Free The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian Page A

down or knock me down, but as soon as I managed to struggle out of their grasp, or they got tired of holding me down I plowed into them again. I almost always lost in the end, but although I would come home messed up, they never got away without a few bruises and some blood. After a while they gave up teasing and bullying because there wasn't much glory in beating up a smaller kid, and they were sure to reap a harvest of pain for their trouble. They saved face by just walking away from showdowns shaking their heads and muttering that this new kid was crazy. I mean crazy! In time, my existence in school and on the block came to be accepted, and I was left alone. In return, I often concealed my intelligence and bookish curiosity, sometimes by pretending not to know the answers to teachers' questions, and occasionally by making wisecracks in class, or funny faces behind some admiring teacher's back after she had complimented me. This involved treachery against my own intellectual caste, and I always felt a little ashamed afterwards.
    I only had to put up with that saccharine, intensely concerned second-grade teacher for a couple of weeks before she brought me to the principal's office, complaining that I was too far ahead of her class and she just didn't know what to do with me. And there was another thing. I was always starting fights. It seemed I was a little bully. (Teachers never know what's really going on.) The principal, a sere woman with colorless hair twisted into a bun so tight that the corners of her eyes were drawn back, pointed out that there was only a month left before vacation, so I might as well be sent directly to the third grade, so Miss Cox could get to know me before I started regularly with her the following autumn.
    Neither the second-grade teacher nor the principal worried about the fact that I would thenceforth be with kids two years older and bigger than I, and some of them even more, for this was before teachers dodged responsibility by falling back on the 'social pass' that would fill urban high schools with sullen sub-literates. In the 'Thirties, a student stayed in the third grade until he was able to do fourth-grade work, or until they gave up on him and sent him to a manual arts school, where he was taught how to bang out copper ashtrays or make a crystal radio by winding wire on a toilet roll. When he reached the school-leaving age of sixteen, he went out into the world to look for work on the basis of his copper bashing and toilet roll winding skills.
    Miss Cox was P.S. 5's dominant figure. I suppose she was in her mid-fifties when I met her, but you would no more think of her in terms of age than you would ask how long gravity had been around. She was tall and broad-shouldered, although surprisingly thin when viewed from the side. Her face was wide, but even so her features seemed crowded together: a prominent hooked nose with a red birthmark on one side, large deep-set glittering eyes beneath thick eyebrows, full, rather pendulous lips accented by bright red lipstick and dyed orange hair, which was so thin that her white scalp showed through. Her taste in clothing was expressive to the verge of eccentricity. Her long skirts, a different one for each school day, were made from what looked like upholstery fabric, and she wore white satin blouses with stand-up collars, padded shoulders, and full sleeves that buttoned tight at the wrist and rippled with each gesture, like a swordsman's shirt in a cloak-and-dagger movie. She often tucked two or three patterned silk handkerchiefs into a broad leather belt, and these fluttered around her as she moved, as did the long-tasseled oriental scarf she draped over her shoulders, its ends flipped over her wrists. She wore copper bracelets and long loops of colored glass beads that swung and rattled and clinked with her quick, angular movements. The timbre of her voice ranged from rich chocolate-contralto speech through to cascading soprano laughter.
    Miss Cox