Free Shine (Short Story) by Jodi Picoult Page A

see them anymore. “Wait till you meet Lola,” Christina said. “Lola has a pet monkey. I swear. It’s part of her dad’s work or something.” She leaned toward Ruth. “It wears a
diaper
.”
    Ruth imagined going to a new friend’s house and meeting this monkey in a diaper. She pictured teaching it a trick, like how to clap or something, and her new friend telling everyone else what Ruth had done.
    And suddenly, they were there. The driver opened the door and Christina bolted from the car, shrieking and throwing her arms around a girl who had silvery blond hair. Lola, maybe? She didn’t look back. They were talking so fast that it sounded like a different language.
    The driver handed Ruth her backpack, which had been Rachel’s last year. “You have a nice day, Ms. Ruth,” he said gently.
    It was at that moment that Ruth realized her mother had never answered her
other
question on the bus: would there be anyone else at Dalton who looked like her?
    Ruth stepped onto the curb. Then she took a deep breath and dove into a wave of white.
    —
    At Dalton you didn’t get assigned to a teacher’s classroom, you got assigned to a house—which, Ruth figured out quickly, was just a fancy word for a bunch of kids who were all the same age.
    Christina was in her house, and so was the girl with the silvery hair—Lola. Ruth trailed them inside to Ms. Thomas’s room, waiting for a break in the conversation so that she could introduce herself, like Mama told her to do. She waited for Christina to come to her rescue, to say,
This is Ruth.
But instead Christina ducked into the room and ran to the neat row of cubbies. “Lola,” she called. “We’re next to each other!”
    Last year, Ruth had not had a cubby. She put her lunch neatly in the bottom and hung her jacket up on a hook. When she turned around, there was a pretty redheaded lady crouched down, holding out her hand. “I’m Ms. Thomas,” she said. “I’m the house adviser.” Ruth guessed that was the Dalton word for
teacher
. “What’s your name?”
    “Ruth,” she said.
    “Well, Ruth, we are so glad to have you with us this year.”
    Ruth nodded. But she wondered who else Ms. Thomas was speaking for; who was the
we
in that equation.
    They played a game where everyone clapped a rhythm that went with their name, and everyone else in the class had to mimic it. Ruth tapped her right knee, left knee, then waved her hands like she was singing hallelujah at church.
Ruth,
everyone said, and they did the same motion she had done. It made her think of her granny’s story about going to the French part of Canada once, and how she had to do charades just to ask where the toilet was.
    Ms. Thomas wore a double strand of pearls that had a glittery spider clasp in the back, and Ruth counted the number of times that the spider slipped down her neck and Ms. Thomas had to tug it back into place. Ms. Thomas showed everyone a picture of herself in a white princess dress, with a handsome man beside her in a tuxedo. It looked like snow was falling on them, but it was rice. She told everyone that her husband’s name was David and then she showed another picture, this one of a very small dog called Caesar. “That’s my family,” she said. “Now I want you to draw me a picture of yours!”
    Ruth was placed at a table with a boy named Marcus (clap up high, clap down low) and a girl named Maia (tiny claps all around her face, like the petals of a sunflower). Ruth had seen Marcus pick his nose during the circle time, and between that and the fact that he was a boy, she had very little interest in him. Maia, though, was the only other student in the house who was new to Dalton. She had moved from Dallas. She had red hair like a molten river that was held back by a rhinestone headband. She had an accent, and when she spoke, her voice was full of music.
    At each seat was the kind of thick vanilla drawing paper Ruth remembered from her year at the Jewish school. A confetti of crayons