Beautiful Child (10 page)

I went after her.

She didn’t go far. She stood just outside the door, taking deep, noisy inhalations to keep herself from crying.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said and that proved too much for her. She dropped her head and dissolved into tears.

I reached out and put an arm around her shoulders. “Come on back in the room.”

Back at the table in the middle, where we usually did our after-school work, Julie flopped down. I lifted over the box of tissues and then sat down myself across from her.

“I can’t do this,” she said. This made her cry in earnest again. She’d had her elbow on the table, hand bracing her cheek, but she opened her hand to cover her face and turned slightly away from me.

“No, I think you’re doing fine,” I said softly. “It was just a bad day.”

Julie shook her head. “No, I can’t do this. I thought I could. I thought I’d like it, but I
hate
it.”

“It was just a bad day,” I said.

“They’re
all
bad days for me, Torey. I can’t do this. I can’t be what you expect of me.”

“No, I’m not expecting, Julie. You’re doing well. I’m happy with how you are in here.”

“You
are
expecting. Maybe you don’t know you are. But you are. You expect me to be as good as you. You expect me to
be
you. And I can’t be.”

I’d been aware there were problems. I knew Julie found the daily rough-and-tumble a little too rough and tumbly sometimes. And true, I was aware of relying on her more than she was really trained for. But I had no awareness of expecting her to “be me,” as she put it. This took me a bit aback because these sounded very much like the words that come right before “I quit.”

“What do I do that makes you feel this way?”

“You want me to
be
you.”

“In what way?”

She snuffled and wiped her eyes with her fingers. “You want me to think like you. You want me to do things your way. If I don’t, if I fail … I feel scared to fail because then I know you’re going to be thinking, ‘If she’d done it my way…’”

“That’s not really what I’m thinking at all, Julie. If you fail, what I’m going to be thinking is: ‘How can we get this sorted out?’”

Julie didn’t respond. She wiped her eyes again.

Unfortunately, as I considered what Julie said, I realized it was partly true. I did find her permissive attitude toward the children out of sync with my philosophy, and when she got herself into trouble I was sometimes aware of thinking that maybe now she’d see the value of my approach. So, yes, there probably was an element of that. But they were normal kinds of thoughts, natural thoughts that come up whenever there are differing points of view. There’d never been any intentional control freakery involved.

The awful aspect of this discussion was that Julie was not saying she found it hard to cope with the kids. She was saying she found it hard to cope with me. This made me feel guilty and unexpectedly defensive.

“What do you think would help?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said pessimistically. This brought the tears back. She struggled with them a moment, the muscles of her face taut.

Watching her, I was distracted yet again by the thought of how young she looked. She could have been fifteen or sixteen from her appearance. I was overcome with an urge to ask her how old she was, which was hardly appropriate at the moment, but it led me to ponder how difficult it must be to establish any type of credible authority when you looked like a teenager. With kids or adults. It also occurred to me that such youthfulness brought out a maternal response in me. I wanted to give her a hug and tell her I’d make it better. I didn’t really want to say maybe she was more right than I was and we’d try it her way.

“This is a
lot
different from working for Casey Muldrow,” she said in a very heartfelt way.

“Yes, I’m sure it is. And I’m sorry for my part in this. I’ve been expecting too much out of you,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s me. I thought this would be fun. I thought it’d be an interesting challenge, because I thought I was ready for something more challenging…” Her words trailed off.

“I’ve been acting like this is your field and you’re fully trained,” I said. “Which is my mistake, not yours. You’re doing all right. I’m happy with what you’re doing. I know it looks like Chaos City in here most days, but, really, we’re doing well. The boys are coming together.”

She dropped her head down and braced it on her hand.

“And, listen, I’m aware we have different philosophies,” I said. “We have different approaches. That’s not a bad thing. Certainly it’s something I can live with, so I don’t mean to make you feel that you should change.”

Julie reached over for a tissue, took it, blew her nose. “Yeah. Okay,” she said. She gave a long sigh and then shrugged. “I guess it’s just been a bad day.”

I nodded.

