Free I'm Down: A Memoir by Mishna Wolff Page A

me to look up the word
contractor
when I got back to class. Turned out even Dad’s put-down job was kind of an exaggeration.
     
    Then one day after school I was waiting to get onto my school bus. I was half watching an Asian boy named Donald Lin, who was obsessed with earthworms, explain to anyone who would listen about an experiment he was doing in a compost bin, when I heard the
thump—thump—thump
of a car stereo that clearly had its bass turned up to eleven. I knew immediately it was Dad. The blaring rhythms of Kool & the Gang came wafting up the block long before he did. And my classmates looked curiously at each other, wondering where the loud music could possibly be coming from. And then he came into sight behind the wheel of the car we referred to as “the boat” crammed with all his buddies: Big Lyman, Delroy, Reggie Dee, and Eldridge.
    “Mishna!” he screamed from the driver’s side window. “Hey, Mishna!”
    At first I was overjoyed to get picked up by Dad and the coolest gang of guys I knew. But this pride was shattered when, walking toward the car, I noticed all of my classmates staring like they had never seen rust before. And when I got to the car, Christopher Scott and Stacey Leigh were practically falling over themselves laughing.
    “Hey, Dad!” I said as I climbed in the car.
    “Hey!” Dad announced to the car, “Look how beautiful my daughter is.” He turned the radio back up and shouted over it, “Now isn’t this better than the bus?”
    “Yeah,” I said, resisting the urge to step on the gas pedal myself.
    Still, once we pulled away from the school and were halfway down the block—and I was riding on the hump between Dad and Reggie—and the tunes were bumping, I had to admit, it was way better than the bus.
     
    But the next day Christopher decided it would be a good idea for him to spend recess making fun of Dad. And I decided it would be a good idea for me to pop him in his bitch face. It actually wasn’t that conscious. I was near the wood chips when he walked over and said, “Hey, Mishna, where do you think I can get a car like your dad’s?”
    “Huh?” I asked.
    “I bet I could get one of those at the Goodwill. Is that where you got your car?” He said it so sincerely, it was confusing.
    “We didn’t get our car at Goodwill,” I said.
    “Did you get your dad there?” Again with the sincere questions, but now Jodie, Ingrid, Marylyn, and Donald were watching.
    “No,” I said.
    “I can’t hear you,” Christopher said. “I asked if you got your dad at Goodwill?” I didn’t say anything. He was being tricky and I didn’t know how to counter it, so I tried to ignore it.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Cat got your . . .” Before he could say “tongue” my fist moved to his face on its own. It happened so fast that as I watched him holding his bloody nose, I honestly wondered what had happened.
    Then, I learned the lesson of what happens when you pop a brat at rich school—they tattle like a fucking girl. I wound up in the principal’s office sitting next to Christopher, who was holding his nose like a little bitch, and saying, “I don’t know why she hit me like that for no reason . . . I didn’t even have a chance to defend myself.”
    I begged them to call Dad and let him punish me, because I knew that the punishment in my house for fighting was Dad getting happy and saying, “I guess you let him know.” But they didn’t. They made me write an apology note to Christopher.
    No matter
, I thought,
I have some well-earned kudos coming my way from the classmates—I fully landed that punch
. However, said kudos were not forthcoming. In fact, at the next recess, Donald stayed fifty yards away from me at all times. And rather than invite me to play foursquare with her, Marylyn just looked at me like I was the wild woman in the attic from
Jane Eyre
.
    I walked over to Gretchen and said, “Why is everyone being so weird?” and she grudgingly threw me