Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

But in fifth, we weren’t children. Loser boys got fists. Girls had their girl shit of no interest to me, like their slam books that got passed around. Skinny spiral notebooks like you’d have for a subject, but with SLAM BOOK and PROPERTY OF on the front to let you know it’s not for a teacher’s eyes. Some girl would poke me in the back with one, to pass on up the row. These were the enterprise of the popular girls with plucked-to-the-bone eyebrows and hair parted in the shape of a lightning bolt. Look, you’re sitting behind some girl all day looking down on her head, you notice the hair. The notebooks though, I didn’t, even after they were getting pushed at me. Even with girls writing in them and looking at me like something’s dead hilarious. Then came the day of Demon’s education. Everybody was set for recess, unless on detention which I usually was, for fidgeting or drawing on my desk. We had the one-piece type with the tiny chair attached, pretty much hell for a kid my size, and the wooden desk tops all gray around the edges with the ground-in dirt of our forefathers. Our parents and grandparents used these desks, and had some of the same teachers, including the mummified individual Miss Huddles we had in fifth. Miss Huddles famously had leathered my mom in front of the entire school for faking a striptease in Christian Music Assembly. (Mom and God, it just never worked.) To look at the old bat now, though, a shrunken head in a dress, I had no fear. These desks had so ma...