Steller Speller

I hadn’t seen Cassie since high school, hadn’t talked to her since fifth grade, but she looked the same standing in her blush-colored bridesmaids gown. I was sitting, trying to look thin, and trying to remember what she’d been up to since being a child.

I was physically at the wedding of a mutual friend. Physically concentrated on sitting up straight in our chairs that tilted downwards but mentally back in fourth grade. Mentally remembering fourth grade Cassie writing the names of the stellar spellers on the upper left corner of the white board—-she did have excellent handwriting, cursive or print.

I must have been remembering a Friday, because that’s when we had spelling tests. To be named a “Stellar Speller” you not only had to get all required spelling test words correct but also all five bonus words. There was no studying for these words, no preparation and even though they were probably similar to the types of words we were tested on for the week, I remember them as national championship spelling bee words, words to weed out the riff raff.

Mrs. Terry was calling out the few, the proud, the stellar spellers: Marley, Bethany, Brooke, Sarah…and Cassie, at least I think it was Cassie, asked “which Sarah?”

There were two Sarah’s in our class. Me, the tall, chunky, greasy banged, loud-mouth weirdo and Sarah Whitt, the small, curly haired, never said a word, sweet one. There had always been two Sarah’s in our class.

My ears started to get hot and my eyes darted around the room.

“It is ALWAYS Sarah Whitt,” escaped my mouth. I was yelling, I was yelling in Mrs. Terry’s classroom.

“It is ALWAYS Sarah Whitt, it can’t be me, so you can stop asking which Sarah!”

~~~

Cassie watched our friend get married. She didn’t look like she was thinking about the fourth grade. Even though I’ve never liked Cassie she doesn’t even look mean in my memory—-doesn’t seem like an evil genius staring down her nose at me from the white board asking smugly, “which Sarah?”

But I always thought she shouldn’t have had to ask.

Cassie started Covenant, which was a very small private school, in kindergarten when I did. There weren’t enough people to lose track of who was in each class and we were in the fourth grade. By this point it was well established that I couldn’t read, that there was something going on with me and reading. While Cassie probably never really knew why or what I did when I left the classroom three to four times a week with Mrs. Morris, my NILD teacher, she did know there was a reason I left.

NILD stands for the National Institute for Learning Development and is a one-on-one cognitive therapy program to retrain neurobiological pathways of the brain. In the first and second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Morris would come to the classroom door to get me for therapy. I knew when she was coming and she never came inside, it was a subtle gesture, her standing outside the door. Without fail before I could get up from the desk someone else in class would blurt out, “Sarah your teacher is here.”

I hated the attention it brought to the situation. My teachers would just nod to me or Mrs. Morris as if to say, “you’re good to go,” but no one ever asked “which Sarah” then.

Sarah, the one who needs the extra teacher.

Sarah, the one who we hate to hear read aloud in class.

Maybe Cassie, maybe everyone, didn’t know as much as I thought. To me it was so obvious where I was lacking, so blatantly apparent that I was missing something. Because of my disability and the extra homework NILD added I had a few adjustments made to the “infallible” classical education curriculum, one of which included only being graded on one half to three fourths of the weekly spelling test words.

I needed the adjustments— hated my difference— wore inability through anger, and developed adolescent coping still playing a major role in my life. Still making me remember how I can’t spell at weddings and how much I wish Cassie knew about my life I don’t want to share with her.

 

Sarah Trautweinis a proud WV native and BA and MA alumna of Marshall University. She is the current David G. Allen Fellow for West Virginia University’s English Department and on-track to defend her dissertation, Material Girls: Stories of Appalachian Women’s Forgotten Work Culture in Spring 25. Sarah has creative nonfiction, craft, and academic publications featured in Change Seven, GNU Journal, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Storyteller Anthology, The Writing Lab, and The James Dickey Review.