Beautiful Child (23 page)

Still, imperfect as it was, She-Ra’s world remained my common ground with Venus. She watched the cartoon
enthusiastically, her small body tensing with the action. She pulled my arms up tight around her and smiled at me when I hugged her close. After the cartoon, we went to find her Sword of Power where I’d put it to dry on the back counter after art the previous afternoon.

Venus moved ahead of me to get it. There was no hesitation in her actions. She could have been any little girl then, going to get a favorite item. Reaching for the sword, she lifted it up.

“Wow! Look at that! Magic or what?” I said. “Let’s see you turn into She-Ra.”

Holding the sword pointing upward, Venus closed her eyes and twirled around. “For the honor of Grayskull!” she called out.

“Wow! That works perfectly!” I said.

Venus gave the sword a test swing.

“Come here,” I said. I pulled her over toward the full-length mirror in the dressing-up corner. “Look, do you see? See how great that magic sword looks?”

I had her standing in front of me, a little girl with scraggly hair and dirty skin. Her clothes were worn and ill-fitting. Her nose was crusty. She had sores along the sides of her mouth.

“Aren’t you beautiful?” I said and smiled at her reflection. “Look. That sword’s made you every bit as super as She-Ra, huh? Don’t you think so?”

Her eyes sparkled. A slow smile spread across her lips. She nodded.

“I’m looking in that mirror and I’m seeing someone who
really
is a Princess of Power. Someone who
really
knows how to use a Sword of Power.” I knelt down and wrapped my arms around her.

Venus kept her eyes on her reflection in the mirror. She nodded.

“You know what I’m thinking?” I asked in a chummy sort of way.

Venus raised her eyebrows in question.

“I’m thinking, what if you stay changed into She-Ra this afternoon?” I asked. “When the other kids come?” I was hoping that this was the magic she needed to be brave enough to talk and interact in the classroom. Perhaps with the Sword of Power at her side, she would risk it.

The expression in her eyes changed slightly. Concern clouded the joy.

“You could keep the Sword of Power with you, if you want. At your table. What about it? What about between now and recess? You could be Princess of Power for that time.”

A long pause followed.

Venus kept her eyes on her reflection in the dressing-up mirror, and as I watched her, she transformed. Without a movement, without a word, the joy drained out of her.

“You don’t want to do that?” I said. It was more of a statement than a question, but I wanted her to know it was all right to make that choice. That she could. “That’s okay.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, which surprised me, because I hadn’t expected her to say anything.

“No, what? What’s the matter?”

We were still in front of the mirror. I still had my arms around her in a sort of backward hug. We were talking to each other through our reflections.

“I don’t want to,” Venus said very softly.

“That’s okay. It was just a suggestion. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. In here you decide.”

She regarded my reflection. The fun was gone from her dark eyes.

“Does it make you feel afraid?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Of what?”

She didn’t answer.

“The boys?”

She didn’t respond.

“Do the boys frighten you? I know the boys are noisy. And pretty rowdy. But they don’t want to hurt you. You’re safe in here. I wouldn’t let anything happen.”

She shook her head. I wasn’t altogether sure what she was meaning by that.

A small silence came.

“I’m not really She-Ra,” she said finally. “It’s just a game.”

“I see.” Then I nodded. “Yes, you’re right.”

“That makes me scared.”

“Oh?”

She didn’t reply.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “Can you explain it more?”

A long silence.

“I’m not really She-Ra. Not for real.”

“Well, no. Because she’s just pretend, isn’t she? She’s just a cartoon. But the things about her – being strong and able to do things that are good – those things are real. And you do have those things inside you. For real. You do. I know. In here.” I tapped her chest. “When we pretend with the sword, we’re just letting them out. But they’re already real. Inside you, you’re strong and able to do things that are good, just like She-Ra.”

Venus shook her head.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “You’ve got lots of good things inside you, Venus.”

Venus shook her head more vehemently. “No,” she said.

