Dexter the Tough

For Hugh Morgan

With thanks to two great teachers, Janet Terrell and Kristi Jerger, for answering my “What if . . . ?” questions. I also greatly appreciate the help from my friends Dr. Andy Schuster and Dr. Dara Schuster, and—from the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute at the Ohio State University—Jan Sirilla, administrative director of the blood and marrow transplant program, and Eileen Scahill, media relations program manager, who filled in the gaps in my medical knowledge and suggested a few “What if . . . ?'s” of their own.

D
exter hated his new school already.

It was only his first day—barely his first hour. So far Dexter had decided that he hated the principal, the school secretary, and the janitor. He hadn't even met the janitor yet, but he hated him anyway. The janitor had made the floor so shiny and slick that Dexter slipped on it, falling right in front of a bunch of other kids.

Dexter hated those kids, too. They laughed at him.

Now he was standing in front of his new fourth-grade class, a sea of staring eyes.

“Dexter moved here from Cincinnati,”
his new teacher said. “Dexter, would you like to tell us a little about yourself?”

“No,” Dexter said.

The smile on his teacher's face didn't shrink at all.

“Well, that's quite all right, Dexter,” she said in a fake, cheerful voice. “I know it can be kind of scary being new.”

Dexter wanted to say,
Oh, no, I'm not scared. Not me.
But the teacher was already showing him to his desk. Her too-wide smile stretched back almost to her ears.

“It's so
wonderful
that you've joined us today, Dexter, because we're starting on the
most
exciting writing project,” she said as Dexter slipped into his seat.

She was wearing huge star earrings that seemed to twinkle at the class. He could tell already: She was going to be one of those sparkly, enthusiastic teachers.

He hated that kind of teacher.

“Don't you all want to hear what the project is?” the teacher asked.

“Yes, Ms. Abbott,” the whole class except Dexter chorused together.

Disgusting. The other kids were going to be as sparkly and enthusiastic as the teacher.

“Great!” the teacher said. “We're going to be working on the same piece of writing every day for a
month!
We're going to pretend we're all professional writers, and that's how they work. They don't just write something and say, ‘Hurray! I'm done! Isn't this wonderful?' They write a story and then they go back and rewrite it, and revise it, and make it as good as possible. Some writers may rewrite the same story dozens of times! What do you think of that?”

Dexter thought that professional writers must be pretty stupid. He wondered if he should add professional writers to the list of people he hated.

“We'll start out today just writing the first draft,” the teacher said, still all twinkly and cheerful. “Get out a piece of paper and
tell me a story. It can be a true story or it can be made up. But”—her eyes seemed to rest on Dexter for a moment—“I'd really like it if you could tell me a story that lets me know more about who you are!”

All the other kids started writing right away. Dexter sat frozen at his desk.

“Dexter?” the teacher said. “Don't you have pencil and paper?”

Staring down at his empty desktop, Dexter shook his head. No. He didn't have anything he needed.

“That's okay,” the teacher said, slipping a pencil into his hand and sliding paper onto his desk. “I'll send a note home with you tonight to let your parents know what school supplies to buy.”

Dexter clutched the pencil so hard he was surprised it didn't snap in two.

“It's my grandmother,” he blurted.

“Excuse me?” the teacher said, and for the first time, she didn't look sparkly or twinkly. She looked confused.

“You have to send the note to my grandmother, not my parents,” Dexter said, the words coming out in a rush. “I live with her now.”

“All right,” the teacher said. “No problem. Let's get started writing, okay?”

Maybe it was no problem for her, but now there was a huge lump in Dexter's throat, which made it hard for him to swallow. It kind of made it hard for him to breathe. He stared down at the blank sheet of paper on his desk. Every other kid in the class was writing like crazy. He could hear the pencils racing. He saw one girl already flipping over her sheet of paper, to start on her second page. Dexter couldn't even remember exactly what he was supposed to be writing. Something about letting the teacher know who he was. Fine. He could do that.

He gripped the pencil and printed:

I'm the new kid. I am tuf.

He put the pencil down.

“Some of you who finish early might want to start your revision process now,” the teacher said from the front of the room. “Add details, descriptions, examples!”

Examples.

Dexter picked up his pencil again. His hand shook a little as he wrote:

This morning I beat up a kid.

It was kind of scary seeing those words in black and white. He stared down at his paper, and the words seemed to stare back at him. He put his hands over the paper so all he could see was one sentence: “I am tuf.”

I am,
he told himself.
I am. So there.

“All right, everyone,” the teacher said. “Make sure your names are on your papers and hand them in. Even if you aren't done, Marleeza.”

A girl in the front, who'd started waving one hand in the air, abruptly put her arm back down.

Someone behind Dexter poked him in the shoulder and handed him a stack of papers. Dexter stuffed his own paper in the middle of the stack, so no one would see it. Then he handed the whole stack to the kid in front of him.

Dexter's stomach churned as he watched the teacher's hands gather all the papers together. Her long fingers smoothed the ragged edges, making the pile neat.

“I'm so excited to start reading these!” the teacher said. “It's almost time for recess any how. I'll let you go a few minutes early, to reward you for all your hard work. And when you return, we'll begin workshopping!”

Why did I write that?
Dexter wondered.
Why?

His hands itched to grab his paper back before the teacher saw it. But how could he do that? What would he tell her?

