Kimmy

Narrow enough to approximate current fashion without reaching it, Kimmy’s rectangle glasses perch awkwardly on her thin head, befitting her personality more than her appearance, much like her perennial topknot of leaf-brown hair. Her binder is about six inches thick with papers and books she’s insistently asked to borrow from her teachers. Kimmy is content to work and prefers to play and executive role in the decision-making process. During class she pursues clandestine Spanish studies, paging through the textbook she keeps in her lap more as a polite signal that she’s working apart from the others than as a vain effort to hide it. I decided to lift the pressure on her solitary pursuits last week when she impressed the other students in her group with her capacity as a secret weapon. They won the jeopardy game on Friday, much to their surprise because she was able to methodically sound out five and six syllable words without double guessing herself.
Her soul comes to us from across recent generations, like an old lady whose spirit not long ago inhabited a body on a Highlandtown stopp, skinny in old age and able to speak without dropping the long cigarette from her chapped lips. She probably lived on until death finally landed the killing blow, swiftly and after several attempts. Reborn for the twenty-first century the Ebonics speak has subsumed the east Baltimore strain of our distinctive Maryland diphthong. Kimmy talks tough and pledges to protect her friends in the traditional language with which the black girls decree. Still, when she’s relaxed and occupied with some sort of task like erasing the board, she sputters off contentedly out of the side of her mouth, turning her head back just enough to throw her speech at us like a well-aimed lugger and I can see her washing ground-floor windows instead, prattling away with neighborly familiarity on a string of anecdotes meant to demonstrate wisdom and experience beyond her age. I can see her with a well-earned face of wrinkles and a Benson & Hedges menthol one-hundred dangling from a dry lip as she does so.
I haven’t once seen her wear her hair down. She keeps it long, connoting some sort of vitality to her ego. It seems to exert all the strength it can muster in its effort to gather up the stray strands of hair and shoot them out of the elastic tie like a geyser. Unruly, stubborn strands fall loose around Kimmy’s ears and down the back of her neck, refusing to be tied back for the sake of appearence or comfort. Occasionally Kimmy reminds us that her personable demeanor is not to be taken for granted. With reasonable regularity comes a day when she declares her meds have been screwed up and refuses to pick her head up off the desk, or she comes to school out of uniform and makes sure we all know it even if she had something to gain by staying quiet. Even if she’s mad she’ll pass by the door a couple of times to make sure I duely refer her to behavior intervention. Other times she forgets herself for a moment and smiles sweetly. A young woman shines past her funny glasses through the acne in such moments, and briefly, we glimpse some future incarnation.