 When I was five, we still lived in the small town in the middle of Nebraska corn fields and they didn't have kindergarten in town. I rode the afternoon bus to a flat brick building, walked into a carpeted class, and sat at a short table with shorter chairs and colored worksheets. Color the balloon blue. Color the kite orange. Color the grass green. The balloon was always blue. The grass was always green, and I didn't understand why the kid next to me didn't know to match the word on the balloon to the word on the side of the fat crayon. The crayons smelled of school. They smelled like the way school was supposed to be- in my day dreams. In real life, it smelled cold and bitter like sassafras tea.
I had big brothers who went to school in the three story brick building on the edge of the town- the place with dried mud patties under the swings. They took their lunch to school everyday in brown paper bags with their names printed on them. My mom sat them on the table by the door and while they were still gathering up their school supplies, I stole their lunches and sat behind the sofa. Their lunch bags smelled like school too and I thought that they were magical- as if by eating them that I would be transported there. My mother started packing a third lunch and leaving it on the table. The teacher was experienced at handling young students and she made sure we only had the pieces of equipment that we were supposed to have- the  flannelboard pieces fit in a wooden box and sat on her desk next to the Bobbsey Twins book she was reading to us during nap time. I really wanted to make my own designs with all those cool shapes inside the wooden box instead of boring duck-ball-duck-ball-duck ones, but the one time I had the opportunity to finish the pattern, she got upset when I used the wrong pieces and gave my turn to another child. PJ rode the bus with me. PJ lived down the street and he loved to double dare people into doing things, but he was a man of his word, and if you triple dared him back, he'd go first. Except the time when he made me eat dog food first, or ride my tricycle down the cement cellar steps interfering with my mom's Old Ladies Wearing Hats Meeting as they rushed out when he screamed. I remember watching their pudgy stockinged legs running toward me as I laid on the cool cement and watched the world spin. Seven stitches later, PJ and I were grounded and told we weren't allowed to dare people to do things. Not that we listened. PJ wasn't in my class. He was in the class next door and once during nap time I heard him laughing. It made me sad that we didn't laugh in our class and I listened to the teacher drone on and on about the adventures of the twins in a world very different from mine. We fingerpainted one day- one color- one finger she said, but I had blue and the kid next to me had yellow. "I'll give you some of my blue if you give me some of your yellow," I suggested. I knew how to make green. The year before had been the year of GREEN at our house. I found a rejected can of green paint in my travels and my mom had agreed that I could paint my belongings green. I'm sure she didn't think that would mean my baby doll, the swing set, my sister's hair, and... the cat. My can of green paint was taken away from me after the cat and my second oldest brother stuck up for me. "You said she could paint things green. If you meant she could only paint some things green, you should have told her." I was also the child of an artist who was the child of an artist so I knew about primary colors. I knew how to make secondary colors and I knew that mixing paint was as much fun as painting the cat green. My kindergarten teacher wasn't amused. We were supposed to follow the rules and the rule was- 1 color- 1 finger. We had a paper that had bears on it and the bears had numbers on their belly. Color the bear with the #1 brown. Color the bear with the #2 black. Color the bear with the #3 blue. But the bears were floating in space, and I knew that they needed grass to stand on, so I added grass and gave bear # 3 a yellow balloon. The little boy next to me raised his hand and told- even though he'd colored bear #1 black and bear #2 brown. My teacher put me at a table closer to her so she could keep an eye on me. On her desk was the wooden box of colored shapes and the BOOK... the one she read a page or two out of every day. If I reached out slightly when she walked around the room drawing stars on perfect papers, I could touch it. A marker showed where she left off and I opened to that page. It had a lot of words on it and the print was smaller than I was used to, but I knew some of the words. Lost in trying to figure out the sentence, I forgot to watch out for the teacher who never smiled and who never read with expression. When she snatched the book away, I was shocked. No one had ever pulled a book out of my hands before. No one had ever told me I couldn't read a book. At my house, I could try to read anything I found- even if I didn't know the words. At my house, someone always read the words I didn't know to me when I asked- even if it annoyed them and they were busy. At my house, even when my mom was mad at me, she didn't stay mad at me. She laughed about the green cat when the neighbor asked her why the cat was green, and she laughed when she found out that the reason we were out of dog food was because PJ and I ate it for snack.  I cried on the bus home and PJ comforted me. "I'm not going back," I said to PJ.