“Well, I think differently, because I can see those things in you. And I’m not the only one. Wanda can too, can’t she? That’s why she calls you ‘beautiful child.’”

“No. She just says that ’cause that’s something retards say.”

I looked at her. “Who told you that? That isn’t true.”

She dropped the Sword of Power on the floor and left it there. Her eyes shrouded. The vacant expression returned.

I looked down at the cardboard sword. Something had happened. I’d inadvertently ruined something. But I wasn’t sure what.

T
hat was my first real conversation with Venus. Up until that moment, I had never had a multisyllabic exchange with her, much less an actual conversation. It wasn’t until it was over that I even fully comprehended what had happened.

On the one hand, I was astonished. It answered so many questions. For instance, obviously she was capable of genuine speech. Her grammar and vocabulary were acceptable. The concepts she was expressing were reasonably sophisticated. While not erasing entirely the concern that she might be developmentally delayed, the conversation was well within normal limits for a seven-year-old. So, even if she were delayed, it was nothing near the level of Wanda’s difficulties. This was positive, valuable information.

On the other hand, I was saddened. The conversation gave evidence of a repressed, unhappy little girl.

And then, of course, the next day she wasn’t there.

Of all the students, the one who was making the most heartening progress was Billy. At the beginning of the year he had been “everywhere” – buoyant, wildly enthusiastic, noisy, explosive, unable to focus himself on anything for long. His academic work had been appalling because he’d never stayed seated long enough to finish any. His uncontrolled enthusiasm was more annoying than charming, because he burst in on everything, hogged the limelight, and ignored everyone else. He spoke loudly and often aggressively. And his off-the-wall sense of humor, usually expressed by taking any figure of speech literally and catching the unwary speaker out, wore thin long before Billy would give up the joke.

Billy’s had been one of the few cases where I’d found the district’s insistence on interminable student assessments to prove valuable. Discovering that Billy was a gifted child when previously he had only been identified as a troublemaker had given me something concrete to work with. Reframing him as an underchallenged, poorly directed child of considerable ability, I’d set about to find something for him to sink his teeth into. This had been difficult initially, because Billy’s academic skills were nowhere near where they should have been for a boy of his apparent ability, so, when necessary, I’d had to come up with a way to
jump-start some of these skills. For example, to allow him to work on projects that would engage him more, Julie and I recorded huge chunks of resource materials, such as encyclopedias, onto cassette tapes. Or I armed
him
with the cassette recorder to interview people instead of writing it down. And I looked for interest areas, knowing that if he were genuinely gifted, they must be there somewhere. But these proved hard to find. His flighty approach to everything meant he pursued everything with equal enthusiasm but stuck to nothing.

The real turning point for Billy, however, was our traffic light system. He was such an impulsive, scatterbrained personality that the tight structure of the behavioral modification program seemed, for the first time, to give Billy the necessary framework for inner discipline. He thrived in the new, rather rigid setup. Even so, self-discipline was still a hard-won virtue. Although he participated enthusiastically and was very motivated to earn the treats and the stars, he had been the last of all the children to actually manage it. Even the twins learned how to keep their traffic lights on green before Billy did. But he made it in the end, and was he ever proud of himself!

What I discovered with Billy that I hadn’t previously appreciated was that once something was learned, it stuck. Once he mastered breaking the time before recess down into chunks that involved sitting and working, interspersed with chunks specifically meant for getting up and moving around, he was quickly able to generalize it to the period
after recess. And then to the afternoon as a whole. And eventually to the rest of his week. Once he figured the system out, his behavior became much more reliable.

