Shine (Short Story) Read online

  “Which one is Ruth again?” Miss Van Vleet asked.

  Ms. Thomas looked up from where she was marking papers. She glanced around the room to see where Ruth was sitting, and Ruth met her gaze. Instead of pointing, she turned to Miss Van Vleet and hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “She’s the girl with the red sneakers.”

  Ruth looked down at her red Keds. There were three other girls in her classroom who had the same shoes.

  On the other hand, she was the only Black student.

  —

  That night, Rachel was being grounded without television privileges because she’d decked a girl for stealing her HoHos at lunch. That punishment wouldn’t have bothered Ruth, who would have happily sat in her room reading, but Rachel had never willingly picked up a book, as far as Ruth could remember. So instead, while Ruth tried to memorize words for her spelling test, she had to block out the sound of Rachel galumphing around the room they shared, trying to find some other way to occupy her time.

  “You want me to test you?” Rachel offered.

  “Why?”

  There was probably a catch. With Rachel, there was always a catch. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her sister; it was just that they saw the world through two different lenses.

  “Because I’m being nice. And because I’m bored as all get out.” She reached out her hand, and hesitantly Ruth gave her the list of words. Rachel climbed onto her bed and stuffed a pillow behind her head. “Baby words,” she muttered, reading them over. “Means.”

  “M-E-A-N-S.”

  “Corn.”

  “C-O-R-N.”

  “Argue.”

  “A-R-G-U-E.”

  “This is stupid,” Rachel said. “You don’t even have to try. Why doesn’t your teacher bump you up a level?”

  Ruth didn’t know the answer to that; there were other students who had more challenging words, although she had never gotten less than a 95 on a spelling test.

  “Well, I know why, even if you don’t,” Rachel said. “Because your teacher doesn’t think a Black girl can be at the top of the class.”

  “That’s not true,” Ruth immediately said, defending Ms. Thomas. “She knows I’m smart.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rachel answered, in a way that meant anything but that.

  “She doesn’t even see me as Black,” Ruth countered.

  Rachel laughed. “Yeah, ’cause she’s too busy seeing you as a charity case.”

  Ruth knew that her sister meant this as a dig, but she fiercely believed that Ms. Thomas saw more than just her skin color. She saw a girl who always said please and thank you and who never interrupted someone else if they were talking. She saw a student who was one of the best readers in the class, who loved learning astronomy. She saw a good listener, a willing friend.

  She saw someone who was one of them.

  Smugly, Ruth told Rachel what had happened that day at school. How Ms. Thomas had identified her.

  “You really think the reason she pointed you out by your sneakers was because it was the only thing she could use to describe you?” Rachel asked.

  That was all it took—that chink in the foundation, that worm of a question—for Ruth to peek behind the fancy wrapping of the story she’d created in her own mind. The justification, the wishful thinking—it was swept away by the broom of doubt like so much smoke.

  Ruth knew she was partly right: Ms. Thomas had been showing a kindness by not singling Ruth out for her appearance. She was trying to be inclusive by not calling Ruth “the Black girl.”

  But that was because to Ms. Thomas, to Maia, to Miss Van Vleet—to everyone in that school—Black wasn’t just any adjective.

  It was something they’d never want to be.

  —

  “I know you don’t want to be my friend,” Ruth said by way of prefacing her conversation with Christina in the sedan on the way to school. “But can I ask you something?”

  For almost a week now, they had moved in similar orbits, but they had not interacted unless they were forced to in a group project. Christina didn’t look at Ruth, but she jerked her chin: Okay.

  Ruth explained what had happened with Ms. Thomas and Miss Van Vleet. “If you were in a crowd with a lot of people and someone asked me who you were, I wouldn’t say you’re the one with the scar on your ankle from where you fell last summer. I’d use something everyone would see right away, like…your purple shirt or your Holly Hobbie lunch box. Doesn’t it seem weird?” Ruth asked. “To not call something what it is?”

  Christina didn’t answer, and Ruth thought it was because she was still mad at her. But then she turned in her seat so that she was facing Ruth. “Maybe no one notices that you’re Black,” she said. “I mean, you act and sound just like we do.”

  Ruth thought about this. It couldn’t really be true, could it? If she dressed in pants and played baseball and did gross things that boys did, like have burping contests, would teachers not know that she was a girl? You couldn’t unsee what was right before your eyes, could you?

  Before she could mull on this further, Christina spoke again. “I never said I didn’t want to be your friend,” she said, her voice small. “It’s just…all of a sudden you’re at my school, with my friends, and I thought…I thought…” She raised her hand to the window and spread her fingers like a starfish. “What if they liked you more than they like me?”

  Ruth didn’t know what to say. It was the first time she realized that a person might look like Christina, and live in a fancy home, and dress in designer clothing, and have everything her heart desired, and still go to sleep at night worrying.

  Maybe we are more alike than we’re different, Ruth thought.

  —

  When Ms. Thomas turned off the lights in the classroom, everyone got quiet. Then she flicked them back on again. “Now,” she asked, “how long did it take for the light to come back?”

  It was instantaneous, immediate. There was probably a word for faster-than-a-heartbeat but Ruth didn’t know it.

  “Light moves fast. It can move 186,000 miles per second,” Ms. Thomas said. “The reason it seems like we see light the instant I turn on the switch is because light is so quick, and because we’re so close to it. But some light comes from much farther away—light from stars. They’re so far away, in fact, that we don’t even measure the distance in miles. We measure it in light-years—the amount of time it takes for light from that star to reach us, on earth. The reason stars look so small in the night sky is because they’re so far away from us.”

  Ms. Thomas talked about the star that was closest to earth—the sun. She made Marcus stand at the front of the class with a flashlight and told him to turn it on. “If he was on the sun, and turned on a very bright flashlight…and we were all waiting in the classroom, we wouldn’t see that light for eight minutes. That’s how far away the sun is from us.” The next closest star was called Proxima Centauri. It was 39.9 trillion kilometers away from us, or 4.2 light-years, which meant that it would take four years—not just eight minutes—for Marcus’s flashlight to reach us on earth from there.

  Ms. Thomas said that when we look at a star, we’re looking backward in time. We’re seeing a moment that happened millions of years ago.

  Ruth thought about that. She knew Marcus’s little flashlight wasn’t powerful enough, but even so. What if there were kids on another planet who, years from now, saw it flash? What if, in the future, they had a piece of the moment Ruth was living right now?

  It made her feel like yesterday and tomorrow weren’t all that far away from each other.

  Then Ms. Thomas gave everyone a toilet paper roll and a circle of black paper. Each student could choose to create either the Canis Major constellation or Orion. Ruth looked over and saw Maia pick Orion. She reached for the other one.

  They had to trace the spiky limbs of the constellations, and poke tiny holes in at their joints to make the stars. Ruth carefully drew the T of Canis Major, and its split legs. It looked to her like a stick figur