“I didn’t mean to lose it. That’s probably the last thing you need. First the kids, then me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Yeah, well. It probably is just me.” She rose from the table. “Anyway, I think I’m going to go home. I’ve had it for today.”

“Okay.”

I really would have preferred she stayed. She was still clearly upset, and I knew she’d be in tears again once she got to her car or wherever. I would have preferred us to have talked until everything was hashed out between us and we ended up with, if not agreement, then at least a companionable understanding of our differences. I had to accept, however, that I was probably not someone she wanted
comfort from, at least not at that moment. Indeed, I was probably who she wanted to get away from.

Julie picked up her things and left. I sat glumly.

Oh well. At least she hadn’t mentioned quitting.

H
ell broke out two days later. It was over the lunch hour, and I actually wasn’t at school at the time. I had a friend teaching at another school nearby and it was her birthday, so I’d popped out to join her for a celebratory double cheeseburger at Burger King. I was only gone thirty minutes of my forty-five-minute lunch hour, but when I pulled my car back into the parking lot, I was greeted by the sight of an ambulance and a great furor on the playground. Given the rush of people toward me when I got out of my car, I had no trouble discerning one of my kids was involved. And, of course, it took no great genius to guess it was Venus.

The details leading up to the event still weren’t clear, but apparently Venus had gone into one of her rages and taken after a little boy in the first grade. He fled to the
climbing bars for safety with Venus in hot pursuit. In his haste, he missed one of the bars, fell off, broke his arm, and hit his head.

To say the school staff were in an uproar was a vast understatement. Complacent as Bob normally was, on this occasion he had gone absolutely ballistic. It came from fear mostly, I think, because the little boy was from a fairly well-to-do family – the kind to know lawyers personally – and Bob’s first thoughts were of a lawsuit.

“That child has to go!” he was crying. “We can not keep her here. She’s dangerous. She’s going to kill somebody sooner or later and she just can’t be here.”

The playground aides were in a panic. The little boy’s first-grade teacher was angry to the point of shouting at me, as if my being off the school grounds was the sole reason this had happened and I was personally responsible. I should have been
controlling
her, the teacher yelled.

Venus had been taken inside. She was still screaming. I could hear her through the doors, through the partition of the office, through the walls. I moved past the people on the playground to go in to her, but Bob put a hand out and touched my arm.

“No,” he said. “Don’t bother.”

I looked at him.

“Just leave her. Go on up to your room.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s not going back into your class. She’s done here.
We’ve called her mother,” Bob said. “So just go up to the kids you’ve got.”

“But –”

He shook his head. “No. This was an incident too far. She can go on homeschooling or … I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t care. As long as she’s out of here.” His eyes met mine. There was a small pause and then he shrugged. “Anyway, your kids are all upstairs waiting, so it’s best if you just go on up.”

I was in a state of shock. It had all happened so fast. Before lunch Venus was part of the class. After lunch she was gone.

The boys were sitting wide-eyed. Julie hadn’t even made an effort to occupy them. Probably she couldn’t have, if she’d tried, as the hubbub down on the playground was too much to ignore.

“Man, what did I tell you!” Billy shouted as I came through the door. “Said Psycho was gonna kill somebody someday, huh? I said that, didn’t I? I was right.”

“Billy, sit down, please,” I replied and took off my coat. “Everybody. Find your seats.”

“Mine’s not lost,” Billy piped up.

I shot him the evil eye. “I’m not having a good day. It would not take much for me to feel
very
angry, Billy.”

Billy pulled his head down between his shoulders.

“So, what’s going to happen?” Jesse asked.

I knew he meant Venus.

“Okay. Look, guys. Come here. Pull your chairs over into
a circle right here. Because I know you’ve probably got lots of feelings about what just happened out there and lots of questions. So, let’s have a talk about it, okay?”

Just then, Gwennie arrived.

“Gwennie, you too,” I said. “We’re going to start the afternoon with a discussion instead of what we normally do.”

“Yeah, we’re going to discuss how Psycho Girl killed some poor kid in the first grade,” Billy added.