I found it interesting the way his mind worked on issues like this. There was always a conscious “click” for Billy. But he had to not only understand it but also experience it logically. Not just consciously, but logically – this part connects to that part which then connects to this part, and all of them together result in this outcome. My telling him to sit down and work, because once he had worked for twenty minutes he could get up and have free time, did not penetrate. Seeing the schedule written down on the board with the traffic lights and experiencing the clockwork regularity of twenty minutes of work time, ten minutes of free time, which meant the traffic light stayed on green, did not penetrate straightaway either. He kept saying, “Why?” “How’s it go?” But finally, when he experienced it, talked about it, wrote it down, considered it from all sides, and told it back to me half a dozen times, it suddenly “clicked” for him. Suddenly he understood the point of what he was supposed to be doing and how each individual behavior contributed to it, and from then on, he was reasonably successful.

With this newfound ability to keep himself in his seat for twenty-minute blocks, Billy started to make startling progress on his academic work, particularly in reading, which had been much further behind than his math. And this, of course, brought its own rewards. There
were
things
he was interested in. But Billy, being Billy, didn’t have your ordinary nine-year-old-boy interests.

The first thing he took to was flowers.

One day he showed up with a beautiful coffee table book about tulips. I had no idea where it came from, as I knew Billy’s family did not live well and there would have been no money for such an extravagant book, but I didn’t query it. And Billy loved this book. It had numerous exquisitely drawn pictures of tulips, including dissections of the bulb and the flower. These fascinated him. Noting this, I brought in other books. I had been a biology major in college, so I brought in one of my botany textbooks. I explained to Billy how, as part of our college course work, we had had to dissect flowers and draw the parts, and when we did, we kept a notebook and drew pictures and diagrams of what we’d seen. This intrigued him. He wanted to try that too. As it was February when I told him this, we did not have a lot of flowers growing outdoors for such an activity, so Julie brought him in a lily left over from a display at her church. With care and remarkable concentration, Billy spent the late morning “dissecting” the flower and making detailed drawings of everything he found, working meticulously to identify stamens, pollen, etc.

As a consequence of all this growth, I felt Billy would be ready to return to the regular classroom after this year in our class was over, as long as we could guarantee placement in a relatively structured program. To prepare him for this, Bob and I decided to try mainstreaming him into a
regular class in the building for part of the day. This instantly hit problems. Where to put Billy? He was nine, going on ten, so he should have gone into the fourth grade. His overall academics made him more suitable for third grade however. So should he go into third grade, despite being older and intellectually gifted? This seemed like asking for trouble to me. Yes, he was only at that level academically, but he was improving steadily. It seemed inevitable that he would soon be unchallenged, if put in with younger children, and I genuinely felt that this lack of challenge had fed significantly into his behavior problems in the past. So I stuck my neck out. There was an advanced placement or AP class for gifted children in a neighboring school. They catered to children across a greater age range, so I suggested Billy go there. Not for all day. Not even for every day. I knew the teacher of the class slightly. I knew she had the children doing special projects of their own interest two afternoons a week. What if Billy went over and joined them for those two afternoons?

Bob did some serious eyebrow raising at this suggestion. Send a behaviorally disordered child with poor academics to an AP class? Send a child who could hardly read and write when the other nine-year-olds there probably read at tenth-grade level? He shook his head in amazement at the sheer chutzpah of the idea. Nonetheless, it appealed to him. He contacted the teacher. We had a meeting. She came again and visited with Billy, who, as with everything else, was joyfully enthusiastic. She was smitten.
Yes, she said, she’d be happy for him to come two afternoons a week.

Every once in a while – on those rare, rare occasions – things really work out. Offbeat as they sound, they work. And this did. Armed with his tulip book and his notebook, Billy left that first afternoon bravely. No hesitation. No worries about where to find the rest room or if the bus driver would remember to come to pick him up from this different school. “I’m going to my special class,” he told Jesse at lunchtime.

“You’re already in a special class,” Jesse remarked.

“This is a different one,” Billy replied.

“Why? Is something else wrong with you?”

Billy shrugged. “No. It’s where I might go next year. Who knows.”

“How come you got to go to a different special class, though? How come you don’t just stay here?”

