Read Online Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz - Free Book Online Page A

them scabs. They call them owies—and so do some of the grown-ups, like Mrs. Olson. “Owies.” I don’t think this is a very grown-up word to use. Unlike owies, scabs aren’t about being hurt. They are proof I am healing.
    I’ve had enough scabs to know that in a day or two these ones will disappear. They will leave behind brand-new skin like nothing ever happened.
    I pick one to see what is underneath. There’s no blood, just pinkness. Pink like Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web . Not the color of our pigs, which are black and white and gristly. I choose another scab because it looks like a bleeder, and it is. It turns into a little bead of blood and looks like it did when I first got hurt.
    Then I pick them all, one by one, and my body is an Advent calendar. Sometimes I have to pinch the skin to coax the blood. And sometimes I mess up and the skin peels too far. The skin runs away like the tissue paper did when I was opening my birthday present.
    The sores spread like watercolors on wet paper, and the bleeding makes me feel the way I did when I still sucked my thumb. It makes everything stop.
    I pull myself out of the tub and go to the door. I unlock the latch and I get back into the claw-foot. I check my knees and find I have to pick more.
    Pick, pick, pick.
    Once the blood is good again, I start to cry. I’m careful not to actually call out for Mama. I cry like I can’t help but cry—the way a person really cries when they are very hurt. But she doesn’t come. No one does. Even when I am really crying, even when I cry for Mama. No one comes.
    *  *  *  *
    â€œThat’s not a real Barbie,” Candace Sherman says. And she keeps her arm up like she’s still waiting for Mrs. Olson to call on her. She does this so no one else can get a turn till she’s said what she wants to say. “ That is the fake kind they sell at Kmart. That’s why she’s so bendy, Fig. Not because she’s a special edition.”
    And the whole second-grade class giggles.
    The way show-and-tell works in Mrs. Olson’s second-grade classroom is each student only gets to do it once a year on his or her birthday. If your birthday is in the summer, your birthday show-and-tell is on your half birthday, or whatever closest day is available. The only other show-and-tell you get is if you travel outside Kansas.
    I’m lucky because we never go anywhere.
    I’d been hoping Mrs. Olson would forget my birthday because I was careful not to remind her like the other kids always do, but she remembered. Even if it took her a few days, she remembered.
    After morning recess, she pulled me aside to tell me I was up first thing after lunch before language arts. I was about to beg her not to make me, when I remembered I still had the bendable Barbie doll in my backpack. I imagined the other girls coming up afterward, asking to play with her during recess. Asking to play with me . And this was the stupid reason I agreed to do show-and-tell.
    *  *  *  *
    I watch the school bus drive away, and then I stand in the road watching the dust settle. I’m the first kid picked up in the morning and the last one dropped off.
    The days are getting shorter, and the moon is coming up—the kind that Daddy calls a harvest moon. It’s as orange as a pumpkin, and it looks too heavy to go any higher.
    I open my backpack to get my sweater.
    There’s the fake Barbie.
    Her legs stick out and make the letter V . I take her out. And I bend her into impossible positions, positions that don’t make sense. Positions that scare me because the expression on her face never changes. Sometimes this happens to Mama, but when it does she is never smiling.
    I bend her until her back should break.
    I force her head into her crotch and jam her legs and arms until all her joints bend the wrong way. I straighten her out and strip off her clothes. I pop off the rubber high