It's Thursday.
Chapter 2. THE DRESSES GAME
After Peggy and Maddie stopped feeling like intruders in a class that had already begun, they looked across the room and noticed that Wanda was not in her seat. Furthermore her desk was dusty and looked as though she hadn’t been there yesterday either. Come to think of it, they hadn’t seen her yesterday. They had waited for her a little while but had forgotten about her when they reached school.
They often waited for Wanda Petronski – to have fun with her.
Wanda lived way up on Boggins Heights, and Boggins Heights was no place to live. It was a good place to go and pick wild flowers in the summer, but you always held your breath till you got safely past old man Svenson’s yellow house. People in the town said old man Svenson was no good. He didn’t work and, worse still, his house and yard were disgracefully dirty, with rusty tin cans strewn about and even an old straw hat. He lived alone with his dog and his cat. No wonder, said the people of the town. Who would live with him? And many stories circulated about him and the stories were the kind that made people scurry past his house even in broad daylight and hope not to meet him.
Beyond Svenson’s there were a few small scattered frame houses, and in one of these Wanda Petronski lived with her father and her brother Jake.
Wanda Petronski. Most of the children in Room 13 didn’t have names like that. They had names easy to say, like Thomas, Smith, or Allen. There was one boy named Bounce, Willie Bounce, and people thought that was funny but not funny in the same way that Petronski was.
Wanda didn’t have any friends. She came to school alone and went home alone. She always wore a faded blue dress that didn’t hang right. It was clean, but it looked as though it had never been ironed properly. She didn’t have any friends, but a lot of girls talked to her. They waited for her under the maple trees on the corner of Oliver Street. Or they surrounded her in the school yard as she stood watching some little girls play hopscotch on the worn hard ground.
“Wanda,” Peggy would say in a most courteous manner, as though she were talking to Miss Mason or to the Principle perhaps. “Wanda,” she’d say, giving one of her friends a nudge, “tell us. How many dresses did you say you had hanging up in your closet?”
“A hundred,” said Wanda.
“A hundred!” exclaimed all the girls incredulously, and the little girls would stop playing hopscotch and listen.
“Yeah, a hundred, all lined up,” said Wanda. Then her thin lip drew together in silence.
“What are they like? All silk, I bet,” said Peggy.
“Yeah, all silk, all colors.”
“Velvet too?”
“Yeah, velvet too. A hundred dresses,” repeated Wanda stolidly. “All lined up in my closet.”
Then they’d let her go. And then before she’d gone very far, they couldn’t help bursting into shrieks and peals of laughter.
A hundred dresses! Obviously the only dress Wanda had was the blue one she wore every day. So what did she say she had a hundred for? What a story! And the girls laughed derisively, while Wanda moved over to the sunny place by the ivy-covered brick wall of the school building where she usually stood and waited for the bell to ring.
But if the girls had met her at the corner of Oliver Street, they’d carry her along with them for a way, stopping every feet for more incredulous questions. And it wasn’t always dresses they talked about. Sometimes it was hats, or coats, or even shoes.
“How many shoes did you say you had?”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty! Sixty pairs or sixty shoes?”
“Sixty pairs. All lined up in my closet.”
“Yesterday you said fifty.”
“Now I got sixty.”
Cries of exaggerated politeness greeted this.
“All alike?” said the girls.
“Oh, no. Every pair is different. All colors. All lined up.” And Wanda would shift her eyes quickly from Peggy to a distant spot, as though she were looking far ahead, looking but not seeing anything.
Then the outer fringe of the crowd of girls would break away gradually, laughing, and little by little, in pairs, the group would disperse. Peggy, who had thought up this game, and Maddie, her inseparable friend, were always the last to leave. And finally Wanda would move up the street, her eyes dull and her mouth closed tight, hitching her left shoulder every now and then in the funny way she had, finishing the walk to school alone.
Peggy was not really cruel. She protected small children from bullies. And she cried for hours if she saw an animal mistreated. If anybody had said to her, “Don’t you think that is a cruel way to treat Wanda?” she would have been very surprised. Cruel? What did the girl want to go and say she had a hundred dresses for? Anybody could tell that was a lie. Why did she want to lie? And she wasn’t just an ordinary person, else why would she have a name like that? Anyway, they never made her cry.
And for Maddie, this business of asking Wanda every day how many dresses and how many hats and how many this and that she had was bothering her. Maddie was poor herself. She usually wore somebody’s hand-me-down clothes. Thank goodness, she didn’t live up on Boggins Heights or have a funny name. And her forehead didn’t shine the way Wanda’s round one did. What did she use on it? Sapolio? That’s what all the girls wanted to know.
Sometimes when Peggy was asking Wanda those questions in that mock polite voice, Maddie felt embarrassed and studied the marbles in the palm of her hand, rolling them around and saying nothing herself. Not that she felt sorry for Wanda exactly. She would never have paid any attention to Wanda if Peggy hadn’t invented the dresses game. But suppose Peggy and all the others started in on her next! She wasn’t as poor as Wanda perhaps, but she was poor. Of course she would have more sense than to say a hundred dresses. Still she would not like them to begin on her. Not at all! Oh, dear! She did wish Peggy would stop teasing Wanda Petronski.