“This other one’s a special class where kids do special stuff they want. That’s what the teacher says. Mrs. Sprang. That’s her name. And she says I can do tulips all afternoon if I want, and the other kids’ll be doing just what
they
want all afternoon.”

“What kind of class is that?” Jesse asked. “Is it school? It doesn’t sound like school to me. What grade is it?”

“It doesn’t got grades,” Billy replied. “Like in here. Like we don’t got grades in here.”

“Have they got kids who are eight, like me?” Jesse asked. He looked over at me. “Is this for real? Is he telling the truth?”

I nodded.

“You mean that he gets to do what he wants? That there’s a special class just for that?”

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “They do schoolwork too. Just like every other class. It’s just Billy isn’t going over there then. He’s going over during project time.”

“Wow, lucky,” Jesse muttered.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Billy replied with a smile.

And that was it, smooth as could be. Billy went into the AP class two afternoons a week and did beautifully. Yes, he was a little wild, a little over-the-top in the way only Billy could be, but he didn’t punch anybody. He didn’t swear uncontrollably. He didn’t have any aggressive outbursts. Nothing gave away the fact that he spent the rest of his time in a class for behavioral disorders. Carol Sprang, the teacher, handled him confidently. Although the children were given a lot of latitude in terms of choosing the projects they would pursue, she was a structured teacher by nature and so put emphasis on order and commitment, and this suited Billy’s needs well. He came back after each visit that little bit happier and more confident. I felt as if I were seeing him mature right before my eyes.

As a consequence, Billy very soon started to think of the AP class as “his” class too. There was no favoritism in his attitude. He enjoyed his time in with us and was generous in his pleasure with our system and our Friday parties and the company of the other boys, but he also liked his
“other” class and the friends he made there. Thus, when March rolled around and his other school announced a school carnival, this was
all
Billy could talk about.

“Know what? My class is going to have a stall at the carnival,” he said to us. “It’s going to be an eggshell game. You pay a quarter and then you got to guess what egg is whole. See, most of them are broken-in-half shells. There’s the big tray with sand in it and they are all pushed in halfway. So it looks like every one of them is whole. But only one is. So, you pay your money and you get to choose. And if you don’t pick the right one, you still get a prize. You get one of those little fun-size candy bars. But if you do pick the whole egg, then you get a big prize.”

“Like what?” Jesse asked.

Billy shrugged. “Dunno. They haven’t told us that. But probably something good. And guess what,
I
get to work on it. Mrs. Sprang said.”

“How come we don’t get a carnival at this school?” Jesse asked, a bit miffed.

Shane ran up at just this point. He was having a silly afternoon. He had put an old knit bobble hat from the dressing-up box on his head and pulled it way down to his eyebrows. All afternoon he had insisted on wearing it like that.

“Yeah, I know what our stall could be for this class,” Billy chirped. “Guess the twin! Guess who was who. Zane or Shane.” He laughed.

Jesse laughed too and reached over to pull Shane’s hat
down over his eyes. “Not much problem if you still got the stupid hat on, Shane.”

Shane lashed out at him but Jesse took it in a playful fashion, wrestled him a moment, and then let go.

“Will you guys come?” Billy asked. “It’s on next Friday night. Will you come to my stall? I’d let you have a turn for free.”

This pleased Jesse. “Hey, man, you bet. I’ll get my grandma to take me. You just tell me where this school is and I’ll be there. And probably I’ll win your big prize. I might even win it twice. I’m good at guessing games.”

After school I asked Julie if she wanted to go with me on the following Friday to visit Billy’s school’s carnival. She hesitated, then nodded slowly. A slight smile crept across her features. “Yeah, okay,” she said. She sounded surprised that I’d invited her.

When I arrived on the Friday evening to pick Julie up, she came out of the house carrying a small child in one arm and a car seat in the other. She opened my rear door and set the car seat inside.

“This is my son, Jon-Paul,” she said and fastened the little boy into the seat.