The arithmetic test will be finished in ten minutes. The classroom is forcibly quiet except on the pencils rustling on paper, and the occasional knock on a chair leg. The playground outside of the classroom is empty only the red wet slide and the squeaking gondola chairs swaying in breeze. It rained a little earlier in this spring day. The dark clouds have slowly moved apart and show the way to the blue sky.

Doris has been in her first grade of primary school since her father walked her to school the first day. On some days, her father still walks her to school, but most of the time, Doris walks to school by herself. It is only fifteen minutes from home. She just needs to climb a small slope up on a road and take a shortcut down some wooden stairs connected with the road and the vegetable garden of the school. Doris likes it better when her father can walk her to school, even though her father doesn’t speak much on the way. He just holds her hand with his big rough hand and walks slowly, his eyes looking ahead but not really looking at anything. Doris is happy when her mother can take a break from her translation work in the afternoon and come to pick her up, because they go to the Gallery Park three blocks further down at the roundabout and stay there until the sun goes down. But most of the time, Doris walks home on her own. She goes home right away after school, and she always does her homework before watching the cartoon Candy Candy for half an hour before dinner.

Doris has black long straight hair, two inches down her shoulders, with a short fringe cut in a straight line on her forehead. She will be seven years old in one month, but she looks smaller than her classmates. Only she and another girl in the class needed to order a size four uniform shirt when others could wear size six even size eight. Doris’ round face constantly appears rosy, a sign of not able to handle the heat. At least her mother thinks so.

Doris’ father often comes home from his construction work after Doris and her mother already have dinner. When it doesn’t rain that much, he comes home even later. Doris is often already in bed. A couple of years ago, Doris’ father took a project and had to leave home and stay in the north of the country for six months. One afternoon, Doris was nowhere to be found. Her mother was so worried and with some neighbors out on the street looking for her. A neighbor spotted Doris five blocks away from the Gallery Park, and took her back. Doris’ mother asked her why she went away, she wiped her tears down the cheeks and said: “I am looking for Papa.” She knew her father would go away for some time, but she didn’t know for how long and she didn’t know how to count the days and months yet. She wandered around in the neighborhood and as if she kept looking, her father would have returned.

Doris always has the things she needs. She has a pink plastic rectangular pencil box with the image of Candy Candy jumping up happily. She puts five pencils, one rubber eraser, a mini pencil sharpener, and her blue hairpins in it. Every morning, when she arrives at school, she sits down at her desk, takes her pencil box out from the front pocket of the uniform school bag, and places it at the upper edge of the desk. The pencil box stays there until the end of school day. She likes to have the pencil ready whenever she wants to write or draw something in her notebook. For instance, two weeks ago, the science teacher showed the pictures of the astronauts walking on the moon. Doris looked at the pictures, imaged that there was a boy going far far away roaming with a pink piglet, so she took a pencil out from her pencil box, and drew a boy walking with a piglet on a flat land just like the square in the Gallery Park, but without fences.

Doris classmates, especially the girls, are jealous of her because she is Mrs. Denton’s favorite. Mrs. Denton teaches most of the subjects except science and gymnastics, and she’s also in charge of the students’ discipline. She is quite small actually, compared to Mr. Jefferson, the science teacher, who is so small that he had to hang the astronauts’ pictures two inches lower from the top edge of the white board, but Mrs. Denton is even smaller than he is. She has broad shoulders and long arms, and boys in the class are all very afraid of her, because when the boys misbehave, they all call to Mrs. Denton, and she makes them stand in a bunch, rounds her arms to enclose each of them, and squeezes them so hard they scream. When there is only one boy caught, he must suffer even more just imagining he will be squeezed as hard as when there was a bunch. But for the girls, Mrs. Denton just tells them off until they burst into tears. Doris has no experience being told off so far. On the contrary, she is often praised in front of the class for her good works. She often gets her full score in almost every subject.

Emily used to be Doris’ good friend. They used to go to the vegetable garden and water the plants together during the breaks. They would choose one vegetable at a time, so by the end of the day, each kind had its own caring time and water. They named the tomatoes as Tommy and his friends, the lettuce as Cathy, the cucumbers as Mr. Green and his family. Doris and Emily talked to them as they were all their friends. But Emily hasn’t talked to Doris since last week. Last Monday, Emily came to school with bruises all over her palms. Doris asked her what happened. She didn’t reply. Doris heard from Jesse that Emily’s father beat her because she had only 50% in her number test.

Today, they have an arithmetic test. Doris wishes that Emily could get a better score. So she won’t be beaten again. After Mrs. Denton hands out the question sheets, she walks out of the classroom to get a coffee in the office. Five minutes later, Jimmy who sits behind her tapped on Doris’s shoulder. She turns around and Jimmy gives her a piece of folded paper. It is from Emily, written: “I won’t be your friend again if you stay perfect.” “What does she mean?” Doris thinks. She is so engaged in her thought that she didn’t notice that Mrs. Denton had come back and walked back and forth in front of the classroom. Doris picked up her pencil again when she heard Mrs. Denton put her cup down on her desk.

“The test will be finished in ten minutes.” Doris is ready to write down the answer of the last question. She holds her pencil so tightly that her right little index finger’s distal phalanx bends so hard on the pencil and the fingertip and the nail are all red. She raises her head and looks at Mrs. Denton for two seconds, and looks down again on her sheet. She writes down the answer.