For this group they were pretty cooperative. I didn’t make the circle too close, so as not to infringe on anyone’s personal space, but I did get them to put their chairs in a semicircle in the middle of the room – the first time I’d tried such a thing with them – and no one immediately committed mayhem. I put Julie between Billy and Jesse. Indeed, I sat on the other side of Billy with the hopes that between Julie and me, we could keep him halfway restrained. Gwennie did not like this change in her routine. She was the hardest to settle.

“Gwennie, sit down, please.”

She sat, but within two seconds she was on her feet again.

“Gwennie, sit down, please.”

“It’s time to do programs. Time to do my folder.”

“Today we’re doing it a little differently. Then we’ll do folders. Sit down, please.”

She sat, but within two seconds she was again on her feet.

“Geez, sit down, would you?” Billy squawked.

“Who says you’re the boss?” Shane muttered and half rose out of his chair.

I sliced my hand through the air meaningfully. Shane sat immediately. Gwennie eyed me a long moment, but then she sat too.

“Okay, good. Thank you. Now,” I said, “I know what just happened is scary.”

“It’s not scary! It’s exciting!” Billy shouted and shot off his chair, punching his fists like a boxer. “Psycho Girl Kills a First-Grade Baby! Pow! Bang!”

“Shut
up
!” Jesse screamed and in a second he was off his chair and onto Billy, knocking him to the floor, pummeling him. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, you dickhead blabbermouth! I wanna
stop
hearing your voice all the time!”

At this degeneration into fisticuffs, Julie’s shoulders sagged. She looked at me, and there was defeat in her expression. I have to admit, I was sort of short of spirit myself at that point.

“Boys!” I didn’t bother to get off my chair. For just that moment I felt, well, if they wanted to slug it out…“Boys!”

The two grappled a minute or more on the floor but my lack of intervention seemed to perplex them. There was hesitation. Billy glanced in my direction. Jesse took advantage of Billy’s moment of inattention to pin him to the floor.

“Are you quite finished?” I asked.

Jesse was sitting astride Billy’s back. Billy started to cry when he found he couldn’t get up.

“I said, are you
quite
finished?”

Jesse looked over. He nodded and started to rise. “I just wanted him to shut up,” Jesse replied.

“Yes, I know how you feel,” I said, “but that’s not how you do it.”

Billy was indignant. “You’re suppose to be protecting me,” he snuffled. “Not letting some bad-ass black kid beat me up.”

“She’s supposed to be shutting you up for once,” Jesse retorted.

“Sit down. Billy, sit in your chair and be quiet. Jesse, you too.”

Both boys did as they were told. Now, how long did I have before the next outburst? Thirty seconds?

“Who saw what happened out on the playground?” I asked.

“Me,” said Shane.

“Me too,” Zane said.

“I did! I did! I did! Call on me, Teacher!” Billy was jumping up out of his chair, waving his hand about six inches from my eyes.

Jesse was eyeing Billy. I eyed Jesse. “Did you see, Jesse?”

He nodded.

“What happened?”

“That girl –”

“She has a name, Jesse. She’s been part of our class every day since school started, so let’s call her by her name.”

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Billy interjected, “’cause she ain’t coming back. I heard Mr. Christianson say. Said she’s
gonna have to go on homebound. I went on homebound. Last year. It sucks. ’Cause like you can’t do anything except stay at home. And my brother said I was lucky. He
wanted
to stay at home all the time.”

“Jesse?” I asked, craning around Billy who was out of his chair and standing right in front of me.

He shrugged. “Just what she always does. Kinda walking around on the playground looking mean. And then this kid comes up. Guess he must of bumped her or something. Dunno. Wasn’t watching. And then she just got chasing him and kept chasing him till he got up to the top of the monkey bars and then she pulled him off. Like I said. She was just doing what she always does. Beating kids up.”

“Well, me, I’m
glad
she’s gone,” Billy said with feeling. “I’m glad Mr. Christianson’s making her go away. ’Cause she
was
psycho, even if you said she wasn’t. I didn’t like her in our class.”

“Would you want someone to talk about you like that, Billy, if you had to go away?” I asked.

