Svitak, Adora

[I wrote this from the point of view of the 'girl who would not talk' from Maxine Hong Kingston's story The Girl Who Would Not Talk.]

For lunch, my mother always packed me some dried fish with whole wheat bread and maybe a small apple. Everyone else’s mothers packed them juices and white bread and turkey and cheese. I did not want to look silly eating smelly dried fish in front of everybody else, so I ate at my own table with my sister. The table was blue and square, on a side of the cafeteria. The cafeteria was small and our school was large, so we were lucky to have our own table. No one bothered to sit down with me except for my sister. Everyone else went to the center of the cafeteria, where the conversation was.
It was good to have my own table with my sister, except for two things. My table was too far away for me to be able to look out the windows and too close to the other children, so I could smell their wonderful food and hear what they said about me.
“I think that she should go to the deaf-dumb school.”
“We have a deaf-dumb school?”
“Yeah. It’s called the municipal something-or-the-other deaf-dumb school. Do you think she can hear us?”
“Naw. She’s sitting too far away.” There were some nods of agreement and they munched on their soft white bread in synchrony.
“She isn’t dumb, though. She reads when she’s supposed to. I can’t hear her too well, though.” I did not like their words, but words were only words, and their words bounced off my ears. My sister grinded her teeth and looked as though she would have liked to pummel them. I smiled a secret smile. No one else, even my sister, would understand why I smiled. My father would probably brush the situation off; my sister would get angry; my mother would worry. I would smile. It was fun to hear the kids speculate on whether I was dumb. They had nothing better to do, I supposed, except talk about me and munch on their white bread. I peeled red paint off the wall and chewed on dried fish as I listened to them talk. The way they spoke made time pass more slowly, made it drip out like honey, only laced with bitter vinegar.