Falling into the Chaos

Nine: Human shield? That could be Hot.

Zoya

"HMM. Do these letters look right to you? Are they all standing properly?" I asked.

Cheeku frowned at the small whiteboard in her lap.

"Any of them backward?"

Understanding hit her. "Oh. The Ds. And the Gs."

"You know how to make a G," I told her.

"G for Goats..."
She rubbed a sock over the board, erasing the misshapen letters. "G for game."

I nodded slowly. We were talking about old shipwrecks up and down the Atlantic.

"Also that..., yes."

She set to rewriting her sentence. "Do you like games? Like, sports and stuff?"

"Yeah. Sure." I bobbed my head. "Let's think about punctuation and capitalization in this sentence. Where would we do that?"

We didn't have much longer until Cheeku and Aditya were scheduled to meet with the school to determine whether they'd promote her to first grade. I didn't want to waste a minute of that time on side conversations.

I'd learned in the past some time that Cheeku was really bright-and really struggled to stay focused. It was like she had a hundred thoughts buzzing around her head at once and it was all too easy for her to lose track of the one she needed.

She wiped the words away again and started over. She was also a perfectionist. If the work wasn't correct, everything was thrown out.
If she didn't think she could do it without error, she wouldn't do it at all.

Whiteboards and dry-erase markers helped cut down on the risk of being wrong but didn't eliminate it entirely.

"Like this?" she asked.

I read the words. "That's a strong statement. 'Ships wrecked because of rocks they did not see.' Nice attention to capitalization and punctuation."

"There's a football game tonight," she said, erasing the words in one dramatic swoop. "You said you like sports so you should come to the game with us."

"Hmm." I paged through the book we'd read. "Let's think about the words wreck and rock." I wrote them on her board. "What similarities do you hear in those words?"

"They both have ck," she replied quickly. "So, you'll come to the game?

Adi says I can get a pretzel as big as my head and there's a marching band too and-"

"This is really interesting," I said. "I want to hear more about it after you look through the story and spy the other words with a -ck blend. Find those words and then we'll talk about giant pretzels."

I really didn't want to hear about giant pretzels.

Not that Cheeku 's stories weren't amazing-they were, even more than most kids...stories were amazing. But we were running out of time here.

"Done." Cheeku snapped the book shut. "It's the first football game. They start playing football even before school starts. Adi says everyone goes so you should go too."

"I'll have to think about it," I said. "Can you think of any other words that have the -ck blend?"

"Chicken. Blackie. Truck." She wrote them on the board. "Fuck." She didn't write that one down, THANK GOD. "You could come to the football game and sit with me."

Before I could respond, the side door opened and Adi entered, phone pressed to his ear and yet another crate tucked under his arm. He nodded to us, set down the crate, and stalked up the stairs.