“Well, if I was psycho like her, yeah. I wouldn’t mind. She was
bad
, Teacher. You were pretending she was ordinary all the time, but you weren’t a kid. If you were a kid, you would have knew she was
bad
.”

After school, I was putting away things from my briefcase and came across the children’s books and the She-Ra comic I’d brought in for Venus. So, that’s it, I thought. End of that. I felt sad. It had ended before it’d even had
a chance to get started. But that’s how it went sometimes. I put the two books on the reading shelf for the other children. The comic? I could see no point in keeping it. The character was out-of-date and not too exciting to start with. None of the kids would be interested. I leaned forward and pitched it toward the trash can sitting beside my desk. It fell in with a thump.

So, we picked up and carried on without Venus.

School had been in session almost eight weeks by this point, so I concentrated on bringing this little band of renegades closer together – mainly, if truth be known, so that I could get shoes back on them before the cold weather set in, because we were still at the stage of needing to remove shoes every time they came into the class.

I found a sense of unity was one of the most crucial aspects of my type of milieu and a key to my success in working with these sorts of children. For many of them, particularly those who came with histories of disruptive, antisocial behavior, it was their first experience of “belonging,” of being part of any kind of positive, cohesive group. Once they felt this sense of belonging, the children often behaved better and demonstrated higher self-esteem than I could have inspired on my own. So I felt it was important to achieve this “group identity.” The challenge each autumn was how.

In the normal course of things, eight weeks was more than enough time to “settle a class in.” During this period
the children became accustomed to me and to the limits I set, to my forms of discipline, my expectations and the kind of work I gave out, and they became used to the dynamics of the group and how each person in it functioned. So by the end of this time, I expected all the kids to have a sense of the class as “us,” to feel a part of it and to find safety and security in knowing its rules.

However, with this group it wasn’t quite as simple as it had been in other years. Eight weeks in and we were still without shoes, still sitting in tables at opposite corners of the room, and still routinely degenerating into fistfights. The Chipmunk society was a small help. The boys had developed a good sense of “us” in contrast to the other kids who spent time in our room – including, unfortunately, Gwennie, who spent enough time with us to be a part of the main class – but they had it only as in “us” versus “them,” which wasn’t really the idea. They liked wiggling their toes at one another, but they did it more to express antisocial feelings toward the part-time kids than as a show of unity.

Consequently, I arrived one morning with a big wooden box that I had used in previous classrooms. In those days, it had been the Kobold’s Box, and I often made up stories for the kids about the “Kobold,” a little invisible gremlin who lived in our classroom and watched out for good behavior. When he saw someone behaving well, he wrote a little note describing the kindness and put it in the Kobold’s Box. But because the Kobold soon got writer’s cramp from so much good behavior, he needed help. So I
asked for the children themselves to be on the lookout for kind behavior and when they saw it, to write notes and put them in the Kobold’s Box. This seemed a little cheesy for my rough-and-tumble group, so I told them it was the “Chipmunk Spy” box.

“We’re going to do something different,” I said during morning discussion. “We’re going to see who’s the best secret agent in this group.”

“You mean like James Bond!” Billy shouted. This called for instantly jumping out of his seat and up on top of the table. He pointed his finger like a gun and made shooting noises. Of course, this meant the other boys had to join in.

I stood there and said nothing. This would eventually annoy them into sitting back down to find out what I was going to say next.

So I explained the plan to them. At the beginning of the week, they would draw names to find out who their intended “victim” was. Then, each day they had to do something nice for that person – a good deed –
but
, and this was a big “but,” they were secret agents! So, they had to do it secretly, so the other person didn’t know it was them. And at the end of the week, we’d try to guess who our secret agent was.

I explained that each day the secret agent would have to come to me to confirm he had
done
a good deed. Then he’d write down what he had done for his “victim” and put it in the box. I said at the end of the week I’d read each of them out. To add a bit of gusto to the proceedings, I told them we’d have treats on Friday while we were doing the box,
and the people who had managed to do a good deed
every
day for their “victim” would get a spy badge. I also suggested that if they wanted to be extra clever at being a secret agent, they could do good deeds for other people too, and that way they’d throw their “victim” “off the scent.”