Free Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink by Nancy Rue

grinning as she ran onto their tiny field and, with her foot like a big squishy pillow, trapped the ball that rolled randomly toward her.
    “Next time I’ll teach you to direct the ball on the first touch,” Mr. Auggy said to her.
    She hated to admit it, but whatever that was, she wanted to learn it.
    She didn’t have the same feeling once they were back in the classroom. Mr. Auggy told them all to take out a piece of paper and think about a person they considered to be their hero.
    “You!” Carla Rosa said.
    Lucy thought of Dad, of course. And then she thought of the obvious next thing, which was having to write about why he was the bravest person on the planet.
    She didn’t rock at writing.
    “This is not for a grade,” Mr. Auggy said as Lucy pulled a piece of paper out of her notebook one wire spiral at a time. “I just want to get an idea what your writing is like.”
    She could tell him that. It stunk.
    “Start now,” Mr. Auggy said. “Simply put your thoughts on paper.”
    Lucy stared at the blank sheet in front of her. She studied a stray fleck of ink from where the lines were printed. She noticed how the ripped places hung out like f lags where it had been torn out. She counted how many lines there were on the page. She wondered why the lines were blue and the margin marker was pink. Anything but pink would have been better.
    She did everything but write on it.
    What was the point? Mr. Auggy was probably only going to scribble all over it in red when she was done. Or circle the words she didn’t spell right, which would be half of them.
    That was the other thing. Why even try to write about “My Hero” when the words she wanted to use — like courageous and insurmountable — she couldn’t even begin to spell. She knew why her dad was her hero. She didn’t have to write it down. She couldn’t write it down.
    So why try?
    “I can see those wheels turning in your head, Miss Lucy,” a voice whispered near her ear.
    Lucy jumped and hunched over her paper, pencil clenched between her knuckles, so Mr. Auggy couldn’t see its blankness.
    “There’s so much going on in there,” he said, “I bet it’s hard to catch it.”
    Lucy curled harder over her table. When he moved on, she sneaked a glance around the room. Carla Rosa was carving into her paper with her pencil, slowly, as if she were cutting up a steak. Emanuel was erasing a hole in his. Oscar shook his hand and huffed and puffed like he’d been writing for hours. J.J. had his head on his arms on the tabletop.
    “Okay,” Mr. Auggy said. “I know what I need to know now.”
    “That we’re dumb?” Oscar said. “I coulda told you that.”
    “Shut up,” J.J. muttered into his arms.
    Lucy didn’t listen to the rest. She just wrote her name on her paper and handed it in.

    She skipped having grilled cheese at Pasco’s that afternoon because Wednesday was her day to go to the market for groceries. Dad went on Saturdays. Since they didn’t have a car, they couldn’t get all the stuff for a whole week in one trip.
    Lucy would have liked going to the market if it weren’t for Mr. Benitez. He was the owner, so he was always lurking there, spying as she went up and down the skinny aisles with her handbasket like he was sure she was going to steal something. He wasn’t a fat man. It just seemed to Lucy like he had thicker skin than most people, and that made him big and fleshy. It also made his eyes almost impossible to see, but she could feel him surveying her anyway.
    Otherwise, the market was fun. On Tuesday nights, she and Dad made a list of what they were out of — usually cat food and milk and bread and Captain Crunch, which they both ate a heaping bowl of almost every morning, and microwave popcorn, their best bedtime snack. When it was her turn to shop, she always got the buttered kind. Dad bought the plain. That was their deal.
    Once the “needs” were taken care of, she was allowed to get some “wants” — as long as she