"You have to go back," he said, confused. "I know how to color pictures already. I can count to one hundred. I know a circle is a circle and triangle is a triangle. I can write my name. Why do I have to go?" My mother didn't have an answer for me either. My father said I had to go because there was a lot I didn't know yet. My biggest brother said that going to school was something everyone did and that I'd be bored at home with mom and the babies. My next older brother sat with me behind the sofa and shared his lunch with me. He didn't say anything as we ate. PJ gave me a new yellow pencil on the bus ride the next day but we weren't allowed to use our pencils in school. We had to use big clunky pencils that were hard to write with and my letters looked all shaky. I used PJ's pencil when I got home. I took out my yellow pad from my father's old briefcase- the one I'd claimed when I was three and where I stashed the stories I was writing and other important things. I sat behind the sofa and thought a long time. But I couldn't think of what to write- the feelings deep inside me didn't have words yet. I finally wrote in BIG letters across the page. I HAT SHOL and put the note pad back in the case and latched it. My second oldest brother joined me behind the sofa. He offered me a homemade cookie and we sat in silence. The lady in the black car came the next week and my brother carried a brown paper box out to her car, got in, and drove away. They told me he was leaving, but I thought they meant that she was taking him shopping and that he'd be back. I knew he wasn't my real brother, but he'd been there since the day I was born, and while other foster kids came and went, he was always there. The next school day there was only two lunch bags on the table- my biggest brother's and the one my mom had gotten in the habit of making. I took my bag, put it in my briefcase, and waited for the bus to come and go before slipping out the front door. I made rounds. I stopped and visited all my friends that I hadn't seen since school started. The cookie lady gave me two windmill cookies, the train man let me stop the train, the mail man gave me a ride in his car, and I walked the entire town. PJ stopped by my house after school and my mother realized that she hadn't seen me get on the bus that afternoon. I sat on the swings outside my brothers' school and my biggest brother found me waiting for him after the last bell. "He's not coming back," he said. "Let's go home." I walked behind him, dragging my feet. "Mom's gonna spank you for cutting class," he warned as we started up the walk. "This is the worst thing you've done since you drove the car!" PJ waited patiently for me to get ungrounded and saved his allowance. He had enough for two peanut butter ice cream cones by the time I was free again. We swung on the swings and our feet touched the clouds. "We're moving," I said. "Really moving or pretend moving?" PJ asked, because the last time I told everyone we were moving it was because friends had taken me to see model homes in a new subdivision and I had decided that we needed to move into them. "Really moving," I said. PJ paid for the ice cream and we walked along the train tracks. "Don't ever eat peanut butter ice again," PJ said fiercely. "Cross my heart, hope to die," I promised.  All our stuff went on a truck and the house was empty and bare. My hiding spot behind the sofa was exposed and so were the empty lunch bags that had been stashed underneath it. Grandpa Mac walked through the empty house with my mother and I. He looked up at the rafters in the basement and laughed. Monopoly money peeked over the edge of the cross beam where it had fallen after I poked it through the hole in my bedroom wall. My mother glared at me while I stared at it. It had made my second oldest brother so mad that the money had disappeared and he knew I'd taken it, but they couldn't find it anywhere. He'll never find me, I thought. I'll be lost forever like the money on the rafter. When he comes back and the house is empty and we are gone, he'll walk down here and look up and see the money and then he'll know--- "Want me to retrieve that?" Mac asked. "NO!" I protested. My mother left it behind- as if she could read my mind. I didn't eat peanut butter ice cream for years after that- long after the promise was forgotten. My brother leaving, school being this ugly place, and peanut butter ice were all tangled up in balled mess. I didn't like any of it, but the one thing I could do was not eat the ice cream... so I didn't. | 
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