Be Afraid
Unlike a boy named Sue, Honey’s parents didn’t name him Honey so he would become tough. He had an entirely different reason for that.
Esmerelda Ramirez, Honey’s mother, hated her name. She thought it was too bulky and that it generally sounded unpleasant. When she became pregnant at 14 she decided her child would have a beautiful, sweet sounding name. Honey seemed like the obvious choice. Couples in American movies always called each other Honey when they were happy and in love. And she was headed to the United States herself, on to a better life with her unborn baby. Furthermore, on the journey from El Salvador to the American border, while pregnant, she mostly ate slices of white bread spread with packets of honey on top. This confirmed to her that Honey was the perfect name for her baby.
It was only later that she learned Honey was usually a term of endearment for a woman, but she didn’t seem to mind and no one bothered Honey about it anyway. They were too afraid to.
My first recollection of Honey Ramirez was in first grade in a reading group. We both sat in front of our name plates that read “HONEY RAMIREZ” and “ANNIE BECKMAN” in big block letters, holding books upside down and not paying attention. The words and the letters on the page were just lines and curves, they meant nothing, and it was boring to look at nothing. But while I sat quietly and compliantly bored, Honey did nothing of the sort.
“Honey, sit down. You have to focus. Honey, be good. Honey, try harder,” said Mrs. Witcomb, our teacher. Honey constantly got up from his seat to mill around the room. He often tried to speak with other kids or pull out some toys, often legos or hot wheels, from his bag and play with them.
On the contrary, I always gave the impression of obedience, even if I did take a few glances around the room. “Good work, Annie,” she’d say when I’d look at the pictures to guess at the words, fooling her that I was reading. I knew all those lines and curves meant something to other kids. The other kids could point at the words and actually say them. Honey and I were left in the dark and left to guess.
Although Honey hardly paid attention to anything Mrs. Witcomb said, he seemed to pay attention to me. He always smiled back at me brightly when I passed him a pencil, and he seemed especially appreciative when I’d share my snack with him, even if it was something I really liked, like pickles or Hot Cheetos.
But not everyone was so nice to us. Even at just six a distinction was made between Honey, me and the other kids, and we all knew it.
“You guys are in the stupid group,” taunted a pale boy with freckles on the playground. “Honey and Annie are the dumb kids,” he said like the fact that it was. Those words made me stand still. My whole body told me it was true. I couldn’t put words to it at six, but the feeling of inferiority was there. The other kids knew their letters, numbers and words, it was just Honey and I left behind. But while the pale boy’s words paralyzed me, they caused an insurmountable rage to move through Honey.
His little eyes darkened and narrowed and within seconds his hot hands pushed the boy over, knocking his blond hair hard on the blacktop. Honey jumped on top of him like a puma and started hitting him relentlessly in the face with little closed fits, breaking his glasses. Like a tornado Mrs. Whitcomb barreled over to us from the other end of the playground, shouting Honey’s name as my mouth dropped. Honey was screaming, tears streaming down his face as our teacher plied his small body off the pale boy. All our classmates circled around in shock, but there was something else in their eyes now too: fear.
I sat in the reading group alone for the next few days. Our assistant principal, a chubby man with a tight plaid shirt, came in to speak with Mrs. Witcomb. He casually sat on the kidney shaped table and began speaking to her as if I wasn’t even there.
“Honey,” he breathed out with a sigh of exasperation. “I tried to talk to the mother again, but she doesn’t speak a lick of English… they passed the phone around to fourteen different people, so I could try and convey what happened. I think most of them were teenagers…”
Mrs. Witcomb didn’t seem to be surprised by this information.
“He doesn’t know anything, John. Only a couple letters. I’ve never seen a kid this low before…” I shifted in my seat quietly, looking down when I heard this. I only knew a couple letters too.
“Well, his mother…” the assistant principal stated in a whisper that I could still clearly hear, “she looks young, very young. I am sure they don’t have any books in their house. You know, she probably never reads to him.”
I knew this wasn’t true. Honey’s mother was a cashier at the corner store, and while she had a heavy accent, I had watched his mother carry on a conversation several times. Furthermore, Honey often pointed out the books he had read before to me. He loved books about diggers, buildings and trucks and could almost recite some verbatim, but these things went unnoticed to these adults.
Mrs. Whitcomb let out a big sigh, pushing some paper in front of her to the side. The assistant principal handed her something else and her face lit up.
“The Reid-Roberts learning center wants to give a scholarship to a first grader that receives free lunch,” he said.
“The Reid-Roberts method! They charge like $145 an hour for this type of tutoring.”
The assistant principal nodded. “They are going to do a news story on it, talk about disadvantaged kids, you know the drill….”
It was a drill. We were some sort of drill.
Mrs. Whitcomb pursed her lips. “Well, it can’t be Honey. He needs this desperately, but it would just be a waste on him... There is no point,” She said, abjectly. She then looked over at me, sitting quietly, with my perfectly braided pigtails that my mother fixed for me that morning. I stared down at my paper book that I couldn’t read, trying desperately for them to think that I wasn’t listening.
The heat of her gaze was too much. I looked up to see my teacher motioning her finger at me, a beaming smile on her face. “She’s perfect for it,” she said as if I was selected to be the prize winning pig. And it was then that my fate was sealed.
