstein was still smiling. “Someone has already volunteered to be your buddy.”
    I wanted to say, “Oh, yeah?” in a really tough way, but I didn't. This buddy system seemed kind of fishy to me. In myold school, anybody who would volunteer for such a position was someone you didn't want to be friends with — either the class bully or the class pet, or sometimes the class weirdo.
    “Anna, come up and introduce yourself to Ola.” To my relief, Mrs. Woodstein turned her smile away from me to someone else in the classroom. In the third row, a girl with a blond ponytail stood up and started walking toward me. I had her sized up within three seconds. Class pet—type A. Anna was a short, dumpy girl with a moon face, gray eyes, and a nose that turned up like a pig's. She was wearing a blue dress like the kind Mama would point out in the store for me when she's joking because she