The paper was lost to him now. The teacher was holding all the papers too tightly.

He squared his shoulders. He tried to ignore the sick twisting in his stomach.

Who cares?
he told himself.

He walked out of the room behind the other kids. He didn't let himself look back.

D
exter spent the whole recess huddled by the side of the building, alone. Once a boy came over and asked, “Want to play kickball with us?” Dexter just shook his head. His throat felt too swollen to let out the word, “No.”

He dug the toe of his tennis shoe into the pebbles that covered the ground between the building and the grass. He lifted his foot a little. Some of the pebbles skipped over the tops of the others. Some of them hit the side of the school.

Dexter slid his foot through the pebbles again, scattering more of them. It felt really good to kick something. Dexter liked the
sound the little stones made, hitting the school. It was the first thing he'd liked all day.

“Stop that!” a woman Dexter hadn't noticed yelled at him. “Are you trying to break a window?”

Dexter wasn't anywhere near a window. He turned his back and walked away from the woman without answering.

At his old school he would have said, “Sorry.” No—at his old school he wouldn't have been standing around kicking pebbles. He would have been out playing with his friends. Jaydell and Dillon and Robert and C. J. They didn't play sissy games like kickball. They played football and basketball. They . . .

Don't think about it,
he told himself.

The woman who'd yelled at Dexter blew a whistle. Dexter guessed that meant that recess was over, because all the other kids came running over, laughing as they got into lines. Dexter wasn't sure which line to get into. He hadn't looked very closely at any of the other kids in his class.

Oh, wait. That girl with the big red bow in her hair—wasn't she the one who'd raised her hand when the teacher said to stop writing?

Dexter stepped into line behind her, almost letting himself feel glad that he'd remembered the red bow. But they were marching back to class now, marching back to the teacher who'd probably read his paper by now.

“Dexter? Would you like to go first?” the teacher said, as soon as they were settled in their desks again, as soon as she'd explained that everyone else was going to have silent reading time while she “workshopped” with each student.

No, Dexter didn't want to go first. He didn't even want to be there. He wanted to be back home in Cincinnati, at his old school, where he belonged. Where he would be right this minute, playing basketball at recess with his friends, if only—

“Dexter?” the teacher said again, motioning him toward her desk.

Somehow Dexter's feet carried him to the front of the room. His heart thudded so loudly he couldn't quite hear what she was telling him to do. Oh. Sit down. All he had to do was sit down. He slid into a smaller chair beside the teacher's desk. She bent her head down over his paper, reading what he'd written.

She frowned.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Beating someone up . . . A fight . . . This isn't true, is it, Dexter? You didn't hurt another child, did you?”

She peered at him across the desk. She had blue eyes. Dexter hadn't noticed that before. Her eyes were the color of the sky on a beautiful spring day, the color of a marble Dexter's dad had given him once, explaining that it'd been his when he was a little boy. “When kids actually still played marbles,” Dad had said with a laugh, flexing his muscles dramatically and surprising Dexter by flicking the marble clear across the room.

That had been when Dad actually still had muscles.

“Dexter?” the teacher said gently.

Dexter felt his face get hot. Beating up a kid was fighting. And of course, fighting would be a very bad thing at this school, just as it had been at his old school. Only bad kids got in fights.

Maybe I am a bad kid now,
Dexter thought.

The teacher's blue eyes were begging him to say it wasn't true, he hadn't really been in a fight.

Bad kids don't just get in fights,
Dexter thought.
They lie, too. If I'm a bad kid, I can do anything I want.

“No,” Dexter said. “It isn't true.”

He was surprised at how strong his voice sounded, how easy it was to lie.

The teacher leaned back in her chair.

“I'm very glad to hear that,” she said, smiling again, the twinkle back in her voice. “Not that I really believed that you'd beat someone up. . . . ”

The way she was looking at him made Dexter's face feel even hotter.

Oh, yeah?
he wanted to say.
You think I'm too small to win a fight? Too scrawny to beat anyone up?

People were always talking about how tiny Dexter was. He'd weighed just four pounds when he was born, so he'd started out behind. The only big thing about him was his eyes, which always seemed to take up half his face in pictures.

“Just tell people that one of these days, you
are
going to grow into those eyes of yours,” Dexter's mom used to say sometimes. “And then—watch out!”

That was back when Dexter's mom had time to say anything about Dexter. When she had time to be his mom.

Dexter swallowed hard. He lifted his arm, which seemed to be shaking a little, and pointed to one sentence on his paper:

I am tuf.

He wasn't sure if he was reminding himself or the teacher.

The teacher looked a little bit confused. Then she laughed. As far as Dexter was concerned, this teacher laughed way too much.

“Oh, very good, Dexter,” she said. “You noticed that you spelled a word wrong! This is what's so great about revision, when you can find your own mistakes and fix them. We don't usually worry too much about spelling until the last stages of revision, but since you saw it already—what should you have written instead of ‘t-u-f'?”

Dexter shrugged. This teacher didn't understand at all.

“It's t-o-u-g-h,” the teacher said, writing it in big letters at the top of his paper.

That seemed wrong, too. “T-o-u-g-h” didn't look tough at all.

“But I was thinking . . . ” the teacher went on. “It's not really . . . appropriate for you to write about a fight. Especially since you didn't really beat someone up. Thank
goodness!” She was smiling again, and waiting for Dexter to say something.