Somewhere I Belong by Glenna Jenkins Page A

silent as everyone turned and stared in our direction.
    Patrick Daley stretched a leg across his seat, leaned over the backrest and checked us over. “Yankee Doodle,” he scoffed.
    If Mr. Dunphy noticed, he didn’t say a word.
    Mr. Dunphy stepped down from the platform and directed us to our seats. He placed Helen in the fourth row from the front, in a seat next to Pat Giddings Jr., with the seventh and eighth graders. He placed me in the same row on the opposite side of the room, in a desk by the window, next to a pale, skinny girl with blond pigtails. The only empty seat in the back row with the ninth graders was beside Patrick Daley. So Mr. Dunphy told Larry to sit there. The minute my older brother settled in, Patrick shouldered him hard. But Mr. Dunphy didn’t seem to notice.
    We stood and prayed the “Our Father,” then sang “God Save the King.” I listened to the girl standing next to me and mouthed the words to the anthem, hoping I would get it right the next time. When we finished, we sat, folded our hands on top of our desks, and waited.
    Mr. Dunphy grabbed a pointer from the top of his desk and smacked it over the blackboard. “Get out your scribblers. Grades one to four, you are to do your printing from the blackboard. Grades five and six, you’re to do the same, but in cursive. Grades seven to nine, get out your readers and copy ten lines from it, also in cursive. And make it neat and legible—I want to be able to read it.”
    We leaned over our desks, gripped our pens, and wrote. Mr. Dunphy marched up and down the aisles, pounding his pointer into the floor. His brace rattled with every step. When he reached Michael Daley, he stopped and jabbed a finger onto his page. “What does this say, young Michael? I can’t read it.”
    Michael Daley shrank from him and didn’t answer.
    â€œWrite it over again, neatly this time,” Mr. Dunphy said.
    After twenty minutes, Mr. Dunphy retrieved an armload of readers from a set of bookshelves on the platform to the left of the blackboard. He passed them out to the little kids along the first and second rows. “Grades six and seven,” he said, “you know the routine.” I looked around to see what it was.
    The blond-haired girl slid from her seat and floated up the aisle, her pigtails swaying down her back. She looked swallowed up in her thick woollen sweater. Her thin cotton dress hung loosely below it. She found an empty seat beside a small boy and slid into it. She opened his reader and ran a finger over the first line, whispering something. The boy stared down at the book and shifted nervously in his seat.
    Most of the grades six and seven soon picked a partner. I looked around, desperate to find one. By some stroke of luck, I noticed Thomas sitting alone at the far end of the front row. He was hunched over his reader, absently flipping its pages. I eased out of my desk and hurried across the classroom, hoping no one would get there first. I slid in beside him and opened his book to the first story.
    I wasn’t a strong reader and I wondered what good I could possibly be. I thought about the evenings at the kitchen table, back home, when Dad sat with me as I struggled through first and second grades. “Look for the words you already know, Pius James. Look at the pictures, they’ll give you some clues.” He would work with me as I struggled through the lessons. Then he would pull a piece of rock candy from his pocket, unwrap it, and share it with me.
    There was a picture of a girl with a dog and a ball. Beneath it, a simple four-word sentence was printed in large, black letters. Trying to sound confident, I placed my finger under the first word. “Give it a go, Thomas.”
    Thomas slumped in his seat and stared at the page.
    I ran my finger under the first line, the way I had seen the blond-haired girl do it. “What’s it say? Sound it out.”
    Thomas shrugged